Foucault and PowerThe Dynamics of Control and Resistance

Michel Foucault did more than rethink power. He fractured it, exposing the cracks in how we imagine control and authority. The traditional view of power is comfortable. Power is a weapon, a possession, something held by kings, chief executives, governments and the rich, something “they” have and “we” don’t. That kind of thinking makes power feel like a thing you can seize or overthrow. A revolution comes, the power changes hands, and the world is fixed.

Foucault calls bullshit on that idea. Power, for him, is something that moves. It is never locked inside institutions waiting to be taken. It flows through relationships and through knowledge itself. It is the water we swim in, shaping what we can see and even how we understand ourselves.

Power tells us what to do. More quietly, it tells us who we are.

This matters for anyone trying to understand an organisation, because organisations run on exactly the kind of power Foucault described: the kind that rarely needs to raise its voice. It is the force The Fractured Lens calls Dynamics, and Foucault gives it its sharpest description.

Foucault on Power: A Network, Not a Possession

We have been trained to think of power as a thing, something you can own, grab, pass down or steal. Chief executives have it. The rest of us try to get some. Restructures move it from one group to another. This is the possession model of power, the idea that power is a resource some people hoard while others struggle to reach it. The org chart is its portrait: authority drawn as boxes, flowing down lines, belonging to whoever occupies the box. Foucault’s work suggests the chart is the least interesting place to look for power in an organisation.

Foucault rips this apart. In his account power is exercised rather than held. It doesn’t sit in a boardroom waiting to be seized; it moves through relationships and through the unseen structures that tell us what is normal and what isn’t.

His most unsettling claim follows from this. We tend to think of power as restriction: the rule, the prohibition, the sanction, the voice that says no. Foucault argued that this repressive picture captures only a fraction of how power works. Power also produces. It creates identities and categories. It shapes what counts as reality. It defines which behaviours are even imaginable before any rule is needed to forbid the others.

Schools show this clearly. They teach facts, and they also teach what intelligence, discipline and success look like. A child who excels at maths is “gifted.” A child who questions authority is “disruptive.” A child who struggles with structured learning is “falling behind.” These labels present themselves as neutral descriptions. They are shaped by power, and as well as describing students they create identities that follow them for years.

Organisations run the same operation on adults. The employee flagged as “high potential” and the one described as “not a team player” have both been handed an identity by a system of categories they did not write. Talent grids, competency frameworks, engagement scores and culture-fit judgements all claim to measure what people are. They also help decide what people become, because once a category is attached to someone, it shapes the assignments they receive and the way they begin to see themselves.

This is why changing who “holds” power so rarely changes the system. Replace the leadership team and the grids, frameworks and categories carry on doing their work through whoever sits in the chairs. Power is happening through us as much as to us. We reinforce norms and internalise expectations. We don’t need constant surveillance once we have learned to watch ourselves.

Power and Knowledge: How Organisations Produce Truth

If power shapes behaviour, knowledge is how power justifies itself. It is not enough to control what people do; power has to shape how they think about what they do. Foucault’s name for this bond was power-knowledge, and in Discipline and Punish he insisted that the two directly imply one another. Every field of knowledge carries relations of power within it, and every relation of power leans on a body of knowledge.

His best-known example is madness. Go back a few centuries and madness was a moral failing, a sign of divine punishment, or even a form of supernatural insight. The “mad” were hidden, punished or revered, depending on the era. What changed was not human nature, and not the existence of mental suffering. What changed was the discourse: the way institutions classified, studied and defined madness. As psychiatry took shape as a medical field, a new set of institutions, hospitals, courts and medical authorities, produced a framework in which madness became a medical condition. That framework did more than describe reality. It created a new way of seeing it, and gave doctors power over people who had once been judged by priests or police.

Mental illness is real. Its boundaries, definitions and treatments are still shaped by history and by power. In one era homosexuality is a disorder; in another it isn’t. In one era hysteria is a medical condition; in another it disappears. The people didn’t change. The power that defined them did.

And this is the trick of power: it makes its inventions feel natural. We don’t feel the moment when an idea goes from “one way of thinking” to “the only way of thinking.” We inherit categories such as intelligence and normality, and accept them as facts of the universe rather than historical products of power doing its work.

Organisational knowledge works the same way, only faster. A personality instrument becomes the language a team uses to explain its conflicts. A single engagement survey turns a mood into a number, and the number becomes the truth about how people feel, to be reported upward, targeted and improved. None of these is simply false. Each is a way of making the organisation knowable, and each carries a decision about which experiences count as data and which count as noise.

Watch whose knowledge prevails in a meeting. The dashboard usually outranks the account from the front line. The consultant’s slide outranks the person who has done the job for fifteen years. Nobody forbids the other kinds of knowing. The organisation has simply already decided which forms of knowledge sound like evidence and which sound like opinion, and people learn to speak in the forms that will be heard. As Michelle Fine argues, the question of who is allowed to produce knowledge about a situation is always also a question about power over it.

Foucault forces us to ask what knowledge we take for granted, and who benefits from these definitions of truth. Power controls more than what is done. It shapes what is known and what it is possible to think.

The Panopticon at Work: Discipline and Surveillance

Imagine a prison where no one needs to be chained and no one needs to be actively watched, because the prisoners watch themselves. This was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon: a circular building with cells arranged around its edge and an inspection lodge at its centre, designed so that the inspector could see every inmate while they could never see him. The genius, or the horror, of the design is that uncertainty makes surveillance constant in the prisoner’s mind, even if no one is actually looking.

It is easy to forget that the panopticon was never only about prisons. Bentham took the idea from his brother Samuel, whom he visited in Russia in 1786, and saw at once that the principle could be applied to hospitals and schools as well as to commercial concerns. Any institution that needed to keep people under inspection could use it. The workplace was in the design from the beginning.

Foucault saw the panopticon as a blueprint for modern power. Contemporary societies, he argued, run on this principle of self-surveillance, where direct force is often unnecessary because people internalise discipline. We don’t just follow rules; we police ourselves.

The panopticon is everywhere. In the classroom, the “good student” learns to regulate themselves long before a teacher intervenes. In the workplace it arrives as productivity tracking, KPI dashboards, read receipts, green dots showing who is online, and open-plan offices where everyone can see what everyone else is doing. It doesn’t matter whether your boss is watching; you behave as if they are. Remote work carried the tower home and installed it on the laptop, in software that logs keystrokes, samples screenshots and marks anyone idle for more than a few minutes. Many people who have never seen such a report still pause before stepping away from the keyboard, just in case. Online, we curate ourselves for an audience we can’t see, and every post is shaped by the possibility of being ranked.

Discipline and Punish names the instrument that brings these pressures together. Foucault called it the examination: a ritual that combines hierarchical observation with what he called normalising judgement. The examination makes each person visible, measures them against a norm and records the result, so that every individual becomes a case with a file. Anyone who has sat through an annual performance review has met it. The review observes from above, rates against a scale and stores the outcome where it will shape later decisions about pay and promotion. It also asks the person being examined to take part, by writing a self-assessment and agreeing to objectives. As The Review explores, the ritual asks for honesty in a setting built to judge it. Forced ranking takes normalising judgement to its logical end. Whatever everyone actually does, someone must occupy the bottom of the distribution, and the category produces the person to fill it.

This is disciplinary power at its finest. It doesn’t need brute force, because it has already shaped how we act and how we define ourselves. We no longer need the guard in the tower. We carry the tower inside us.

The real trick is that this control arrives dressed as choice. The worker “chooses” to be productive. The graduate “chooses” to answer emails at eleven at night. The conditions that shape these choices are set before anyone makes them. The panopticon’s great achievement is to make obedience feel like freedom.

Foucault also described a quieter form of modern power, which he called biopower: power that governs populations by managing life itself. Where older power punished what you did, modern power regulates who you are. Public health campaigns tell us how to eat and how to age properly. Employment norms shape how we view productivity and self-worth. In organisations the same logic appears in wellbeing programmes that treat stress as a personal failing to be managed with an app, and in performance cultures where people track their own output more closely than any manager would. Nobody is forcing anyone to behave a certain way. We do it anyway, because the expectations are built into the systems we work inside.

That is power at its most complete: when you don’t consider breaking a rule, not from fear of punishment, but because the rule has shaped how you think about yourself. There is no evil mastermind pulling the strings and no single villain to overthrow. That is what makes Foucault so hard to use as a manifesto and so useful as a lens: he removes the comfort of an enemy and leaves us looking at the arrangements we reproduce each day. The system runs because we all take part in it, often without realising.

Resistance: Why Power Absorbs Its Challengers

This is where Foucault becomes uncomfortable. If power is everywhere, where is the outside? If it flows through language and habit, how do we resist it?

His answer is infuriating in its complexity. Even resistance is shaped by power. And yet power is never absolute. If power is everywhere, then so is resistance. The structures that shape what we believe and how we behave are full of cracks and contradictions, points where they can be challenged and rewritten.

In organisations those points are rarely dramatic. Resistance shows up in the side conversation after the town hall, or in the workaround that quietly ignores a process everyone knows is broken. It shows up when a manager writes the honest review instead of the calibrated one, or when a team declines to adopt the language of a change programme and keeps describing its work in its own words. None of this overturns anything. All of it keeps alive the possibility that things could be described, and therefore organised, differently.

The difficulty is that power adapts. Resistance is never a single battle after which power collapses and freedom wins. The moment resistance gains ground, power shifts, absorbs the challenge and returns it in a new form. Feminism fought for decades for autonomy and equality, and corporate culture answered with the girlboss: systemic inequality repackaged as an individual challenge to be solved with hustle and self-confidence. The vocabulary of liberation became a marketing slogan. The resistance was real. Power found a way to commodify it. The commodified version survives because it is easier to live with, for organisations and often for individuals too: it asks individuals to change and leaves in place the structures that produced the problem.

Organisations do this constantly and politely. Staff ask to be heard, and receive an annual survey. They name the fear in the building, and receive a psychological safety programme with its own metrics and facilitators. Each response is a concession, and each also brings the challenge inside the machinery that produced it. Dissent becomes data, and data becomes a target someone is managed against.

The deeper lesson is that fighting power on its own terms often reinforces it. The moment we define ourselves with the categories power has given us, we have already conceded ground. The moment we accept its framing of who is rational and who is deserving, we are still inside its logic.

So resistance, for Foucault, begins with seeing. If power makes things seem natural, resistance starts by treating them as constructed: asking who benefits from this system, who is allowed to speak and who is dismissed, which ideas feel so normal that nobody questions them, and who wrote the stories we tell about ourselves. Foucault gives no blueprint for revolution. He gives a way of looking at the structures around us as contingent rather than inevitable. The moment we realise the rules were written, we can see that they could be rewritten. The moment we recognise that “normal” is a product of power, new normals come into view.

He doesn’t give us a roadmap, because there isn’t one. The struggle is ongoing, always in motion. But maybe that’s the point. Resistance, on this account, has no endpoint where power finally disappears. It lives in keeping the cracks open, refusing to let power settle, and always being willing to ask the next unsettling question.