Redline Training Program – The “Institutional Gaze” and Disciplining Subjects
Introduction
Southwestern is a sales and leadership company based in Nashville, Tennessee that provides summer work opportunities for university students across North America. Students sell educational products directly to families in their homes throughout the summer (SW Corporate). Redline is part of the Southwestern Company training and working with mostly students from the West Coast, including Canada, Washington, California and all over (What is Redline?). To work hard, study hard, and be coachable are three fundamental focuses for Reline 2012 training program. In this assignment, I would particularly examine how the company uses the norm of hard working…show more content… The manual that the subject regularly follows explains clearly about the cycle of selling and how daily schedule looks like. “The cycle of selling” trains the “normal” individual how he or she is supposed to behave in pre-approach, approach, introduction, demo (showing the product), close (bringing the prospect to a decision), answering objections, and cash collection. Daily schedule requires the subject to wake up at 6am, make appointments with moms of young kids from 8 to 9am, work from 9am to 9pm, make appointments with families with older kids during 9 and 9:30pm, get home around 10pm, and go sleep around 11pm (Redline training manual 6, 18). Working in different book field, the subject never fails to works alone. Therefore, the actual practices would not be under supervision of any expert, which means that the individual has to be extremely self-regulated when he or she is at work.
“Made Visible”: Turned into a case to be monitored Being well-disciplined in Redline training program means that not only is the subject’s initial condition and progress recorded in a file kept in a database that is weekly updated and assessed, but also she or he needs to internalize self-regulation, constantly comparing her or himself to norms presented in media images. According to Foucault, in the era of capitalism the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforced one another in a circular process
