Research Information System
Educational Policy Analysis and Strategic Research, vol.16, no.1, pp.153-171, 2021 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
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.