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L'oeuvre des auteurs comme Foucault et Baudrillard a mis au defi les theories conventionnelles en sociologie quant au pouvoir de l'etat et de l'economie politique. Malheureusement, la recherche au Canada ne s'est peu orientee vers ces etudes theoriques. Cette communication cherche a demontrer l'utilite des notions de “surveiller” de Foucault et de la “codification” de Baudrillard pour mieux comprendre les composants et les pratiques quotidiennes des commissions des accidents du travail au Canada. The work of theorists such as Foucault and Baudrillard has posed a significant challenge to more conventional sociological frameworks for dealing with issues of state power and political economy. Yet empirical work on the state-political economy relationship in Canada has, so far, made little use of these theoretical insights. In contrast, the specific aim of this paper is to display the usefulness of Foucault's concern with surveillance and Baudrillard's concern with codification so as to better understand the constitutive features and the mundane practices of Canadian workers' compensation boards.

Foucault's theorising on power/ knowledge is combined with recent feminist work on the importance of analysing embodied experience in order to re-examine the conventional interpretation of nineteenth century ‘friendly society’ insurance history. In contrast to conventional accounts which interpret the eventual adoption of life insurance tables as the belated acceptance of sound, scientific principles, this article argues that such a transformation also represented the destruction of a prior cultural organization of health care via the imposition of the mundane ‘disciplinary’ technique of ‘counting.’