Andrew Monroe [pseud.] (b. 1894) was a Colorado street kid whose acts of truancy and theft landed him before the state's early juvenile courts, and his youth was marked by attempts at escape from reform school. His childhood and youth provide insights into the mechanics of how systems of juvenile corrections operated in the early twentieth century. To enforce new truancy laws, Progressive Era child-savers relied on report cards for the surveillance of probationers, categorizing children like Andrew as “stubborn,” “unyielding,” and “disobedient.” Ultimately, Andrew's refusal to comply with these new forms of institutional control serves as a case study for the challenges that children faced in escaping an apparatus that reduced them to the label of “delinquent.”

Soft power and hard power are conceptualised in International Relations as empirically and normatively dichotomous, and practically opposite – one intangible, attractive, and legitimate, the other tangible, coercive, and less legitimate. This article critiques this binary conceptualisation, arguing that it is discursively constructed with and for the construction of Self and Other. It further demonstrates that practices commonly labelled and understood as soft power and hard power are closely interconnected. Best understood as ‘representational force’ and ‘physical force’ respectively, soft and hard power intertwine through the operation of productive and disciplinary forms of power. We illustrate this argument by analysing the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Both governments exercise representational force in constructing their respective versions of events and Self/Other. The soft/hard power binary itself plays a performative role as the Self is typically associated with soft power and the Other with hard power. The operation of productive power, moreover, privileges the attractiveness of the former and the repellence of the latter, and disciplinary power physically enforces these distinctions on subjects in both states. Finally, reinforced Self/Other distinctions legitimise preparations for violence against the Other on both sides, thus exposing how fundamentally entangled soft and hard power are in practice.

This article uses the lens of disciplinary power to analyze the North–South relationships in efforts to govern drug trafficking in Senegal. Disciplinary surveillance shapes the activities of anti-trafficking units through repetitive examination, correction, and persuasion. These practices produce forms of resistance to the ways in which interdiction occurs, which implicate elites in the country. The result of constant international correction, and subsidiary actor resistance, is a frustrated law enforcement team. The argument deepens the literature on police reform in Africa, acknowledging the effects of international discipline on policing agents, while maintaining that immediate political settings heavily constrain disciplinary techniques and their internalizing effects.

Organizational control is conventionally – from a critical stance – viewed as a negative and restrictive phenomenon, which in one way or another subjugates workers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that organizational control is often based on a particular understanding of power; an understanding that views power as repressive, equating it with domination and subjugation while paying little attention to its productive function. We question what the implications for understanding organizational control would be if we were also to see power as productive. We contend that the Foucauldian notions of pastoral power, disciplinary power, and governmentality can be used together through the concept of regime of practices to enrich our understanding of the workings of organizational control. We thus delineate an analytical framework for the study of organizational control based on an open-ended investigation of the regimes of control in local settings.