(p.12) Workplace dignity can be considered not just a concept in management studies (Lucas, 2015; Lucas et al., 2013), but a paradigm that offers an alternative perspective on 12 hegemonic management discourse and theorizing. It responds to the current debates around the tensions between shareholder and stakeholder value and the rising gap between corporate profit and wage stagnation (Lazonick, 2014). However, in contrast to proposed solutions around balancing organizational and shareholder interest in profit maximization with the needs of the environment, a dignity paradigm offers a more radical proposal towards today’s questions. A dignity paradigm confronts the problematic nature of the...

(p.14) Following a dignity logic, new meanings for resilience in the workplace can be generated. In contrast to a neoliberal anchoring, a dignity-perspective offers a number of key principles in relation to resilience at work. While resilience denotes the ability to bounce back from adversity at work, a dignity paradigm does not advance this concept as instrumental and as an individualized responsibility. In contrast, while dignity assumes intrinsic worth, it also denotes resilience as an important capability of human beings. As adversity is part of everyday life of every human being, it is indeed important to strengthen the resilience capabilities of...

(p.16) Foucault was a late entrant to organization studies, but his presence was already being felt in British accounting studies. During the 1970s, accounting in universities moved away from its excessively technical and vocational studies orientation and embraced the social sciences. The currents that were running through 1970s sociology found their way into accounting through intermediaries such as David Cooper, Anthony Hopwood, Tony Lowe, Peter Miller, and Tony Tinker. Accounting as a social science was borne, and in the 1980s, Foucault was to have a major impact on this subdiscipline of management.

(p.26) The story of the rise of Foucault in British organization studies is one of the remarkable stories in the discipline. Consecrated as one of the major thinkers in the field, promoted and debated by a number of key theorists, and routinely appearing in prestigious journals, the star of Foucault is one that has shone brightly over the past twenty years. It is perhaps interesting to speculate what organization studies might look like now had another philosopher, for instance, Baudrillard, Derrida, or Habermas, been adopted? Skeptics who see mere ornamentation when they read Foucauldian organizational analysis would argue that very little...

“The ascent of corporations is one of the great, if unheralded, paradoxes of the modern West. Corporations are regarded as the apogee of modern capitalism and have found their most fertile soil within liberal, democratic, capitalist polities, where their legal protections are most numerous. Yet they are of premodern provenance and themselves violate all the basic principles of liberalism, democracy, and free-market capitalism. More than any other phenomenon, the rise of corporations challenges the adequacy of our liberal individualist frames and underscores the urgency of complicating them.” p.156

(p.300) In our view, Foucault's ethics offer some important, though necessarily limited, contributions to the business ethics literature, which deserve our attention. First, he offers some alternative ways of thinking about freedom as a concept relevant to business ethics. Rather than seeing freedom as an entitlement to be acknowledged by managers, he posits freedom as a condition of being human that can never be absolute but can only ever be exercised within a field of discipline and control. As such, we can discern a little more clearly some of the conditions of our freedom in organizations. Foucault's ethics also offer a...

(p.1755) Since having been formally introduced to the field of organization studies by Cooper and Burrell in this journal (1988; Burrell, 1988), Foucault’s ideas – or rather what we might call various ‘Foucauldianisms’ – have been among the most significant and oft-cited intellectual influences in the field (see Carter, McKinlay, & Rowlinson, 2002, pp. 515–16). This was originally most notable with regard to innovations within labour process studies, and in particular the work of Knights, Willmott and associates (especially Knights & Willmott, 1989; see also Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). These studies took early inspiration from Foucault as part of attempts...

(p.45) There is a common misperception that Michel Foucault was oblivious to the relationship between the subject and the other, if not hostile to its very possibility in as much as he conflated them together in his notion of power. In the pages that follow, I want not only to counter such a fallacy but to argue that, in the context of organisations seeking to balance control with creativity for the purposes of fostering innovation, Foucault offers a solution to this conundrum. Insofar as theory ought to be deformed for the analytical purpose on hand (Burrell, 1988, p. 229), his vision...

(p.4) The Foucauldian analysis of workplace subjectivity (e.g. Bergström and Knights, 2006; Covaleski et al., 1998; Knights and McCabe, 1999; Townley, 1993) has been preoccupied with subjectification, that is, with what a subject position has to offer in terms of new ways of thinking, behaving and feeling. Empirical research has accordingly focused on what a person becomes when entering a new subject position. But analyses of workplace subjectivity have not systematically focused on ways of thinking, behaving and feeling that are incongruent with a particular subject position. Empirical research has thus not focused on which abilities a person takes a critical...

(p.46) Specifically, we use Foucault’s work in order to develop an understanding of ethics and management in a way that mediates between an understanding of ethics as an individual responsibility and ethics as organizationally determined. The means through which a manager acts in relation to both ethics and organizations are the central issue. Thus, in this perspective, the subjectivity of managers is located at the centre stage of ethical discussion. Subjectivity is a means through which to think of individual people not as being distinct or self-contained but as necessarily social; however a person might consider themself to be an ‘‘individual’’,...

(p.576) Throughout his intellectual career, Foucault was concerned with the epistemological rules of disciplines formation, the disciplining of populations and subjects through power–knowledge relations and the selfformation of the ethical subject. However, it does not constitute too great a violation to perceive his work as having been broadly about how human life organizes itself and is organized. Similarly, once we reject the notion of perceiving the subject matter of organization theory exclusively as the bounded entity that commonly attracts the label ‘organization’,3 the two forms of study can be seen as having parallel, if not identical, concerns. In this sense, organization...

(p.550) Whereas Marxists concentrate on the exploitation of labour through capital's appropriation of surplus value, and feminists are concerned with the domination of women through patriarchal legacies, Foucaulťs analysis complements and qualifies these perspectives by focusing upon power-infused processes of subjugation. Contrasting it with previous forms of power - such as domination where groups were subordinated by virtue of their race or ethnicity, and exploitation where labour is deprived of the full return on its production - subjugation is seen as more economical in as much as it is a technique of the 'social' and of the 'self' which produces a...

(p.272) As in many other fields of research, the legacy of Michel Foucault has become almost ubiquitous in management and organization studies (Carter et al., 2002; Rowlinson and Carter, 2002; McKinlay and Wilson, 2012; Välikangas and Seeck, 2011). This overarching presence appears to be especially marked within British organization studies (Carter, 2008) and within Critical Management Studies in particular (McKinlay and Wilson, 2012). Across this reception, one particular attraction to Foucault’s philosophical style has been its ability to push organizational analysis in new directions and beyond a preoccupation with already established categories. Foucault is regarded as a way to ‘reject the...

(p.274) Foucault’s dispositional analysis can be articulated as a history and a typology of connected social technologies, as well as a potent analytical approach to social reality. As an interconnecting, broad, and diversified analytical tool, the notion permits an alternative access to the circumstances under which organizing and organizations take place. Deferring attention from the organization as an entity to a larger social field, without reducing the former to a given, even more fundamental entity (e.g. society), dispositional analysis elucidates conditions for organizing and organizational processes, which managers and concrete organizations as well as organizational theory need to address and take...

(p.156) Since the establishment of Organization Studies in 1980, organizational scholars have drawn inspiration from the writings of Michel Foucault. Across the subsequent decades, his oeuvre has had a remarkable and continuing influence on the field. This influence has certainly not been uniform. Nor has it been a simple matter of ‘applying’ Foucault’s concepts and analyses to the domain of organization studies. For Foucault is in many respects a nuisance for scholars of organizations (Mennicken & Miller, 2014). Indeed, he had little interest in formal organizations, even though he was deeply concerned throughout his lifetime with the administering and organizing of...

(p.162) Contrary to a thoroughly ‘disciplined society’, or a society in which everything happened in accordance with discipline, a ‘disciplinary society’ for Foucault is a society in which discipline has a decisive impact and plays the role of an important form of normativity, yet never fully rules, but exerts an influence, rivalling other form of norms and dispositions (Raffnsøe et al., 2016b, p. 189–190). Even when discipline and surveillance may be ever-present, ubiquitous or even allpervasive, they are only present as dispositional devices that may act on our actions or perceptions (Raffnsøe, 2013a).

(p.175) Organization scholars ought to draw more attention to the complex constellations within Foucault’s work, the intricate relationship between power and freedom, and the potency of indirect action. Fruitful in this context would also be a closer engagement with Foucault’s notion of ‘dispositive’ and its analytical potential, which until recently has been largely overlooked by organizational scholarship (Raffnsøe et al., 2016a). Yet, the notion of dispositive (dispositif) ‘forms a crucial constituent of societal analysis in Foucault’s oeuvre on par with the more familiar analytics of discourse, discipline, power/knowledge, subjectivity, and subjectification’ (Raffnsøe et al., 2016a, p. 274). Seeking ‘to lay bare...

(p.527) For English-speaking Foucauldians, any questioning of Foucault or his influence is ‘demonstrative of the worst excesses of Anglo-Saxon empiricist small-mindedness’ (O’Farrell, 1989: 20). In assessing Foucault’s influence on the treatment of history in organization studies we knowingly court accusations of an excessive commitment to empiricism. But our argument is that the invocation of Foucault has exacerbated the separation of organization studies from history, both as empirical research using documentary traces from the past, and as historiography.

(p.75) Drawing from a Kantian view of dignity, humanistic management scholars such as Pirson (2017) maintain that organizations and managers have a duty to both protect and promote the dignity of individuals. In this vein, Donaldson and Walsh (2015) advance a theory of business that positions the protection and promotion of all participants’ dignity as the ultimate purpose of business and the standard by which success should be judged.

(p.76) What distinguishes workplace dignity from human dignity is that the former is composed of two sources of worth. Human dignity is founded on to the premise of inherent dignity, which is the belief that all people are entitled to an equal and unconditional worth simply for being human. In contrast, workplace dignity is founded on inherent dignity and earned dignity, which is the worth accrued through instrumental contributions on the job and, as such, is variable and conditional (Hodson, 2001). Although inherent and earned dignities logically contradict one another (i.e., unconditional and equal value opposes the notion of conditional and...

(p.99) [O]ur findings show that workplace dignity (inclusive of both dignity and indignity factors) is a critical organizational construct in that it is a cause and a consequence of important organizational phenomena. Positioned as a cause, positive experiences of dignity predict higher levels of engagement; negative experiences of indignity predict burnout and turnover intentions above and beyond variance driven by organizational respect and meaningful work. Positioned as a consequence, workplace dignity and indignity are predicted by factors including dirty work and income insufficiency. In addition to empirically validating that there are connections between dignity and its theorized antecendents and outcomes, this...

(p.2) A new concept has arrived in organizational research inspired by Michel Foucault; the uncanny term ‘the dispositive’. The field is already populated by a number of well-known concepts derived from Foucault, including ‘discipline’, ‘governmentality’, ‘biopower’ and ‘technologies of the self’, which have all become part of the critical vocabulary in organization studies. Indeed, infusing analytical concepts into organizational analysis has been a significant effect of the adoption of Foucault by organization scholars since the late 1980s. The most recent addition to this range of concepts, ‘the dispositive’, is presented as a solution to longstanding problems in organizational analysis, since the...

(p.8) Another key feature, by which Foucault sees power as functioning in his genealogical writings, is the theme of pastoral power, a power relationship often found in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Foucault 2007, 175, 130). Foucault addressed this topic in greatest depth in his lectures at Collège de France 1977–1978 (see Foucault 2007). Pastoral power is a power relationship, where the pastor aims to modify the spirit and will of the guided person in a certain direction with the help of spiritual guidance and subjects’ confessions (Foucault 2007, 181; Foucault 1981; Elden 2005). During the confessions, the pastor aims to gain more...

(p.13) According to the Foucauldian stance, it is essential to study ethics as a form of practices, i.e. what managers and workers actually do in their everyday activities (Clegg et al. 2007; Starkey & Hatchuel 2002). This viewpoint is very similar to the idea which Foucault expressed. He pointed out that in order to understand subjectivity, it was crucial to study practices: “[I]t is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. […] It is constituted in real practices – historically analyzable practices” (Foucault 1997a, 277). Thus study ethics should not, according to Foucault, begin by...