Dispositif is one of the most prevalent concepts in 20th and 21st century philosophy, especially in Continental philosophy. As a philosophical term, dispositif has been introduced into the English language via the work of Michel Foucault, although there is now an extensive literature covering the much broader genealogy of dispositifs in contemporary philosophy. In general, they are a complex arrangement of discursive and non-discursive elements, which produce our world, subject positions, and ways of understanding. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, they are "machines that make one see and speak." Power is productive in dispositifs, which not only capture, control, and orient subjects, but also create openings for resistance (either through counter-dispositifs or by rendering them inoperative). Dispositifs are used by scholars in a number of disciplines, including anthropology, art history, communication studies, cultural studies, feminism, film studies, geography, linguistics, literary theory, organization theory, political science, queer theory, science and technology studies, and sociology.

Translation issues remain a key point of contention in the English literature on dispositifs. Various translations have been used for this French word such as "apparatus", "assemblage", "arrangement", "construction", "deployment", "device", "enframing", "formation", "machinery", "mechanism", "procedure", "syntactic", and "system".

In the English translation of Foucault's first volume of the History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Robert Hurley translated the "dispositif de sexualité" as "deployment of sexuality". Later English translators started using "apparatus" for such texts as Giorgio Agamben's "What is an Apparatus?" (Che cos'è un dispositivo?), or as a "social apparatus" in Gilles Deleuze's "What is a Dispositif?" ("Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?").

In his essay on dispositifs, Agamben notes that there are generally three different senses of dispositif in French: juridical, technological, and militaristic. English commentators have noted that these senses are lost on English readers, where "dispositive" merely retains an arcane legal meaning (the legal disposition of a deceased person's property in their deed or will). The act of disposing (from disponere) is expressed in this word, but it falls short of conveying the broader senses implied in the French dispositif.

Authors have also pointed out that "apparatus" is an inappropriate translation. A dispositif is not the same as an (appareil). Apparatus is a technical term which does not convey the broader array of meanings or the etymological connotations of (disponere), implied in dispositif. Commentators have argued that a single dispositif often consists of multiple apparatuses. Others have argued that a dispositif is more comprehensive than earlier, largely discursive and technical, uses of appareil in French philosophy, such as Louis Althusser's ideological or state apparatus and the cinematic application of it by Jean-Louis Baudry with apparatus theory. Since the publication of Agamben's essay, many English authors are now either translating it into English as "dispositif" or simply retaining it in French as dispositif, while a few have elected to use "dispositive".

Foucault was not the first philosopher to use dispositifs. In contemporary philosophy, the genealogy of dispositifs has been subjected to much debate and speculation. The term has been compared with Foucault's former teacher Louis Althusser's concept of Ideological state apparatuses; yet, Foucault incorporated dispositifs in his research in order to account for the productive and material dimensions of power/knowledge. For these reasons, others have traced the genealogy of dispositifs back to such concepts as Jean Hyppolite's notion of positivité, Martin Heidegger's Gestell (enframing), Jean-François Lyotard's early 1970s studies on the Libidinal Economy, Georges Canguilhem's notion of "social normativity" (1966) and his use of the term dispositif in "Machine and Organism" (1952), even Karl Marx's "assemblage of machinery" in "The Fragment on Machines".

In the 1970s, Foucault's research shifted from archaeological analysis to genealogical investigations. The archaeological method focused on discursive statements and archives (see episteme), whereas the genealogical approach re-centres the problem of the production of knowledge around questions of power and is grounded in an institutional analysis. “The transition from episteme to dispositif,” claims Yuk Hui “is a strategic move to a more immanent critique, which Foucault was able to apply in a more contemporary analysis.” Foucault's dispositifs, notes Judith Revel, "include institutions and practices, that is, 'all the non-discursive social aspects.'" During his later stages of research, Foucault deployed dispositifs to examine how the discursive and material dimensions of power/knowledge are assembled together in a heterogeneous network of instruments, procedures, techniques, and strategies. "[A]ll social institutions" are treated as dispositifs, notes Jacques Bidet, "that is to say, as relations of power, which is always the power of some over others, in the concreteness of 'technologies,' material assemblages and discursive formations."

In many of Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, he refers to dispositifs in general terms, such as a "dispositif of power" (dispositif de pouvoir) or a "dispositif of power-knowledge." Dispositifs played a central role in Discipline and Punish and in The History of Sexuality, volume one. In the former, he periodically refers to disciplinary power as a dispositif (dispositif disciplinaire), and he describes the panopticon as a dispositif (dispositif panopitique). His most sustained analysis of dispositifs is found in the closing chapters of The History of Sexuality. Part Four is entitled "Le dispositif of sexualité" ("Deployment of Sexuality"). In these pages he provides a rough genealogical sketch of how the dispositif of sexuality emerges out the "dispositif d'alliance" ("deployment of alliance"), while the final chapter outlines the relationship between dispositifs and biopower. Foucault also mentions several types of dispositifs in his Collège de France lectures during this period, such as the "dispositif of security" (Security, Territory, Population) and the "dispositif of governmentality" (The Birth of Biopolitics).