Notion Of Governance Research Articles

Governing the consumer: technologies of consumption

One of the recurring themes within commentaries of the cultural economy is the tension between the desire of producers to exercise control over consumers and consumers' sovereignty. Using Foucault's notion of Governmentality and drawing on a study of Tesco's loyalty card programme Clubcard, the paper argues that Tesco represents an important site in the modern cultural economy. “Post-modern” producers like Tesco no longer dichotomise consumer agency and the will to power. Instead, through the mobilisation of the reflexive capacities of both producer and consumer, they seek to frame and extend agency whilst simultaneously attempting to guide how that agency is connected to acts of consumption. It is through technologies of consumption such as Clubcard that agency and consumption are connected and governed.

Parents, expertise and identity work: the media conceptualised as a lifelong learning practice

Parenting is a recurring topic in books, newspapers, magazines and TV shows in Western societies. Often it involves experts giving advice to adults. Hence, parenting is made visible, categorised, evaluated and corrected in public. Judgements on what is desirable are demonstrated, and objectives to be achieved are pointed out. In the present study, norms and claims for parenting are investigated through the discourse analysis of a Swedish TV show. Drawing upon the notions of governmentality, power/knowledge relations and subject positioning, it will be argued that regularities are displayed, negotiated and established in the dialogue; first, to make childhood experience matter, second, to expose reproductive strategies, and third, to claim identity work in parenting activities. Located in the discourse of lifelong learning, parenting may be depicted as valid knowledge and competence. Norms for what is considered skilful parenting and positive progress reveal a pattern that appears to be more or less ‘fixed’. However, the process seems mutual rather than one-sided, and, moreover, whose interest this may serve is a main theme in the concluding discussion.

The OECD's thinking on the governing of unemployment

Based on Foucault's notion of governmentality and problematisation, I analyse the problematisations, causal assumptions and policy recommendations found in the documents of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concerning labour market issues. The article shows that, since the mid-1970s, the OECD's strategies on employment have consistently evolved around the problematisation of ‘structural unemployment’. Demand management and other ways of tackling unemployment have been dismissed in favour of interventions seeking to stimulate the self-governing capacities of the unemployed, entrepreneurs, students and others. While the emphasis on the self-governing capacities of citizens may very broadly be characterised as a supply-side strategy, it has really nothing to do with a laissez-faire approach that assumes the existence of perfect, self-governing markets.

Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership

This article critically explores how educational leadership is becoming increasingly affective in order to cultivate pupil potential and thereby meet the challenge of creating the best schools in the world. It critically analyses policy and handbook approaches to affective educational leadership technologies by showing the difficulty in keeping promises and by introducing the Massumian distinction between possibilities and potentiality. The analysis draws upon the notion of governmentality and the ‘affective turn’, and highlights affective, educational, leadership technologies as they appear in contemporary leadership handbooks in Denmark using four examples: (1) How school becomes the managed core of society. This reshapes educational leadership as onto-power, which means governing through ideas and materialities of perception and neurons. (2) How affectivity becomes synonymous with positive feelings, while more indeterminate parts of affectivity are neglected. (3) How educational leadership becomes a matter of governing the future through simulation and imagination. (4) How affective leadership is energised by a temporally and spatially structured bio-morality. I argue that such discourses tend to maintain the status quo rather than challenge basic premises and thereby, the edifying nature of the technologies paradoxically overshadows the possibilities promised by the technologies.

Ethnicity, Well-Being, and the Organization of Labor among Shade Tobacco Workers

The cultivation and processing of shade tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley (United States) is highly specialized and labor intensive and is dependent on a multi-ethnic workforce of migrant farm workers from Latin America and the West Indies. Production is structured through an ethnically reified division of labor, constituted by historical migration patterns, English language ability, and racially informed perceptions of what constitutes a “good worker.” Regardless of position, these workers find themselves geographically and socially isolated and subjected to hazardous and exploitative working conditions. This article will explore the effects of these conditions on workers’ physical and emotional well-being. Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, the article demonstrates the ways in which these deleterious effects are embedded in workers’ internalizing of race and ethnicity as naturalizing principles for self-regulation and the organization of work and in neoliberal forces that produce a surplus of temporary, highly mobile workers from the global south.

Teaching the 2008 Presidential Election at Three Demographically Diverse Schools: An Exercise in Neoliberal Governmentality

This article describes the disparity in political instruction found in six government classes from three demographically diverse high schools during the 2008 Presidential Election. In general, students from working-class households or those in lower-level classes were rarely given opportunities to discuss politics at a national level or engage in analytical discussions of the election; students in middle-to-upper-class schools and those in advanced-level classes were privy to rich discussions of politics on a regular basis. Using Foucault's (1991) notion of governmentality as a guide, these findings are then discussed as symptomatic of a neoliberal approach to education in which students are trained for the presumed roles they will play in the nation's political economy as adults.

Agile bodies: a new imperative in neoliberal governance

Modern business discourse suggests that a key bulwark against market fluctuation and the threat of failure is for organizations to become ‘agile’, a more dynamic and proactive position than that previously afforded by mere ‘flexibility’. The same idea is also directed at the personal level, it being argued that the ‘agile’ individual is better placed to secure employment and to maintain their economic worth within globalized, rapidly changing markets. Educational discourse, particularly relating to the tertiary sector, is also beginning to appropriate such concepts and in this paper the discourse is probed from the perspective of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. The paper argues that agility can be seen to be aligned both with the neoliberal concept of the entrepreneurial self and also with the ‘governance turn’, whereby policy aims are achieved through the apparently autonomous actions of agents, but actions which are heavily steered by various control mechanisms. The paper suggests, however, that the ‘agile’ self is but one, albeit powerful, response to the current crisis of capitalism and that counter‐conduct is possible by focusing on alternative ethical and political stances.

Policy rationalities and policy technologies: a programme for analysing the raised school‐leaving age in Western Australia

In this paper I outline an approach towards policy analysis that takes governmentality as its point of theoretical orientation and begin to apply this approach to my research into the recently raised compulsory school‐leaving age in Western Australia. I aim to demonstrate the methodological potentials of this approach by giving examples of the thinking and practices that shape and condition the policy. I commence by situating the school‐leaving age policy within a broader field of reforms occurring under the general banner of neoliberalism and argue that the policy is primarily concerned with the conduct of students classified at ‘educational risk’, and with transforming these students to become more visible, participative and engaged in their schooling. By focusing on the policy rationalities and technologies, and drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I explore the forms of knowledge and practical strategies that are deployed in this policy field. I contend that this particular deployment narrowly constructs young people’s experiences of schooling in ways that do not allow for a broader debate about their declining school attendance and what should be done to address it

Developing Tanzanian civil society

PurposeThe development of Tanzanian civil society is widely understood to be one of the key processes in the democratization of the country, and this vision is also shared by the World Bank. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the intention and impact of World Bank policies aimed at supporting Tanzanian civil society organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach combined with Foucault's notion of governmentality as a conceptual tool. Within this theoretical framework, a specific World Bank programme in Tanzania, the Social Development Civil Society Fund, is analyzed.FindingsDeveloped democratic states produce, through the World Bank, the desires of not‐yet‐fully democratic countries to embrace the benefits that (democratic) development can bring. The World Bank programme aimed at the development of Tanzanian civil society is formulated in a way that posits Tanzania as a not‐yet‐fully democratic country. This is achieved through the World Bank's advice and recommendations, which trigger the desires of Tanzanians to participate in development and thus to achieve (always elusive) prosperity and democracy. Moreover, the World Bank programme can be seen as an ensemble of governmental practices advancing the idea of self‐empowerment through which Tanzanians are made governable.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the understanding of democratic transition, from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a social fantasy that plays a crucial role in the constitution of global hierarchical relationships and in the construction of the identities of so‐called democratic states and not‐yet‐fully democratic countries. Within this scheme, the World Bank's policies are governmental technologies that trigger desires of not‐yet‐fully democratic countries.

Discipline through documentation: a form of governmentality for school principals

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how principal subjectivities are constructed by particular normalizing processes that occur through the disciplinary power of grants and submission writing. An increasing part of the principal’s job, under moves towards self‐governing schools, is a reliance of grants and submissions in order to obtain funding. This paper uses case studies of two school principals who are concerned about the increasing time and energy spent on these funding applications. Foucault’s notions of governmentality and disciplinary power are used to theorize the constitution of these principals as subjects through the mechanisms of grants and submissions. This paper therefore contributes to much needed theory building around principals’ work under school‐based management.

The politics of display in post-Franco Spain: Max Aub at the Reina Sofa

The political significance of museums and commemorative exhibitions in post-Franco Spain has been comparatively little explored. By elaborating on the new critical literature on museums and the debate on the notion of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault, this article draws attention to the institutional rationale at work in the birthday centennials of key Spanish artists and literati of the Silver Age celebrated at the turn of the millennium in various Spanish museums. Since the Nationalist uprising and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War disrupted the cultural revival and the artistic trajectories of figures like Federico Garca Lorca, Luis Buuel, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Ramn Gomez de la Serna and Max Aub, such commemorations are, indeed, a battlefield of conflicting ideological and political claims and grievances, whether or not this is explicitly acknowledged by political authorities, institutions and audiences. Centring on Max Aub's centennial held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa in 2003, and on the memorial exhibition and catalogue entitled Jusep Torres Campalans. Ingenio de la Vanguardia/Jusep Torres Campalans. The wit of the avant-garde (Llopis 2003), this article examines a case study for the official remembering/forgetting of the Spanish Civil War. The article contends that practices orchestrated at this memorial happening silence, euphemize, and/or distort Max Aub's legacy. In doing so, these commemorative practices subtly end up colonizing and domesticating the critique immanent in all of Aub's oeuvre in exile. The visual and rhetorical strategies employed for erasing, silencing, or distorting alternative memories analysed here make explicit the modes in which audiences can be addressed in public contexts. Likewise, the disturbing manipulation of politics and aesthetics reveals that practices heralded as a remembrance of the past may just as well serve to hide and dissimulate that past.

Governmentality of Youth: Managing Risky Subjects

This article poses the question: How do understandings of governmentality play out in discourses of youth? In the twenty-first-century neoliberal contexts of consumer capitalist societies, discourses of youth need now to move beyond the valuable earlier understandings based on psychological and cultural/subcultural studies to harness Foucault's notion of governmentality. In terms of governmentality, if youth cannot or will not control their conduct, they cease to be ‘docile bodies' and ‘useful’ to the state. If their behavior becomes unacceptable and criminal, the state will intervene, administering its biopower in the form of the youth justice system – governmentality in action, which is probably the biggest risk of all for youth, especially in the disciplinary, punitive way it is formulated in much of the USA, where it totally ignores the theoretical findings of youth development that have been established in psychological discourses. The first section of the article briefly discusses the emergence of Foucault's notion of governmentality. The second section examines a dominant discourse of youth – youth ‘at risk’. It starts with definitions, and then covers therapeutic and economic aspects of risk management. These include technologies of the self via a range of voluntary and community-based socio-psy programs and interventions; and social security, risk assessment, risk management and insurance. The third section, ‘Beyond Cultural Studies’, analyzes the importance of changing economic conceptions of the self which demand something more than perspectives garnered solely from cultural studies. The author argues that a Foucauldian history of homo economicus, as in the last four lectures of The Birth of Bio-politics (2008), and a critical engagement with the economics of the self where the dominance of pure rationality models have given way to a consideration of a range of psychological attributes that influence our economic decision-making, are valuable additions to traditional cultural studies of youth.

Learner success, retention and power in vocational education: a snapshot from research

In this paper we explore whether power issues enhance and/or inhibit retention of foundation‐learners in vocational education in Aotearoa New Zealand. After surveying reasons given for early departure in the retention literature, the paper offers Foucault’s notion of governmentality as another possible factor in early departure. The paper explores three aspects of governmentality through the data: whether student resistance to the exercise of power creates conditions for early departure; whether the process of group formation, identity building and behaviour creates power dynamics within groups that inhibit or enhance retention; whether self‐disciplining, using power on oneself to conform to others’ expectations, norms or rules, influences learners’ decisions about staying or leaving early. Our conclusions are tentative but we suggest that power issues do play a part in helping learners decide whether or not to complete their courses of study.

911: The after-life of colonial governmentality1

In dialling 911, the US emergency number, the paper connects the terrorism of New York to the backstreet infections of Mong Kok, Hong Kong. New York and Hong Kong lead back to the binary political forms of Carl Schmitt and also the complications added by Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality. In a highly condensed argument, Dutton outlines the contours of power that govern this two-sided contemporary Western notion of the political. He argues that it is characterised less by a shift, in the language of Foucault, from sovereign to disciplinary power than to a wedding of the two and it is on a bed of colonial governmentality that this was consummated. Here is a form of government and power that combines notions of ‘betterment’ (registered through concerns about the health, wealth and education of the ‘native’ population) with brute force. It is a sign of the rifle lying hidden by the side of the ‘force of the better argument’ and herein lies the political form that the number 911 reveals.

Not all practices are equal: an exploration of discourses, governmentality and scale-free networks

Foucault's ideas surrounding the notion of governmentality are built upon the intersection of multiple discourses and discursive practices – a “complex topography of rule”. The notion of disciplinarity is well accepted in the literature; however, there are few attempts to conceive how practices, from a range of discourses, relate to each other. Everyday observations indicate that not all learnt practices are equally important to a given subject. To say that all these practices are inculcated in order for the subject to be able to conduct themselves appropriately does not provide insight into the relative importance of particular practices to a specific subject's constitution. The central contribution of this article is that the sum of practices acquired by a subject may be conceived of as a network; more specifically, as a “scale-free network”. The adoption of this perspective adds texture to the Foucaultian tradition in a way that emphasises the connections between acquired practices – the perspective facilitates the conceptualisation of the sum of practices in terms of a topography of practices. This approach is explored through an examination of the background, training and work of patent examiners. Examiners make a useful example as they operate within both the scientific and legal discourses and, therefore, learn and express practices associated with both discourses. This network-based approach offers a new perspective for understanding practices that occur in multiple disciplines – that is, it offers a useful conceptualisation of the processes by which discursive practices are ordered (thereby facilitating acquisition).

Thinking beyond polemics: Approaching the health society through Foucault

This paper offers a synthetic outline of the contribution of a foucauldian approach to the analysis of health, with specific attention to the dynamics of the relation between health promotion and the ‘health society’. Through the concept of ‘biopower’, this approach was among the first in sociology to highlight the general relevance of health to the constitutive dynamics of modern (and eventually late-modern) societies. Through the concept of ‘governmentality’, scholars in a range of disciplines offered early critical analyses of health promotion discourse in the specific context of neo-liberalism, highlighting some of its paradoxical features. To the extent that such paradoxes are now more widely articulated as an explicit subject for public debate through the notion of a ‘health society’, it might be argued that the critical function initially offered through the notion of governmentality has become somewhat redundant. Against this background, the paper concludes by discussing, through examples relating to new biotechnologies and to drug policy, how a foucauldian approach continues to be relevant in the contemporary context.

‘There’s no limit to how much you can consume’: the New Public Health and the struggle to manage healthy bodies

During the past decade or so, organization studies has witnessed a small but growing interest in the human body, in health, and in the management of life beyond organizational boundaries. In light of this development, this paper investigates how the New Public Health seeks to construct and manage people as healthy bodies beyond the boundaries of formal work organizations. The paper does so through a discourse analysis of a UK health campaign on healthy eating. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, the paper discusses the power, limitations and subversion of this campaign by problematizing the neo‐liberal managerialism that it actualizes. Finally, it discusses what implications this has for the New Public Health and for organization studies.

Teaching in Full View: GLA as a Mechanism of Power

Foucault's concept of governmentality frames a critical discourse analysis of Grade Level of Achievement (GLA) Reporting in Alberta. GLA requires teachers to report to the provincial government a whole number that represents their judgment of each student's achievement in meeting the mandated curricular outcomes in grades 1 to 9 language arts and mathematics. Foucault's notion of governmentality guides the analysis as results are illuminated within three prominent themes: homogeneous, efficient effects of power; visibility; and identity. GLA is of interest and import due to the scope of the project, the unique requirements, not solely test-based, and the myriad of ways the data gathered could be used to influence future directions. GLA is significant, micropolitically, in the way it distributes power by involving the subjects directly. The results of this analysis will serve to provide teachers, administrators and policy makers with a way to reconsider their professional agency and identity within a culture of accountability.

Sustainable Development Policy in Britain: Shaping Conduct Through Global Governmentality

This paper relies on the premise that the environment (in an ecological sense) is political. In other words, the environment and the threat of environmental degradation and destruction are operational discourses that work to legitimate and shape power relations between states, corporations, societies and peoples. Based on this premise, and in line with Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality, this paper traces the shifting discourses of environmentalism in Britain to offer an overview of how environmental issues work to discipline relations around achieving market based objectives. I go on to argue that environmental concerns legitimate and are legitimated by globalisation and that, perhaps conversely, globalisation in relation to the environment, works in the service of neoliberal expansionist agendas. As such, this paper turns to investigate Britain's international sustainable development policy and how this works to shape and discipline, primarily gendered, social relations in consolidation of neoliberal principles. In sum, this paper contends that environmental degradation is a discourse that works to shape identities in line with a global neoliberal expansionist agenda.

Foucault, space and primary school dining rooms

This paper takes up recent debates within Children's Geographies as to the ‘usefulness’ of theory and its application to school dining rooms. The paper argues that in particular, Foucault's notions of governmentality have the potential to advance theoretical understandings of the spatiality of school dining rooms, the social relationships that occur within them and that in addition this can have relevant practical and policy implications that could impact upon the everyday lives of children that are both constituted by and constitutive of this space.