ABSTRACT
There are few organizations that explicitly have the infl iction of pain as one of their primary functions. Prisons, however, have as their overarching aim, their ultimate purpose, the exercise of punishment. With “the deliberate infl iction of suffering and hardships upon those contained within its walls” (Scott, 2007, 49) prisons are unique places (Sparks, Bottoms and Hay, 1996). Although Goffman (1961, 1968) in his analysis of ‘total institutions,’ and Foucault (1977/1991) in his exploration of power and control, could draw upon a range of organizational settings including mental hospitals, monasteries, factories, and schools, there is nothing so total, in constraints, in degradation, and the display of power, as the prison (Christie, 1994). A situation Foucault appears to accept when he states “the prison, much more than the school, the workshop or the army . . . is ‘omnidisciplinary’ . . . it gives almost total power over the prisoners; it has its internal mechanisms of repression and punishment: a despotic discipline” (1977/1991, 235-236). Despite their unique status, an understanding of prisons can resonate with issues pertinent to institutional, management, and organizational theory. For critical management theorists in particular, prisons and the related concept of the panopticon, have provided a potent metaphor for describing the repressive, disciplinary nature of managerial and organizational practices (Deetz, 1998; Papa et al., 1995; Townley, 1993). Moreover, because prisons inform us about what a society values as its core concerns, we can understand power by looking at its extremities (Foucault, 2004). Nevertheless, prisons, as real, physical institutions in which thousands of people work and thousands more are contained, have rarely been theorized within critical management studies.
