ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how discursive discipline is precisely enacted through the use of expert knowledge as a source of unquestionable truths, and how lived realities are suppressed in favor of the common meta-narrative. It also examines the possibility of where these processes of control can be found in other social arenas. The chapter argues that discursive discipline is culturally pervasive in the sense that the values and ideals espoused by individuals in people's society are reflective of a master narrative that they adopt for fear of being different or seeming bad. Discursive discipline found at the institutional level in a number of different arenas. The construction of the institutional self occurs in everyday life through the institutions people set up to frame their lives and identities. There is no conductor leading people's actions or choreographer influencing their behaviors, but there are cultural ways of understanding the self and resistance to those understandings is met with a unique form of discipline.
