‘The Dispositive’: Foucault’s Concept for Organizational Analysis?

Abstract

Foucault’s notion ‘the dispositive’ has been introduced in organization studies as a highly promising concept. However, its analytical and empirical potentials remain to be fully explored. This article develops dispositional analytics which conceives of organizations as pervaded by multiple dispositives that interact, reinforce or contradict one another. In this reconstruction, particular emphasis is given to the visibility produced by dispositives, through which subjects and object emerge in a particular prescriptive light. Furthermore, analytical privilege is given to relations over substance. This means foregrounding the interrelations between dispositives as well as the dispositive’s ‘internal relationality’, that is, the relations established by each dispositive out of which organizational problems arise and transform. The framework’s potentials are explored in a study of care workers’ responses to a management reform that disciplined and depersonalized care-giving. The difficulties that care workers faced in straddling legal demands, service standardization and care ethics are understood as a situation of heterogeneous dispositions. In this context, care workers and their managers tactically reconstructed their subjectivities, relating to the dispositives in diverse and unexpected ways.

Speaking truth through power: Conceptualizing internal whistleblowing hotlines with Foucault’s dispositive

“…Dean and Villadsen, 2016: 96;Raffnsøe et al, 2016: 280). But apart from this and a few other related examples given by Foucault on topics such as grain scarcity (2007: 30), there are still rather few explicit contemporary empirical examples of these types of dispositional frictions and co-existences in the existing research (see however Daudigeos et al, 2016;Villadsen, 2019;Whelan, 2017).…”

“…While the concept of dispositive as such is a rather broad term, several scholars (e.g. Dean, 2010: 27; Villadsen, 2019: 4) have noted how dispositional analysis can be operationalized through the use of one or more specific entry points. Consequently, in the second order analysis (Gioia et al, 2013), emphasis was placed on the rationality and imperative of the whistleblowing hotline.…”

“…The main theoretical points of reference in the following derive from Foucault's College de France lectures (Foucault, 2008(Foucault, , 2009, along with subsequent operationalizations of dispositional analysis (e.g. Raffnsøe et al, 2016;Villadsen, 2019). The section begins by situating the concept of dispositive in relation to Foucauldian studies of organization and governmentality, before detailing how the attunement of dispositional analysis toward social heterogeneity is useful for understanding the ambiguous nature of the internal whistleblowing hotline.…”

A Sociological Perspective on the Experience of Contention

“…Note that dispositives are not merely "discovered." In identifying a dispositive from a diverse set of practices, the researcher is also engaged in an act of methodological construction (Villadsen 2021).…”

“…Instead, the concept directs our attention to how contention is constituted through a prescriptive dimension in social practices, concerned with how conflict ought to be practiced and regulated. The concept should be seen as an analytical grid, which must always be specified in a concrete research project (Koopman and Matza 2013; Villadsen 2021). I first introduce the reception history and the etymology of the dispositive.…”