We try to understand the emergence of the institutional subject and its everyday reconstruction within the institution. Our questions are who this (re)producer is and how s/he becomes who s/he is. How does the institutional subject emerge and happen to be sustained? We propose that the frameworks of Foucault, and Berger and Luckmann regarding the institutional subject are complementary. The institutional subject is possible in and through the everyday presence of power and reciprocity. Power and reciprocity operate together to socially construct the institutional subject capable of engaging in reciprocal and power relations. Our concern is not the institutional entrepreneur or the agency of institutional change but the everyday reproducer of the institution.

This essay draws upon the writings of Michel Foucault to interrogate the changing nature of supervision in Ford Motor Company, 1900-50. Foucault is often misleadingly caricatured as the prophet of a monochrome world of pitiless surveillance and grinding discipline. But a central theme of Foucault’s work is the necessary but complex connections between power and knowledge in specific institutional and historical settings. In Ford Motor Company before 1941 supervisory surveillance was intense. However, supervisors and their relationships with workgroups were not subject to systematic evaluation by Ford. Equally, while supervisory powers were wide- ranging and arbitrary, foremen were themselves exposed to routine, often violent, confrontation with the company’s private army of ‘servicemen’. Before 1941 Ford operated a system of terror rather than a bureaucratized disciplinary system. The gap between power and knowledge was closed between 1941 and 1947 when Ford adapted to emergent trade unionism by bureaucratizing all aspects of supervision. This essay aims to contribute to theoretical and historical debates. Theoretically, we aim to recover a neglected foucauldian category – ‘monarchic power’ and its complex relationship to the more familiar “disciplinary power”. In particular, our aim is to point to the complex, hybrid forms of power/knowledge that mark the transition from ‘monarchic’ to ‘disciplinary’ institutions. Historically, we aim to reconsider Fordism by examining the changing nature of supervision. Far from being a highly choreographed, machine-paced labour process, face-to-face supervision was an integral and essential part of driving efficiency. The realities of shopfloor and the prospect of supervisory unionism triggered Ford’s adoption of a new language of foremanship. Between 1941-1947 Ford established the foundations of a modern, disciplinary system. By reconstituting something of the experience of historical actors such as Ford supervisors we can extend Foucault theoretically to consider the nature of transition between monarchic and disciplinary regimes.

Critical organizational scholars have kept discussions of power inequity within the realm of theory, rarely providing practical discursive tools for shifting systems of control and helping low-status workers empower themselves. In order to address this gap in the research, this paper describes some concrete methods for decentralizing organizational power through application of social movement theory, and it demonstrates how theory-based interventions can help managers and their staff critically evaluate and redistribute power.

What does a manager do when he “labors”? We begin by describing what is commonly referred to as “managerial labor” in the sense of Arendt’s vita activa (the labor itself, the work and the action). These three activities provide us with the initial scope of the notion of managerial labor, grouped by “family resemblance” as in language games. We will then draw the portrait of a manager, self-described as a hard worker. The construction of this portrait comes to complete our initial approach by incorporating the task of forging ties outside the organization, and that of symbolic representation. This activity of symbolization enables the creation and reaffirmation of common organizational paradigms. We will explore the way in which they appear, notably through a work of representation that leads to the emergence of magical thinking, ritual incantations with no effect on the real world, but also to “performance” in the theatrical sense.