Theorizing Team Process Through a Foucauldian Perspective: Gaining a Voice in Team Activity at the Clinical Coalface

Abstract

While Michel Foucault’s work on the birth of the clinic in Enlightenment France, and the subsequent development of the ‘medical gaze’ as a diagnostic method, has been widely discussed and critiqued, there is little in medical education that deals with his later work on ‘technologies of self’. This work focuses on identity construction as a ‘work’ that is both aesthetic (self-forming) and ethical (practices of the self in relation to others). Foucault returned to late Greek and early Roman sources to show that the forming of self is a characteristic strand throughout Western cultural practices and not a modern invention.