To Örebro University

While studies of disciplinary power have largely focused on how employees conform, resist, or adapt to organizational norms, less attention has been paid to what happens when normalization efforts fail, leading to exclusion. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, this article examines how top management handles employees who persistently deviate from organizational expectations. Based on an empirical study of managerial responses to two types of deviant employees—underperformers and socially nonconforming individuals—we reveal how exclusion emerges as an escalating process. Initially, managers employ corrective measures aimed at normalization, yet when these efforts prove unsuccessful, they shift toward intensified control, documentation, and ultimately, exclusion. Our findings demonstrate that exclusion is not a failure of disciplinary power but rather its extension, reinforcing organizational norms through the removal of those deemed irredeemably deviant. By conceptualizing exclusion as an active disciplinary mechanism rather than a passive outcome, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of power dynamics in contemporary organizations.

Existing theorizations on how the proliferation of market-based technologies within universities come to foster so-called academic performer subjectivities have mainly drawn attention to their coercive and seductive powers. However, while these theorizations help explain why researchers either unwillingly adapt to, or identify with and cherish, their neoliberal ideals, they are less useful to explain recent empirical results showing that many researchers willingly comply yet are very critical of the very same ideals. Drawing upon an interview study of Swedish researchers, we address this theoretical gap in the literature by analytically disentangling three important qualities of the technologies per se, in terms of them producing performance numbers characterized by Specificness, Ongoingness, and Emptiness (SOE). These three qualities do not only have the dual power to interchangeably provoke bitter and sweet feelings, but also to foster the adoption of an academic performer subjectivity. In fact, it is precisely by provoking bittersweet feelings that these qualities break the sharp edges of pure coercion and seduction, thereby fostering a type of low-affective, yet highly persuasive form of reasoning about pros and cons of market-based technologies, which make their neoliberal ideals seem acceptable and reasonable at the end of the day.

Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken-for-granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market-based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators, apart from setting up quasi-markets, may intervene more directly to give the invisible hand of the market a helping hand. Aiming to address this lacuna, the purpose of the current article is to develop an empirically grounded taxonomy of different types of such interventions, and to theorise them in terms of the different facets of the neoliberal milieu that they reproduce and the various forms of subjectivising work among academics that they seek to engender. We do so by means of a qualitative study of so-called 'Grants Offices' at three Swedish universities. The findings arguably add to and problematise our understanding of how neoliberal markets work in academia in three different ways. First, while extant research has noted that university managers and administrators may intervene beyond the setting up of neoliberal markets per se, our study is to our knowledge the first one that identifies and systematises a broad array of such interventions. Second, it problematises the view of neoliberal markets as a form of monolithic entity that produces a uniform competitive pressure on academics. Third, and related, it furthers our understanding of the type of subjectivity that competitive milieus are assumed to bring about.

Critical educational literature suggests that an increased reliance upon neoliberally inspired management technologies transforms the very foundations from which images of the ideal teacher are constructed. The purpose of this paper is to add to this literature by (i) identifying and analysing a number of theoretical qualities associated with performative technologies, and (ii) discussing how such qualities contribute to the emergence of performative teacher subjectivities. Drawing upon the findings from a qualitative interview study into the extensive use of performative technologies in a Swedish upper secondary school, we discuss four key roles of performative technologies—referred to as territorializing, mediating, adjudicating, and subjectivizing—and the intensity by which they play out such roles. A key conclusion is that the intensity by which performative technologies territorialize, mediate, and adjudicate educational practices affects self-reflection and internalization among teachers and, hence, is important for understanding the subjectivizing role of performative technologies.

This thesis is devoted to the darker side of organizational control. How individuals, viewed by their superiors as dysfunctional or deviant, are dealt with once the everyday disciplinary standard operating procedures and social mechanisms are consider to fall short. My two research questions, how the deviant employee is constructed by management and how management handle the deviant employee, are closely related to how the threshold of deviance is defined, explicitly or implicitly, in formal organizations.

Central in my work is the concept of ostracism, a process where an individual is both physically removed/banished, made redundant, isolated or relocated and socially defined as deviant, said to be disloyal, uncooperative or lazy. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault I conceptualize this as the last step in the organizations disciplinary process, a point where the aim of normalization is replaced by a process of exclusion, to safeguard the organization.

In the analysis I identify different types of deviations and how managers construct deviance in relation to different logics. The individual can be regarded as a misfit in relation to a rational economic, a bureaucratic, a collegial social and finally a socio-cultural logic of action. The individual is classified as deviant in relation to one of these frames and the manager’s attempts to normalize the individual accordingly, something that also determine if and how the individual is excluded from the organization.

The wider implications of the study is that in order to understand disciplinary regimes in working life, the processes of labelling deviance and managing exclusion must be understood.