Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison. New York Vintage, 1979. 

J. Rouse, Power/Knowledge , in G. Gutting (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 92-114, p. 102. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27. 

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 143. See also Rouse, Power/Knowledge , pp. 92-9. 

Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. A. S. Smith (New York Pantheon Books, 1978). 

The distinctions between these two voices create a dissonance in the way the enforcement of safety works. Whilst those at the higher corporate level seek to develop and position safety only positively, through no-blame cultures and realities intolerant of violation to the point of denial, those who manage and participate in construction site practices on a daily basis at site level instead have a version of safety firmly positioned within a reality of rules, violations, enforcements and punishments. Yet this latter approach also has the potential to create an understanding, or rather misunderstanding, that safety is the rules, rather than any wider considerations of safety and practice. In fact, when the safety rules are explored in more detail, their associations with safety become rather irrelevant and the enforcement of safety is much more bound up in issues of discipline and punishment on a societal level, rather than the potential consequences of any safety violations themselves. 

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 202-203, writes He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power he makes them play spontaneously upon himself he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles he becomes the principle of his own subjection. ... 

Motivating to implement and promote safety and health systems is harder than driving safety by force, discipline, and punishment, but is the only way to succeed. 

Eoucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish The birth of the prison. New York 6ntage Books. 

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