The Birth of the Prison, the Functional Reproduction of the Body: A Reading from the Field of Critical Management

Abstract

This study aims to examine how disciplinary techniques function in different historical and social contexts. In this regard, it is argued that the critical management perspective can open new debates on the visible and invisible workings of disciplinary mechanisms and, through the questions it raises and the tools it provides, contribute to the effort of establishing a critical tradition in Turkish academia. This research, which asserts that disciplinary power exists not only as a repressive mechanism but also by producing individuals’ consent, analyzes the nature and effects of disciplinary practices in prisons through interviews conducted with formerly incarcerated workers in Turkey. The interviews, conducted with purposefully selected participants, were examined using critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that surveillance, reward-punishment mechanisms, and disciplinary techniques implemented in prisons also function in similar ways in workplaces and modern management systems. These findings indicate that prisoners are not merely punished but also shaped as economic subjects. In this context, the study discusses how disciplinary techniques function through the labor of incarcerated workers and how they are connected to broader social control mechanisms. Instead of considering identities as natural, given, and universal, this study highlights that subjective experiences are constructed within certain power structures through subjectification practices, particularly by examining the prison-body relationship. In this direction, the study calls for expanding the critical management field by emphasizing the possibility of developing new subjectivities.