Organization can be seen from the metaphor of a fort. From outside we can see fort as a structure of wall, while from inside it is a complete organized and perfectly managed complex but structural body. It is said that an organization is a social entity that has a collective goal and is interconnected with human group or managing body. Thus, it can be said that organization is a part of human social life. In fact, whole human life is based on it. Our whole life is a continuous process of navigating from one organization to another. Either it is traveling in train or shopping in market or working to earn livelihood. All it is matter of planning, organizing, controlling, or managing. Nothing of these would have been possible without organisations or group to manage. The act of coordination among people in order to accomplish the desired task or goal is a matter of management. Therefore management can also be defined as human action that required design, to facilitate the production of useful outcomes from a system. Foucault has also discussed the management into social real life. His influential works plays an important role to understand such complexity in organisation.

Management is a concept of managing that incorporates governmentality, power, discipline, punishment and reward. The controls of these managers are directly linked to and handled by hierarchical authorities sitting in the headquarters. Headquarter is a place, where all plans and procedure takes in order to organise, manage, control, and distribution of power and role. In a critique towards control of headquarters Foucault emphasizes on the organization is that we no longer need to look for the headquarters of power superficially. According to McKinlay and Starkey, Foucauldian thinkers categories and reflects throw fresh light on the history of the factory, management and the modern corporation. They clarifies that unlike clinic and prison, factory is not an institution. The creation of factory is represented as production regimes. He compare factory as a place where all sort of managerial tactics takes place and this is a place where all new forms of power, knowledge and practice takes place. So, the factory steadily becomes the site of new forms of power and knowledge. This paper will attempt to apply foucauldian perspective to throw a light upon his influence on the management practices.

Foucault has facilitated us through his work to rethink management and the organisation of work, providing us with new ways of seeing. Truth and knowledge, from the foucauldian perspective are weapons by which a society manages itself (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998). Foucault work is complex and multidimensional (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998). Foucault seminal work discipline and punish examines as a technique for the exercise of power. It also examines how the tactics of power immanent in various forms of discourse. Foucault’s famous works such as History of Madness, his work on History of Sexuality played an important role to understand complex social system but Discipline and Punish that has undoubtedly had the most impact in management and organization studies over the last twenty years.

Foucault postulates an approach to explain new organizational forms and innovative managerial techniques such as team working, total quality management and just-in-time production (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992). While his works also enables a more nuanced understanding of human resource management practices (Barratt, 2003). Many researchers have started to rethink Foucault beyond disciplinary power and the use of his archaeological methods in organisation studies rather than using a straightforward application of his concepts (Butler and Dunne, 2012 and McKinlay, 2006). However, critical interest in Foucault may well have peaked in the 1990s, it remains the case that his work still has a widespread influence in management studies and continues to provide a useful theoretical for challenging and making assumptions about management knowledge and organisational forms.

Management and its tactics are not a new concept, all sorts of planning, accounting and bureaucratic coordination’s were existed since very before than such contemporary modern managerial enterprise. From the beginning of industrialization of society till contemporary globalization of society working style and managing manner is changing incessantly. Foucault has shed light on several issues related with social life which directly or indirectly reflecting on our contemporary social and organizational life. The discussion of the Foucault’s proposed concept of Management under governmentality shows that the governing of mentalities is the shaping of the minds of a population through seemingly institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons, etc.

The ways people govern others have changed throughout history from the very first nation-state and simple rule through brute force to the complex governments we have today. Governance has become governmentality. In contemporary organization developments in new managerial skills are not only to advance the knowledge but also aim on both to broaden the opportunity and deepen the intensity of the management. The rise of activity based costing in the last decade offers corporate managers a new way of understanding of management not just the internal workings of the corporation but its relationship to suppliers and consumers.