Foucault’s Panopticism in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Organisational Control, and Field Power

Abstract

This article constructs a conceptual framework of panoramic governance to explain how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes organizational control and institutional power.  Drawing on Foucault’s panopticism and Boudieu's field theory, this article believes that the monitoring empowered by artificial intelligence constitutes a cybernetic governance architecture, which induces self-regulation through continuous visibility and algorithmic uncertainty. Unlike traditional hierarchical supervision, panoramic governance transforms individuals into quantifiable and self-monitoring actors through data collection, predictive evaluation and feedback cycle operation. At the theoretical level of the field, artificial intelligence redistributes economic capital and symbolic capital, and strengthens the organizations that control the algorithm infrastructure. Although this uncertainty-induced combedience mechanism is applicable to various political and economic systems, its legitimacy and binding force will vary from system to system. This article will explore the rights contained in the "circular prison" based on network monitoring in the era of artificial intelligence. "Circulation prison" is a system that produces self-restraint among the observed through the gaze of the subject of internalizing rights.