Disciplinary Society

CORE DEFINITION

A concept developed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, describing the social form that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through enclosed institutions such as schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons, and through techniques such as timetables, drill, hierarchical observation, and examination, power shapes bodies into docile and useful instruments. Discipline is productive rather than merely repressive: it manufactures the capacities and the normality it needs. Foucault located the model in the panopticon, where visibility alone produces self-regulation, and argued that the techniques spread far beyond the institutions that originated them.