Since the era of deinstitutionalisation, many clinical approaches have emerged to enable the care and treatment of people suffering from mental illness. In recent years, the use of coercive approaches in the community (e.g., outpatient commitment or community treatment orders) has also increased internationally. Although nurses' role regarding these coercive approaches is central and significant, few empirical and theoretical writings have tackled this controversial nursing practice. The purpose of this paper is to analyse coercive nursing care through the lens of (...) French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concept of ‘societies of control’. Taking up Michel Foucault's work on disciplinary power, Deleuze explores how the move from the striated spaces of closed institutions to the smooth spaces of societies of control took place since the middle of the 20th century. According to Deleuze, the overall objective of ‘societies of control’ is no longer simply to govern deviant behaviour in closed environments (e.g., psychiatric hospitals and prisons) but to ensure a regime of unrelentless surveillance in the open spaces of our communities. (shrink)

This paper applies concepts Deleuze developed in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, especially those relating to modulatory power, dividuation and control, to aspects of Australian schooling to explore how this transition is manifesting itself. Two modulatory machines of assessment, NAPLAN and My Schools, are examined as a means to better understand how the disciplinary institution is changing as a result of modulation. This transition from discipline to modulation is visible in the declining importance of the disciplinary teacher–student relationship (...) as a measure of the success of the educative process. The transition occurs through seduction because that which purports to measure classroom quality is in fact a serpent of modulation that produces simulacra of the disciplinary classroom. The effect is to sever what happens in the disciplinary space from its representations in a luminiferous ether that overlays the classroom. (shrink)