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(Pfeffer, 1997: 146). Alternatively, power is analysed through its symptoms, by what is observable through behavioural exchange and by identifying who the players are. As a result, any research that does exist on power concentrates on its exercise, taking, as we shall show later, the formal organisation and deeper power relations for granted. While the better frameworks allow us to observe the ‘turf rules’ that underlie the power game in different contexts (Buchanan and Badham, 1999), a predominantly inter-personal focus tends to trivialise power by treating it as ‘office politics’. Though the ‘pitch’ that serves as the context for the turf game can be contextualised as comparative corporate or national contexts, it tends to be treated as particular structures and cultures within organisations (Buchanan and Badham, 1999: 32). Even when dealt with in a more substantial way, as in strategic contingency theory, the focus is primarily on horizontal power: ‘Conventional organisation theory seldom considers the power within organisations, the power exemplified by top management, as an expression of power relations external to the organisation’ (Cockburn, 1990: 77).

Vertical power hierarchies are set aside by the interpretation of the division of labour as consisting of relations between sub-units. Such neglect is reinforced by the tendency to see managerial authority and goals as always accepted by workers, or at least subject to joint regulation and negotiated outcome through the interplay of power. Substantial power differences and sources of dissension are therefore underestimated. We need to deal with ‘power over’ as well as ‘power to’, and treat managerial authority as a form of organisational power. Though power is multi-faceted, zerosum circumstances can and do exist, whether they are manifested in distribution of profits in dividends or wages, or the right to bargain collectively or not.

Clegg’s (1977) early critique is pertinent to this debate. French and Raven and strategic contingency theory can show how managers use resources to exercise power. Neither explain the prior distribution of power – how some people come to have access to these resources while others do not. The exercise of power is premised on institutional frameworks and rules; ‘the “power” of the sub-unit has to be grounded in the prior capacity to exercise power which managers possess’ (Clegg, 1977: 27). Furthermore, managerial power has to be located within deeper structures of economic domination that underpin its use and legitimacy. A prime example is the concentration of ownership and control in the transnational company. The power to switch resources and relocate operations simply cannot be explained at the level of the single enterprise and its sub-units. Without such a structural framework, we are left with a micro-level analysis capable only of explaining the skills of ‘politicking’ rather than political power. We are also left with a view of managers solely as self-interested manipulators and power-seekers with little understanding of the broader dynamics and constraints which dispose management to use power in the first place.

These differences in perspective can be clarified by reference to the wider debate on power, taking the three-dimensional model of Lukes (1982) as a framework. The behavioural literature is primarily one-dimensional in that it focuses on the observable activities of particular ‘subjects’, seeking proof of power in processes such as decisionmaking. This formulation, which draws on Weber’s definition outlined earlier, is specifically linked to intended effects and imposition of will: ‘Power is only relevant to our understanding of behaviour and organisation, when there is conflict’ (Dawson, 1986: 148). On this basis rests the behavioural assumption that power can always be observed and measured.

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In the broader debate the one-dimensional view has been criticised by writers such as Bachrach and Baratz (1962), utilising the concept of ‘non-decision making’. This may sound odd, but refers to the capacity of power-holders to limit those issues that are contested or even discussed. The approach usefully distinguishes between the sources and bases of power. By controlling agendas and mobilising the bias inherent in greater access to institutional resources, values and even the language of legitimacy, they can keep to safe issues and exclude others that threaten their interests. Though the research deals with political actors, there is no doubt that management actions can be seen in this light. Crucial decisions regarding investment or the introduction of new technology very seldom reach normal bargaining, except perhaps to deal with the consequences. In industrial relations terminology they are ‘non-negotiable’, particularly when market trends favour employers. Even with worker director schemes such as those at British Steel in the 1970s, management could manipulate the rules of the game and socialise workforce representatives to the extent that their interests were not seriously contested (Brannen, 1983).

Lukes (1974: 21) pays tribute to this ‘two-dimensional’ analysis, but argues that it remains too much on the terrain of observable behaviour. Élite power can prevent grievances, and therefore conflict, from ever arising by shaping the very wants and preferences of subordinate groups. This is not a question of brainwashing, but of the hidden structures of power. Market mechanisms and the distribution of wealth and property constitute power relations – such as ownership rights – which frequently come to be taken for granted. Nor should the formation of consent be conceptualised as a process distinct from the operation of power. Though there are concrete practices that arise from such relations, they are not always observable in the traditional sense. Power does not necessarily need a subject. As Clegg and Dunkerley observe, ‘Much of the time the power of capital does not have to be exercised to be present . . . because this exercise is grounded in a structural “capacity” which frequently obviates the need for its exercise’ (1980: 495). Put another way, power might be both the production of effects and the capacity to produce them. Take the previously discussed example of the diffusion of ‘best practice’ in large companies. What is perceived to be ‘best’ is largely taken for granted within existing structure of property and power. Ownership of resources thus sets the actual grounds through which agendas are set.

Though the processes cannot always be measured, the outcomes can, in terms of structural inequalities between groups. For Lukes, this indicates that a latent conflict exists, ‘which consists of a contradiction between the interests of those exercising power and the real interests of those they exclude’ (1974: 284). His three-dimensional explanation of power in general therefore coincides with radical perspectives on organisational power, which would draw on Weber and Marx’s analysis of the deeper economic roots of domination. This involves a different understanding of ‘dependency’ in which there is a ‘fundamental asymmetry of power between employers and workers’ (Rueschemeyer, 1986: 76), based on workers’ lack of control of the means of production. The propertyless have to ‘seek access to resources owned or controlled by the few’ (Fox, 1974: 284). When Nissan opened their factory in the North East of England, they had 30 000 applications for 300 jobs. Not surprisingly this enabled them to pick workers and a union wholly on their own terms. This ‘structural’ account of power differs sharply from the use of that term in mainstream theory, reflecting a one-dimensional focus that signifies position in the formal structure or division of labour (Pfeffer, 1997: 144).

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Nevertheless Lukes’ work has been subject to considerable criticism, even from other radical theorists (see Clegg, 1989). He wants to retain an emphasis on power that presupposes human agencies that make choices, but on the other hand recognises that those choices are not equally available in circumstances of differentially constraining structures. At the level of individuals it is fairly easy to attribute intentions, but much more difficult when the individual is given an ‘interest’ because of membership of a group, whether that be capital and labour, men and women, or professionals and skilled workers (Barker and Roberts, 1993: 210). When Lukes argues that A may shape B’s preferences in a manner inimical to B, how do we know what the latter’s ‘real’ interests are without attributing preferences to them or arguing that what they actually think or act is ‘false’? How do we recognise the power to persuade without reproducing totalitarian images of agencies that control all our thoughts and desires? It may be possible, as we shall see later, to draw on a more complex notion of interests, but Lukes never adequately resolves these dilemmas about structures and agencies. The debate on dimensions of power demonstrates that there have been intractable problems in defining what power is and where it is located. A particularly intractable problem has been how to conceptualise deeper, hidden forms of power, ‘Since it advantages or disadvantages individuals without being consciously mobilised’ (Hardy, 1996: S8). An increasing number of radical theorists have sought refuge in the work of the French writer, Foucault, to escape those limitations.

Foucault, post-structuralism and disciplinary power

On the face of it an analysis based on surveillance techniques and forms of knowledge originating in monastic and military orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Foucault, 1972, 1977, 1984) might seem to have limited relevance to contemporary organisation theory. But the attraction is based on the approach to power and how it can be applied to modern (or postmodern) organisations: ‘deeply embedded within his detailed analyses of concrete historical situations and events there is a rich and complex model of the mechanism of power which is of direct relevance to organisational analysis’ (Marsden, 1993: 108).

That appeal derives partly from restoring an idea of power as productive rather than prohibitive or solely repressive, creative and constitutive as well as limiting and constraining. This is characteristic of broader post-structuralist thinking. Indeed one can have post-structuralist theories of power without reliance on Foucault (see Leflaive, 1996). Such perspectives are not mere echoes of Parsons’ emphasis on positive-sum rather than zero-sum relations. For power is held to be the central feature of social life from which there is no escape. Foucault uses the term ‘capillary’ to explain that power does not come from above, from a central source. Rather, it ‘circulates through the entire social body’ (Fraser, 1989: 24), into the furthest reaches and localities. Power is embodied in heterogeneous micro-practices, in everyday life rather than in a special sphere. But as particular forms become generalised in a network of relations, Foucault allows himself to use the term ‘strategy’ to describe the results. Resistance may break out at different points in the chain, and while that resistance recreates power, it promotes a ceaseless process of shifting alliances and tensions. Power, therefore, is discontinuous rather than stable.

Nor is power something that is possessed by an individual or group. This can be

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considered to commit the sin of belief in a sovereign power held by agents making rational decisions or attached to and formally administered by states, corporations or other groupings. From a Foucauldian perspective, power is understood without reference to agency, its mechanisms impersonal and independent of conscious subjects. In one sense this seems to extend Lukes’ third, structural dimension of power in which the agency (such as capital) and its effects remain hidden. But Foucault’s disciplinary power removes entirely a deliberately controlling relationship between subject and object, the imposition of A’s will over B (Barker and Roberts, 1993: 216), even when conceived of as thought control and ideological hegemony (Clegg, 1989: 182). A similar argument is developed by Leflaive: if organisations or any of their members are defined as power holders, that is merely a status bestowed upon them; ‘sovereignty, defined as the embodiment of power in the exercise of will, is not a characteristic of our contemporary environment’ (1996: 43). Power lies outside its possessor, in routines and narratives that confer fluid, temporary capacities to act effectively.

This is part of a post-structuralist emphasis on de-centring the subject. Power operates not through agencies with specific interests, but through discourses: practices of talk, text and argument that continuously form that which they speak. Disciplinary practices produce knowledge that is inseparable from power. Language thus becomes a central feature in the discursive production of power, and power/knowledge discourses constitute norms of acceptable conduct, constructing social identities. All this sounds very abstract, but Foucault underpins his concepts by an historical account of the emergence of a distinctively modern power. Pre-modern sovereign power had depended on personalised bonds of obligation. In contrast, the techniques of disciplinary power were developed and refined in religious institutions, prisons, asylums, hospitals and workhouses at a local level, rather than overseen by the state. Such micro-techniques were concerned with evaluating, recording and observing individuals in an exhaustive and detailed way. During the early nineteenth century, surveillance spread from the institutions that were first faced with the mass management of large groups of people, especially to the factory:

The dark satanic mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire simply latched on the disciplinary apparatus already let loose from the monastery into the poor house, the work house, the orphanage, the barracks and so on. (Clegg, 1989: 173)

But the prison remained the purest exemplar and microcosm of disciplinary techniques and knowledge: power is fundamentally carceral in character.

In the range of modern institutions, power also becomes increasingly focused on the body as an object, distinguishing Foucault’s analysis from a more conventional emphasis on ideology and moulding of the mind. Developing originally in the eighteenth century, bio-power was aimed at the control of wider populations, their movements, gestures and routines, such as the posture of pupils and marching steps of soldiers. These processes were also facilitated by the partitioning and regulation of time and space (Dandeker, 1990: 25). Penology, medicine and psychiatry become the focal points for the development of new power–knowledge discourses that punish deviation from normative standards.

The most potent imagery of Foucauldian theory is the panopticon – Bentham’s design principle based on a circular building with central observation tower – which,

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from prisons to the new model housing estates, facilitated a unidirectional disciplinary gaze. In other words the observed can be seen but cannot see, while the observers see everything but cannot be seen. So effective are such practices that individuals begin to discipline themselves to be, in Foucault’s words, docile and useful bodies. The overall effect of disciplinary practices is summed up by O’Neill: ‘in the bourgeois social order the prison, the factory and the school, like the army, are places where the system can project its conception of the disciplinary society in the reformed criminal, the good worker, student, loyal soldier and committed citizen’ (1986: 51–2). The fact that neither Bentham’s nor anyone else’s panopticon was ever built has not stopped it becoming one of the most pervasive images in social science. This is, in part, because the emphasis is less on a physical manifestation, than on panoptic power expressed through electronic and self-surveillance, as discussed in the previous chapter. Surveillance constitutes organisations and their members as subjects of power (Leflaive, 1996: 25).

Applications to organisations

These perspectives have given theorists the language to interrogate past, present and future. O’Neill is one of those theorists who have used Foucault to help reconstruct the past. The process of the emergence of the factory and large-scale organisation is overlaid with the conceptual apparatus of the disciplinary society. Indeed much of the material discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 is represented in precisely this way. Industrial discipline was a central theme of the later rise of scientific management, which Weber praised for its military character. Equally such systems also involved an immense expansion of managerial knowledge and calculation of workers’ time and motion. Theorists working in the tradition of Marx and Weber see these developments as the necessary preconditions for sustaining the appropriation of profit and the removal of the obstacle of worker control over aspects of the labour process. But for followers of Foucault, ‘The causality is all wrong. New forms of disciplinary power preceded the establishment of the factory by at least two centuries’ (Clegg, 1989: 188).

Foucauldian perspectives are also proving a means of reframing the present. The work of Townley (1990, 1993), Burchell et al. (1985) and Marsden (1993) focuses on identifying the social technologies of contemporary specialists in human and organisational behaviour as power/knowledge discourses. These latter day ‘soft cops’ in HRM, accounting and consultancy are concerned to ‘observe, examine and normalise performance and behaviour’ (Marsden, 1993: 118–19), carrying on a tradition established by human relations and its efforts to habituate the employee to the changing conditions of work in the large corporation. All the elaborate emphasis in organisational theory on power expressed through the politics of decision-making, inter-group conflicts over resources, regulations and rights is held to be a sideshow diverting attention from the substance of power. At the heart of that process is the monopoly of knowledge by management and its agents, a form of discursive closure that marginalises other representations and identities (Deetz, 1992).

It is in Deetz’s analysis of disciplinary power in the modern corporation that we see the most complete application of Foucault. Organisational processes act to produce corporate obedience, where ‘The disciplined member of the corporation wants on his or her own what the corporation wants’ (Deetz, 1992: 42). Similarly for N. Rose (1990), the culture and discourses of the modern corporation have become a

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crucial means through which human feelings, emotions and thoughts have become increasingly managed and governed. In either case, how this is actually achieved is vague, given the need of such theory to avoid mentioning deliberate operations of directive power. But attention is drawn to an accumulation of local power/knowledge discourses that disperses into norms and standard practices of moral, medical, sexual and psychological regulation. Elsewhere in the same book of readings, reference is made to the capacity of knowledge products of personnel and organisation psychology (such as performance appraisal) to ‘gaze at, scrutinize, classify and count individual characteristics and behaviours. Collected data are analysed and stored, ensuring that an individual’s legacy, good and bad, is not forgotten’ (Steffy and Grimes, 1992: 192). New forms of surveillance, when specified, rest largely on illustrative examples drawn from the power of information systems and the behavioural technology arising from the expansion of culture change programmes. Willmott (1994) supports Deetz’s critique of the colonizing tendencies of the modern corporation, arguing that the creation of monocultures displays nascent totalitarianism. Employees are not only coercively socialised, but positively attracted to such cultures because they learn to tie their own identities to the associated norms and knowledge. Their subjectivity becomes ‘self-disciplining’ as individuals begin to feel secure within the corporate identities (Knights and Willmott, 1990: 550). Such analyses draw on Foucault’s use of the term ‘subject’: meaning where an individual is made subject and makes themselves subject to a form of power through the association between identity and self-knowledge.

We will look in more detail at issues of corporate culture in Chapter 13. But whatever the source of new processes, Deetz argues that the effects are greater than the prison exemplar, because the modern corporation goes home with its members and colonizes competing institutions such as the media (1992: 38). Similarly, in supporting and explaining Foucault’s view that all organisations resemble prisons, Burrell (1988: 232) argues that, ‘Whilst we may not live in total institutions, the institutional organization of our lives is total’. Opposition is largely self-defeating since those who play the game become addicts to the rules, and the pursuit of sovereign rights through bodies such as trade unions hides the disciplinary processes that produce the struggle in the first place (Deetz, 1992: 42). In addition, resistance does not threaten power, because ‘It means that discipline can grow stronger knowing where its next efforts must be directed’ (Burrell, 1988: 228). Clegg is similarly pessimistic in noting the organisational outflanking of resistance, due to subordinated agencies, ‘Lacking the organizational resources to outmanoeuvre existing networks and alliances’ (1989: 19). As Collinson (1994) observes, this analysis draws on Foucault in arguing that knowledge and information structure access to power. Subordinates either have too little of both, or their knowledge of the likely outcome of action is so predictable that it is similarly inhibitive.

As we saw in Chapter 8, this imagery of all-powerful total institutions is reproduced in another Foucauldian-inspired literature, whose object of inquiry is new production techniques such as JIT and TQM (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Delbridge, Turnbull and Wilkinson, 1992; Webster and Robins, 1993; Sewell, 1998). Marrying Foucault and Braverman, they argue that more effective surveillance techniques enhance managerial control of the labour process. Webster and Robin’s alternative history of the information revolution traces a line of descent from Bentham’s original conception of the panopticon, through Taylorism as a means of monopolising

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knowledge in management, to the contemporary flexible firm which has the capacity of IT to centralise information from an increased range of geographically dispersed units. Shop floor techniques utilise more extensive information systems that can collect data on worker performance and behaviour. This is described as an electronic panopticon that brings the disciplinary gaze to every aspect of worker activity. As we indicated in the last chapter, this orientation has been reinforced by the growth of call centres, whose sophisticated surveillance capacities have led to the label ‘electronic sweatshop’ (Fernie and Metcalf, 1997), which has stuck even in the popular media.

Fernie and Metcalf talk of ‘perfect supervisory power’ without direct supervision. Commentators on new factory regimes argue that as a consequence of such discipline and the removal of any ‘slack’ from the production system, ‘worker counter-control (in the sense described by Roy and many others) is effectively eliminated . . . the ultimate goal of management under a JIT/TQM regime must be recognised to be Total Management Control’ (Delbridge, Turnbull and Wilkinson, 1992: 105). Chapter 12 explores further current trends in the reorganisation of the labour process, but we cannot take the above description for granted, regardless of its current vogue status.

Critique

We have already critiqued conceptions of the novelty and effectiveness of surveillance. Here we want to examine in more detail some of the accompanying theorising of power. Whether Foucault’s history is accurate or methodology competent is beyond our scope (but see Giddens, 1982; Walzer, 1985; Habermas, 1987), and, we suspect, not pertinent to his appeal in and out of organisational analysis. New languages to describe old realities are always attractive to academics, in this case despite, or perhaps because of, the obscure and opaque terminology. Dandeker (1990) recaps the history of the growth of the modern business enterprise, rounding up all the usual suspects – Chandler, Edwards, Clawson, Williamson, Littler – without ever demonstrating that his over-arching concept of surveillance depicts anything substantially new or distinctive, at least with respect to the workplace. At a more micro level, Townley (1990) repackages the personnel function as a power/knowledge discourse with the Foucauldian terminology of dividing practices (enclosure, partitioning and ranking), to similarly unconvincing effect.

Townley’s work has helped stimulate some useful studies of particular HRM practices, such as appraisal (Newton and Findlay, 1996), but it also illustrates the dangers of over-privileging language and discourse. She argues that personnel can be understood as the provision of language or knowledge to reduce the space between what the formal contract of employment promises and what the employee’s practice delivers. Aside from the fact that all managerial agencies operate in this gap, such conceptions distort the power resources available to and drawn on by those involved in managing the employment relationship. Language is part of that resource, but it is not, of necessity, the defining feature. Employment laws and labour markets may be more significant in empowering personnel, and may have only peripheral connection to any new power/knowledge discourse. In the context of accounting controls, Armstrong (1991) argues that Foucauldian analyses present disciplinary powers without reference to material sanctions and rewards. For example, the new accounting regime at the American company ITT was adhered to, not because those involved had internalised its disciplinary discourse, but because they were paid 25 per cent over the going rate to do so.

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when confronted by resistance, the systematic surveillance and behavioural norms of disciplinary power can only work within a matrix of physical coercion, economic power, negotiated order, or some combination of these. In other words, Foucauldian representation of the manner in which accounting controls operate are incomplete because Foucault’s ‘microphysics’ of power is itself incomplete. (Armstrong, 1991: 31)

In Chapter 1 we used the example of the Wapping dispute involving News International and print unions. A combination of bribes, threats, sackings and the use of new anti-union employment legislation was among the ‘non-discursive strategies’ that proved highly effective in Rupert Murdoch’s victory.

When we examine capital and its managerial agencies it is clear that power is somewhere and its use may, in some circumstances, be rationally intended. Power is both a relationship and administered by individuals or collectivities. It therefore remains legitimate to refer to ‘power holders’, though never in an exclusive and uncontested sense. Removing ‘power holders’, particularly in support of the view that power is productive for all, also tends to gloss over substantive differences in sources and effectiveness of power. As we illustrated in the previous chapter, there are some circumstances in which workplace decisions may be zero sum – they cannot be ‘possessed’ by both management and workers. By setting aside such distinctions through arguments that power is productive for all, Foucauldian analyses run the risk of softening its substantive origins and effects. For example, Hardy seeks to move beyond negative ‘power over’ connotations to consider how more sophisticated multi-dimensional frameworks can help managers develop a broader array of mechanisms that facilitate successful strategic change. In particular, they can help ‘those seeking to orchestrate collaborative action by preventing conflict over strategic options from emerging’ (1996: S4). Negative consequences are limited to the recognition that such help may leave employees to the ‘abuse’ of this more sophisticated and less visible power (1996: S14).

One of the reasons why post-structuralist views are persuasive is that they trade on polarised conceptions of power. Their target is stereotypical: power as top-down, fixed and stable. Reality is considerably messier than this. Take the conflicts around the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1999. There is no doubt that we can identify the discursive constitution of power, through, for example, ideologies of progress and globalisation. We can also see how unstable power is, and the extent to which it can be disrupted by a variety of ‘local’ voices and interests. However, it remains the case that the WTO has both sovereign power holders, particularly in the agenda-setting leading nations, and the power to set rules for economic exchange that fundamentally structure social relationships across the globe.

A similar argument could be made with respect to interests. We have acknowledged that there are problems with this concept. If interests are attributed purely as a result of group membership, when people do not act in accordance with them, the legitimacy of those actions is unhelpfully questioned through concepts such as ‘false consciousness’. Cultural affinity and identity may cut across imputed interests. It is possible to identify inequalities of power in terms of more and less successful struggles to deploy ideological and economic resources, rather than through the idea of interests (Hindess, 1982). Alternatively, interests can be regarded as structural predispositions to act collectively, which need to be discursively constituted in order to become effective. Moreover, identities and interests form the basis of employee resistance and

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misbehaviour at work, ranging from work limitation to joking rituals (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999).

The WTO conflict is an illustration of the fact that power is not necessarily unobtrusive, invisible, ‘low profile’ (Fraser, 1989: 23), or used unilaterally only as a last resort (Deetz, 1992: 40). It may be said that the example is not organisational, but high-profile disputes are not the only source. As we have seen, employment relationships in this century have become progressively more bureaucratised. Yet Deetz (1992: 37) criticises Richard Edward’s (1979) theory of bureaucratic control because it refers to identifiable rule and routine instead of a complex set of practices which become internalised as common sense and personal identity. This judgement is hopelessly inaccurate. Far from taking rules of payment, measurement and task allocation as given and natural, workers and their representatives have engaged in a persistent low-intensity war to use and manipulate them to their own advantage. Not only that, but there have been highly visible artefacts, such as Ford’s 200-page ‘Blue Book’, for each side to draw on as a resource in the power struggle. Such examples confirm other evidence from shop-floor life that specific forms of knowledge are a key resource through which resistance can be mobilised (Collinson, 1994), a process illustrated with respect to call centres in Chapter 8.

A further problem is that the contested rationality between capital and labour is reduced to a local site of struggle. It is claimed that having decentred the loci of power, Foucault may be ‘the last pluralist’ (Clegg, 1989: 7). It is true that there is an emphasis on the dispersed and local character of power, with associated micro-technologies of discipline investigated in their own right. But the label of pluralism does not sit well with the theoretical substance of disciplinary power, which has prison and panopticon at its centre and determining force, and all organisations conceived of as total institutions, going way beyond Goffman’s (1961) intentions. By treating the workplace as an extension of disciplinary practices and the factory, hospital and other organisations as paler versions of carceral institutions (Burrell, 1988), the specific character of employment relations in a capitalist society is lost. For example, control is treated merely as another version of discipline, and functionally oriented towards the creation of obedient bodies rather than sustaining exploitation (Clegg, 1989: 176). Vague and extravagant references to control over body and soul can only be justified by extreme examples such as AIDS testing in the workplace (Deetz, 1992: 140–1).

Finally, there is the problem that because power is everywhere and nowhere, the impression can be given that it is omnipresent, a force that there can never be any escape from. Resistance is part of the formal picture, but is under-theorised (Smart, 1985) and the dice loaded against it, because, ‘only power is positive and productive, while resistance is simply a reaction to its production’ (Dews, 1987: 99). Fragmented, insubstantial and counter-productive, resistance largely disappears from view, to be replaced by the language of docility and obedience (O’Neill, 1986: 55). In fact, the whole conceptual framework is saturated with the language of colonisation and conquest – images more appropriate to Invasion of the Body Snatchers than the complexities of organisational life. The problem is not so much with the Foucauldian description of new managerial techniques of power, but the assumption that they actually work.

A number of poststructuralist writers, noting this problem, have drawn back from some of the consequences of this ‘over-disciplined’ view of organisational life (Leflaive, 1996; Sewell, 1998). Unfortunately, the desire to bend the stick backs goes against the grain of their own language and concepts. There is also little sign of dissent and resistance in the case studies of writers such as Sewell (1992, 1998). A focus on talk and

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text away from agency tends to remove the gap between intent and outcome. What management or managerial discourse says it is doing is too often taken as synonymous with effects and effectiveness (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). Where studies of companies with a strong normative and surveillance agenda let us hear the voice of employees, we get a much more complex and balanced picture of power and resistance (Zuboff, 1988; Kunda, 1992; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). This issue is returned to in Chapter 13.

Conclusion

Power gets everywhere, but it is not everything. As Fraser observes, ‘Foucault calls too many different sorts of things power and simply leaves it at that’ (1989: 32). It is important, for example, to demarcate a boundary with control. For radical theorists in a labour process tradition, ‘Power is expressed in organisations through the control of the means and methods of production’ (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980: 476). Though power will be exercised in order to re-assert control by management, this should not mean that power is marginal or subsumed under control. The ability of employers to exert controls over labour is conditioned by a variety of different power relations. In particular companies or sectors, crucial factors will include those arising from product and labour markets, the state of employer and worker organisation, and factors identified by strategic contingency theorists such as management dependence on specific occupational and work groups. As we have seen, control structures are also shaped by broader non-industrial power relations, such as those embodied in employment laws that sustain the power of capital, or relations of social dependence in the community that are transferred into the workplace. Processes of control and power are both independent and interrelated inside and outside the workplace. More concrete discussion should reveal those complexities, not treat them as synonyms or analogues.

In the light of the evidence discussed in this chapter, power should also be accepted as inherently multi-dimensional. As with Lukes, Foucault’s motives in trying to transcend the limitations of sovereign or one-dimensional power are admirable. But the result has been a conceptual and practical prison rather than a genuinely complex picture of power. Though some power decisions may be zero-sum, conceptualisations need not be. The advantage of Luke’s framework is that whatever its limits, the recognition of different levels or dimensions of power remains valuable. It is perfectly possible to focus analysis primarily on one dimension, without denying the significance or influences of others. In advocating an ethnography of micropolitics in organisations, Badham notes that ‘There is no presumption here that the absence of explicit or tacit attention to “deeper” structural influences on politics means that they do not exist. These factors may be manifested in or combined with an ethnography of politics focusing on political strategies and tactics’ (1997: 3). Alternatively it may be possible to apply all three dimensions of Lukes’ schema to explain different aspects of the same phenomenon, as Wilson and Thompson (2001) do with respect to sexual harassment. Gender and sexuality are, in fact, good illustrations of how we need to allow for the possibility that power may be a highly distinctive phenomenon inside different social relations. This will be one of the themes of the next chapter.