where in the world is michel foucault???

Loyal orgheads know that Foucault is one of my underground favorites (see page 5/July 2007 newsletter). But I was kind of stumped when Dan the Orgtheory Man asked me where Foucault was in modern orgtheory. At first, I thought he meant the absence of Foucault on this blog. He meant *all* of org theory.

Now, Dan wasn’t quite right. There is actually a critical organization studies wing,* where Foucault is right at home. Foucault is also popular among ed school org folks, at least the skeptics who view schooling as partly (or completely) a form of social control.

These pockets of interest don’t explain the lack of Foucault in the rest of org studies  and mainstream sociology, though he does have fans in sexuality studies. Of all the fancy French theorists, you’d think he’d get a bit more attention. He wrote books on hospitals (Birth of the Clinic), prisons (Discipline and Punish) and state formation (Studies in Governmentality). Basically, he’s the orghead of the Continental tradition. The organization was the site of power. I would say that he’s had more to say about organizations than any other major European social theorist since Weber.

So what gives? I mumbled an answer to Dan. Here’s what I tried to say:

• Timing: Foucault had an impact in the English speaking world in the 1970s/1980s. He’d have to compete with neo insitutionalists, ecologists, network theorists, contingency folks, and Carnegie school people for attention. Not easy.
• Hard to reproduce I: The power of Foucault’s writing emerges from a combination of historical vision, deep skepticism toward modern notions of freedom, and a solid acquaintance with the history of philosophy. How many American sociologists would even try to pull that off?
• Hard to reproduce II: Foucault doesn’t offer any simple variables for you to work with like cultural capital, class position, network centrality, etc. “Episteme” and “discourse” are too big and broad for most people to handle.
• The swing away from fancy theory: Foucalt *really* took off in the 1980s – when his major works had been translated and picked up in America. At that time, sociology (and management) was moving away from super big theory and shifting towards middle range Merton style sociology. Blame Parsons and Marx in equal parts. And the GSS. Very un-Foucault.

In the end, any explanation has to concede the general distaste that Americans have for fancy social theory (see this post on the decline of “high theory” generally) and specifically why orgtheorists would just ignore the one guy who would have much to say. I’d probably split it 50/50.

* Organizations and Markets routinely trashes these people in the “Pomo Periscope” series.

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