Foucauldian Governmentality Research Articles

Governmentality rationales and calculative devices: The rejection of a seventeenth-century territorial barter proposed by the King of Spain

Almost 400 years ago, Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantova and Marquis of Monferrato, refused a territorial barter proposed by the King of Spain, who had offered the Isle of Sardinia in exchange for the Marquisate of Monferrato. In 1618, an advisor to the Duke drafted a report to highlight the governmental issues surrounding the island. This Relatione, together with correspondence between the governors and advisors engaged in the prospective transfer, reveals why the Duke rejected the proposal. These sources provide the foundation for a close analysis of the potential effects of the trade on the Duchy’s welfare, as well as the problems associated with its government. Using a model based on the Foucauldian governmentality framework, this analysis reveals that denying the barter was the result of rational behavior, driven by territorial governability aims.

CSR and the Politicization of Multinational Corporations: A Foucauldian Governmentality Framework

This paper scrutinizes an emerging political conception of CSR, and its power dynamics. By exploring CSR programs, this paper analyzes new micro-powers and their instrumentation by knowledge on CSR...

Gay in a ‘government town’: the settlement and regulation of gay-identified men in Ottawa, Canada

This case study examines Ottawa, Canada, a ‘government town’, as both a destination for mobile gay men and a place where their conduct historically has been regulated by the government and military institutions located there. By placing the findings of 24 in-depth qualitative interviews with self-identified gay men in a Foucauldian governmentality framework, I argue that the government town is a powerful attractor for gay men in terms of economic opportunity and official prescriptions of nondiscrimination and acceptance, but is also a site where gay men and gay communities are regulated into certain modes of conduct. In particular, this article finds that Ottawa, as both a historic center of antigay activity and a more recent center of an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) rights-seeking agenda in Canada, encourages practices that are based on discretion, gender normalization, and maintenance of the status quo. The article argues that these practices – with some notable exceptions – have led to a fragmented gay community characterized by economic and professional stratification, out-of-town consumption of gay culture, and a lack of recognizable social, political, and geographic focal points for gay men. It also posits that the mechanisms through which governmentality is leveraged are particularly central to the experiences of sexual minorities in places like Ottawa, where government institutions are especially dense or thick.

“Let's Light this Candle”? Early Online Investment and the Regulation of Freedom in “New” Work Forms

Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality studies, this article follows the contested construction of the early online investor. First, it explores the contingency of the investor's imagined freedom, as an expression of neoliberal and informationalist prescriptions of personhood. But it also explores the complexity and multiplicity with which that freedom was structured—especially in countervailing “intermediate-level” regulation, oriented as much toward protecting a vulnerable client as toward liberating an information-savvy sovereign consumer. In complicating the investor's freedom, and in clarifying its limits, struggles over online investment offer an instructive model for evaluating the ambivalence of self-entrepreneurial work.

Governmentality and EU Democracy Promotion: The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights and the Construction of Democratic Civil Societies1

The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is often considered the “jewel in the crown” of the European Union's democracy promotion. Its mandate encompasses the funding of democratizing civil society organizations and thus the facilitation of democratization “from below.” It is argued here that if we apply Foucauldian governmentality tools to the analysis of the workings of the EIDHR, we can see that, despite the pluralistic rhetoric that guides it, the Instrument's objectives and management structures facilitate particular kinds of democratic visions. Neoliberal governmentality, it is argued, may be hidden deep within the expectations set for EU-funded civil society “democratizers.” This has important consequences for how we understand the model of democracy that the European Union promotes and the power relations of the European Union's “locally owned” democracy promotion.

Educating for active compliance: discursive constructions in citizenship education

This article examines the discursive construction of ‘active citizenship’ within recent civics curriculum documents across three provinces in Canada. New secondary school civics curricula have emerged across liberal democratic states since the year 2000, presumably in response to the perception of youth as disengaged from political involvement. Many of the new curricula subsequently emphasize ‘active’ engagement within the polity. The central task of this paper is to better understand what such ‘active citizenship’ actually means, via the methodological tool of discourse analysis. Engaging a theoretical frame that incorporates Foucauldian governmentality theory and cultural theories of the role of the state in creating subjectivities, the paper ultimately argues that the ‘active citizen’ of contemporary civics curricula is, in fact, a deeply neoliberal subject. The article then draws on feminist theories of citizenship in order to assess the forms of exclusion that the curriculum documents inadvertently create, arguing that they ultimately participate in a long tradition of devaluing such elements of citizenship as relationality and emotional ties. We conclude that one of the fundamental goals of citizenship education – to expand access to citizenship participation for all – has failed.

Understanding risk governance: Introducing sociological neoinstitutionalism and foucauldian governmentality for further theorizing

This article traces the career of risk across prominent theoretical approaches by highlighting their key assumptions and premises, specifically the technical approach found in the physical sciences, and economics, psychology, and sociology in the social sciences. In each discipline, the strengths and limitations of each theoretical approach are pointed out. The discussion focuses on sociology in particular because other approaches—in treating risks as dominantly technical, psychological, or economic phenomena—tend to downplay the broader historical and socio-political context that impinges on risk construction and production, and its differential impact across society. This exploration points out that institutions play an important role in creating, managing, and distributing risks in society. After highlighting the integrated risk governance framework as a nascent practice-oriented framework, the framework is examined theoretically using sociological neoinstitutionalism and Foucault’s concept of governmentality. The conclusion elaborates the challenges of using these two bodies of knowledge to study risk governance of extreme events. Although Foucault’s concept of governmentality corrects neoinstitutional theory’s ambivalence toward power, more work needs to be done in order to reconcile their divergent intellectual commitments.

European Policy of Career Guidance: The Interrelationship between Career Self-Management and Production of Human Capital in the Knowledge Economy

‘Everyone has a career to be managed’ is the simple message in new policy strategies for career guidance in Europe. In this article, the promotion of career management for ‘all’ will be unsettled by analysis of career self-management put in relation to rationalities of government and self-government. We are governed to self-manage our career and at the same time govern ourselves to do that. European policy documents on career guidance and career development produced from 2000 to 2008 are analysed from the Foucauldian governmentality perspective. From the starting point that reshaping of career guidance is part of human capital strategies in the knowledge economy of Europe, the author argues that policy of career guidance aims to shape not only a competitive workforce, but in addition entrepreneurial and responsible citizens. In political strategies of career guidance, the competences of career management skills work as a technology to govern the individual to participate in inventing human capital by capitalising oneself to manage the career in working life as well as in social life. The author discusses what desirable subjectivities government of career self-management constructs in relation to re-regulated responsibility of the individual and the state.

"Caring" Capitalism and the Duplicity of Critique

How do individuals become emotionally invested in neoliberal ideology? Why do people passionately attach themselves to formations that are ultimately domineering and destructive? This paper brings together Foucauldian governmentality critique with autonomist Marxist writings on post-Fordist capitalism to contribute to the on-going conversation on the social reproduction of neoliberal capital. While, both bodies of theory grant subjectivity a constitutive role, neither takes seriously enough the power of neoliberal ideology to put forth credible affective structures and the ability of individuals to derive genuine pleasure from them. While Foucauldian approaches exaggerate the role of economic rationality in capitalism thus inviting an easy retreat into individualist and consumerist resistance tactics, autonomist thinkers are overly confident that the communicative and cooperative dispositions demanded from the post Fordist workforce already contain the potential to "become common." Seeing how neither of these promises has yet materialized, I propose a more humble and subtle critical practice that borrows from Foucault's "critical ontology of ourselves."

Fostering a hunger for health: Food and the self in ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly’

Over the past decade, consumers in Australia and elsewhere have increasingly been confronted with a fast growing number of health food products. This profusion of health foods is accompanied by a proliferation in popular culture of professional nutritional advice on ‘what is good to eat’. The genre of lifestyle magazines is one popular medium via which healthy eating practices and health foods are frequently reported. In this paper we use a visual discourse analysis of food-related editorial and advertorial content sourced from the long running and popular The Australian Women’s Weekly to investigate how lifestyle magazines have been one important locus for constituting health conscious consumers. Taking up a Foucauldian governmentality perspective we trace how this active, responsible conceptualisation of the consumer, which we refer to as ‘healthy food consumer’, has increased in prevalence in the pages of The Australian Women’s Weekly over time. Based on our analysis we suggest that the editorial and advertorial content offers models of conduct to individuals about what possible preventative activities in which to engage, and plays an important role in shaping how we think about taking care of our health through eating.

Trust, Distrust and Reassurance: Diversion and Preventive Orders Through the Prism of Feindstrafrecht

This article considers Gunther Jakobs' controversial theory of ‘the criminal law of the enemy’ (Feindstrafrecht). Taking an interpretive perspective that is anchored in social theory, rather than normative principles, the article traces the implications of Jakobs' central claims concerning trust relations in society as mediated by the criminal law and endeavours to articulate their relevance for English law, particularly as regards the growing role of diversion and preventive orders in criminal justice. It identifies the various ways in which these current alternatives to the criminal sanctioning process link with neo-liberal technologies of government by connecting Jakobs' thoughts on trust with key themes in the Foucauldian governmentality literature and recent research on the ascent of auditing as a meta-regulatory mechanism.

Critiquing the Educational Present: The (limited) usefulness to educational research of the Foucauldian approach to governmentality

The claim may be made that the Foucauldian analytics of power, in its detailed attention to the question of how modern societies are rendered governable, has superseded classical and radical analyses. This paper points to problems occasioned by Foucauldian governmentality's reliance on Foucault's flawed conception of the subject. These problems undermine the ambition of this style of research to outline possibilities for political intervention. It is suggested that educational critique can draw usefully on the scrupulous specificity of Foucauldian governmental analysis but that only a critique firmly based in a normative framework aligned to an idea of democratic sociality can aspire to political effectiveness.

Gegenstrategien als (neue) Systemressource des Kapitalismus?

Criticism, resistence and subversion are discussed to have developed from counter strategies to resources of capitalism recently. This diagnosis is highly popular, finding its theoretical and conceptional roots in Foucauldian Governmentality Studies, in labour-market related approaches to subjectivation in post-fordism as well as in Boltanski/Chiapello “The new spirit of capitalism”. This article shows problematic aspects of this diagnosis, without denying its inspiring facets. It is based on the assumption that the over-hasty and over-generalized abandonment of the subversive potentials of counter strategies prevents the development of a well-founded and context-related theory of resistance. As a conclusion central steps towards a sociology of resistence are delineated.

Assembling the Space Economy: Governmentality and Economic Geography

AbstractThe emergence of a ‘new’ economic geography in recent years has emphasised the ways economic processes are inextricably linked to political, cultural and social processes. This article argues that the Foucauldian governmentality literature has the potential to make a contribution here through its operationalisation of the idea that ‘the economic’emerges as a sphere that is distinct from the political, cultural and social spheres rather than being distinct a priori. Drawing on work at the intersection of economic geography and governmentality, this article shows how governmentality has provided a distinctive perspective on many of the key concepts and processes economic geographers study, including particular spaces like the region, particular actors like the manager, and the processes of globalisation and neoliberalism. It is argued that governmentality analysis reveals how knowledge about these concepts and processes shapes their realisation through informing the rationalised deployment of existing and reinvented technologies and programmes of government. The article concludes by arguing that bringing economic geography and governmentality agendas together in theoretically and methodologically innovative research programmes has benefits for both: for the former further cultivating an appreciation for the particular role of the myriad of actors, knowledges and technologies involved in the formation of economic systems, and for the latter by extending the spatial scope of governmentality analyses that have tended to focus on governmental regimes associated with the spatiality of the nation‐state.

Governance Reforms and Rural Women in India: What Types of Women Citizens are Produced by the Will to Empower?

In 1993, the Government of India reserved one-third of the seats in rural councils (panchayats) for women, and along with NGOs, set up programs to empower rural women. We examine the usefulness of a Foucauldian governmentality framework in analyzing how women participants in panchayati raj institutions in Pune District, India, have been produced and the ways in which they respond. We conclude that the emphasis of a strong Foucauldian perspective on structure at the expense of agency obscures the complexity of women's responses. In contrast, a weak Foucauldian perspective is able to recognize that in some cases these incorporation processes create assertive, reformist, and resourceful citizens.

<i>Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire C. Michael Hurst (bio) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire By Wendy Brown; Princeton, 2006 Wendy Brown's latest book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, offers a probing account of the ways that discourses of tolerance function within networks of power as a mode of Foucauldian governmentality. Brown associates a wide range of figures, including George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Samuel Huntington, Susan Okin, Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Lewis, and Seyla Benhabib, with tolerance discourse to demonstrate that tolerance talk knows no bounds and transcends all political affiliation. Brown exposes a blind spot in the debate about multiculturalism by showing that the terms of that argument depend upon the essentialization of cultures that are perceived to fall beyond the purview of liberalism. Huntington's apparent embrace of global cultural relativism (180), Okin's failure to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the liberal assumptions that undergird her critique of multiculturalism (191–99), and the acultural perspective Benhabib assumes to negotiate multicultural complexities (168) all conceal a submerged liberal political agenda: "an exercise of hegemony that requires extensive political transformation of the cultures and subjects it would govern" (202). According to Brown, tolerance enacts these core transformations through a process of depoliticization that reframes the differences between cultures and subjectivities, particularly "radical" ethnic, racial, and sexual subjectivities, as differences of essence rather than as differences occasioned by historical experience and specific discursive manipulations. After outlining the way in which tolerance discourse is deployed as a tactic of power in the first two chapters, Brown shows impressive scope and ambition [End Page 157] by offering an assessment of tolerance as it functions both domestically and globally. Although Brown identifies many distasteful aspects of tolerance, including the sense of superiority that accompanies the act of toleration, its investment in managing rather than resolving conflict, and its association of difference with distaste, her primary critique of tolerance is that the act of tolerating a given individual or group always occurs as an uneven sociopolitical power relation: "Tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection or incorporation to the less powerful" (178). Tolerance can only be extended to the margin by the center; as a unidirectional domination, it assumes the authority to limn the parameters of belonging. Tolerance describes the boundaries of group identity by positioning its objects as the limit cases of that identity, and rather than obviating difference, toleration sustains it through a process of reification that "involves the simultaneous incorporation and maintenance of the otherness of the tolerated element" within a central body that reserves the right to revoke the conditions of that membership at any time (28). Moreover, because "[a]lmost all objects of tolerance are marked as deviant, marginal, or undesirable" (14), the terms of this incorporation maintain a hierarchy that superordinates the ethical and moral value of the dominant center over the groups it marginalizes through the rhetoric of tolerance. In order to analyze the protective function of tolerance discourse in a national context, Brown seeks to determine why the Woman Question was framed as a question of rights while the Jewish Question was framed as a question of tolerance in nineteenth-century Europe. Brown argues that the thoroughgoing subjugation women faced in the domestic sphere limited the real impact of their potential enfranchisement, thereby eliminating the need for tolerance talk. By contrast, because Jewish oppression was primarily maintained by a legal apparatus, the extension of formal equality to Jews represented a far more potent threat to the national power structure. Since there was no extralegal check, like domesticity, to exorcise the specter of Jewish equality, one had to be invented. This is where tolerance discourse came into play. By incorporating Jews in a highly qualified manner that insisted on the maintenance of innate Jewish difference as the terms of that incorporation, the discourse of tolerance contained and nullified [End Page 158] the threat they posed to a cohesive national identity. According to Brown, this is an early example of the conflation of culture...

Developing governmentality: conduct3 and education policy

This article examines education policy and the policy process in the light of two key concepts. The first is the concept of ‘governmentality’ from the work of Michel Foucault (1991). The second is the concept of ‘political spectacle’ from the work of Murray Edelman (1985, 1988). Taking note, further, of recent work by Fairclough (2000) on political ‘spin’ and rhetoric, the article suggests that education policy needs to be seen in the light of a more modern stress in governance which recognises that ‘the conduct of the conduct of conduct’ (the management and presentation of policy – the conduct3 of the title) is not only of electoral relevance but has considerable implications for education and policy. The article probes the ways in which current education policy in the UK is affected by conduct3 and attempts to place it within the Foucauldian governmentality framework. It suggests that while conduct3 can be understood as a modern variant of the Machiavellian concern with sovereignty, it is also associated with the neoliberal marketisation of democracy. On this reading, it can be considered as a mutation of liberal governmentality, serving to undermine some of its key principles.

Drugs, Sport, Anxiety and Foucauldian Governmentality

This paper1 uses concepts of anxiety and Foucauldian governmentality to investigate the ways that the discourses supporting the ban on performance-enhancing drugs in sport have been manipulated and broadened to treat this issue as a public policy and health issue rather than an example of rule violation in sport. Some effects of this expansion include the broadening of drug testing to include testing for recreational drugs, the intrusion of both central governments and scientific experts into the issue and the curtailment of civil liberties for athletes. A further effect has been the perpetration of injustices against athletes under the guise of such injustices being necessary to maintain the integrity of sport.

Free Trade: A Governmentality Approach

The content of global free-trade rules and the number of nations beholden to them have expanded dramatically since the Uruguay round of multilateral negotiations; much of it through agreements to form preferential trade areas (PTAs). Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality studies, this paper explores how the spaces of ‘free trade’ are produced through neoliberal spatial and political imaginaries and material practices to construct ‘barriers to trade’ as objects of trade rules. These concepts are explored through a case study of rules of origin in PTAs, increasingly long technical footnotes to trade agreements that aim to sort hybrid flows of commodities and services into single nation-state categories. I argue that projects to create spaces of unimpeded trade reconfigure obstacles and barriers in new and sometimes unexpected ways.

Integrating Governmentality: Administrative Expectations for Immigrant Associations in Finland

From the first half of the 1990s, and especially after the accession to European Union in 1995, immigrant authorities and administration have emphasized the significance of immigrant associations in integration of immigrants in Finland. The purpose of the associations from the administrative perspective is to socialize and activate immigrant communities and individuals according to basic political rationalities, such as security of the society, happiness of the population and individuals, and cultural pluralism. On the one hand immigrant associations are technology through which integrative government of individuals and communities is implemented. On the other hand, associations themselves are governed through multiple techniques, mainly funding and registration. The author approaches this associational government of integration of immigrants with the “toolkit” applied from Foucauldian governmentality studies.