Browsing by Author "Wet, Mercia Christine De"
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- Foucault 2.0: Discipline, Governmentality and EthicsPublication . Wet, Mercia Christine De; Santos, José Manuel BoavidaThe rise of globalisation, along with the proliferation of the internet and the development of groundbreaking technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technology has, in the twenty-first century, given rise to a complex nexus of mutable relations that lends itself to a continuation and recontextualization of the kind of philosophical explorations and analyses that Michel Foucault started in the previous century. This then is what this thesis sets out to do, with the ultimate goal of seeing what lessons we can learn from Foucault, particularly in the context of the modern organisation and business ethics. This thesis tracks the trajectory of the subject through Foucault’s work on power, governmentality, and ethics. Central to this, is the question of how Foucault’s analysis may be applied to the contemporary networked, high-tech social context today’s subject finds himself in. I contend that today’s subject constitutes itself in a way that is very different from the subject of any preceding epoch. The subject of today is a divided subject, a type of Deleuzian "dividual" who occupies both the physical world as well as the virtual one. In order to understand how the modern subject constitutes itself within the current socio-economic and technological environment, I use a quasi-Foucauldian methodology. However, instead of analysing practices in hospitals, sanitariums, schools or clinics, my focus is on the twenty-first century enterprise - on companies and corporations as microcosms of a larger social, economic and technological macrocosm. This entails a thoroughgoing investigation into the twenty-first century organisation - its discourses, its mechanisms of power, domination, and control, “managementality”, and the care of the self or the self-constitution of the contemporary working subject. Ultimately, this results in an attempt to unearth an entirely new perspective on ethics, particularly in business.