Power, Knowledge, and Vocational Education in Nigeria: A Foucauldian Analysis of Disciplinary Mechanisms

This study applied Foucauldian theoretical concepts of power, knowledge, discipline, and subjectification to analyze the organizational and pedagogical practices that constitute and regulate vocational education in Nigerian technical institutions. Mainstream vocational education research in Nigeria largely operates within positivist and functionalist paradigms, leaving the discursive and disciplinary dimensions of how vocational knowledge is produced, validated, and withheld largely unexamined. Drawing on Foucault's frameworks in Discipline and Punish, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and his lectures on governmentality, the study employed genealogical discourse analysis of curriculum texts, workshop regulations, assessment regimes, and institutional codes of conduct across six technical institutions in Enugu, Kano, and Lagos States. Fieldwork included 40 weeks of institutional observation and 50 in-depth interviews with students, instructors, and administrators. Findings revealed extensive disciplinary mechanisms including spatial organization of workshops as panoptical surveillance spaces, normalization through NABTEB credentialing, hierarchical observation in apprenticeship supervision, and the subjugation of indigenous craft knowledge through examination power. The study proposes a post-structural agenda for vocational education research that foregrounds power-knowledge relations, resists reductive instrumentalism, and centers the voices of marginalized vocational learners. This study makes a significant theoretical contribution by introducing Foucauldian scholarship to Nigerian TVET research. Keywords: Foucault, power-knowledge, vocational education, discipline, Nigeria.