Summary
Contents
Subject index
This volume draws together critical assessments of Michel Foucault's contribution to our understanding of the making and remaking of the modern organization. The volume provides a valuable summary of Foucault's contribution to organization theory, which also challenges the conventions of traditional organizational analysis. By applying Foucauldian concepts such as discipline, surveillance and power//knowledge, the authors shed new light on the genesis of the modern organization and raise fresh questions about organization theory. The bureaucratic career is, for example, analyzed as a disciplinary device, a mechanism that seeks to alter rational choice rather than constrain bodies. This raises questions about Foucault's link
Discipline, Surveillance and the ‘Career’: Employment on the Great Western Railway 1833–1914
Discipline, Surveillance and the ‘Career’: Employment on the Great Western Railway 1833–1914
In 1908 a Director and future Chairman of the Great Western Railway Company (GWR), Viscount Churchill, informed his staff that:
however subordinate your present position may be, if you will only take the trouble to make yourselves efficient you will, I am sure, rise to positions of trust in this great company. (GWRM, January 1908)
The same year his words were echoed by the staff journal of the GWR, which informed its readers that
railway employees have never had such splendid opportunities to improve their position as they have at the present time, and if a man does not attain a reasonable measure of success he ...
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