Disciplinary Power in The School: Panoptic Surveillance

Abstract

The curiosity on how disciplinary power operates in a secondary school in the context of Panoptic surveillance became our motive. We designed the study as a single case study in qualitative approach to grasp the holistic understanding of disciplinary power, surveillance, and resistance to it in a secondary school. The data were obtained by a set of data collection techniques including a focus group interview, semi-structured interviews, observation and document analysis. The content analysis method was employed to analyze the collected data. In the analysis, we identified the themes of forced docility, norm provider, and reflection on discipline. To the findings, the main disciplinary power practice in this school is surveillance on appearances, behaviors, and exams, and the students prefer reacting to surveillance practices in two ways: either normalizing their behaviors or displaying resistance and insisting on the undesired behaviors. For further research, the relation between power, surveillance, and resistance can be analyzed as multiple case study to compare the findings at different types of school.