Panopticon – Cybercontrol in Liquid Modernity

The chapter proposes a critical analysis of the panopticon, the model of an ideal prison devised in the 18th century by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and its function in modern management. The original prison was designed in such a way that it enabled a single prison guard to watch all the inmates at all times, while the latter could never tell whether they were currently being watched or not. The idea behind the panopticon gave rise to the concept of panopticism, a philosophy developed by the French thinker Michel Foucault, which he voiced in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975/1995). Analyzing the mechanism of control through the ages, he ponders the resilience and adaptability of such concepts as discipline, training and hierarchical surveillance. I intend to provide a critical analysis of methods and techniques of organizational control applied today, in the era of liquid modernity. Since that control, more often than not, is executed nowadays by electronic surveillance equipment and computer programs, hence my term of choice – “cybercontrol”.