RCRG
Syndicate
] "There are two images then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society." (p. 209)
"Techniques of control and the panoptic power they convey offer one such alternative. Information systems can alter many of the classic contingencies of the superior-subordinate relationship, providing certain information about the subordinates' behavior while eliminating the necessity of face-to-face engagement. They can transmit the presence of the omniscient observer and so induce compliance without the messy conflict-prone exertions of reciprocal relations." (p. 323)
"In the past twenty-five years, computer-mediated work, despite its potential for reintegrating design and execution, has been employed, typically but not exclusively, in a manner that reproduces the hierarchies of managerial authority. The division between intellectual and manual labor and the degradation of manual labor that was characteristic of the industrializing era have been simultaneously shifted to the division between the operators and the professional-managerial employees, but also the division between the "lower" operating and "higher" expert orders broadly reproduces within intellectual labor itself the old gulf separating manual and intellectual labor in the mechanical era. Hierarchy is frequently maintained despite the integrative possibilities of the technology. Under this regime of production, the computer provides the basis for greatly extending the system of discipline and control inherited from nineteenth-century capitalism. Many corporations have used it to extend their Panopticonic world-view; that is, they have deployed the computer as a means of employee surveillance that far exceeds the most imperious dreams of the Panopticon's inventor, Jeremy Bentham, or any nineteenth- or early twentieth-century capitalist." (p. 89)