ABSTRACT
Occupational assessment is conventionally seen as one area of application of those parts of the science of psychology which measure and evaluate individuals and differentiate between them for the purposes of prediction and control of behaviour. In this chapter I want to examine occupational assessment from a rather different point of view. Analytically speaking, occupational assessment demonstrates the relations between power and knowledge (see pp. 115 ff.). Practically speaking, it shows psychology in action as a ‘technology of the social’. These are perspectives drawn from Foucault’s approach (which is developed fully in the Introduction to section 2). By the term ‘technology of the social’, I am not denoting technology in the conventional applied psychological sense of the hardware of psychological methods, with the neutrality that this implies. Rather it ties in with our emphasis-as outlined in the Introduction-on psychology’s part in the processes of social regulation which are so central to modern social organization (see the Introduction to section 2, p. 106 for an elaboration of this usage within discourse theory). A technology of the social has its effects because it is legitimized by social science knowledge. Reciprocally the knowledge is a historical product of certain practices. This is what Foucault means by the mutuality of the powerknowledge relation (see the Introduction to section 2, especially pp. 100 ff.). Thus a ‘knowledge’ is not a body of truth as science would have it, but a historical product of certain practices, such as ‘technologies of the social’. It is in this sense that I talk about the knowledges that make up psychology, rather than talking about psychology as a discipline. It is worth pointing out that power should not automatically connote something negative; something linked with oppressive practices. In a Foucauldian analysis, power is productive of all knowledges, oppressive and liberatory.
