ABSTRACT
What follows is an empirical study of power in some contemporary organizations. By choosing power as the point of departure, I want to reawaken a number of insights elaborated by Michel Foucault in the course of a few brief but brilliant years in the 1970s. The ambition in this introductory chapter is to present an understanding of power which has for a long time been hidden beneath a thick layer of governmentality studies and discourse analysis. The presentation is structured around three distinctions. The distinctions provide the cornerstones for this study, as well as, arguably, any study of power. Although firmly rooted in Foucault’s work, they have received far too little attention in the Foucauldian literature. The first distinction is that between power as a relation and power as an activity. The concept of power is ambiguous as it can refer to both. Foucault exclusively studied power as an activity, which was not always kept separate from the notion of power as a relation. The second focuses on the way in which power as an activity exists in two forms, productive power and repressive power. The distinction between productive and repressive power is primary in relation to all other concepts employed by Foucault to make sense of the business of regulating human behaviour. Discussions of ‘sovereignty’, ‘governmentality’, ‘discipline’, ‘mechanisms of security’, ‘pastoral power’, ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘bio-power’ presuppose – or would benefit greatly from – the distinction between productive and repressive power, which cuts across all historical manifestations of government. The third distinction is that between programmatic and non-programmatic acts of power. In this book, as in the Foucauldian tradition generally, it is the programmatic – rather than the singular and spontaneous – attempts to shape conduct that are of interest. Yet the distinction, in so far as it accounted for, tends to ignore the organized nature of power in favour of an exclusive focus on the element of thought and deliberation. By redrawing all three distinctions a new light can be cast on power and the process of social reproduction.
