Panoptic & Hegemonic Stories

David Boje - revised March 8, 2000

Stories can be prisons. Once we are inscribed in stories, characterizations and live out its plot lines, we get enmeshed with other folks who expect us to act, talk, and walk a certain way. In the family we have certain roles to play, certain scripts that get acted out over and over again. Some stories are absolutely addictive and we get hooked on playing our characters and waiting for that climatic moment when we get to play our favorite scene. Stories and storytelling can become part of the panoptic gaze and the hegemony of power. What, then, is a story? And what does it mean ‘to follow’ a story?”

"A story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or undergone by a certain number of people, whether real or imaginary.  These people are presented either in situations that change or as reacting to such change.  In turn, these changes reveal hidden aspects of the situation and the people involved, and engender a new predicament which calls for thought, action, or both.  This response to the new situation leads the story toward its conclusion" (Ricoeur (1984: 150).
The web of stories we inhabit in storytelling organizations is a panopticon, a  vigilance of intersecting gazes. Foucault argues that our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance. But, I think it is both the Societies of the Spectacle of which Guy Debord (1966) wrote and the Society of Surveillance. And in storytelling both intersect.

What is Panoptic Gaze? Michel Foucault defined the panoptic gaze as a bultiple, automatic, continuous, hierarchical, and anonymous power functioning in a network of relations from top to bottom, from bottom to top, as well as laterally, to hold an enterprise together (Boje, 1995: 1027).

How does panoptic gaze relate to storytelling? Today's enterprises applaud flat structures with few layers of management, yet there is still control.  Through a variety of dispersed and multiple panoptic mechanisms, some digital and others face-to-face, stories are gathered to construct our personnel records. There are for example, meetings in which committees and review teams monitor, assess, classify, and normalize our story.  Our story is observed and rated to see if we fit into the preferred story of the disciplined employee. Deviations and differences are noted in our records.  There are ways that our personal story becomes the subject of surveillance. This networking of story assessment mechanisms turns panoptic when we do not quite know for sure if our story is being gazed and evaluated or not.

An Example from Disney Walt Disney made it a habit to have his demployees put their projects (movies, cartoons, them park ideas, TV shows) onto story boards. The storyboard process was invented by Webb Smith abournd 1931. Walt latched onto the idea of pinning sketches of scenes, dialogue, music choices, etc. onfour-by-six-foot story boards.  The sketches were pinned to the boards to indicate the continuity of the story scenes.  Hundreds of drawings on Webb's storyboards would bet repositioned until the story was ready for telling at a story meeting (See Boje, 1995:1027-1028). Walt reviewed every project idea on these story boards at story meetings.  Story boards were approved or disapproved and if accepted used to coordinate production.

Stories discipline by defining characters, sequencing plots, and scripting actions. Because of the opportunity for multiple interpretation, much of management is about judging stories and storytellers and capturing story characters in a panoptic, interconnected netwrok of interpretative-disciplinary relationships. This is a storied panoptic process in three ways.
 

First, the meetings set up an intersecting gaze to make each project and its progress visible.  Story meetings were tense affiars. Walt had a habit of drumming his fingers on the arm of his chiar. If the thumping got faster, you had best speed up the telling of your story. If the tapping got too slow or Walt yawned you lost his interest and most likely a project you had spent months developing.  A typical story meeting could last from one to three hours and involve as many as 20 people.
Second, Walt being an obsessive snoop made it a habit to roam the halls at night and to peek here and there, in this office or that one, at the storyboards.  He had a way to observe and monitor the visible workings of each departmental cell in his modern factory-prison. Most did not know if Walt had visited their office or not, during the night. A few times he lingered and Chesterfield cigarette butts gave away his cisit.  Disney set up an efficient cage of surveillance.  He did not need layers of managers and advanced info systems to effect command and control.
Third, at Disney stories are a way to control the corporate culture. In Walt's day you were part of the "Disney Family,: Boys were reprimanded when they cursed in front of girls.  The metaphoric language of family reinforced Walt as the father figure to his "boys" and "girls." Being part of the family meant working long hours for the paternalistic hero.  Walt did not allow his family members to have facial hair, but Walt sported his moustache. By 1941, some 293 employees had grown skeptical of the "one big happy, harmonious family" storyline.  It was shattered when the boys and girls went on strike and joined the picket lines.  With the emergence of the theme parks, the family storyline was replaced by one favoring theater.  In the theater motif, employees became "members of the cast" who performed theatrics for the "guests" and wore their "costumes." The costume and theatrics included the ever-present "smiles." This third example reveals the "hegemonic" (see below) aspects, cloaking employees in a storybook script of smiling performers costumed for the show.  There is a postmodern aspect of simulation here, masking the employment contract in favor of the culture of the smile-theater. How many college students take jobs at theme parks to be in the show, whle forgetting to look at their minimum wage returns.


In all three aspects, the commonsense, taken-for-granted story practices become routinized in the panoptic world of the sotrytelling organization. There are two hidden aspects to stories, particular in institutional settings: the panoptic gaze and hegemony.

Panoptic Gaze - Michel Foucault applied Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon" to look at organizational behavior in 19th century prison design. Foucault extended Bentham's theory of how prison architecture can set up towers of observations where by use of backlight the observer can not be seen by the observed. We see the tower, and wonder if our cells and our selves are being gazes. Hence the Bentham principle of power, that it should be "visible and unverifiable" (foucault, 1977: 201). Panopticon thus allows seeing a tower without our seeing the guards, so that we gradually internalize self-surveillance. Since we are always under surveillance and do not know when we are being observed or not, we internalize the gaze, we just self-monitor as if the boss was standing behind us, watching every keystroke.  In the panoptic organizations every person is placed under the gaze of a seamless hierarchy of surveillance that socializes us into self-gaze. We used to worry about command and control managers, now we have internalized those managers.  For example, we moved from supervised departments to self-supervised teams.  Now we watch ourselves.  The gaze is everywhere, in the smallest detail of everyday work life.  The inspectors and managers and our self-managing teams have set up measurement, observation and listening posts everywhere. Everyone is locked in a cage of surveillance. Our lives our full of performance reviews, confessional reports, corrective audits, debriefing interviews, assessment meetings, surveys, and inspections. Our beings are registered in digital reports and key strokes in a mechanism of power. And now there is institutional software to monitor where we surf on the net and our email habits on our company computers, bringing us one step closer to a surveillance society. The Biotech age of Gattica. The panoptic gaze has entered an era of web-electronics and soon to arrive ---> undetected gene-surveillance. The iron prison cells are know digital bars. And the same three criteria apply (Summarizing Foucault 1977: 218):
We have moved from command and control to diffuse, loosely-coupled, boundaryless, even fragmented and chaotic networks because the costs of surveillance have been lowered by the digital revolution, we can attain intense docility without hierarchy, and the links are transorganizational.

Panoptic Storytelling becomes one important cog in the uninterrupted disciplinary mechanism of omniscient power. For me, Foucault (1977: 217) theorizes a contemporary form of storied networks as “the vigilance of intersecting gazes." The monarch used the symbolic power of spectacles of violence to reinforce his eagle and sun status. Spectacle theatrics demonstrated that power was supreme and resistance was futile. "Violent forms of power fell into disuse" (1977: 221).  This aspect of spectacle is for Foucault no longer necessary, since the decentered panopticon exercises its surveillance with intersecting gazes rather than a single centralized spectacle-gaze from the top to the rest of the pyramid. Adam Smith also argued that we internalize the gaze ( "impartial and well informed Spectator"). Mead called it "the generalized other." (more on this topic).

And he concludes the major effect of the Panopticon is "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (p. 201).   It is not whose story is best, mine or others in organizations, “but who has the power to make his story stick as one that others will choose to live by or in” (White, 1987: 167).

”Panoptic Gaze Internalized - "To stare at the body is to envisage the self through the internalized gaze of others inhabiting subjectivity" (Postmodern Fashion).
 

"Simultaneously, fashion magazines are instruments for global consumer capitalism and forums for feminism; they contribute to women's objectification through photography's male desiring gaze and to expressions of newly gained women's independence; they have fostered increasingly sexy styles and progressive social dialogue; they aid and abet gender constraints and display women's assertiveness; they warn women about systematic sexual violence and encourage them to develop sexual allure" (PF, 1996).


Self-help books and TQM seminars seduce us to self-monitor, self-manage, and self-engineer our performance in every detail.We are taught to measure, assess and diagnose our own transformation.  Who needs a Taylor time and motion man, when we have one in our head? We too easily assemble and surrender coded stories to our institutions for easy info retrieval. We are already the self-disciplinary individual.  We interrogate our self.   For Foucault the disciplinary mechanism of panopticism is so perfect and popular it "will be democratically controlled" (1977: 207).   Teams are formed so that at a glance each team-mate can observe all the others. In the end the society as a whole becomes a panopticon supervising its own gaze and disciplining the entire social body, not just the lower echelons but turning the gaze onto the seats of power.  And then the disciplinary mechanisms swarm, so that the team members begin to gaze one another's family lives (p. 211). The gaze disseminates throughout society with the most advanced info technologies until it is omnipresent surveillance.  Thus we do not need hierarchical networks of command and control, the lateral gaze is everywhere, perfectly monitoring and recording our stories. The hierarchical gaze of surveillance, centralized the rituals of monitoring, interviews, self disclosure such that the Napoleonic character at the top of the pyramid could exercise sovereignty with a single gaze (1977: 217). With the smart machine, our vertical gaze allows the single gaze in flattened and delayered hierarchies.


Hegemony -- Antonio Gramsci's idea of Hegemony is how the ruling class uses ideology as a soft form of control, one we in the lower and professional classes are socialized to take for granted.  Hegemony is power taken for granted, treated as the only way we could organize our relationships of domination. Gramsci (1971) refers to forms of domination that gain power from being cleverly masked, taken for granted and otherwise invisible.

Hegemonic Storytelling - Stories can be inhabited by many Western dualities, camouflaged in ideologies we rarely explore.  Stories can be hegemonic when various tellers impose their story onto others. Storytelling organizations co-negotiate, co-construct, and co-shape the telling of each others stories.   We just accept so many stories of our relationships as common sense practice, giving up our power.  For example, if we forget to deconstruct such dualities as doctor/nurse hospital/staff doctor/patient  or administrator/staff we can get lulled into accepting the power relations as a common sense way for the first term of the duality to dominate the second. We surrender our consent to a story of power relations that we do not question.
 

Storytelling Organizations recruit others to subscribe to their more valued stories (what Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, call faciality) and exclude those who do not believe. Various factions are at odds over story interpretations, and with shifts in contexts, the story work is never done. The performance of stories is a key part of storytelling organization members’ on-going sense-making and a means to allow the to supplement individual memories with institutional memory. The STO story work sets story habits, organizing story monitoring and story passage points, providing for story dispatch, and encouraging story delegation (Boje, 1994).
 
 

Story-habits Habits of story performance range from hierarchical separation of who monitors and delegates to including a great diversity of views and voices, even resistant ones.
 
 

Story-monitoring Actors self-monitor (the internal gaze) and are monitored by others who are sensitized and socialized to contradictions between story-in-line and performances out-of-line with official story lines.
 
 

Story-passage points there are managerial, worker, and activist committees everywhere to decide if actions abide by the story, sort out alternative story interpretations, and take other hegemonic actions to make there story appear to be the comm on sense. They are the guardians of institutional memory and the official story and in the case of dissent or activist the counter-hegemonic story.
 
 

Story-dispatch Stories dispatch actions to be played out in the roles of the performers of the storytelling organization. Power in this network is defined here as the ability of a storyteller to g et another to abide within and live out the storyteller’s plot.
 
 

Story-delegation Actors (are encouraged to) delegate to the (official) story plots their own ability to attribute their own roles. It is in this way that stories become a technology of discipline and control.
 
 

 References

Boje, David M. (1994). Organizational storytelling: The struggles of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern organizational learning discourses. Management Learning Journal, Vol. 25 (3): 433-461.

Boje, David M. (1995) “Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as “Tamara-land.”  Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4), 997-1035.

Boje, David M., John T. Luhman, & Donald E. Baack, 1999 "Hegemonic stories and encounters between storytelling organizations." Journal of Management Inquiry, 8(4): 340-360).

Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison.  New York: Vintage.

Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and Narrative, Volume I. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan  (1996) Living Alone Together.

White, H.  (1987). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press.
 

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