Power in Marketing:

A Broadly Dimensional Approach

© John Desmond

First published, October, 2025

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design, “Feeding Frenzy” © Jean Hall

Chapter Nine: Foucault

Introduction

Some suggest that Foucault opened a fourth dimension of power by exploring issues beyond those addressed by Dahl, Galbraith and Lukes.¹ Whether or not that is so, his approach differs in that he delighted in challenging and subverting orthodoxy. For instance, in the series of seminars published as Society Must Be Defended, Foucault (2003) reversed Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. By taking war, as opposed to the Philosophy of Right as the lens through which to view politics and power, Foucault argued that truth is not neutral, but is rather used as a weapon to justify an historically partisan victory; put plainly, the supposed “truth” of history is written by the victor (Foucault, 2004: 57). In so doing he wilfully placed himself on the margins, identifying himself with the sophists and against mainstream philosophy. That he did not trouble himself to discuss dimensional theories of power developed by American and British political theorists is to an extent understandable, given that his main point of reference was France. Even though he was elsewhere at the time, Foucault was deeply affected by the political upheaval that occurred in France in May 1968.² His reflections on the events of May largely shaped his ideas on power as signalling a void in Marxist theory, pointing to the emptiness of abstract discussions of class, surplus value, consciousness and ideology, such that to focus narrowly on the sovereign power of the State misses out an entire nexus of power.

It can be somewhat confusing for the reader who like me is not fully conversant in French, that we have had to wait for translations of Foucault’s work. This is not just down to the exigencies of translation, but rather because while some appeared rather expeditiously, others appeared many years after the original was published, notably the lectures bundled as Society Must Be Defended, delivered in 1975-1976, (first published in English in 2003) and The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered in 1978-1979 (published in English in 2008). Discipline and Punish, on the other hand was published in French in 1975, and appeared English translation relatively quickly in 1977, while the first volume of The History of Sexuality was published in French in 1976, appearing in translation in 1978. This may help explain the preponderance of articles on discipline and the repressive hypothesis by anglophone authors in the intervening period.³

Foucault (1982) divided his work into three periods. In the early stage he explored how versions of the subject were created by science and economics. He then turned to study the period in the seventeenth century when the emergent field of psychiatry developing dividing practices to sequester the mad from the sane, the sick from the healthy and criminals from “good boys” (Foucault, 1982: 777). His subsequent work on the development of disciplinary power and biopower can be seen as complements to this project as they explain how, in the modern nation-state, these forms of power came to be exercised over juridically free subjects. Then the broader question of how the government of citizens changed in the transition from the ‘raison d’etat” of the police state, to the operation of power contemporary market societies. Foucault’s last project focused on ancient Greece and the early Christian period to illustrate how individuals turned themselves into subjects of sexuality (Foucault, 1982: 778). His status as an historian was controversial, rejected by conventionalists who took a jaundiced view, describing him as an “antihistorical historian” (Poster, 1982) who played fast and loose with historical facts.

Given that Foucault coined a series of concepts such as dispositif, episteme, genealogy and governmentality, then one might reasonably expect to find some form of clear definition of these terms. However, as noted by Rene Ten Bos, Foucault’s accounts are elliptic and vague, provoking scholars in organization studies to respond by providing clear definitions. Ten Bos argues to the contrary that such attempts are mistaken as they fail to grasp Foucault’s catachrestic philosophy. Catachresis usually refers to using a word mistakenly, for instance, “alibi” instead of “excuse”. Ten Bos’s point is that Foucault, who was acutely aware of the framing power of language, saw the role of philosophy as to produce concepts. In this view, a signifier such as governmentality should be freed from its traditional associations and given rein to inhabit new and different semantic fields (Ten Bos, 2010). Whether Ten Bos is correct in asserting this is a moot point, however, given the laxity of Foucault’s descriptions, the following account seeks to retain something of that looseness.

Dispositif and Episteme

Foucault was antithetical to abstract theorisations of power such as those formulated by Hobbes’ theory of Leviathan, or the dialectic. He was suspicious of the presumption that concepts pass down unchanged from one generation to the next and that to explore the dimension of subjectivity requires that one becomes attuned to the system of symbolic classification prevalent in a given culture at a given time. These concerns are reflected in his development of the related concepts of dispositif and episteme. These concepts are not easy to understand at first but hopefully make more sense as one becomes attuned to his concern to focus on specifics. A dispositif refers to a combination of physical and discursive ways of ordering in a particular domain that makes a certain understanding or action in that domain possible. Take for example the domain of sexuality. In the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes how the modern concept of sexuality would have made little sense to the ancient Greeks, whose dispositif centred on aphrodisia, which linked bodies to pleasures, such that the relation of self to others was concerned with acts and not as today, with identities. In volume three he discusses in more detail the differences between early Greek and early Christian works, while the fourth volume considers how aphrodisia came to be replaced by a dispositif centred around the Christian concept of the flesh. So rather than assuming an unvarying meaning of sex, “aphrodisia”, “the flesh” and the modern concept of,

sexuality” are specific to a particular time and place, constituting three modes that tell us something different about what we now call sex and also about subjectivity and truth.⁴

Genealogy

In the early works Foucault studied systems of knowledge in Europe from the Renaissance, to the Classical and Modern periods, to argue that it is wrong to think of knowledge as a gradual progression of ideas. Rather, each historical period was governed by a distinctive episteme or structure of thought that moderated the production of discourse on topics such as life, language and labour. From this one can detect the seeds of the idea that truth does not exist independently of the discourse that produces it. In a controversial move which distanced him from more conventional historians, Foucault later developed from Nietzsche, the genealogical approach. In an interview he explained that genealogy begins by posing a question in the present time and then working backwards to try to explain how this state of affairs came to be (Kritzman, 1988: 262). For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1978) locates the abstract model for the spatial, embodied, control of the citizen in modern disciplinary societies in the panopticon, devised by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. Genealogy does not search for origins but seeks to describe the “erratic and discontinuous process whereby the past became the present”.⁵ Genealogy also informs our understanding of the present by bringing to light hidden conflicts of the past (Garland, 2014).

The Subject….and Power

Aside from Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s most condensed comments on power are made in the first volume of The History of Sexuality and in The Subject and Power (1982) and what follows is heavily influenced by my reading of the latter. Foucault’s ruminations on the aftermath of the events in France during 1968 convinced him that to focus narrowly on the sovereign power of the State misses out an entire nexus of power. Power does not come from the top down but from the bottom up involving a host of agencies, in the absence of which one cannot provide a theory of the State. Consequently, although discussion of the State features in many of his works, Foucault felt that a wider, more expansive theory of government was required. This led him to consider a dimension of collective experience hitherto unexplored, the micropolitical dimension, pertaining to the specifics of how power is exercised over individuals and how it circulates through networks, together with the actual practices of subjugation;⁶

This is exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume or destroy them. It is a question of “capacity”. It brings into play relations between individuals, that certain individuals exercise power over others. (Foucault, 1982: 786).

Power involves a relationship between human beings where certain actions modify others. Moreover, it exists only when it is put into action. One should thus analyse institutions from the perspective of power relations and not vice versa.⁷ Power relations are located deep in the social nexus and are not “above” society as a supplementary structure. Power can only be articulated on the basis of two indispensable elements; that the “other” on whom power is exercised is recognised as person who acts and from this that when faced with a relationship of power a whole field of responses may open up. While at one extreme this relation may involve violence (when power is forced to remove its mask), and at the other extreme, consent, these are the instruments or the outcomes of power, not its essence. Rather the basic nature of power is, “(a) total structure of actions brought to bear on possible actions, it incites, it induces, it seduces”. Garland’s (1995) understanding of this is one should consider that all social relations intertwine with power relations which involve an asymmetrical balance of forces. One should not consider that these forces operate within a social whole such as “society”, but rather across disparate multiple fields. Garland notes how Foucault’s “special focus” was not on groups, nor on individuals who dominate or are dominated, but on how power relations are organized and the techniques they depend on. At the extreme it forbids, absolutely. The exercise of power involves guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.” ⁸ When power is defined as a mode of action on the actions of others, characterised by the government of some people by others, freedom is important. Notwithstanding the ultimate possibility of violence, power is only exercised over free subjects and only insofar as they are free. This means that the field of possibility includes several alternative modes of behaving, at the heart of which, “and constantly provoking it is a recalcitrance of the will”.⁹

Near the beginning of The Subject and Power, Foucault (1982) remarks that it is not power, but rather the subject that constitutes the general theme of his research. Power is of course heavily implicated in the formation of the subject and particularly in the ascription of identity. But that is getting ahead of the argument. What does Foucault mean by the subject? He shared with Lacan the notion the notion that the “subject” is not what is given us by nature, such as how short or tall we are, but rather pertains to our formation as symbolic beings who are subjects of and subjected to the language and culture we are born into. For him there are two meanings of subject; subject to someone else by control and dependence, and being tied to one’s identity by a conscience or self-knowledge”.¹⁰ Foucault (1982) revisits the theme that informs his lecture series Society Must Be Defended, by inviting us to consider power as a struggle, naming three kinds; struggles against discrimination, whether this is ethnic, religious or social; struggles against exploitation that separates the individual from what they produce; finally, struggles against what ties the individual to himself and which thereby submits him to others. He mentions that quite often these are mixed up although one is usually dominant. In the nineteenth century it was exploitation, whereas at the time of writing it took the form of resistance against forms of subjection.¹¹ He elaborates that these are struggles for and against the government of individualisation. Identity is a constraint such that the individual on the one hand asserts their right to be different, while on the other hand they attack everything that separates them, breaks their link with others, splits up community, ”forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his identity in a constraining way”.¹²

This form of power attaches itself to immediate, everyday life, which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects.¹³ What exactly does “being tied to one’s identity” mean? Foucault’s argument seems to run along similar lines to Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic, the pre-existing system of culture we are born into which classifies according to a binary logic even prior to birth. Understood in this sense, Foucault, writing more than forty years ago was prescient in noticing that even then,“(m)aybe the target nowadays is not to discover who we are but to refuse who we are”.¹⁴ Foucault recognised the dynamic nature of the symbolic system we are enmeshed in and from this that to explore the dimension of subjectivity requires that one becomes attuned to the symbolic system of classification prevalent in a given culture at a given time. This is exemplified in his method, which focused on systems of classification at specific times and in specific places. It seems obvious that the symbolic system at work today is not the same as that which prevailed in the 1980s, nor indeed, the 1790s. It would not thus make much sense to consider power today as solely constituted as a disciplinary regime nor in terms of the neoliberalism of the 1980s.

The development of these dividing practices was important as they substituted the idea of a psychological identity, considered fixed and immutable, from what previously had been understood as sporadic manifestations of reprehensible behaviour. The concepts of disciplinary power and biopower melded into this project as they explain how, in the modern nation-state, these forms of power came to be exercised over juridically free subjects. Where discipline is suggestive of a largely passive subject who is moulded by power, Foucault’s final project considered how the individual turns him or herself into a subject, by seeing themselves for instance as a subject of sexuality.¹⁵ He argues that there was a gap when it came to studying power which was almost exclusively the province of legal studies such as what constitutes legitimate power. To study power requires an understanding of the historical conditions that structure our conceptualization. Additionally, we should not take reality for granted but need to know the type of reality we are talking about.

Critique of the Philosophy of Right

The philosophy of right refers to the concern of Western philosophers and jurists since feudal times, to justify and explicate the limits of royal power, which had to be seen as right, or as limited by being subjected to rules.¹⁶ In an early lecture from Society Must Be Defended, Foucault focuses in particular on Thomas Hobbes as a prominent philosopher of right. As is mentioned in chapter four, Hobbes developed his concept of Leviathan not long after the shock of the execution of the English king and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy. Hobbes argued from the premise that human nature is invariably vain and selfish and that given a scarcity of desirable objects, individuals who are motivated by a common desire for an object will soon quarrel and fight over its possession. Given this situation, individuals live in constant fear for their property and for their lives and the lives of their loved ones. The solution Hobbes offers to forestall this dread prospect, is that the individual members of society contract together to cede some of their powers to a third party, the sovereign, Leviathan. The sovereign absolute ruler in turns contracts with the citizens to protect the common weal, maintaining peace through the administration of impartial justice. This preserves order, as the individual who breaks this contract by harming another, is made accountable to sovereign justice.

While there is insufficient space here to reprise Foucault’s entire critique, his basic argument is that Hobbes’ abstract conception of sovereign power deflects from and masks the real history of England, following the Norman Conquest. ¹⁷ Where a “Hobbesian” view sought to justify the Norman invasion of England as right and proper and thus to legitimise it, Foucault argues that the real outcome was a continuing struggle between the Norman invaders and the indigenous population, which they had conquered and subjected. Hobbes’ abstract scheme elides this struggle of the dispossessed from history as in his view, “no matter what, it is you the subjects who constitute the sovereignty that represents you (Foucault, 2003: 98).

Since Foucault wrote about this, the idea that all of those who are ruled willingly accede to this state of affairs and consequently, that society can be thought of as an organic whole shaped in the figure of Leviathan has come under intense scrutiny. His critique of Hobbes is relevant in light of recent re-evaluations of the sociology of modernism that are complementary to the discussion of slavery in chapter five of this text. Bhambra and Holmwood (2021) criticize the founding fathers of sociology, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, who wrote at the height of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century, for paying scant attention to the ongoing violent colonization of other peoples. They argue that the key presumptions of liberalism, which envisaged the modern sovereign state as delineated by clear boundaries and possessing an autonomous economy acted to mask the reality of empire, colonial dispossession and appropriation. They date this fiction to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, made just three years before the publication of Leviathan. Hobbes’ vision of the modern state as essentially contained within its borders was linked to the belief that economic development, based on modern, rational lines, would form a sound base for future prosperity. Bhambra and Holmwood describe that what actually happened was expropriation of colonised peoples on a grand scale, involving nefarious alliances between States and capitalist enterprises such as the East India Company and the Royal Africa Company.  Davies (2022) too comments that, “commerce did not, as liberals such as Hobbes liked to think, gradually displace barbaric and murderous economic practices, but grew along with them.” The reality was that these were empires, not bounded nation-states, which largely relied for their development and growth on the expropriation of those whom they subjugated.

Reminiscent of Foucault’s critique of Hobbes, the authors argue that a paradox of modern social theory is that although it is an historically formed enterprise, ‘it does not appear to be changed by changing historiographic accounts. Rather it relies on a relatively unchanging view of the rise of the West, associated with the emergence of democracy, industry and science.’ The claim that modern societies are constantly on the threshold of some great change that will liberate them from the past turns out itself to be a historical relic, forged in a particular time and place, that continues to constrain our sense of chronology. In relation to consumption there is a continuing reluctance on the part of many to consider the expropriation and destruction involved in the production of many of the goods and services we take as essential to our wellbeing.

Governmentality

Late-on Foucault developed the rather clunky concept of governmentality, which nevertheless encapsulates the core of his project.¹⁸ Governmentality offers an answer to the fundamental question posed by the liberal order to the question of power, which is, how to structure the possible field of action of free subjects? One might venture to assert that the broad aim of Foucault’s genealogical approach was to understand how, by the 1980s, individuals were no longer so much subjected to juridical power, moral sanction, or shame, but rather were constituted as free subjects who behave in rationally in accordance with the laws of the market. The principle of self-government appears at various points in Foucault’s work. In the 1976 lecture series Society Must Be Defended, he argues that contemporary forms of self-government have their roots in Christian and military practice. The State, “that was mistrusted by everyone from left and right”¹⁹ in the period following the Second World War, was by then being reorganised by politicians on the model of the market economy. The key question posed by Foucault is, how did this come about? He answers that this was enabled by the development of an apparatus borrowed from the Church he calls pastoral power, which spread throughout the social body in Europe.²⁰ In the new dispensation formed by the emerging nation state, pastoral power was repurposed towards a secular end, such that salvation was recontextualised to signify progressive development towards a life of security, health and wealth in this world. Foucault later discussed contemporary forms of self-government in the neoliberal era towards the end of the lecture series on biopolitics delivered in 1978-1979²¹ and on the ideal of self-mastery as it was understood in ancient Greece.²²

Pastoral Power

In his critique of the Philosophy of Right, Foucault argues that this philosophy had the dual effect of justifying monarchical institutions and narrowing considerations of power to focus on a sovereign/subject relation. Taken together these had the effect of blinding theorists to the emergence from the late seventeenth-century onwards, of pastoral power, borrowed from the Christian Church, which is largely incompatible with sovereign power.²³ Pastoral power consists of two complementary roles; disciplinary power, a micro-power that constructs analyses of and pacifies the individual body, and bio-power, that operates at the macro level to manage the population as a whole. Together, these played a role in subjectification; an important point, which reminds us that Foucault’s (1982) stated focus was not power per se, but rather, the subject.

Disciplinary Power

Norbert Elias shared Foucault’s concern to explain how power was reconfigured in the period from the feudal era of absolute monarchy, to the formation of the modern democratic nation-state. Elias’s answer to this complex question is based on increasing self-discipline. He argued that changes in the social environment (sociogenesis) impacted on the individual psyche (psychogenesis), leading to increasing self-control, which was achieved through the medium of a greatly strengthened superego. The character of the sober Puritan described by Weber fits well with this image of powerful restraint and repression of desire. In the modern period this restraint involved training in self-restraint, particularly during early childhood. Marcuse also based his explanation on the Freudian idea of repression by arguing that the bourgeois class imposed its sexual repression onto the working class, such that the nuclear family was stripped of its extended context and fitted out for work in capitalist enterprise so as to meet the demand for a stable, punctual workforce. The character of Laura Brown presented in chapter one illustrates Elias’s vision of the isolated modern adult, who is troubled, not be the threat of external violence, but of violence within the psyche.

Increasing self-discipline forms an important part of the explanations provided by Elias and Marcuse. In Elias’s explanation, described in chapter one, the inculcation of discipline formed a niche for the development of homo economicus, the repressed ‘self-steered’ individual, who acts rationally and reasonably. For Marcuse, this same individual was rationalized in the modern period when the critical potential of the ego was squashed such that all desire became subjected to social control. While discipline and self-restraint also feature in Foucault’s explanation, his account is more encompassing, challenging both Elias and Marcuse. One difference pertains to the method of study. Elias’s explanation was largely based on his empirical study of manuals aimed at the European upper classes that served as guides to manners. Foucault in his various projects also focused on Europe, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the modern period. In one set of projects he explored the changing judicial and penal system in Europe, largely England and France, as the basis for his critique of the philosophy of right, which provides the philosophical basis for the foundation of modern democracy.

Even although he was elsewhere at the time, the political upheaval in France during May 1968 was formative for Foucault. ²⁴ He reflected that these events signalled a crisis in Marxism, pointing to the emptiness of abstract discussion of class, surplus value, consciousness and ideology. He also distinguished the modern history of civil rights from the emergence of disciplinary power; where rights codify and govern the de jure relationship between government and citizens, disciplinary power insinuates itself into power over the individual body. Furthermore, the focus by authors on the philosophy of right and on rights effectively masked the emergence of disciplinary power. Foucault argued that in the transition from absolute monarchy to the modern nation-state, the state changed complexion, becoming more diffuse, surrounding itself with ancillary agencies that shared its progressive goal, such as charities, businesses, medical practice, schools and universities, mental institutions, the penal system and the family. Exercised through these dispersed institutions disciplinary power emerged as more effective than sovereign power in defining the modern individual, as disciplinary technologies and human sciences create and maintain forms of individuality (or rather, identity). Thus, given the multiplicity of agencies involved, to focus purely on the sovereign power of the state would be to miss out an entire nexus of power from the bottom up, comprising a micropolitics of power that is engaged in by a host of agencies, without which one cannot provide a theory of the State. Consequently, although several of his works are devoted to discussion of the State, Foucault’s point is that what is required is a wider theory of government, turning to explore a dimension of collective experience that hitherto had been left unexplored, to argue that the study of power should focus on micropolitics, the specifics of how power is exercised over individuals and the actual practices of subjugation and that power circulates through networks.²⁵

Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977) begins with a visceral illustration of the exercise of the power of the absolute monarch by providing an account of the execution of the regicide Damiens, Foucault explains how this ostentatious display of sporadic, extreme violence was gradually replaced by a new form of power, disciplinary power, that was conducive to the government of free citizens and consumers. Disciplinary power was regular and rationally administered by experts, a decentralised and multifarious power that was tied to knowledge through the construction of the subjectivities of those governed by it.

An important aspect of Foucault’s argument that directly addresses Elias and critical theorists such as Marcuse, is his putative rejection of what is called the “repressive hypothesis”.²⁶ Repression plays a direct role in Elias’s explanation which foregrounds the enhanced power of the superego in the modern democratic state. In contrast Foucault was not at all interested in discussing the existence or workings of supposed internal agencies. Nor was he convinced that the period from the late eighteenth, to the early nineteenth century was a time of sexual repression. He contended that the opposite was the case, as during this period sexuality was discussed as never before, as a subject of concern. This occurred through the development of a discourse on sexuality in the emerging field of psychiatry, based on the revelation of the most intimate details of sexual life to medics by their bourgeois clients. Reading Foucault more closely, his denial of repression is not as sharp as it first seems, for he does not deny that publicly, a more prudish public sensibility developed towards the expression of sexuality. Rather he is pointing to the private sphere of confidential exchanges between medics and their patients when sexual practices were opened to scientific enquiry and codified as never before, with the aim to identify and pathologize deviations from the heterosexual norm.

Where Marcuse and others argued that sexual repression was foisted onto the working classes Foucault highlighted this emergent discourse of ‘normal sexuality’ that was first applied to the bourgeois class by its own members. As with Norbert Elias, conflict between social classes plays a role in Foucault’s explanation. In volume one of the History of Sexuality, he revisits the events of the 18th century, when the rising bourgeois class began seriously to compete with the nobility. At that time a prevailing belief going back to the notion of the “divine right” of the monarch was that the noble is naturally superior to members of other classes. When it came to matters of distinction the nobility had an ace up their sleeves, based on the common belief at the time that their superior social status was divinely ordained, based on their ‘breeding’ or ‘blue-blood’. The challenge for the bourgeois was how to compete against such pedigree? Foucault states simply that the bourgeois class: ‘converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality’.²⁷ What he means by this is that the bourgeois became preoccupied with ensuring and increasing the normality, health and longevity of their “stock”. The creation of a ‘healthy’ sexuality involved the identification and rooting out of all that was perceived to be unhealthy in the social body of the bourgeois class. This involved the construction of a ‘body’ of knowledge by medics and other experts (who were of course themselves bourgeois).

Foucault contended that the mechanism for revealing this knowledge was borrowed from the Church in the form of the confessional. Individuals were encouraged to confess their diverse problems to the medics and the medics in turn came up with a range of perversions and other ‘unnatural’ sexual identities that deviated from the heterosexual norm. Sexuality thus began to be seen as an object for psychiatric attention, via the understanding of the aetiology (cause) of ‘nervous disorders’ and the labelling and understanding of ‘mental illnesses’. The role of the medical expert was to identify the ‘unnatural’ or ‘perverted’ in the same way that a surgeon might identify a lesion. An entire mechanism of power was thus brought to bear on the bodies of individuals, by singly out and sequestrating practices deemed abnormal. Foucault noted an important difference between the traditional treatment of perverse behaviours by the Christian Church and the new approach developed by medics. The focus of Christianity had been on the act or the sin; ‘buggery’ was thus deemed to be a repugnant act for which a person should confess and do penance. The new medicine on the other hand located the act as an essential part of the identity of the person. Thus, a scattered set of perverse practices (sins for which one did penance) became solidified and essentialized in the construction and ascription of an identity foisted on a person. Consequently, individuals identified on the basis of their sexual orientation towards others of the same sex were classified as ‘homosexual’. Where‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’.²⁸

Initially the actions of the medics focused solely on the bourgeoisie, in identifying deviancy and in seeking to prevent this or to cure it. The creation of healthy bodies was seen to be an essential act of self-affirmation on the part of the bourgeois class. However, with the growing power of capitalism and also in response to concerns about the spread of diseases such as cholera, the body of the ‘healthy’ worker began to be explored, regulated and disciplined in like manner. A concern with reform flowed also through the prison system. The ultimate aim of disciplinary techniques was to produce useful individuals and healthy vibrant bodies, through discouraging debauchery and other perversions among the general population and ‘reforming’ criminals so that they could become useful members of society, acting according to the principle of ‘homo economicus’. Prisons became centres that sought to transform the individual through training in work according to a strict timetable and the discipline resulting from isolation in cells (a term borrowed from Christian monasticism). Most importantly the regime developed a knowledge of each individual based on detailed observation. Foucault argued that this form of disciplinary apparatus gradually permeated institutional life, integrating ideas around normalcy and the creation of ‘healthy’ bodies through constant surveillance, the examination and discipline that centred on pacifying the individual body through the following techniques:

Spatialization: These concerned the spatial distribution of bodies – how they were separated, aligned, serialized, subjected to surveillance – and the organization of a whole field of visibility.

Controls: These concerned the techniques to control the body, in order to make it more productive, for instance, through diet, exercise and drilling.

Technology: The development of forms of power that were the most rational, least costly and most efficient, made possible through the development of a system of surveillance based on hierarchies, inspection, bookkeeping.

Rational disciplinary power was exercised primarily through the organization of space. The pyramid style of bureaucratic organization was apt to control the wayward activities of the populations of army camps, factories, schools and hospitals. The pyramid structure ensured constant supervision and surveillance of the spaces of the soldier, student, worker, patient and consumer. Within these disciplinary spaces behaviour was oriented around the need to measure up to the norm, where the main motivating factor was the fear of being branded abnormal. Those who excelled were awarded rank, while those who failed were subject to a range of micro-penalties. The system was thus a balance of rewards and punishments with the emphasis placed upon rewards.²⁹ For example, with respect to children, meticulous attention was paid to the organization of dormitories (with or without partitions, or curtains) and the rules for monitoring recreation activities and sleep periods. In factories this consisted of control of spaces for storing materials (which could be stolen) and of time and motion studies to regulation of the work-rate of production.

The examination played a very important role in the system by classifying individuals (mad/ sane; normal/ abnormal; competent/ incompetent), qualifying (pass/ fail) , rewarding and punishing those who were subject to its discipline. This indicated a shift from the pre-modern period, when only those of high rank and status were regarded as individuals. In the new dispensation of the disciplinary regime this was reversed, as those at the bottom of the heap were individualized. Those who in pre-modern times would have been regarded as part of a mob, or a lumpen mass were transformed into a codified and disciplined body of individuals comprising soldiers, students, workers and patients.

The examination privileges the faculty of sight or vision. In the army, school, the prison and the hospital the individual is constantly on view. Discipline is exercised through the visual examination whereby those who do not measure-up to the norm may be subjected to ridicule and potential reward. According to Foucault the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light which would illuminate everything but would mask who was (or was not) behind it and would be the central point for the convergence of all that was known. This image fits almost exactly with Jeremy Bentham’s design for the Panopticon, the inspiration for the construction of Strangeways gaol in Manchester, England, among others.

Foucault argued that disciplinary mechanisms began to spill out beyond institutions such as the prison and school to permeate the whole of society. For example, as the training of children had been entrusted to teachers in schools, teachers then became interested in the quality of the life of the child beyond the school and in the activities of their parents and neighbours. He cited as early examples of more fluid disciplinary mechanisms, those religious groups that visited the poor, checking on their welfare and at the same time ensuring among other things, the ‘stability’ of the household and that children were not sleeping in the same beds.

Biopower

Towards the end of Society Must be Defended, Foucault describes the emergence of biopower, as a form that is emerged later than disciplinary power and is complementary to it. While disciplinary power is exerted on the body of the individual which it renders docile and useful so as to maximise its productivity, biopower is principally concerned with maximising the productive potential of the populace.³⁰ Foucault explains that the concern with biopower began with the work of eighteenth-century demographers in compiling statistics on births and deaths.³¹ Overall management of the health of the population as a whole was not centralised but involved an interleaving set of agencies including the insurance industry, which mitigated risk,; the banking industry, which extended credit and the hygiene industry, concerned with improving the nation’s health and safety. Foucault explains that these initiatives were developed as responses to statistics on mortality relating to climate and geography, such as epidemics related to living near a swamp. Like disciplinary mechanisms biopower, initiatives were designed to maximize and extract forces, to maximize the health and fitness of the populaceResearch was often motivated by charitable purposes; for instance, the philanthropist Charles Booth compiled what is known today as the Booth Map with the aim to identify the poor and indigent so as to better target resources to alleviate the harm done them through excessive consumption of drink and drugs.³² Booth’s initiative came relatively late in the efforts by demographers from the late eighteenth century to monitor the fertility of the population in relation to birth and death rates, to monitor and curtail endemic diseases that sapped the strength of the population.

Governing the Neoliberal Subject

As we have seen, for Foucault, if the question that liberalism posed to power was how best to govern free subjects then how did the government of these free subjects came into being and evolve? Given his sensitivity to context and to the dynamic nature of social relations and discourse, Foucault (2008) focused on the influence of political economy on biopolitics, dwelling particularly on the period following the Second World War. From this he concluded that the self-limitation of government since then has been primarily influenced by political economy and not the legal system of rights.³³ In particular he summoned attention to the growing influence of the discourses of European ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism, each of which is highly critical of the State and inimical to State control, elevating individual freedom from State interference as the highest value. It was timely that he devoted the last three lectures of the series to the discussion of neoliberalism, just as this project was about to be realised following the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. His main argument was that this involved a radical shift in the conception of homo economicus, no longer envisaged as a partner in exchange, but rather as the manager of his or her own enterprise, whose aim is to maximise his human capital.

Foucault (2008) devoted the final three lectures of the series to discussion of the Chicago School economists, Theodore Schulz and Gary Becker. Becker, whose arguments are outlined and discussed in chapters four and five, laid much of the groundwork for the extension of market principles well beyond the traditional remit of economics. Foucault noted that there is much to admire about Becker’s (1964) formulation of an individual subject who is as free as possible from coercion by the State,³⁴. Additionally, while the concept of human capital shares the same progressive aims as those that inform disciplinary power and biopolitics, in this new formulation, the onus shifts more firmly onto the individual who is charged to realise this goal. Being the manager of one’s human capital is individualising, particularly for those who fail to meet the standard. Foucault also notes that Becker’s analysis does not concern itself with the decisions of actual individuals, but rather operates at the level of statistical aggregation, based on the assumption that the overall market is rational and efficient even though individuals and households may not always be.³⁵ This form of power does not work directly on the individual but rather takes the form of incentives (see Becker’s work on marriage), leading Foucault to voice the concern that the form of power on which neoliberalism rests is based on behaviourism.

Foucault (2008) makes three broad points about Becker’s ideas. Firstly, he wonders where the notion of continuous improvement of human capital might lead? Will individuals seek to maximize their reproductive potential by looking for partners who possess high human capital, or seek to ensure that potential partners carry no genetic risk to their offspring? While noting that this was not an issue at time of writing he worried that; “it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions….will be called for”, noting that the racist implications of such moves are to be feared.³⁶ Secondly, Foucault notes the difference between Bentham, who had hoped that the Panopticon would entirely eradicate criminality and Becker’s argument that some criminal conduct is invariably inelastic and so there is a point beyond which the costs of trying to address crime will simply outweigh the negligible benefits.

Thirdly, and most significantly, Foucault detects a paradox in the changing understanding of homo economicus from liberalism to neo-liberalism. The former holds that homo economicus should be laisser-faire, let go, and allowed to pursue his own self-interest, given that one cannot know the ways of the market. On the other hand, Becker integrates behaviourism with economics when he redefines and stretches the meaning of economic rationality to signify; “any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment”...”which accepts reality”. Thus, as opposed to the liberal individual who should be left to laisser-faire, Becker’s neoliberal argument points towards an individual that is “eminently governable”.³⁷ Through such a move Becker was able to argue that economic principles can usefully be applied to a broad range of social issues such as racial inequality, crime, addiction, education, the desire to have children and family welfare, all of which are subject to the inexorable logic of benefits and costs. Homo economicus, is thus transformed from being conceived of as a partner in exchange, to the manager of his or her human capital and producer of their own satisfaction.³⁸ Foucault noted, presciently, in light of the subsequent development and popularity of service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), that this notion of the consumer as producer of their own satisfaction, provides a “very useful theory of consumption”.³⁹

Foucault was struck that from a moral perspective, Becker’s argument does not judge the individual whose behaviour is framed purely in relation to a balance of incentives. The individual, for instance, someone addicted to drugs, is not subjected to moral judgement, or censure, nor are they subjected to a disciplinary regime. Instead, they are framed by an economic model that assumes that they will respond rationally to the incentives on offer.

As described by Foucault neoliberal theory as conceived of by the Chicago School paved the way for the realisation of a new domain or field, constituting a new logic of power that goes beyond the traditional understandings of homo economicus and of the subject of right.⁴⁰ Similar to its previous instantiation, this requires a subject who is free to make choices between alternatives and whose behaviour is governed with a light touch, aiming towards an emancipatory goal, that is arrived at by manipulating the range of choices available to the individual. Foucault argues that what is new here is that there is no moral judgement of the individual and that instead behaviour is viewed simply as a question of incentives; for instance, the criminal is assumed to be a rational economic actor who weighs up costs and benefits and is not tied to a pejorative identity. Foucault picks on Becker’s assumption that all individuals are rational, which is based on aggregate patterns of market behaviour across a population. For Becker, while the individual may act irrationally, rationality will prevail at the aggregate level of the market. A consequence of the idea of human capital, once it takes root, is that the individual is, (in another unfortunate butchery of language), subjected to being “responsibilized” (Shamir, 2008).

While Becker’s espoused intention was to promote welfare on a number of fronts, it is clear that in his explanation the husbandry of their capital is a matter for the individual to sort out. Foucault calls attention to some of the potential weaknesses of this by mentioning the role played by a person’s genetic endowment in the formation of their human capital, which privileges some and is a handicap for others. He also worries about the pressure to seek out a spouse who will maximise one’s human capital.⁴¹

Foucault, Social Science and the Consumer

The translation of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977), inspired American social theorists Sandra Bartky and Hilary Radner amongst others, to explore contemporary gym culture, a spatial arrangement that conforms closely to the disciplinary ideal described by Foucault. Bartky (1992) argued that while women were not forced to develop a fit body, they were disciplined to produce and maintain a ‘properly feminine body’ pleasing to men. In her view the considerable time and energy devoted by women to body maintenance was due to the simple fact that they were subordinate to men and so had to use their bodies to gain entry to the world of men and to compete with other women for men and for jobs. Moreover, if a woman refused to go along with social expectations of what constituted an acceptable appearance, she faced severe sanctions of being scorned, or shamed. Bartky acknowledged that body discipline could have a positive side, in that attention to diet and exercise could enhance feelings of empowerment, even though these activities moulded women’s bodies to the ideal-image fored by men.

Radner contended that Bartky made too much of women’s disempowerment, citing the ‘workout’ tapes produced by Jane Fonda, who in her view provided a role model for women who wanted to control their lives. Radner argued that the bodies of the models used by Fonda were different from the pencil-thin shapes usually propagated by the media and that the body produced by Fonda’s workout tapes was neither erotic, nor designed to please men, but rather suitable for public life and for work. In this view “working out” did not render women passive and helpless but was rather purposeful, providing them with a sense of autonomy and the means to reconstruct themselves. Referring to Fonda’s decision to have reconstructive surgery, Radner explained this as a logical extension of the Fonda workout, as an activity that was voluntarily engaged in because of the returns it provided in terms of status and even pleasure.

Zygmunt Bauman (1995) offered a different explanation for the rise of the culture of fitness, which for him was equally applicable to women and men. Bauman saw no need to bring Foucault to bear on this question, which he explained as a postmodern development that went beyond the modern focus on training and regimentation of the modern ‘healthy’ body. While the modern healthy body was a requirement for soldiers and workers, the shift to postmodernity called for the development of the ‘fit’ body. As an example of the modern concern with health, Bauman mentions the industrialist Joseph Rowntree who in the late nineteenth century devoted considerable effort to calculating the materials necessary to maintain the minimum standard of healthy living for his workers; for instance, he, excluded tea from his calculation, on the basis that it has no nutritional value (despite that at that time tea was seen to be an indispensable social drink). For Bauman, the opposite idea came to prevail in the postmodern era, when the body began to be framed through a multitude of discourses as a consuming body, such that the measure of its proper condition became the extent to which it could consume what the consumer society had to offer.⁴² The fit body is a ‘DIY’ creation, which creates a strange and untenable position; ‘S/he must be in control but s/he must be controlled’.⁴³

Governing the Consumer

The compendium put together by Miller and Rose (2008) includes empirical research conducted by the authors over the course of a decade. In the introduction the authors state their intention to study governmentality, wisely steering clear from attempting to form a general theory, and instead develop a set of conceptual tools to flesh out Foucault’s sketch of this concept.⁴⁴ They start by citing Foucault’s pronouncement that governmentality concerns the conduct of conduct, that must be related to a specific issue or concern that is problematic for a group of agents. They note that in relation to marketing practice, the group that determines and addresses the problem is likely to be diverse, perhaps involving business executives, politicians, inhouse and external market researchers, media agencies, psychologists and architects. Miller and Rose separate rationalities from technologies of government. The plural rationalities, emphasizes that there is no one rationality at work in knowing and representing a particular problem. Once identified, problems come to be framed in a common language. Technologies are ways of acting upon a problem so as to transform it, for the obvious reason that if it is to be altered the conduct in question must be amenable to intervention by some form of rationalized technique.

The authors situate their discussion of specific issues within the context of neoliberalism, which foregrounds individual freedom over all else and so demands less top-down control and intervention by the state and more self-restraint on the part of the individual. They argue that the nub of neoliberalism is to provide a sufficiently strong State to defend its interests internationally and ensure internal order, while providing as much room as possible for the individual citizen and consumer to go about their daily business unfettered by State control. One of the central devices is the market and the State becomes involved in the development and proliferation of means to develop and sustain quasi markets (ibid.: 81). Markets are to replace planning and market principles are to be extended beyond the marketplace. Economic entrepreneurship is to replace regulation, as individuals acting in pursuit of their own interests are best placed to achieve these. Active entrepreneurship is to replace passive solidarity.⁴⁵

Miller and Rose distance their approach from a number of well-known radical critiques of advertising, including those by Vance Packard, Herbert Marcuse and Stuart Ewen, They contend that the problem of ‘making up the consumer’ was not a “brute attempt to impose desire upon a plastic undifferentiated mass but an intricate cartography…of the everyday life of consumption and its little pleasures and anxieties” (Miller & Rose, 2008: 120). While their rather superior and dismissive tone could have gone further to engage with the nuances of these works, they make the fair assertion that critiques often focus on marketing practice from the outside-in, rather than seeking to construct an understanding the complexities of the problems perceived by the marketer. Miller and Rose do not take the existence of the consumer as given, but rather seek to explore how the consumer is “made up” or “assembled” by marketing discourse. One of the strengths of their contribution is that they support their argument is based on extensive archival material pertaining the activities of psychologists working at the London based Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) from 1950 to 1970. Their extensive discussion of this in the context of neoliberalism is rather puzzling, as the period they focus on antedates the formation of the neoliberal consensus.⁴⁶ However, their central point is that a new form of governance emerged during this period, based on the application psychological knowledge that effectively “made up” different versions of the consumer coupled with related techniques to influence their behaviour.

The authors point to the irony that at the beginning of this period the ‘Tavi’ as it was known , which was once known for its emancipatory approach to alleviate psychological distress, shifted perspective to deploy its resources for some of the largest consumer business in the UK for a diverse range of products including ice-cream, biscuits, toilet-paper and beer. Their analysis suggests that from the perspective of the marketing practitioner, the process of constructing the consumer was not easy, as researchers had to figure out ways of marketing goods that were almost functionally identical. Rather than imposing false needs on the individual, the authors contend that the construction of the commodity evolved in relation to the understanding of the consumer, firstly by identifying the consumers’ real needs, then linking these to the product and the context of its use. They argue that these psychologists contributed to the development of new forms of marketing knowledge based on concepts such as the brand-image and the product lifecycle.

Miller and Rose contend that the research conducted by the Tavi was “exemplary” of the work involved in “assembling” the modern consumer, such that consumers’ desires were not just uncovered, but were “forced into existence” through the application of methods such as the focus group.⁴⁷ Consumers were not treated as passive automatons but rather were conceived as “highly problematic entities” that became “thinkable by new techniques of calculation, classification and inscription”. The authors describe several different theoretical understandings of the consumer that were deployed by researchers at Tavi, depending on their individual preferences. For instance one group used focus groups to construct a psychoanalytic understanding that went well beyond the physical characteristics of the product, to delve into the often unconscious pleasures, fears and anxieties associated with the consumption of ice-cream and chocolate. Another group applied a social-psychological frame to explore the context hair-care and in particular, the meaning of home perms to women, which revealed the positive and negative attributes associated with the use of these products. A third group of researchers applied a form of rational choice theory on behalf of the Guinness brand, to understand male preferences for beer. The researchers who worked on this study criticised the assumption that all consumers use the same universal rationality, to argue instead that different personality types use different forms of rationality.⁴⁸ Researchers also started to investigate brand loyalty, to discover the psychological cost of choosing between alternatives, how best to differentiate products and to explain why one product succeeds, while another fails. This led to the understanding that different consumers responded to the same product in consistently different ways, leading to the classification of consumers into demographic and psychographic segments.

As a coda, the authors briefly acknowledge that by comparison to the sophisticated programmes of research conducted at TIHR, “many of the efforts to understand consumers’ needs, wants, envies and anxieties” at the time were “cruder and more cynical than those we have described.” (ibid.140).

Scholarship in Marketing and Consumer Research

Unlike their colleagues in social theory and organization studies, marketing scholars were slow to apply insights from Discipline and Punish to their field.⁴⁹ From their study of a service firm Skålén et al. (2009) concluded that disciplinary power, which is central to scientific marketing management, was mainly narrowly applied to front line sales workers. They refrain from discussing the various contexts in which consumers are disciplined, perhaps because there are so many that involve the logic of surveillance, discipline and shame. For instance, many of us “enjoy” the experience of air travel where the “normalised” passenger is disciplined to perform a series of tasks that would have bemused their predecessors, by providing details of the identities of all passengers in advance, checking in for the flight in advance, ensuring their baggage conforms strictly to the weight-limit specified by the carrier, loading their baggage onto the conveyor belt, paying extra if they wish to sit with family or friends, ensuring too arrive on time to pass through security prior to departure and ensuring that they enclose all liquids less than 100 grammes in a re-sealable plastic bag; and posing for facial recognition cameras at passport control. Those who fail to conform or perform to the requirement to act knowledgeably and quickly, are exposed to public ridicule and shame; like me you may have witnessed the frequent indignities inflicted on passengers of budget airlines, who in my experience are usually women.

Scholars have been inspired by Foucault to challenge received accounts of the historical development of marketing theory and to apply his ideas on biopolitics and governmentality to their field. Some papers extend discussion of themes of surveillance and control discussed in Discipline and Punish (1978). For instance, Chartiris et al. (2019) discuss how the circuits that link runners to their tracking devices and to other runners (and brand managers) through access to web portals gamify the experience for runners. One might argue for rather obvious reasons that they go too far in suggesting that this transforms running into a competitive and social activity, as perhaps it is more acceptable to contend that this technology acts to shape and steer the act of running to maximise use of the app, which “tames, captures and appropriates value from different aspects of consumers’ lives, including – and combining – their social behaviours, cognitive capacities and bodily conducts” (Charitsis, et al., 2019). Another paper is devoted to discussion of the brandscape (Wood and Ball, 2013).

The following discussion is not intended to provide an exhaustive account, but rather draws selectively on examples to illustrate some of the different ways in which Foucault’s ideas have been applied to the contexts of marketing and consumer research.

Revised Accounts of the History of Marketing Thought

The research conducted by Mark Tadajewski and his collaborators has been influenced by Foucault in two main ways. Firstly, they employ Foucault’s genealogical approach to good effect by tracking down literature omitted from conventional accounts of the development of marketing thought to complexify and challenge the received wisdom. From their investigations they discovered that relationship marketing⁵⁰ and Service Dominant Logic⁵¹, were not relatively recent irruptions in marketing thought, but have a much longer lineage. They also discovered an alternative formulation of a “Socialist Dominant Logic” motivated by the goal of, “increasing access to consumption and quality of life”, that was subsequently excised from the record in conventional accounts.⁵²

Tadajewski and his collaborators employ “hyper-power”, a relatively obscure concept that so far as I can detect, appears once in Foucault’s 1972-1973 lectures, never to be seen again. Tadajewski draws from Foucault to explain hyper-power as a, ‘multiplied, accumulated power’⁵³ that threads throughout society. Its function, ‘is to connect up time, the body, the life of individuals, to the process of production and the mechanisms of hyper-profit’.⁵⁴ Although the above is typically sketchy, it makes sense to think of hyper-power as a species of pastoral power that is applied to the action of corporate entities, whose aim is to realize “hyper-profit” by achieving a monopoly position. Tadajewski, (2019), argues that the formation of habitual consumption has been neglected in discussions of the history of marketing thought. He explains that habit played an important role for Foucault in the realization of hyper-power, in relation to the need to inculcate good habits and suppress bad habits, so as to maximize the productive capacity of the economy. Tadajewski detects a related trend in the actions of marketers to inculcate habitual dependency in consumers, not only in the pursuit of profit, but ultimately, to free the business from the scourge of competition, to dominate the market. It is worth pointing out here that while habit may not have been discussed much in relation to the history of marketing thought, its importance has long been recognised in the consumer research literature, for instance in relation to the concept of involvement, which differentiates brand loyalty, as a more active form of habitual behaviour from inertia.⁵⁵

Denegri-Knot and Tadajewski (2017) offer the “Napster” case as a further example of hyper-power.⁵⁶ As with the World Wide Web, the base technology that led to the development of the MP3 player was designed in the University system in the mid-1980s and was thus funded by the public purse. The authors do not delve into origins of MP3 technology, nor into how this escaped through nefarious means, to arrive eventually onto the laptops of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker who founded the business of Napster Inc., the peer-to-peer sharing platform they launched in 1999, which consolidated all of the songs shared by users into an easily accessible database. The massive business success of Napster quickly aroused concern in the music industry, leading to a lawsuit against Napster and the paper by Denegri-Knot and Tadajewski focuses on documents pertaining to this legal case.

The authors describe how three countervailing discourses were brought to bear in the course of the litigation which they label as digital communitarianism, digital libertarianism and market conservatism. They describe how ultimately, market conservatism won out over the others, whose arguments were either ignored or ruled out as inadmissible. They also mention that a key point arose when an expert argued that MP3s are not crude copies, but are identical to CDs, the implication being that they can therefore be considered as assets owned by those who made the CDs. Seen this way, file sharing is illegitimate, because users have not sought the permission of the owner. The authors conclude that the Napster case is an example of ‘hyper-power’ in action involving those acting for the industry, “supported by the weight of the legal community and precedent”, who used experts to define this new technology, “in a manner consistent with a capitalist convention and the legal status quo.” Denegri-Knot and Tadajewski go further to argue in relation to marketing theory, that their findings upset the widely promulgated claim by proponents of Service Dominant Logic, which holds that the customer is the co-creator of value. From their perspective, this fails to consider the question of power, particularly that of the law as a gatekeeper which undergirds how value is judged and effectively sanctions what is permissible, from what is not.

Hyper-power can thus be considered as a sub-species of pastoral power that is geared towards optimization, as a quest towards a secular ideal of “salvation” in this world that is achieved by improving the health and wealth of the population (Foucault, 1982: 783). This progressive emancipatory goal is consistent with Tadajewski’s (2019) description of businessmen in the early twentieth century such as Bernard McFadden and John Harvey Kellogg and the injunctions of periodicals such as the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette that promoted self-management, exercise, diet and moderation, as ways to demonstrate the superiority of the national stock. While he maintains that such activities were geared towards achieving maximum utility for the government, financiers and employers, Tadajewski might have done more to highlight the overtly racist worldview that ultimately informed this line of thought.⁵⁷ Tadajewski, (2019) puts Foucault back to front when arguing that religious teachers, “encouraged self-formation consistent with the needs of capitalism” by instilling, “ideals of motivation, sobriety and discipline”; Foucault, (1982) argued the other way round, that modern institutions adopted what he calls pastoral power from Christian practice.

I had to think again about where to put the paper by Skålén et al. (2006), as its topic is ostensibly about governmentality, although it also seeks to problematize the received wisdom of the periodization of the history of marketing thought. On reflection, the paper sits best here. In contrast to Miller and Rose (2008), who resist the temptation to do so, Skålén et al. defer to the organization theorist Stewart Clegg, who defined governmentality as, ‘reflexive self-control, [creating] situation[s] in which external sources of surveillance become unnecessary’.⁵⁸ Their professed aim is to understand “what marketing seeks to govern, how marketing governs, and who we become when governed by marketing”? While this may seem overly ambitious, the authors principal aim is then stated as to challenge the received wisdom on the historical periodization of marketing. They do so by consulting historical accounts by managerialists, marketing historians and authors of influential textbooks.

Based on their analysis they argue that up until the 1930s, the “governmental project” of marketing discourse, which was primarily centred in the USA was not well defined. The second period from the 1930s onward focused more on the importance of the consumer and on the optimization and control of the sales process, such that, by the 1950s, customer orientation had become the dominant logic informing the sales process, with the rise to prominence of marketing management and the the marketing concept which was different from engineering and sales perspectives. The authors contend that the marketing concept, created a new form of subjectivity to that of other managerial discourses by producing the “customer knowing” subject. The more recent shift to services marketing led to a focus on optimizing the process of service delivery, such that all employees were exhorted to consider themselves as part-time marketers. As a consequence, “all organizational members are turned into objects of marketing management and control”. The authors contend that this was achieved by means of a paradoxical mix of standardization and flexibility. Standardization involved the monitoring and control of processes and activities through a variety of means such as customer satisfaction surveys. In a follow-up paper the authors argue that this resulted not in excellence, but normalization. However, because standardization can also detract from an employee’s ability to serve customer needs, control technologies are not designed to shape employee behaviour in detail but to allow limited scope for freedom of action. In the service marketing mode the employee becomes the “customer determined subject” who has internalized the service culture which frames her actions.

Consumer “Responsibilization”

One didn’t need to be Foucault around the time of the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 to detect that individual responsibility was a key part of their agenda, for they proclaimed it from the rooftops. This mantra was proclaimed from the start and has since been repeated time and again while discussion of structural factors has virtually vanished. The poor and indigent were firmly told that it was their responsibility to “pull themselves up by their bootlaces” and those made unemployed in 1981, were advised by Secretary of State for Employment Norman Tebbit, to “get on your bike”, while fast-forwarding to 2023, Works and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride helpfully informed “economically inactive” older workers that jobs were available at Deliveroo!⁵⁹ The absurd Kafkaesque plight of the individual subjected to such ideas is well-described by Ken Loach, in I Daniel Blake (2016).

Pertaining to consumer responsibility, Giesler and Veresiu (2014) explored the creation of four forms of consumer subjectivity in the discourse of the World Economic Forum.

They slickly package their argument through the acronym P.A,C.T. (thereby inflicting English with even more “izations”), to argue that three process are involved in transforming irresponsible consumers to a more enlightened being. Personalization pins the solution to the problem in the personage of individual agent whom others decide needs to be enlightened; authorisation acts to legitimate this subject position, while capabilization centres around the question of how to design products that will help achieve this state of enlightened self-management. The authors discuss how these processes were applied in WEF fora to those who were deemed poor and indigent, feckless, careless of their own wellbeing, or indifferent to the environment. Their report of the WEF discussion of the financially literate subject is jaw-dropping in light of the well-known egregious behaviour of the financial services industry in precipitating the sub-prime crash that triggered the Great Financial Crash (GFC) resulting in the near-meltdown of the world financial system in 2007- 2008. While it is true that poor financial literacy of buyers played a role in this, this was also true of those running some of the top financial institutions, whose products were so complex they couldn’t understand them themselves!⁶⁰ Thus, to learn that rather than calling for more regulation and better consumer protection, Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF, shifted discussion away from the system and entirely onto the back of the individual consumer, who was exhorted to become a “good capitalist”, seemed outrageous! There are interesting resonances between the WEF discussions of “good stewardship” and the analogy drawn by Margaret Thatcher’s between management of the economy and that of the prudent housewife managing the family finances.⁶¹

How useful is the P.A.C.T. framework? While it has certainly captured the imagination of a number of consumer researchers, I was drawn back to the case of Sammy, that was discussed in chapters four and five. Someone, somewhere must have thought it a good idea to enable Sammy, who is severely learning-disabled, to be judged responsible and give him control over his own budget, which he spends on ice-cream and mobile-phones, to the frequent exasperation of his carers. In relation to capabilization, Sammy has little prospect of attaining the requisite literacy to enable him to make informed decisions and so there is little prospect of any transformation in his condition.

P.A.C.T. has been popular with those who investigate the supposedly socially responsible consumer. It should be clarified that the discourse on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) differs from the “Chicago” form of neoliberalism espoused by Milton Friedman and others. As mentioned in chapters passim, Friedman argued that the one and only role of business is to make a profit, while proponents have CSR make the contrary argument that business should have wider social goals.⁶² The paper by Caruana and Chatzidakis. (2014) opened the theoretical door to explorations of how consumer power is mobilized by others as a resource for CSR, which has since been followed by empirical papers on topics such as, how consumers deal with being asked how much to pay for food in a café (Eckhardt & Dobscha, 2019), how they respond to calls to manage waste (Cherrier & Türe, 2022) and in response to an advertisement to eat more chicken and less meat (Döbbe & Cederberg, 2023).

Consumer Resistance

n his observation of how the poor openly celebrated as a mark of their distinction, the glutinous cheap foods that the middle-classes scorned and the “champion chompers” who fedFoucault (1982: 780) suggests that when it comes to questions of power, resistance is the place to start ones investigation, as this acts as a ‘chemical catalyst” to reveal power relations, which can be investigated “through the antagonism of strategies followed”. For instance, to find out more about sanity, enquire into insanity and the power of psychiatry over the mentally ill. Foucault continues that such struggles are not abstract, based for instance on the drive for profits made by medical companies, but immediate, apparent in the concrete situation of the medic who is right in front of you, who has direct control over your body. This seems obvious when it comes to the power of the medic to identify an individual pejoratively, for instance, by labelling them as psychotic or as suffering from dementia. Nowadays authors tend to blame social media for a noted rise in mental suffering, particularly amongst the young (Haidt, 2024). While there seems little doubt of the deleterious effects of these technologies on attention, self-esteem and anxiety, this also has the effect of increasing the power of therapists and of the wellness and pharmaceutical industries who also have a stake in this. It is also noteworthy too that there are situations where being labelled as ADHD or dyslexic is not necessarily deleterious for the individual concerned. There is some evidence that rather than being used to label individuals as abnormal so as to sequester them, diagnoses of “disorders” such as ADHD and dyslexia can actually offer these individuals a leg-up, as these diagnoses are sought by concerned middle-class parents as means to secure competitive advantage over their peers.⁶³

Foucault argues that there are three forms of struggle; against forms of domination based on ethnic, social and religious differences; against forms of exploitation that separate individuals from what they produce; and that, “which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way”.⁶⁴ As I see it, the first invites us to explore the operations of power with respect to class and religion and the second appears close to Marx’s arguments about alienation and fetishism. That said, much of the subsequent research inspired by Foucault has focused on explorations of subjectivity. In Berlant’s (2007) discussion of obesity, informed by Foucault’s account of biopolitics, she does not start with resistance but rather launches straight into her argument that obesity in the USA ins a form of “slow death” suffered by the “economically crunched”, comprising those class fractions deemed superfluous to requirements, condemned to life in trailer parks or low-income housing. She puts it that while biopolitics is enrolled to maximise the productive health of the population, it is also concerned to eliminate everything that is a threat to this, “from bacteria to people”. Berlant acknowledges the complexity of this situation which began with past government decisions to focus on the production of cheap food for the poor, resulting ultimately in the development of tasty ultra-processed food (UPF) “that was ultimately to poison them”; extended to local zoning decisions made in favour of fast-food outlets in poor neighbourhoods; to the harried life-styles of waged labourers who as a result eat “on the fly”; and the infiltration of cash-strapped schools and colleges by UPF brands. She describes the situation as even more complex, given the involvement of the insurance industry, public health departments, corporate, government information campaigns, proposed legislation and the media, not to mention the pernicious marketing and PR campaigns engaged in by the industry.⁶⁵

While offering considerable insight into the issue, a potential problem with Berlant’s (2007) discussion of obesity is that it is top-down and so does not discuss the various strategies used by the parties involved. Perhaps one of the difficulties in doing so is because questions of weight and obesity are so individualised, which can seem strange, given that these issues lie at the intersection of the massive food, health and wellness industries. Weight control is portrayed as a personal struggle and despite evidence to the contrary, obesity is often cast as a form of moral failure.

What then would resistance look like when it comes to obesity? It is hard to imagine any space that is free from the machinations of the diet industry or the wellness industry or indeed of supposedly independent nutrition which in any event are tied up with the Big Food.⁶⁶ There are of course many informed pundits on mainstream and social media with advice on “healthy eating” and exercise regimes. There are those too who simply resist the stigma attached to the label of being labelled fat, involved in “fat-acceptance”, or fat-rights” groups, who direct their ire against the “holier than thou” approach of advocates of healthy eating, rather than against the industry that fuels their predicament. Perhaps in such circumstances where people resist resistance, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) explanation of amor fati, (the love of one’s fate) can help. From his empirical work in France, Bourdieu noticed how those stigmatized can actively celebrity their stigma, based o on them. In this context it is interesting that the last large-scale boycott of the sugar industry in Britain happened in the eighteenth century, but then the target in that instance was not calories but the slavery involved in sugar production.

Where empirical research is concerned it makes good sense to focus on a well-defined area. Since his death Foucault’s writing has itself fed into an increasing general awareness of struggles against categorization and individualization and has influenced movements that proclaim the individual’s right to be different. There are traces of these elements in Gurney (1999), whose discussion of UK discourse on home ownership might be seen as a relatively early example of the objective formation of subjectivity involved in the construction of consumer “responsibilization”. Gurney describes how private housing was marketed as “owning your own home”, in contrast to rental property which was described impersonally as “housing”. Owning one’s “home” was privileged, as the idea of “home” indexes nature and biology through tropes such as “nest-building and additionally, ownership sets the individual as a responsible citizen against the renter, who is labelled as a potential scrounger. Gurney discusses the process of normalisation of the individual mortgage applicant which at the time involved categorisation as either “quality” or “high-risk”, based on; “an examination of earnings, marital status, sexuality, health and indebtedness” (1999: 53). Gurney’s paper is centrally about resistance given that the subject he describes was based on his own experience as an applicant who was refused a mortgage because he was gay and so judged by actuaries as constituting a higher risk, apparently because of the chance he might contract AIDS. Thus, drawing from his own experience trying to resist his categorization, Gurney was able to trace some of the impersonal operations of the system by which he came to be objectified as an irresponsible consumer. Much has changed since Gurney wrote his piece and indeed renters now demand similar information from their tenants. Gurney’s paper can help one understand Foucault’s argument that resistance often involves struggles against “privileged knowledge’ and ‘secrecy’, representing struggles against the question “who are we?”⁶⁷

Döbbe & Cederberg (2023) investigate consumer reactions to a corporate attempt to shape their responsibility in relation to the marketing campaign,“Do something simple for the climate”, by the Swedish poultry producer Kronfågel. A strapline for the campaign reads, “If everyone who reads this chooses chicken instead of beef only once, it’s like compensating for 14 long-haul jumbo jet flights.” Taking on board Foucault’s argument that where there is resistance there is power (for example in Foucault, 1982) the authors were interested to identify instances of counter-conduct where individuals resist or to evade being made responsible and identified four forms of counter-conduct, ranging from presenting challenges to the truth claims made in the campaign to the formation of a community to press their case.

Such instances returned me to think of the concern I had when reading Foucault’s statement that one should focus on what is immediate rather than on abstract struggles, based for instance, on the drive for profits made by medical companies. His call to focus on the immediate experience of those involved is understandable, given his awareness of the proclivity of armchair theorists to apply rote explanations to situations they have no direct experience of. But does this rule out all forms of abstract engagement? Foucault’s mention of medical profits summoned for me the image of the Purdue Pharmaceutical Corporation owned by the Sackler family, whose joint fortunes were made on the backs of millions of individuals who became hooked on Oxycontin and the many thousands who died prematurely. As with obesity, so the Opiod crisis hits the poorest hardest. Of those dying from Opiod addiction in the USA, seven out of ten are rural males who are less educated and unemployed.⁶⁸ While the effects of obesity on mortality are huge, the Opiod crisis is also a significant contributor.⁶⁹ The roots of the Opiod epidemic are simpler to trace, centring mainly on the actions of Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, their sales agents and the medics they managed to corrupt. In relation to resistance, a pertinent question might be to ask whether and how, those addicted to Opiods resist the organizations they depend on for their fix?

Foucault and Dimensional Theories of Power

At the start of this chapter, I mentioned that Foucault developed a unique explanation that paid no heed to dimensional theories of power offered by Americans such as Dahl and others. His conception of power differs from A/b accounts in several ways. For Foucault the concept of sovereign power is outdated as there is no one centre of power (A) which represses another (b). Rather, power works through discourse to construct the very identities of ‘A’s’ and ‘B’s. Language, or discourse, is not neutral but is shaped by and reflective of, power. Medical discourse is not neutral but constructs and essentializes the ‘normal healthy’ body against which to frame those of deviants. Discourse can act in both ways, in transmitting power, but also in undermining and exposing it. For example, Foucault argues that the creation of a whole series of discourses which labelled the species of ‘homosexuality’ enabled not only the creation of a series of social controls, but of a ‘reverse discourse’ which used the same vocabulary and categories to argue that it was ‘natural’. To sum up his theory of power:

Power is not something that is acquired seized or shared, it cannot be held.

Power is closely related to knowledge.

Relations of power are not outside of other relations. The identities which comprise ‘A’ and ‘B’ are themselves artefacts of power.

Where there is power there is resistance; but resistance is not outside power.⁷⁰

Power comes from below; it is not something Whiwhich is exerted by ‘A’ who is ‘above’ B.

Power is intentional and rational to the extent that it has an aim and objective, but it should not be thought of as the creation of an individual agent, nor of a grouping such as the state.

Starting from the ‘bottom-up’ in this way, Foucault was able to conclude, in opposition to Elias and many others, that the idea of sexual repression is largely a myth. Rather than repressing sexuality, the bourgeoisie class in distinguishing itself in relation to the nobility began progressively to open itself up to the scrutiny of a range of experts who would ensure the vigour and good health of this class. The resultant examination of the bourgeois family achieved several results. First it fixed what had previously been scattered and indeterminate (sexuality) into a set of diverse sexual identities. This in turn led to the development of a set of discourses which aimed to improve the social body through the close supervision and maintenance of real bodies.

Lukes’ Critique of Foucault

Although Lukes (1974) critique of Foucault is also discussed in chapter eight, given this chapter is intended also to be read as a standalone piece, I also discuss it here. One wonders what Lukes must have felt when he first read Discipline and Punish; What a nightmare! Whilst to begin with Lukes was dismissive of Foucault’s, as is mentioned in the last chapter he is somewhat more generous to him in this latest edition of PRV (Lukes, 2021), where he acknowledges that Foucault’s originality led him to refine his own ideas on power. Lukes now sees power not as the exercise of a capacity, but simply as a capacity, “because power may never, and does not need to be exercised, ‘and you can be powerful by satisfying and advancing others’ interests”. This led Lukes to revise his original conception of power as domination, which he now understands to be insufficient, being too narrow, by limiting power to binary relations between actors who are assumed to have unitary interests. Lukes appreciates complexity involved in the existence of multiple and conflicting interests. He also acknowledges the validity of Foucault’s approach to understand the mechanisms by which compliance to domination is secured by linking power to knowledge through the shaping impact of expert knowledge claims and by highlighting the microphysics of power, which insinuates itself “into the very grain of individuals’, reaching into the body and acting to shape their actions, behaviour, discourses and learning processes.⁷¹

On the downside, Lukes criticizes what he sees as Foucault’s overriding and “very broad” concern, to understand structural relations, institutions, strategies and techniques rather than concrete policies and the actual people.⁷² Moreover he detects a related idealism inherent in Foucault’s argument, which is not about how power actually works but which rather focuses on how it is meant to work; “Foucault was not examining actual disciplinary practices but their design”.⁷³ However, what Lukes finds most troubling about Foucault, is his concern with Nietzschean rhetoric that leads him to assert that each way of life imposes its own regime of truth and politics as to what counts as acceptable discourse. In this view power is all encompassing and all-pervasive with no space for “primal liberty” outside of power. It is on this basis that Foucault has been said to have undermined the basis of the rational, autonomous moral agent, for in his account there can be no individual who exists outside and independently of its effects⁷⁴. The stakes are high because if Foucault is correct, then we must abandon the emancipatory ideal of a society where individuals are free from the negative effects of power and related to this, that power can be based on the rational consent of those who subject themselves to it. Not only is there nothing outside of power, there is no way of judging between different ways of life, since each imposes its own regime of truth, the types of discourse it accepts and makes true and how one distinguishes what is true from what is false.

As Lukes sees it the trajectory of Foucault’s project over his lifetime tilts progressively from a focus on repression towards production, noting also that the claim that power is productive has been, “wildly overstated and exaggerated” in numerous subsequent studies. He argues that in its ,’non-overstated and non-exaggerated form”, this simply reflects the notion that, if power is to be effective, then those subject to it must be rendered susceptible to its effects; repression says “no”, whereas production makes up subjects, moulding souls by normalizing subjects.⁷⁵ The emphasis in Discipline and Punish is on the ‘carceral society’, where those who are ‘produced’ as subjects are constrained and moulded into docile bodies. In contrast, the later ‘phenomenologically richer’ work on sexuality explains that those who cast off sexual inhibitions may imagine themselves to be free, which is an illusory freedom, given that the subject is controlled by economic exploitation, “from suntan products to pornographic films” (this quote from Foucault, 1980). Lukes quotes Amy Allen⁷⁶ who pointed out that while Foucault has a lot to say about the conceptual necessity of resistance, that he himself did not bother to discuss the actual strategies employed by those deemed mad, delinquent, perverted or hysterical, “to modify or contest the disciplinary or bio-power exercised over them”.⁷⁷

Lukes suggests that Foucault’s response to criticism was to strike a more voluntaristic tone in his later work on governmentality and in The Subject and Power (1982) where he states that power is ‘exercised over free subjects to the extent that they are free”. Lukes’ summary of governmentality, which argues that this consists of four layers, is as good as any and better than most, as he attends to the complexities in Foucault’s account. Governmentality pertains firstly to, ‘rationalities of rule’, which are styles of reasoning embodied in governing practices; secondly to conceptions of the person that these rationalities seek to inculcate such as the enterprising subject or the consumer; thirdly, the ‘technologies of the self ’ deployed by individuals as they follow their respective interests, and work on themselves to develop virtuous habits and to fashion their characters; and fourthly, the ways in which these elements are aligned with one another. Quoting Foucault (1987: 19) who said, “I am aiming at the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other”, Lukes concludes that this version of ‘making up people’ is supposed to preserve their freedom, indeed to exhibit governing through freedom.

Lukes asks finally how one is to understand power today in relation to the subject? He quotes from Foucault that, “(t)he subject constitutes himself in an active fashion by the practices of the self. These are not invented by the subject but are patterns found in culture which are proposed, suggested and imposed”.⁷⁸. For Lukes it is at this point that Foucault’s earlier ultra-radicalism “dissolves”, as he is here, “simply restating some elementary sociological commonplaces…that individuals are socialized: they are oriented to roles and practices that are culturally and socially given; they internalize these and may experience them as freely chosen.”⁷⁹ What is distinctively Foucauldian, is the insight that these socialization practices can be seen as forms of “government” that are outside the purview of the state that involve a panoply of different agencies which “propose, suggest and impose” roles and practices deemed appropriate upon individuals who in turn must interpret their requirements and will sometimes resist and sometimes reject them. The key issue for Lukes, is the need to develop criteria to decide where power amounts to domination and to distinguish between dominating power and non-dominating power and dependency, “and, not surprisingly, the ‘Final Foucault’ reaches for just such a distinction”.⁸⁰

Discussion and Conclusion

From the above it is clear that Foucault’s ideas did not stand still but evolved as a process, from earlier work which focused on dividing practices and confinement, to disciplinary regimes and latterly on how individuals came to be subjectified in a diverse array of settings, as sexual subjects in the ancient, early Christian and early modern worlds and as economic subjects in the emergent neoliberal society.⁸¹ While his earliest translated work produced a number of insights into how disciplinary mechanisms are embedded into consumption contexts, interest has since moved to consider the construction of the consumer in different contexts, of consumer “responsibilization” and the struggles against it, leading also to fuller and more nuanced accounts of the history of marketing thought.

One of Foucault’s main contributions was to differentiate disciplinary power from sovereign power and how these too have changed since the development of biopolitics. Sovereign power calls for punishment, disciplinary power calls for surveillance and correction, whereas within the apparatus of security, theft becomes one of a series of probable events. While discipline continues to work through individuals in consumption contexts, from airport security queues to shopping, there areas where it seems to have little effect. For instance, even though video surveillance is ubiquitous, “low-level” crimes such as shoplifting, vandalism and car-theft continue to plague local neighbourhoods. Cost-benefit analysis and the statistical bell-curverule, as Foucault (2004) reminds us, the relevant questions are, “what is the average rate of criminality?” And “how much does it cost society?”

While the Panopticon provided a captivating, if flawed, image of ideal control, its equivalent today is the bombardment of the individual by the Cookie. Cookies occupy a strange zone between consciousness and the unconscious. On the one hand they are overt, as demonstrated by our need to accept them every time we visit a website. On the other hand, we seem blind to their effects. This seems a rather strange reversal of the myth of Gyges, described by Plato in The Republic, who could do all manner of unspeakable things to others because he was invisible – for now we – who are Gyges’ victims – are openly aware that he is prowling there somewhere in the background on social media, but don’t seem to care.

The effect of discourse in “making up subjects” is a potent idea associated with Foucault. When Francois Ewald told Gary Becker about Foucault’s concern that Becker’s theory was a fiction, Becker replied by saying that all theories are by nature simplifications and fictions but what matters is that they explain and predict behaviour. What I think Foucault is getting at was is that Becker’s fictional subject is not confined to the academy but has spilled out into the real world where real people are treated as if this were so, such that no matter what their level of competence the individual is assumed to be capable of managing choice. Miller and Rose describe the rupture between the political consensus that held from the end of World War Two to the 1980s, where citizenship focused on values of solidarity, contentment, welfare and security, and the enterprise economy which succeeded it, based on active citizenship based on individual freedom, personal choice and self-fulfilment. The vocabulary of enterprise provided reshaped the worker from being a social being who acted in solidarity with others to achieve security and welfare for all, to being the manager of their own social capital and so responsible for the level of return generated on this. Nowadays “enterprise” and “choice” have penetrated down to every crumpled niche of society, forming new relations between the exercise of choice in the market and consumption in domains that were long perceived as being beyond the market.

Questions have been asked as to the extent to which Foucault endorsed neoliberalism. Ewald, (in Harcourt et al., 2012) claims that Foucault was attracted by the lack of moral judgement in Gary Becker’s explanations which offer the prospect to promote new forms of liberty that might be free of subjection by sovereignty or discipline imposed by moral and legal prescriptions. Foucault was certainly no fan of marxism, especially those ideologues who owed unquestioning obedience to Soviet ideology. One critic argues that Foucault bought in too neoliberalism for constructing a “a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated”.⁸² The critic adds that in doing so Foucault “directs our attention primarily to its ideological elements, which he valorizes as a purportedly different way of thinking politics, and not to its imperialist and colonial character as a global project of super exploitation and intensified repression”.⁸³ On the other hand, because the statistical methods of biopolitics allow for the efficient management of a population, liberty should not be considered unambiguously good. For Newheiser (2016), the techniques used to calculate the certainties generated by statistical normalization are profound for the individual.

Foucault’s discussion of discourse summons attention to the framing effects of language. Consider for instance the difference between referring to “climate change” as opposed to “climate crisis” and to “global warming” rather than “global heating”. Foucault has also done some harm to language, for instance, by coining the neologism “governmentality”, for which he had the grace to apologize. Unfortunately he seems to have encouraged others to try to outdo him leading to linguistic excrescence such as “responsibilization”,“capabilization” and “bioanatamopolitics”, that should have been strangled at birth. 

Some of the concerns Foucault mentions in relation to inherited human capital are more pressing today than they were in the 1980s. There are pressures on individuals to enhance their human capital through human germline engineering, which enables the genome of an individual to be edited in such a way that the change is heritable. The potential dangers of engaging in such processes remain unknown, as are those of Neuralink, which has so far proved to be relatively benign.

De Certau offers a simple analogy by which to illustrate the limits of even major thinkers like Foucault, asking us to imagine that the world of practice is like a sheet of rolled pastry and that each theory is a cookie cutter. Each theoretician will cut out a section that enables us to understand something of the whole, but they will also leave something behind. Foucault’s cookie-cutter is largely concerned with how discourse shapes subjectivity and specifically the imposition of, and resistance to identities that come from outside, from the developing fields of medicine and psychiatry that are also linked to the law. These derive from the development of a dispositif, a symbolic classificatory system that is linked to professionals in psychology, psychiatry and the law, devising manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and applying criteria to identify and label individuals. Today, a quite different state of affairs seems to have arisen, despite the continuing growth in power of the medical, legal and psychiatric professions to categorize and label the individual. Now the individual will confidently label themselves, claiming that they (and only they) have the self-knowledge to self-identify the “real me”. For Foucault as for Lacan, the idea that one can “really” know who the “real” me is, is illusory and is itself an effect of the operations of power. But then this highlights another aspect of Foucault’s cookie-cutter, which is that his is a purely cultural explanation that is totally lacking the physicality of the embodied self, of skin and bone, and guts and blood and phlegm, never mind the messy interactions involving genes, neurotransmitters, senses, emotions, hormones and cortex constituting all those things that operate “beneath the bonnet”, as it were. There is so much that remains to be known.

It is rather obvious but still important to note that Foucault does not discuss conventional theories of power, although Lukes suggests that in his final years his explanation came closer to these. Lukes makes an important point in relation to Foucault’s idealism, that the latter seems to assume that discourse will be realized, so he pays scant attention to what happens in practice. Added to this he tends to focus strictly on just one discourse. For example Foucault, (2008) describes the similarities and differences of the ordoliberals and neoliberals in some detail, while downplaying the role of the State and the juridical system. This focus is understandable, given that his aim is to trace the origins of the new form of governmentality that fully emerged fully fledged in the 1980s. However, he consequently omits to discuss the influence of the jurist Robert Bork, who played a huge role in creating the conditions for the rise of the mega-corporations we live with today. Additionally, while describing the framing of the individual in neoliberal discourse as “entrepreneur of the self” and noting the the paradoxical relation whereby the free consumer is subject to behaviourist conditioning, he has precious little else to say about business or marketing.

Marketing scholars have since drawn upon Foucault to re-enquire into a range of issues and in particular it is good to see the emergence of empirical studies. However in this last section I would like to revisit Tadajewski (2019), whom I think makes a good point about the role of habit in marketing. As discussed above, Foucault was well aware of the paradox by which the free consumer who is left to laisser- faire, is also open to behaviour modification.  While the very mention of behaviourism can send a chill down the spine of the liberal social scientist by invoking the spectre of manipulation of the masses by an elite, it would be interesting to know what is actually involved in this form of governmentality? The following paragraph provides a very brief foray into an area that ought to be explored further. 

Many of the incentives argued for by Gary Becker in relation to State intervention might be regarded with little consternation by the famed man on the Clapham omnibus. For instance, amongst other things Becker advocated economic incentives to reduce racism in the workplace (Becker & Landes, 1974), the use of financial gifts from parents to badly-behaved children to encourage them to be better behaved (Becker, 1974b) and for provision of continuing education and well-paid jobs to prevent individuals turning to crime (Becker, 1974). The aim of the more recent development of Nudge Economics, described by Richard Thaler (2015: 329) paradoxically as “libertarian paternalism”, is to frame the decision context in ways that “ help people achieve their own goals”, for example, to increase the level of organ donations, reduce teenage pregnancies and increase the level of savings for retirement.

The aims of these government sponsored programmes seem benign when compared to the activities of the gambling industry, food producers and social media giants, amongst others, which target the poor and vulnerable in society with a range of perverse incentives. For example, the social media industry targets human attention as the key to profitability, with the aim for each organisation to achieve 100%.  Corporations compete to feed the users of their platforms ratcheting up a series of perverse incentives geared to stoke base emotions of envy, pride, jealousy, lust, fear and anxiety; for example, a young girl who searches for tips on how to stay thin can then be bombarded with “recommendations” promoting bulimia and anorexia.   From this one might hypothesize that the ability of these industries to grow fat on the misery of their customers is based on the increasing capture of government by corporate interests, resulting in a lack of regulation and control.  In an earlier chapter, I described how this form of “governmentality” was facilitated by the acceptance by the US Supreme Court of the neoliberal argument presented by Robert Bork, that efficiency is the most efficient criterion by which to judge a monopoly, resulting in the giant corporations we see today.

References and Further Reading

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Assael, Henry, (1994). Consumer behaviour and marketing action. South-Western College Publishing.

Barnes L, Hicks T. Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity. British Journal of Political Science, vol.52(3):1296-1314. doi:10.1017/S0007123421000119

Bartky, Sandra (1992) ‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, pp. 103-118. In Kourany, Janet A., James P. Serba and Rosmarie Tong (eds.) Feminist Philosophies, New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in fragments: Essays in postmodern morality, Cambridge: Polity.

Becker, G. S., F. Ewald & B.E. Harcourt, (2012). Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault's 1979 'Birth of Biopolitics' Lectures. University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics Olin Research Paper, (614).

Becker, G. S. (1974). A Theory of Social Interactions. Journal of Political Economy, 82(6), 1063–1093. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830662

Becker, G. & W.M. Landes, (1974). Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. In, Gary Becker and William M. Landes (eds.) Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment: 1-54. NBER. http://www.nber.org/books/beck74-1

Beckett A. (2012) ‘Governing the Consumer: Technologies of Consumption’, Consumption Markets & Culture 15(1): 1–18.

Berlant, L. (2007). Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 754–780. https://doi.org/10.1086/521568

Bhambra, G. & J. Holmwood, (2021). Colonialism and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bos, R. T. (2002). Machiavelli’s Kitchen. Organization, 9(1), 51-70. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050840291003

Brownlie, Douglas & Michael Saren (1997) ‘Beyond the One-Dimensional Marketing Manager: The Discourse of Theory, Practice and Relevance’. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 14: 147-161.

Callewaert, S. (2017). Foucault’s concept of dispositive. Praktiske Grunde. Nordisk tidsskrift for kultur- og samfundsvidenskab, nr. 1-2(29-52).

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Charitsis, V., Yngfalk, AF. and Skålén, P. (2019) “Made to run”: Biopolitial marketingand the making of the self-quantified runner. Marketing Theory, 19 (3). pp. 347 - 366. ISSN: 1470-593

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Denegri-Knott, J. & M. Tadajewski (2017). Sanctioning value: The legal system, hyper-power and the legitimation of mp3. Marketing Theory, vol. 17(2):

Denegri-Knott, J.; D. Zwick & J.E. Schroeder (2006). Mapping consumer power: an integrative framework for marketing and consumer research. European Journal of Marketing, vol. 40(9/10): 950-971.

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1 See for instance Digesir, (1992).

² François Ewald, in Becker, Ewald, Harcourt, (2012).

³ Raffnsøe et al., (2019), argue that articles on discipline formed the first wave of Foucault-inspired commentary and research in organization studies. This proved very influential, because of its ‘striking and graphic analysis and because of the potency of the image of the Panopticon. In the authors’ view this led to an over-emphasis on discipline that had a distending effect on the literature. The authors note that the focus of Discipline and Punish is from 1840 to 1860AD and that by the time the book was published in 1975, discipline “no longer seemed natural and inevitable”. They mention too that Foucault differentiated between the ideal of a disciplinarian society from the reality of a disciplined society.

⁴ This section is informed by Foucault, in Callewaert, (2017: 43) and by Elden (2021).

⁵ Garland, (2014: 372).

⁶ See B. Jessop (2014) and Francois Ewald on the discussion by him, Bernard Harcourt and Jesus Velasco (2015) entitled: Foucault: May 1968. https://michel-foucault.com/2015/06/23/foucault-and-may-1968-2015/.

7 Foucault, (1982: 791).

⁸ Foregoing references are to Foucault, (1982: 789).

⁹ Foucault, 1982: 790).

¹⁰ Foucault, (1982: 781). Foucault, unlike Norbert Elias does not discuss any form of internal division of the subject, as as that made by Freud. This comment on being tied to one’s identity ‘by a conscience or self-knowledge” seems to come as close as he ever gets, but raises some intriguing questions. While “conscience” is not all that different from the Freudia superego, it is hard to fathom what Foucault is getting at by referring to self-knowledge. Answers on a postcard please!

¹¹ Foucault, (1982, 782).

¹² Foucault, (1982, 781).

¹³ Foucault, (1982, (781).

¹⁴ Foucault, (1982, 785).

¹⁵ Foucault, (1982, 778). The last three volumes of the History of Sexuality are devoted to explaining very different forms of subjectivity prevailing in early Greece and the early Christian period.

¹⁶ Foucault, (200,: 25-26).

¹⁷ Foucault, (2004, ch.5, 87-114).

¹⁸ He acknowledges this when writing that, “The governmentality or governmentability – forgive these barbaric terms – of these individuals…(Foucault, 2008: 294).

¹⁹ Foucault, (2008, 117).

²⁰ Foucault, (1982, 784).

²¹ Published in English as Foucault, (2008).

²² The Use of Pleasure and Care of the Self first appeared in French in 1984 as The History of Sexuality, vols. 2 and 3, respectively.

²³ Foucault, (2004:35-36).

²⁴ Comment by François Ewald in Harcourt et al. (2012).

²⁵ See Jessop, B. (2006) and Francois Ewald in discussion with Bernard Harcourt and Jesus Velasco (2015) entitled: Foucault: May 1968. https://michel-foucault.com/2015/06/23/foucault-and-may-1968-2015/.

²⁶ Foucault, (1978: ch.2: 36-49).

²⁷ Source: Foucault, (1979: 126).

²⁸ Source: Foucault, (1984: 43).

²⁹ This bears comparison with the incentives provided through “nudge” economics today.

³⁰ Foucault, 2004: 243).

³¹ Foucault, (2004: 245-246).

³² For more on the Booth map see https://booth.lse.ac.uk/highlights. This is considered the forerunner of modern geodemographic segmentation, pioneered by Richard Webber in Liverpool through ACORN whose successor MOSAIC is offered for sale by Experian.

³³ Foucault, (2008: 13).

³⁴ Foucault, (2008, seminars of 7th-28th March, 1979: 215-289.)

³⁵ This might be regarded as an instance of the pot calling the kettle, as Foucault’s own approach is closer to the view from a helicopter than to one based on the ground.

³⁶ Foucault, (2008: 228-229).14th March, 1979.

³⁷ Foucault, (2008: 270).28th March, 1979.

³⁸ Foucault, (2008: 225), 14th March, 1979.

³⁹ Ibid. 226.

⁴⁰ Foucault, (2008: 295).

⁴¹ Foucault, 2008: 227-228).

⁴² Bauman, (1995: 116).

⁴³ Bauman, (1995: 118).

⁴⁴ (Miller & Rose, 2008: 14-21).

⁴⁵ Miller & Rose, 2008: 79-80).

⁴⁶ The Heath government elected in 1970 was influenced by neoliberal arguments. There is no mention whatever of the Chicago School nor of Schulz or Gary Becker. It seems reasonable to argue that neoliberalism did not come into its own until the 1980s.

⁴⁷ Miller & Rose, (2008.: 139/140).

⁴⁸ Miller & Rose (2008: 130).

⁴⁹ See Raffnsøe et al., (2019), in relation to organization studies.

⁵⁰ Tadajewski & Saren, (2009). Brown, (1998) made a similar point that relationship marketing was not a novel concept.

⁵¹ Tadajewski & Jones, ( 2021).

⁵² ibid., 21.

⁵³ Foucault, (2015: 219)

⁵⁴ Foucault, (2015: 219, in Tadajewski, (2019).

⁵⁵ See for instance Assael, (1994).

⁵⁶ A&M Records vs. Napster Inc.1999-2001.

⁵⁷ While Darwin himself partly contributed to this, the notions of competitive “fitness”, of “racial superiority”, “racial purity, “racial pollution” and ‘racial conflict’ associated with “social Darwinism”, which constituted the cultural worldview of the West at the time, were legitimised as having a scientific basis by Darwin’s cousin Herbert Spencer, who was also a firm believer in individualism and laissez-faire government (see Dennis, 1995).

⁵⁸ Clegg, Pitsis, Rura-Polley, & Marosszeky, (2002: 318).

⁵⁹ Elledge, John, (2023). The absurdity of the Tories “get on your bike” plea. The New Statesman, 5th August.

⁶⁰ See for example, Peñaloza, & Barnhart, (2011) and Lenzer, Robert, (2012). The 2008 meltdown and where the blame falls. Forbes, 2nd June.

⁶¹ See for example, Barnes and Hicks (2022).

⁶² Source: Wood, (1991).

⁶³ University of Oxford, (2015). Imbalance of ADHD in the US. Department of Psychiatry. 23rd Nov. https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/imbalance-of-adhd-diagnosis-in-the-us. See Kirby (2020) for discussion of dyslexia.

⁶⁴ Ibid. (781).

⁶⁵ See Moodie et al., (2021) as an instance.

⁶⁶ Carriedo et al. (2022) discuss how the nutrition profession in the USA has been captured by Big Food.

⁶⁷ Foucault, (1982: 781).

⁶⁸ Judd et al. (2023).

⁶⁹ The scale of deaths recorded in North America from opiod abuse is large, accounting for an estimated 600,000 deaths in the USA and Canada over the past two decades and forecast to kill 1.2 million by 2029 (Editorial, The Lancet, 2022). However, obesity has an even large effect as in 1999 it was estimated that 280,000 Americans died from obesity-related causes annually, (Allison et al., 1999), rising to 500,000 per annum in 2022 (Ward et al., 2022).

⁷⁰ Source: Based upon Foucault, 1978: 93/4

⁷¹ Lukes, (2021: 93 & 95).

⁷² This argument is informed by Garland (1992).

⁷³ Lukes, (2021: 98).

⁷⁴ Ibid.:97.

⁷⁵ Ibid.: 95/96. The notion of “making up people” was advanced by Ian Hacking, (1986).

⁷⁶ Allen, (1998: 54), in Lukes, (2021, 100-101).

⁷⁷ Lukes, (2021, 101).

⁷⁸ Foucault, 1987: 11, in Lukes, (2021: 101-102).

⁷⁹ Lukes, (2021: 102).

⁸⁰ Ibid. 103.

⁸¹ See for instance, Garland, (2014: 365).

⁸² Foucault, (2008: 259-260).

⁸³ Rockhill, G., (2020). Foucualt; the faux radical. The Philosophical Salon, 12th Oct. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/foucault-the-faux-radical/#:~:text=By the late 1970s and,me about Marx any more. See also Zamora, (2019) and Zamora, & Behrent (2016).