Individualism: Resistance to Panopticism In the fast pace of the retail market, employees, customers, cash, and merchandise flow in and out of the store at rather high speeds. High volume stores such that of Express Inc, which specializes in women clothing, find it a rather difficult task to keep track of every item purchased and every customer and employee who comes and leaves the facility. Security becomes a major issue in this context. Sensors are only placed on merchandise with a price value over thirty dollars, a greeter/converter is placed in front of the store at all times and is never to leave her zone, every employee that places a customer into a fitting room must check all pockets of the clothes and counts the item of clothing before entering the customer into the fitting room. Sales associates or employees are all positioned in a ¡§zone¡¨ and are never to leave that zone. Managers do ¡§circle eights¡¨ through out the store, watching the associates as well as the customers. Many measures are taken into account to protect the company from external theft and internal theft of merchandise. As a former employee for this company I will recount the certain ¡§disciplines¡¨ that were implemented to protect the company from internal theft or ¡§abnormal behavior¡¨ which is a term used by Michel Foucault. Many precautions are taken into place, so that normal behavior is exerted, however disciplinary mechanisms designed in the Panoptic context will not always return the results desired. Resistance will occur towards excessive authority and loss of individuality due to Panopticism. In Michel Foucault¡¦s, ¡§Panopticism¡¨ he explains how the development of disciplinary mechanisms creates disciplined individuals. A disciplinary mechanism then according to Foucault is a form of organizing society through the use of applying disciplinary measures to prevent ¡§abnormal¡¨ behavior. He then goes to illustrates this concept of a ¡§disciplined society¡¨, which is a society that is made to function more efficiently and less chaotic by risk of punishment enforced by constant surveillance. Panopticism can also be used to describe a great variety of settings in which power is "automatized and disindividualized,"(313) and made widespread and "homogeneous" in its effects, in its formation and disciplining of subjects who "must never know whether [they] are being looked at any one moment," but are nevertheless "sure that they may always be so" (312).
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