Mitchell Dean Research Articles

Institutional cooperation in handling epidemics: The case of the Misericordia of Florence during the Italian preunification period

The function of nonprofit organisations (NPOs) in managing healthcare and poverty relief and the role of accounting and reporting in their management control systems have many implications for accounting historians. The present research examines the relationship between NPOs and local governments in the management of public services, particularly during health emergencies. Specifically, this study examines the institutional cooperation between the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Misericordia of Florence and the Santa Maria Nuova Public Hospital during the cholera epidemic of 1855–1862. This research applies a conceptual framework based on Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘governmentality’, ‘nosopolitics’ and the ‘government of the poor’ and Mitchell Dean's ‘technologies of government’ to the study of archival primary sources. This research makes several contributions to the accounting history literature regarding the involvement of NPOs in healthcare, including an original analysis of the role of accounting and reporting in the ‘government of the sick’ from a nosopolitical perspective.

Multi-agency counter-terrorism in Britain and Norway: Intelligence agencies and the administration of welfare

This article explores the emergence of new counter-terrorism programmes in the Britain and Norway through which intelligence and security agencies administer welfare. Support and resources are covertly allocated to persons identified as potential threats, through multi-agency structures led by intelligence and security agencies. Unlike Countering Violent Extremism programmes, this multi-agency management is not led by the local municipality; nor are its participants asked to consent to participation. These new programmes are covert. To conceptualize the significance of intelligence agencies entering the space of welfare administration, Mitchell Dean’s work ‘Liberal Government and Authoritarianism’ is used to underline the traditional separation of agencies within liberal governmentality. Governing through freedom entails the ostensible separation of policing, education and care agencies – reflecting the categorization of the population into groups requiring varying levels of coercion to self-govern. To avoid governing too much, each category of population is allocated a specific agency. Traditionally, intelligence and security agencies have been positioned at the highest tier of repression. By entering the space of welfare administration (and thus social policy), intelligence and security agencies have disturbed the sectoral separation integral to liberal governmentality, leaving care and repression in an ever more ambiguous relationship.

The first reactions of early childhood education schools during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece

ABSTRACT In this paper, we report the first findings of a study that sheds light upon the way early childhood education schools in Greece responded to the COVID-19 lockdown conditions. Specifically, we explore through content analysis and semi-structured interviews: (a) the way 16 early childhood education schools in Athens (8 public and 8 private) first contacted students and their families to inform them about the suspension (b) the way they adapted their programmes to continue to provide education during the first lockdown (Spring 2020) using different models of home-schooling and (c) teachers’ views on the teaching practices they followed at their schools and the challenges they faced. We argue that schools’ first reactions reveal what they advocate, their real beliefs, their deep pedagogical goal, as well as the Greek Government’s attitude towards early childhood education. In this attempt, we use analytical tools developed by Michel Foucault and refined by Mitchell Dean.

Govern of conducts, risk and homeless care in Brazil: Reflections

Abstract In this study, inspired by governmental studies on Foucault, Nikolas Rose, Deborah Lupton and Mitchell Dean, we develop considerations about the ways through which the concept of risk has been operating within the homeless health care that live in some metropolitan areas of Brazil. In this paper, we discuss risk us as a moral and political technology that produces patterns to experience and to analyze reality.: Risk as a technology that has an important role in governing conducts and production of subjectivity. We argue that whilst health policy determines healthy ways of life, its effect can contribute to active surveillance (by the health care experts and by the homeless persons) that stigmatizes and divide society around the concept o 'normality' informed, between others, by epidemiological 'evidence'. Albeit the risks associated with risk-based technologies to build up a surveillance net and standardization that reinforces submissive ways of life, we find out on our ethnographic study within the services - named 'Street Surgery'- that offers transdisciplinary healthcare for people living in the streets of Campinas, Brazil, that those technologies strikes itself continuously with practices of counter-conducts by the homeless that resist the normalization of their lives and point out to other ways of producing life and care. Others ways that, is important to say, have been very influential to change the medical and other professional experts practices of the 'Street Surgery' of Campinas and had been very important to academic researchers that have been questioning hegemonic discourses, arrangements and practices of care on the Primary Health System. Key messages Risk-based approach to health can lead to the reinforcement of submissive ways of life, incompatible with a broader concept of health. For the development of a compromised and humanized care, it's important to take into consideration the.

‘You can’t show impact with a new pair of shoes’: negotiating disadvantage through Pupil Premium

The Pupil Premium policy was introduced in 2010 by the UK coalition government to tackle the attainment gap disproportionately affecting children from low-income families. Semi-structured interviews and policy documents are examined for the way the policy has been enacted in a single comprehensive secondary school in England. In 2014, this school had a lower population of Pupil Premium pupils (18%) compared to (29%) nationally and (25%) countywide. Despite this, the study provides evidence that the Pupil Premium has become invested within and gives rise to, a number of neoliberal techniques, technologies and practices. The study bridges insights from Mitchell Dean’s ‘analytics of government’ and Ball et al.’s work on policy enactment to provide an in-depth, grounded analysis of the way the policy plays out within this school’s context. It argues that the combination of national accountability measures used to show impact for Pupil Premium, and the school’s ongoing struggle to raise overall attainment, leads school leaders and staff members to rethink the concept of disadvantage for their school population. This results in disadvantage being reconceptualised to fit a matrix of moral/pastoral obligations and efficiency/economic competitiveness, in which the tensions between these two orientations are uncomfortable and unresolved.

Book Review: Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault

Book Review: Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, <i>State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault</i>

Constituting neoliberal subjects? ‘Aspiration’ as technology of government in UK policy discourse

Since the 2000s, successive governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have embraced the idea of ‘raising aspiration’ among young people as a solution to persisting educational and socio-economic inequalities. Previous analyses have argued that these policies tend to individualise structural disadvantage and promote a ‘deficit’ view of working-class youth. This paper adopts a novel approach to analysing aspiration discourses combining Michel Foucault’s four dimensions of ‘ethics’ and Mitchell Dean’s notion of ‘formation of identities’. Applying Foucault’s and Dean’s work in this way provides a new lens that enables an examination of how policy encourages particular forms of subjectivation, and, therefore, seeks to govern individuals. The findings presented in the paper complicate previous research by showing that raising aspiration strategies portray disadvantaged youth both in terms of ‘deficit’ and ‘potential’, resulting in a requirement for inner transformation and mobility through attitudinal change. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the identity formation of young people and for conceptualising contemporary forms of governmentality.

Introduction: undoing the demos

In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown argues that neo-liberalism has undermined democracy in a hitherto unprecedented form. To be specific, neo-liberalism has undermined what is at the heart of democracy: popular sovereignty, the demos – it has, in a word, undone the demos and, hence, democracy. Analysing neo-liberalism and its relationship to democracy, Brown draws on the works of Michel Foucault and Karl Marx. The exchange here between the three reviewers – Mitchell Dean, Alen Toplisek and Anne Barron – and Wendy Brown focuses on a number of issues: the use and usefulness of Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism for analysing neo-liberalism; the way that neoliberalism ‘economises’ everything including politics and democracy; the nature of the state and of sovereignty, and how the left should relate to these; and the nature of critique in its different forms (Kantian, Foucauldian, Marxist and others). These are issues that are important not only for the specific argument of Undoing the Demos, but more generally for social and political theory today.

Becoming Business-Like

How do nonprofit practitioners learn to understand themselves as nonprofit professionals? Although the literature has explored the extent and repercussions of nonprofits becoming more business-like and professionalized, little attention has been placed on the process through which this professionalization occurs. Using an autoethnography based on my practice as cofounder and eventual manager of a small nonprofit organization, this article narrates the range of practices and mechanisms through which I came to understand myself as a nonprofit professional. Following Mitchell Dean, who draws heavily on Michel Foucault’s later work, this article argues that professionalization is taught to nonprofit practitioners through two intertwined mechanisms: the “technologies of performance,” which include funding, and evaluation and monitoring procedures; and “technologies of agency,” which involve the often subtle socialization mechanisms into the sector. It thus deepens our understanding of how the transition toward being more business-like is occurring.

Fighting Fire with Fire

Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in transitional justice. Although much attention has been directed toward measuring the effects of transitional justice mechanisms, discussion of the motivations for and manifestations of resistance to transitional justice processes has been limited. Th is article contributes to this underexamined area through an analysis of the nature of resistance to transitional justice in Bahrain following the February 2011 uprisings. It identifies existing explanations for resistance to and engagement with transitional justice before considering whether Mitchell Dean’s analytics of government approach—with its emphasis on identifying discrepancies between actors’ declared and actual intentions—assists in revealing less obvious manifestations of resistance, such as those seen in Bahrain. It is suggested that adopting the institutional manifestations of transitional justice may, paradoxically, be understood as a strategy for resisting popular demands for accountability and political transformation—the very notions at the core of any transition.

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

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Professional Alchemy, or How to Make Bread from Air and Literature from Science

This article examines writings by Carlo Emilio Gadda dedicated to industrial technologies used to produce fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen. Although these essays, along with other writings of the 1930s explaining scientific concepts to a popular audience, have been essential to recent reconsiderations of Gadda’s affective and intellectual relationship to fascism, scholars have neglected the fundamental importance in Gadda’s thought of the technologies themselves. These industrial processes — and the call for their invention — focalize a critical intellectual current of the nineteenth century: a new awareness of scarcity and related anxieties about population growth. Engaging with work by Michel Foucault and Mitchell Dean, I note the emphasis on labour that follows from this concern with scarcity and ‘overpopulation’. What results is a cruel riddle of governmentality: labour is the antidote to the scarcity engendered by overpopulation; but the reproduction of labouring bodies results in further overpopulation, and thus further scarcity. The solution to this riddle — vital to the development of fascism — is the promise offered by synthetic fertilizers: that of nourishing labourers with thin air. This article proposes that Gadda uses these technologies as a philosopher’s stone, catalysing another alchemical process: that of his own professional transformation from engineer to writer.

Local governing of climate change in Denmark: recasting citizens as consumers

This paper is concerned with the ways in which Danish municipalities seek to mitigate climate change through a range of governance strategies. Through the analysis of ten municipal climate plans using the framework of Mitchell Dean, as well as extensive ethnographic fieldwork in two municipalities, this paper explores how local climate change mitigation is shaped by particular rationalities and technologies of government, and thus seeks to illustrate how the strategies set out in the plans construe climate change mitigation from a certain perspective, thereby rendering some solutions more likely than others and recasting citizens as passive consumers who are to be guided to consume in more climate-friendly ways in the process.

Book Review: Mitchell Dean, The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics

Book Review: Mitchell Dean, <i>The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics</i>

Reducing risk, producing order: The surprisingly disciplinary world of needle exchange.

Emphasizing the reduction of risk over the cessation of drug use, needle exchange in the United States is often condemned for coddling its participants. Declining the punitive measures or unwavering teleology of criminal justice and drug treatment approaches, harm-reduction measures in general are faulted by naysayers for their refusal to establish clear normative boundaries for behavior modification. This article will seek to subvert such critiques by describing the ways in which disciplinary technologies suffused one needle exchange program in New York City. Drawing upon 1 year of participant observation at "Bronx Harm Reduction," this article will consider how the "minor procedures" of disciplinary power first characterized by Foucault (1977) worked to shape and organize different user bodies in needle exchange; it will further employ the work of Mitchell Dean to reflect upon the connections between program-level "technologies of agency" and government-led "technologies of performance." While conceding the overarching disciplinary transformation of late harm reduction, this article is specifically interested in the ramifications of this trajectory within one specific time and place. Namely, it postulates that attempts to "raise the bar" within a low-threshold program may serve to alienate or explicitly exclude certain service users.

‘Drop-outs’ or ‘heritage learners’? Competing mentalities of governmentality and invested meanings at a weekend Japanese language school in the USA

Based on fieldwork at a weekend Japanese language school in the USA in 2007–2009, this article illustrates the ways in which different regimes of government arise from an activity depending on meanings individuals invest in it. We examine how two students in the same classroom experienced two different regimes of government: one of a low-track class for ‘native speakers’ and the other of a heritage language class for bilingual speakers. Building on Mitchell Dean's reworking of Foucault, we suggest a new approach to ethnographically studying governmentality which focuses on invested meanings.

‘(World) risk society’ or ‘new rationalities of risk’? A critical discussion of Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernity

This paper calls attention to some basic problems and inner contradictions in the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theory of the ‘(world) risk society’ or reflexive (second) modernity. A main thread in the critique is that of addressing the theoretical ambiguities that seem to characterize Beck’s at the same time ‘social constructivist’ and ‘realist’ notion of risk – ambiguities that seem to be repeated on the one hand in Beck’s view on the relation between knowledge and unawareness in reflexive modernity and on the other hand in his view on the role of the mass media in the ‘(world) risk society’. Moreover, Beck’s notions of second modernity, reflexivity, rationality and critique are critically examined. With the alternative positions discussed in the paper – represented by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Niklas Luhmann and Mitchell Dean – some indications are given as to how one might fruitfully elaborate on the problem of risk. Thus, rather than a mainly technology-driven new type of social reality, the ‘(world) risk society’ could perhaps better be seen as indicating a changing cultural self-understanding of late modern society, a new ‘semantics of crisis', or the emergence of new forms of governmentality in the contemporary welfare state. In conclusion, some indications are given as to how an analysis of more specific ‘risk logics' or ‘rationalities' could be elaborated on, and a terminology that reflects this more differentiated approach to risk in late modern society is suggested.

Contractual audit and mental health rehabilitation: a study of formulating effectiveness in a Finnish supported housing unit

Saario S, Raitakari S. Contractual audit and mental health rehabilitation: a study of formulating effectiveness in a Finnish supported housing unitInt J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 321–329 © 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare.Mental health NGOs in Western Europe are increasingly managed by contractual audit procedures. This article concerns how contractual audit and its emphasis on effectiveness of care impact on the practices of long‐term mental health rehabilitation. To demonstrate this, a case study of a Finnish NGO that provides supported housing is presented. The study looks at how service purchasing practices, as stated in the contract between the municipality and the NGO, are reflected in the meetings among practitioners. Documentary and meeting data were utilised together with Mitchell Dean's notion of technologies of agency. It was found that practitioners actively sought to show the effectiveness of their everyday work in terms of contractual audit by demonstrating both the economic and progressive aspects of care. Thus, professional competency in mental health rehabilitation appears to entail both the skills of care interventions and the ability to perform these interventions as efficient and financially accountable activities.

Software as Risk: Introduction of Open Standards in the Danish Public Sector

In June 2006, the Danish parliament passed a resolution introducing open standards for software in the public sector. Open standards ensure interoperability in software. The introduction of open standards facilitates the spread of alternative software solutions, such as open source software, into environments (e.g., the public sector) that have hitherto been dominated by software produced by the proprietary software industry. In this article, the authors analyze the political process that led to the passing of the resolution, arguing that the concepts of risk and governmentality associated with Ulrich Beck (1992b) and Mitchell Dean (1999) allows one to theorize about this process. In so doing, they draw attention to the significance of the notion of risk in the context of public-sector software.

Managerial audit and community mental health: a study of rationalising practices in Finnish psychiatric outpatient clinics

In many European welfare states the reform of mental health services has been accompanied by the implementation of new forms of governance, including the introduction of managerial audit systems. While such systems have been developed for ‘good causes’, such as quality assurance, financial management and monitoring staff performance, they may simultaneously produce diverse and contradictory effects on practice. The aim of this article is to examine the role of one managerial audit system, introduced in psychiatric outpatient clinics in central Finland, and assess its impact on practice. Reference is made to modernising mental health policy in the UK as that has producedsimilar practics outcomes. The research was an empirical study of practice using a mixed-method case study design involving documentary research and semi-structured interviews. Insights from Mitchell Dean's notion of governmentalisation of government were utilised in the analysis. It was found that, although the audit system primarily served administrative needs, it began to reshape practice by reinforcing certain modes of working and excluding others. The analysis of community mental health work in Finland, with similar trends in the UK, highlights the connection between documentation, resource allocation and managerial priorities that reinforce particular styles of practice. In community mental health services it would appear that the problems of professional practice have become the problems of administration.