Beekhuijzen, Lina

The present project interprets how discipline constitutes the employee through e-learning and the digital platform. It draws, with inspiration from a chapter by Katherine Nicoll, on Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary technologies. The postmodern approach allows for new perspectives on e-learning which is not only seen as a means for education, but as having power-knowledge regimes embedded which discipline the subject towards specific rationales regarding lifelong learning. The empirical base of the project stems from the transcription of three semi-structured interviews with two technicians and a technical manager who work in a global software company. The analysis was conducted in two parts, one evolving around the employee’s indirect constitution, and one evolving around the direct constitution of the employee on the e-learning platform. The analysis has concluded that the employee is indirectly disciplined through various techniques that are integrated in the back-end of the platform. The platform makes it possible to use hierarchical observation of the employee, and the mere possibility of surveillance makes the employee keep set deadlines and behave accordingly in the most appropriate way. Through the use of bodies and language the employee becomes knowledgeable and the corporal rationales are normalized in the employee. Using the disciplining technique of examination, the employee’s constitution gets objectified and captivated by saving the data regarding the employee’s advancements for the management chain to see and strategize from. At the same time, the examination is also subjecting the employee by first, letting him gain more knowledge and thereby constitutes a certain view of truth, and second, by learning the employee to make binary conclusions on what is and is not knowledge.The disciplinary power made up of the indirect technologies has also been concluded to inflict on the subject’s own direct disciplining. The employee takes ownership of the rationales imposed through the digital platform and makes actions according to them. The subject thus follows the rules and the norms that are constituted on the platform and makes them a part of his own neoliberal moral operations which he is performing to become the best version of himself, the best coworker in the company. The discussion has enlightened the topic with a view of the multi-centric subject that is made up of a wide range of practices which make him an active agent to make tactics upon his life, but that the strategy is meticulously planned by the corporal power inflicting on the subject.<br/

An analysis of how discipline constitues the employee through e-learning

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Roskilde Universitet