Analysis Of Governance Research Articles

The techno-politics of human rights: The case of the National Food Security Act in India

To attend to the techno-politics of human rights is to bring into focus how tacit assumptions and norms about human dignity are rendered into technical, or implementable, legal frameworks and governmental interventions. Drawing on legal geography, an analytics of governmentality of human rights, and Nancy Fraser’s “politics of need interpretation,” this article presents an ethnographic examination of how the right to food, and its related normative principles, were translated and ratified, or not, into a food entitlement law, called the National Food Security Act (NFSA). It scrutinizes how the judiciary, para-public, and legislative lawmaking spaces in India have framed the formulation of what the hungry may need and how the state develop legal tools to satisfy (some of) those needs. Human rights policy-making is complex and messy. As this article shows, bringing into focus the technical and procedural process of human rights lawmaking reveals how which interpretation of food security needs were legitimized and which ones were not.

Enterprising refugee women: Analyzing postfeminist governmentality in an organizational context

AbstractThis study examines a model project initiated by a German Federal Ministry in the middle of the vast increase in forced migration to Germany after 2015. The project aimed at facilitating the integration of female refugees into German society by way of ‘empowering’ them to become self‐employed. A business counseling agency with a feminist orientation was commissioned to design and run the project. Interpellating refugee women as subjects of entrepreneurial self‐actualization to enact gender equality, the project embodies a tangible example of postfeminist governmentality. Combining recent research on postfeminism with analytics of governmentality, the study directs its analytical gaze to the work of governing. This opens up a twofold perspective: it enables us to investigate the operation of governmental power in relation to its envisioned subjects, and how this power acts upon the subjects tasked with the work of governing in the contemporary organizational context. Drawing on qualitative interviews and documentary materials within an “ethnographic imaginary”, we examine, first, the assemblage of elements that made up the fabric of postfeminist governmentality in the governmental intervention at hand and what happened when the governmental attempts “hit the ground” met—and failed to meet—the diverse bodies of the envisioned participants. This perspective illustrates how the logic of postfeminist governmentality radically failed when it came to differences deriving from the structural positioning of the women, but also indicates moments of agency and resistance and the perspectives for those who were able and willing to access the offered subject position. Second, the analysis shows how this failure affected the women involved less than the female project manager who was to bear the consequences. In this respect, the analysis sheds light on the amount of practical and emotional work that the task of rendering the project nevertheless ‘a success’ required, the “hidden injuries” this work involved, and how this work ultimately led to a reaffirmation of the logic of postfeminist governmentality. The study contributes to understandings of the gendered operation of governmental power in and through contemporary organizations and in the organization of labor.

Three rationalities for making sense of internal displacement in Ukraine

Abstract The territorial disputes between Russian Federation and Ukraine over Crimea and Donbas have led to the forcible internal displacement of at least 1.6 million people. While Although the literature on forced migration and internal displacement have been framed predominantly in terms of trauma and disenfranchisement (IOM 2018; Dunn 2018), this article argues that a fuller range of Internally Displaced Person (IDP) subjectivities can be made intelligible by considering the rationalities organizing IDP survival. Based on a comparative analysis of 155 interviews with IDPs from Crimea and Donbas, the article demonstrates that forced displacement is more heterogenous than has previously been allowed. I theorize this diversity by using analytics of governmentality to examine the logics or ‘rationalities’ used to make sense of forced migration. The conceptual tools offered by studies of governmentality are ideal for this case because they overlap with themes that predominated in data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Ukraine between 2015 and 2017: agency, responsibility, and freedom. The article contributes a framework for comparing IDP subjectivities that encompasses diversity and provides a new vocabulary for describing the strategic efforts forced migrants exert to mend their lives.

Governmentality and Language

This article reviews how the analytics of governmentality have been taken up by scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. It explores the distinctive logics of “linguistic governmentality” understood as techniques and forms of expertise that seek to govern, guide, and shape (rather than force) linguistic conduct and subjectivity at the level of the population or the individual. Governmentality brings new perspectives to the study of language ideologies and practices informing modernist and neoliberal language planning and policies, the technologies of knowledge they generate, and the contestations that surround them. Recent work in this vein is deepening our understanding of “language”—understood as an array of verbal and nonverbal communicative practices—as a medium through which neoliberal governmentality is exercised. The article concludes by considering how a critical sociolinguistics of governmentality can address some shortcomings in the study of governmentality and advance the study of language, power, and inequality.

A METHODOLOGY TO DIAGNOSE ICT GOVERNANCE PROCESS BASED ON ISO/IEC 38500 STANDARD. CASE STUDY: ECUADORIAN RETAIL ORGANIZATION

The purpose of this paper is to show the application of a new methodology approach to diagnose the impact of management of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) with the reference frame ISO/IEC 38500 inside the organizations. It is based on the government's analysis of organization’s technological resource management, being the strategic axis part of business strategic planning and its ICT Governance, effectiveness and efficiency, and the value of ICT for its guidelines and the risks involved in its development to optimize the use of organization’s resources. In the first stage, a documentary research was carried out as an essential part of this study and an interview with an expert; Then a tool (questionnaire) was designed to collect, measure and evaluate data on aspects and components of the ISO/IEC 38500 standard. A case study of Ecuadorian retail organization was carried out. Once the information was processed, the respective indicators were obtained that helped to identify current status of ICT governance processes of the organization. With the obtained indicators we could see which principles are the ones that characterize this sector, in which they put the greatest amount of resources; be they human or financial. It was also evident that the two dimensions on which the study was based on have very different results, since emphasis was placed on what corresponds.

Using Foucault: Genealogy, Governmentality and the Problem of Chronic Illness

This article explores the unique contribution that Foucault’s work on genealogy and governmentality can make to the analysis of contemporary programs of government. The article uses an Australian study of the ‘problem’ of chronic illness to argue that this perspective offers valuable insights into how ‘problems’ such as chronic illness have become linked to advanced liberal discourses and practices of self-governing and self-responsibility. These insights are particularly valuable in fields such as primary health care that have a noted shortage of critical and reflective studies that explore the links between people and changing ideas of health and disease. This article details how taking up an analytics of governmentality and political genealogy informed by Foucault, facilitated the tracing of the dominant discourses and practices, and the connections to the day-to -day lives of the clients with chronic diseases. Importantly, this approach opened up a more critical consideration of the ways in which dispersed approaches to governing through programs, such as integrated care, shape and influence the lives of individuals. These dispersed ways of governing are not linear but rather unfold through ongoing relays, connections and the (re)production of discourses.

Youth as an artefact of governing violence: Violencetoyoung people shapes violencebyyoung people

Young people are routinely depicted as uniquely violent. Much work has been done, particularly within the sociology of youth, to dispel this misconception. However, these portrayals persist, as does the narrative of youth as a period of transition. This article argues that the transition in youth is a process of governing violence into sanctioned forms. To achieve adult status young people must conform to sanctioned forms of violence. Furthermore, the article argues that the physical, structural and symbolic violence done to young people, shapes the violence done by them. Youth is an intensely governed period. The young people in focus in this article are subject to additional governing by the state. They are hyper-governed. This article draws on labelling theory and the analytics of governmentality to analyse hyper-governed young people’s experiences of ubiquitous violence. Hyper-governed young people describe experiences of ‘neoliberal violence’ that produce docility and progressively increasing commitments to the norms of violence. The article concludes, therefore, that youth is an artefact of violence that governs, but also the product of governing young people’s violence. Youth as an artefact of governing violence describes violence done to young people shaping violence done by young people.

A Longitudinal Perspective on Sustainability and Innovation Governmentality: The Case of the Olympic Games as a Mega-Event

The purpose of this research is to analyze how governance is related to sustainability and innovation in mega-events over time by looking at the Olympic Games as a case study. Three main contributions are made to management research and practice. First, Foucauldian governmentality is built upon and enriched with a longitudinal perspective by following the evolution of Visibility, Techne, Episteme, and Identity analytics of governmentality. Second, an innovative methodology based on interviews, a systematic documentary review, and software-assisted thematic auto-coding for a theory-led structured analysis is applied. Third, the theoretical and empirical contribution of this study on the longitudinal aspects of governmentality over different parties and outlets of information could be used to guide practical and strategic decisions for managers and policy makers. In addition to its scholarly importance, this work is needed because mega-events can have a sustainable long-term impact, balancing legacy and innovative change.

Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethnography: A rejoinder

Mitchell Dean and I agree there is an important discussion to be had about Foucault and the social sciences. My recent article sought to advance this debate. Dean has responded because he views my article as an attack on his work. This interpretation is mistaken. My article is not focused on Dean’s work though, as he points out, it does make reference to what he has called his “very simplified framework” for engaging in an analytics of governmentality.1 My article seeks to explain the logics that underpin recent efforts to use ethnographic methods (broadly defined) together with an analytics of governmentality. The arguments that motivate these “ethnographic” works have been advanced by various scholars for a number of years. However, the visibility of these works has been reduced by the fact that they have been scattered across various social science disciplines. My article also locates these works within broader debates about governmentality studies, including common criticisms. In his response, Dean pursues four key criticisms of my article, suggesting that it: (1) makes an untenable claim that Foucault was a realist sociologist “seeking to access the complexity of everyday life”2; (2) claims ethnography has “special access to the real in the form of ‘actual people’”3; (3) accuses the governmentality literature of a tendency towards “cookie-cutter” analysis, but fails to name an author or work that displays this weakness; and (4) discusses what Dean has referred to as his “simplified framework” in Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society4 but fails to consider his other works. I will address each of these points in turn. First, Dean devotes three pages to advancing the claim that my article argues that Foucault was a realist who addressed the “sociological reality of the singular ontological domain of practice”5 and who sought “to access the complexity of everyday life,”6 with

The Responsibilization of Refugees in the United States: On the Political Uses of Psychology

Contemporary theorizing about refugees has centered on the refugee as a victim of disciplinary coercion and a focus, especially in camps, of biopolitical control. This article expands that line of inquiry in a different direction by closely considering the interstitial space between refugee service providers and their clients. Analytics of governmentality reveal not the victimization but the responsibilization of refugees through orientation programs that utilize psychology to attain political and economic objectives. Relationship education programs provide an additional site for reconfiguring gendered domains, entailing technologies of the self that encourage refugees to rethink intimacy. This individualized and psychologized framework is especially clear in refugees’ encounter with services providers who focus on intimate partner violence. While some seek to change refugees’ “whole concept of the world,” refugees maintain their ability to establish hybridized identities and define normal for themselves.

Ethnographies of Neoliberal Governmentalities: from the neoliberal apparatus to neoliberalism and governmental assemblages

This article is aimed at Foucauldian scholars and seeks to introduce them to ethnographic works that interrogate neoliberal governmentalities. As an analytic category ‘neoliberalism’ has over the last two decades helpfully illuminated connections between seemingly unrelated social changes occurring at multiple scales. Even earlier —in his College de France 1978-9 Birth of Biopolitics lectures, to be precise—Foucault began his engagement with neoliberalism as a dominant political force. Despite being more than three decades old, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal rationalities remains fresh and insightful, which perhaps explains why scholars inspired by his analytics of governmentality have been able to make major contributions to the current social science literature on neoliberalism. However, there are increasing concerns that governmentality scholars succumb to a more general tendency among social scientists to present neoliberal transformations in monolithic and linear terms. This article critically reviews contributions from a small but growing group of neo-Foucauldian researchers that avoid these tendencies. These researchers investigate the changes wrought by neoliberalism through methodologies that involve combining an analytics of governmentality with ethnographic and quasi-ethnographic methods, and in doing so they avoid deterministic, homogenous and static accounts of social transformation. By beginning with the “everyday,” these works reject the idea that neoliberal governmentality forms a coherent apparatus. Instead these ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities focus on governmental ensembleges (or assemblages) that link neoliberal political rationalities with non-liberal rationalities, and they explore how neoliberal thought and practice is transformed across time and space.

Making and remaking multicultural arts: policy, cultural difference and the discourse of decline

Currently, a discourse of decline shadows multiculturalism, claiming it is ‘no longer’ viable as a governmental technique to manage present-day social complexity. This article revisits multiculturalism as an intervention in the discourse of decline, shifting the terms of the multiculturalism debate from the abstract struggle between competing political ideologies, to the minor material processes through which multiculturalism was enacted. Through a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality, we examine in particular the invention and evolution of multicultural arts over the last 30 years. We attend to the multiple ways in which cultural difference has been mobilised and understood by policy-makers and the constituents they served; how these various framings of cultural difference informed the shifting objectives and constituencies of multicultural arts; and how these shifts were influenced by the dispersed nature of policy formation, crossing multiple sites and stakeholders, each subject to, but also resisting and reshaping, the discursive parameters of this category. Such an approach dismantles the coherence and stability of multiculturalism upon which the discourse of decline is premised, but also anticipates the way multiculturalism is presently transforming in response to a transnational, neoliberal cultural imaginary.

The choice of the social discount rate and the opportunity cost of public funds

The decades-old literature on the correct method for choosing and estimating a social discount rate (SDR) has resulted in two, largely opposing viewpoints. This note seeks to clarify the key sources of disagreement between these two camps. One view advocates that the choice should be based chiefly on the social opportunity cost of the return to foregone private capital investment (SOC), and suggests a SDR of around 7%. The other viewpoint, expressed by the authors, argues that the choice should be based on the social rate of time preference (STP), the rate at which society is willing to trade present for future consumption, suggesting a SDR of around 3.5%. Because of the fundamentally normative basis of the SDR choice, neither approach generates testable hypotheses that would allow falsification. For government project evaluation, the choice ultimately depends on the opportunity cost of public funds, which in turn depends on how fiscal policy actually operates. The STP approach contends that governments set targets for deficits and public debt, so that a marginal government project will be tax-financed, largely crowding out current consumption. The SOC belief is that governments set revenue targets, so that any government project will be deficit-financed on the margin, which will largely crowd out private investment. The authors also argue that a SDR based on the STP approach is appropriate for: benefit-cost analysis of government regulations, self-financing government projects, and government cost-effectiveness studies.

Prescribing Practice: Pharmaceuticals, Children, and the Governance of Difference

This article centers around two questions: (a) What do social workers do at the sites where psychopharmaceuticals and practice with children and youth converge? and (b) Are social differences reinscribed through our practices at these sites of convergence? A Foucauldian analytics of governmentality provides a lens through which the authors explore how social workers function within neoliberal discourses, specifically when they are called to reinforce compliance and disciplinary practices in their interventions with children and youth. Drawing on two practice examples, the authors argue the importance of an analytics of historical contexts of race and ability when working with medicated children and youth.

Governmentality and the politics of CSR

In this article we argue that an analytics of governmentality has an important contribution to make to the study of governmental approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Looking at developments within the EU, we see government emerging as an enabling and empowering facilitator that a) promotes a strategic understanding of CSR as a lever for economic competitiveness and growth and b) disregards regulatory measures in favour of liberal and indirect means of steering. We argue that the analytical vocabulary of governmentality makes it possible to address and problematize the indirect modes of power and governing that are prevalent in governmental approaches to CSR in general and in neoliberal modes of CSR governance in particular. Using EU and member states policy developments as an empirical backdrop, we provide a conceptual exploration of the prospects of applying governmentality to the study of the changing roles of government in CSR. We position our contribution within the critical literature on CSR as a political phenomenon.

Regional governmentality: Neoliberalization and the Caribbean Community Single Market and Economy

Formally launched on 30 January 2006, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Single Market and Economy (CSME) is, like many other regional economic initiatives, designed to create an economic space in which the uninhibited flow of goods, capital and skills across the borders of member states is anticipated to generate competitive business opportunities and external investment. Despite the intensification of such regional programmes, promoters and critics alike continue to consider CARICOM to be an intergovernmental organization dependent on the political will of member states as they negotiate the pressures of neoliberal globalization. In this paper, I argue that such a framing of regional integration in the Caribbean misses some of the tangible ways that CARICOM works beyond the sovereign intent of member states to enable the encroachment of neoliberal‐style economic orders across the space of the region. I adopt a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to unhinge CARICOM from the governments of its member states. Once freed from a persistent statism it becomes possible to consider the technical competencies through which CARICOM initiatives increasingly connect and cohere with neoliberal rationalities. My goal in developing such an analytics is not to suggest CARICOM operates as a superstate but rather to broaden the sites considered relevant to understanding the encroachment of neoliberalism in the Caribbean.

Older Men and Work in the Twenty-First Century: What Can the History of Retirement Tell Us?

AbstractThe New Labour government has set a target of getting 1,000,000 more people aged 50 and over (50+) back into work as part of its aim of achieving an overall employment rate of 80 per cent among people of working age. To this end, a variety of policies have been introduced to encourage citizens to work later in life, notably the 2006 Age Regulations. However, much of the government's analysis is based on supply-side reasoning that has retained its credibility only because of the rise in older people's employment rates that has taken place since 1994. This article focuses on the employment problems of older men, since their employment rates have fallen sharply since the 1970s. Examination of both the history of retirement and less favourable underlying economic trends suggests that extending the working lives of older men may not be easy.

(re)Imagining the global, rethinking gender in education

This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the ‘girl-citizen’. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in ‘making’ and ‘managing’ global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

THE ELUSIVE SUBJECTS OF NEO-LIBERALISM

This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity.

Operationalizing Iraqi freedom

Purpose – To understand practices of inscription and description used by the US Government in the production of discourse concerning the war in Iraq as part of the post 9/11 War on Terror and as part of a neo‐liberal project of governance.Design/methodology/approach – Using an analytics of governmentality, this paper interrogates US government discourse on the war in Iraq, focusing on a series of Department of Defense documents entitled Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq (MSSI).Findings – Through the use of New Public Management techniques, the MSSI reports render the war in Iraq in depoliticized, decontextualized, apolitical and amoral terms. Such a rendering does an unacceptable violence to the experiences of those living in the war zone and to the complex context of US military involvement in Iraq.Originality/value – Neo‐liberal regimes of knowledge and practice are ubiquitous, perhaps even hegemonic. This analysis disturbs the neat logic of neo‐liberalism and seeks to reinsert the troubling bodi...