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This article considers the role of humour as a disciplinary technology. Using the British military as an organizational context, and drawing on data from the published memoirs of recently serving military personnel, the article makes three arguments in this regard. First, it is argued that the disciplinary apparatus of the military, as an example of a rule-bound and hierarchical organizational structure, creates the conditions that allow for a controlled form of resistance (through humour) to be enacted by organizational subjects; but ultimately, such acts work to serve the requirements of the organization. Second, it is argued that humour contributes to the establishing of social cohesion through disciplinary practices of inclusion and exclusion and the drawing of lines of normalization, both at the local level and at a wider institutional level. Third, it is argued that humour permeates the power relations that structure organizational life: both those governed by rank and position and those that arise through the modes of self-regulation through which much organizational disciplining is enacted. This article concludes by drawing attention to the dialectic and dynamic nature of humour while also offering suggestions for the wider applicability of the disciplinary role of workplace humour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the intersection between sovereign power and disciplinary power specifically the intersections of madness and sovereignty and micro and macro physics. It focuses on the scene concerning the madness of King George III of England explored by Michel Foucault in his lecture at the College de France under the title "Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique." The author highlights the role of the madness of King George III as a savage force that transforms the sovereign into a sort of human beast. Also highlighted is Foucault's notion that the question of human and non-human life is a political problem.

This paper analyses how the preferred self-conceptions of men in an elite military unit-the British Parachute Regiment - were disciplined by the organizationally based discursive resources on which they drew. The research contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, we argue that preferred self-conceptions (i.e. desired identities) are mechanisms for disciplining employees' identity work, and analyse how paratroopers were subject to, and constituted by, the discursive practices of the Regiment. Paratroopers' preferred conceptions of their selves were disciplined by understandings both of what it meant to be a paratrooper and of the institutional processes by which they were made. In talking about how the Regiment 'manufactured' them, paratroopers provided insight on how the Regiment produced and reproduced the idealized identities to which they aspired. Second, to complement other understandings of identities, we suggest that people are often best characterized as 'aspirants'. An aspirational identity is a story-type or template in which an individual construes him- or herself as one who is earnestly desirous of being a particular kind of person and selfconsciously and consistently in pursuit of this objective. The recognition of subjectively construed identities as narrativized permits an appreciation of individuals as sophisticatedly agentic, while recognizing that their 'choices' are made within frameworks of disciplinary power which both enable and restrict their scope for discursive manoeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a critical examination of the rationalisation of British dairy farming in the early twentieth century, with a particular focus upon the emergence of milk yield recording as a vehicle of rationalisation. The historical analysis is used to rework and rethink the concept of rationalisation itself, by conceiving it as a disciplinary technology of ontological purification, which reconfigures the relations between humans and nonhumans, and between humans and animals in particular. In this way I seek to integrate contrasting approaches to modernity, showing how the core sociological narrative of rationalisation can be re-worked in terms of a Foucauldian conception of disciplinary power and a symmetrical or ‘actor-network’ approach to ontological politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that through a concern with disciplinary power, post-structuralists have recently turned their attention to the discursive force of welfare in constituting the poor as docile and subservient populations. Using the recent example of 'work-welfare' in Britain, the pessimism of this position is rejected by pointing to the continuing importance of resistance and opposition, while considering their wider significance for the analysis of welfare provision. With the apparent failure of welfare statism, the inability of collectivism to withstand the current phase of welfare retrenchment and the growing influence of the new social movements and the voices from the margins, post-modernism and post-structuralism have been embraced as offering new ways of thinking about welfare and social policy. The post-structuralist claim to represent a new radical agenda for the analysis of social welfare provision is considerably less impressive, however, when positioned in relation to wider developments in radical thought.

The article discusses the importance on the application of natural justice in disciplinary cases in both public and private sectors to ensure fairness and to avoid or reduce grievances of staff and clients in Great Britain and France. The problem is not a purely legal one, although the legal aspects are important. The nub of the question is the role of the courts in deciding conflicts between individuals on the one hand and those in positions of power and authority on the other. These are also conflicts between different sections of society. But the rules of natural justice applied to disciplinary procedures should not give rise to the problems that judicial review of administrative action generally and of legislation in particular gives rise to.

This article examines the process of training informal carers on stroke units using the lens of power. Care is usually assumed as a kinship obligation but the state has long had an interest in framing the carer and caring work. Training carers in healthcare settings raises questions about the power of the state and healthcare professionals as its agents to shape expectations and practices related to the caring role. Drawing on Foucault's notion of disciplinary power, we show how disciplinary forms of power exercised in interactions between healthcare professionals and carers shape the engagement and resistance of carers in the process of training. Interview and observational field note extracts are drawn from a multi-sited study of a training programme on stroke units targeting family carers of people with stroke to consider the consequences of subjecting caring to this intervention. We found that the process of training informal carers on stroke units was not simply a matter of transferring skills from professional to lay person, but entailed disciplinary forms of power intended to shape the conduct of the carer. We interrogate the extent to which a specific kind of carer is produced through such an approach, and the wider implications for the participation of carers in training in healthcare settings and the empowerment of carers., (© 2017 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.)

This article reports that doctors facing some misconduct allegations by the UK regulatory body, the General Medical Council, will escape full disciplinary hearings if they agreed to have conditions attached to their registration. "Consensual disposal" will be available for the less serious cases in which the doctor will agree to not practice single handedly, not to perform minor surgery in a general practice setting or to undergo a period of retraining. The most serious cases such as those where a doctor might be suspended or removed from the medical register and those where there was a public interest in a hearing would go before a fitness to practice panel.