Zygmunt Bauman: another curious absence

It is not only that Weber and Goffman have been written out of the history of orga- nization theory. Others were never written in. Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world’s most eminent intellectuals, notable for many outstanding contributions to social science, especially Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). It is a work of great

Total institutions as instruments of genocide in total war

1. The roots of evil Anti-Semitism was not a novel experience in German life. Weber, for instance, encountered it in his support of the academic careers of friends such as Simmel. Higgins (2004: 89) suggests that the Prussian elite had constructed the German project of modernity exclusively in terms of an ethnic nationalism. It

Marking identity in peaceable total institutions

1. Total institutions for marking life rather than creating death The focus switches now to less harrowing but no less total institutions. First, we shall consider the case of the Irish Magdalene Laundries, in which young girls were held captive in a kind of forced labor serving as a moral penance. Second, we shall

Washing away sin in the Magdalene Laundries

The Magdalene Laundries case presents an instance where the specificity of gen- dered power relations is only too apparent. The gaze that some young women of Eire were subjected to was not one that touched their boyfriends, their brothers, their priests and those others who may have contributed to their ‘fallen’ state. The Magdalene

The Stolen Generation

Australia is today a vibrant multicultural society, one that is highly inclusive of most of those who are its citizens.25 Its original peoples were deemed to exist formally in the 1960s when they were first included in national statistics and electoral rolls, having failed to be written out of history by death or breeding.26

The German Democratic Republic: a total society?

Next, we shall consider what happens when total institutions seek to impose total con- trol on a society. While such control is difficult to achieve organizationally it is almost impossible societally, where subtle forms of control have to be involved in the fabrica- tion of total – not just organizational – identities by the

An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism

That was the byline of an article that appeared in the respected UK newspaper The Independent, by Robert Fisk, on May 7, 2004.34 The reference was to the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib. Apparently, the goal of the US forces in photograph- ing sexual humiliation was to blackmail Iraqi victims into becoming informants against

Twenty techniques of total institutional power

Many of the techniques that were evident in total institutions can be used to make everyday acts of extreme power easier to think and to do. What these extreme cases do is throw everyday power practices into sharp relief. Any one of the techniques in Table 6.1, abstracted from the cases reviewed here, is

The sounds of silence

Sometimes that which is left unsaid is more important than that which is carefully articulated. The silences of power speak from the words they don’t pronounce as much as those they do. Texts speak to us by the words they tell but also by the words they keep quiet. In A theory of literary

Power, conflict and consensus

Conflict theory, the major rival to functionalism, centered on power (Bartos and Wehr 2002), especially as developed by Ralf Dahrendorf (1959). Dahrendorf had incorporated important aspects of Weber’s (1978) work into a basic schema derived from Marx (1976). From Weber, Dahrendorf derived the concept of authority lodged in imperatively coordinated association as the fundament

‘Power to’ conceived as a functionalist relation

1. Power as a circulator y medium Power is similar to money, says Parsons (1964): both are circulatory media. Just as money functions as a generalized mechanism or means for securing satisfaction of desires within the economy – without money you may want things but you cannot buy them because you lack ‘effective demand’

Giddens’ conflict critique of Parsons’ functionalism

Parsons’ theory was sophisticated – but at odds with the experiences of liberal democracies in the 1960s characterized by civil rights demonstrations, race riots, student demonstrations, and the ‘Paris Events of 1968’ which marred General de Gaulle’s last year as president of France. All of these events questioned existing author- ity rather than obeying

Niklas Luhmann’s system building, revising Parsons’ analogies

Giddens was not the only contemporary European theorist to find ideas from Parsons useful; at least two other theorists beat a path to Parsons’ intellectual door. The first of these we shall consider was a German, Niklas Luhmann, another grand theorist with a desire to create a total system of thought. He does so

Michael Mann’s historical functionalism

Parsons displayed little historical sensitivity, preferring to construct vast synthetic schemes that were similar to Russian dolls: open one box and you will find it replicated inside, all the way from the state to the psyche.3 They were all boxes in Parsons’ schema and any historical or substantive material could be squeezed into them.

‘Power over’, in one dimension, conceived as a mechanical relation

Parsons saw himself as explicitly addressing Hobbes’ problem of order – how society is possible – while the others did not choose to do so through the approach to power that he pioneered. They accepted the Hobbesian question but not the Hobbesian tools.6 Hobbes’ tools were fashioned from the dominant intellectual resources of his

‘Power over’: two faces and three dimensions

In an influential critique that was published in 1970, two American political scien- tists, Morton Bachrach and Peter Baratz (1970), argued that power has two faces. One face concerns the outcomes of decisive battles between different actors over specific issues. It corresponds to the diagram of power in Figure 7.4 . The other face

Four dimensions of power

What characterizes the three-dimensional view of power is that these dimensions, as Lukes (1974) conceived them, are dimensions of the same essentially contested concept – the underlying notion of power as A getting B to do something that they would not otherwise do. Lukes did not seek to synthesize disparate conceptions of power that

Power and subjectivities

Clearly subjectivity is important in the discussion of power, but unfortunately neither Lukes’ discussion nor its extension in Hardy’s work quite grasps what is important in subjectivity. The basic point of reference for any contemporary discussion of subjectivity has to be Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy. It was this work that

To have or have not: power as a relation in space, not a thing

1. Digging deep into power The dimensional view of power resolutely dissects power into layers. Analytically, the imagery is of the theorist digging deeper into the topic, but the topic is rather static. Nothing much flows. Power is all about stopping things happening in this radical view of power. Lukes’ account of power moved

Foucault’s power

1. Reading Foucault Something termed ‘the Foucault effect’ (Burchell et al. 1991) has been noted, not always favorably. It is perhaps not surprising, given the undoubted influence of Foucault’s work on power, that such a powerful effect should have been noted. A vast critical industry is now addressed to Foucault’s oeuvre.1 Foucault has become