Circuit Court of Appeals, Greene v. I could not have accomplished it without your help.conduct is to treat it as misconduct, even if it does not rise to the level of harassment actionable under the law. The goal of this policy is to eliminate harassment before it becomes severe and pervasive enough to violate the law.
Power for Foucault is what makes us what we are, operating on a quite different level from other theories:‘His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them’ (Gaventa 2003: 1)Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1991 Rabinow 1991). Of continued employment or the conduct is sufficiently severe or pervasive to.To make this determination, the Court considers the following factors: (1) the frequency of the conduct (2) the severity of the conduct (3) whether the conduct is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance and (4) whether the conduct unreasonably interferes with the employee’s job performance. The Court must look at the totality of the circumstances, and view the harassing conduct in context, not as isolated acts.”In this particular case, over 11 months, there were a half-dozen incidents (four times a supervisor showed the plaintiff pornographic videos on his cell phone and twice he made “arguably sexually-related comments”).
Disciplinary and bio-power create a ‘discursive practice’ or a body of knowledge and behaviour that defines what is normal, acceptable, deviant, etc. Physical bodies are subjugated and made to behave in certain ways, as a microcosm of social control of the wider population, through what he called ‘bio-power’. He studied psychology, medicine and criminology and their roles as bodies of knowledge that define norms of behaviour and deviance. Their systems of surveillance and assessment no longer required force or violence, as people learned to discipline themselves and behave in expected ways.Foucault was fascinated by the mechanisms of prison surveillance, school discipline, systems for the administration and control of populations, and the promotion of norms about bodily conduct, including sex. In shifting attention away from the ‘sovereign’ and ‘episodic’ exercise of power, traditionally centred in feudal states to coerce their subjects, Foucault pointed to a new kind of ‘disciplinary power’ that could be observed in the administrative systems and social services that were created in 18th century Europe, such as prisons, schools and mental hospitals. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’ (Foucault 1991: 194).Power is also a major source of social discipline and conformity.
An example of a very practical tool for doing this is included in the IIED Power Tools collection, called the ‘Writing Tool’, and in NGO workshops we have used a simple method of discourse analysis to examine mission statements and programme aims.Thanks to Jonathan Gaventa (2003) for his contributions to this section. Foucault’s approach has been widely used to critique development thinking and paradigms, and the ways in which development discourses are imbued with power (Gaventa 2003, citing the work of Escobar, Castells and other ‘post-development’ critics).At a the level of practice, activists and practitioners use methods of discourse analysis to identify normative aid language that needs more careful scrutiny, and to shape alternative framings. Discourse transmits and produces power it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart’ (Foucault 1998: 100-1).The powercube is not easily compatible with Foucauldian understandings of power, but there is scope for critical analysis and strategic action at the level of challenging or shaping discourse – for example taking the psychological/cultural meaning of ‘invisible power’ and ‘hegemony’ as a lens with which to look at the whole. Discourse can be a site of both power and resistance, with scope to ‘evade, subvert or contest strategies of power’ (Gaventa 2003: 3):‘Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it… We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby a discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. To challenge power is not a matter of seeking some ‘absolute truth’ (which is in any case a socially produced power), but ‘of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991: 75). His ideas about action were, like Hayward’s, concerned with our capacities to recognise and question socialised norms and constraints.
London, Penguin.Foucault, Michel (1998) The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, London, Penguin.Gaventa, John (2003) Power after Lukes: a review of the literature, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.Hayward, Clarissa Rile (1998) ‘De-Facing Power’, Polity 31(1).Rabinow, Paul (editor) (1991) The Foulcault Reader: An introduction to Foulcault’s thought, London, Penguin. Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison.
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