316 ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERS
describedinhisownwords:‘‘...the goal of my work during the last twenty years
...has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture,
human beings are made subjects’’ (Foucault 1983, 208). To begin to unpack this
seemingly innocuous statement let us consider the key word here – ‘‘subject’’ – in
both the meanings that it admits: ‘‘subject to someone else by control and depen-
dence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both mean-
ings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to’’ (Foucault
1983, 212). While the first meaning is a relatively familiar one (hierarchical employ-
ment relations, prisoner-guard, parent-child etc.), the second hints at the radical
and innovative nature of Foucault’s thought. What is equally significant regarding
the exercise of this power, is the interrelation between power and knowledge
which Foucault signifies by the slash in the term ‘‘Power/Knowledge.’’ Foucault
argued that to properly grasp the conditions for the emergence of the ‘‘human
sciences’’ – all those ‘‘sciences’’ that are concerned with describing, explaining,
understanding, predicting and controlling human behavior – one must under-
stand its complicity with the historically unprecedented presence of a widespread
and general control of human beings. Foucault (1979, 191) argued that the ‘‘birth of
the sciences of man’’ probably lies in the various written techniques (of notation,
registration, columnar and tabular presentation, of measurement, classification
etc.) by which individuals are turned into a ‘‘case.’’ Transforming a human being
into a ‘‘case’’ (patient, student, prisoner, worker) simultaneously homogenizes (by
classifying as one within a series) and individualizes (by measuring the individual
differences). Implicit in such classification and measurement is the presence of nor-
malizing judgments wherein the measurement of individual differences are made
in regard to deviations from a norm (for example, students grades, standard cost,
time and motion studies, budgets, benchmarks). According to Foucault, it was only
by the late eighteenth century that this manner of describing, or more precisely,
writing up individuals as cases became widespread and general. It furthermore
represented a reversal of historic proportions, as stated by Foucault (1979, 191):
For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of
everybody – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked
at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninter-
rupted writing was a privilege....The disciplinary methods reversed this
relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this
description a means of control and a method of domination.Power, in this light, is not negative or repressive but rather positive and
productive, because ‘‘it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge gained of him belongs to this
production’’ (Foucault 1979, 194). Accordingly, for Foucault (1990, 98), power and
knowledge are constitutive of, but not identical, to each other, since ‘‘between
techniques of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if
they have specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference.’’
The scientific disciplines which generate our knowledge of human beings is thus
also complicit in their disciplining, or as Foucault (1979, 222) suggested, ‘‘The
‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’’