Individual Responsibilization Research Articles

Who cares about digital disconnection? Exploring commodified digital disconnection discourse through a relational lens

Digital disconnection has risen as a new and necessary act of care that individuals perform to counter the burdens associated with 24/7 connectivity. Resources to perform such caring tasks, however, are known to be unequally distributed. Leaning on feminist theory and digital disconnection studies, this study explores whether this unequal distribution also extends to the realm of digital disconnection by examining who is portrayed to care about digital disconnection in marketing communication of digital disconnection products and services. Through a critical discourse analysis, we find that digital disconnection is foremost presented as an individualized responsibility, meaning that the particular responsibility to (re-) gain control, focus and productivity, lies with the individual user. This responsible individual is feminized in most communications, except for highly masculinized, entrepreneurial-oriented forms of commodified digital disconnection. Overall, our analysis highlights how stereotypical gendered caring roles and processes of individual responsibilization are reinforced in commodified digital products and services. To breach this vicious circle, we argue that it is crucial to bring awareness to the essentialness of digital disconnection care work to ensure that disconnection opportunities and responsibilities are not dictated by social inequalities generated by neoliberal logics.

Homo responsabilis as an extension of the neoliberal hidden curriculum: The triple responsibilization of responsible management education

In the responsible turn in business school education and management learning, the responsibility approach is proposed as a possible panacea against a hidden curriculum which leads to damaging business practice. The explicit promise of responsible management learning and education is that homo oeconomicus can be re-formed in the image of a responsible business subject, what we here call ‘ homo responsabilis’. We explore how a business school curriculum centred on responsibility affects key subject positions such as consumer, employee, manager, entrepreneur, investor and leader. In three responsible management learning and education illustrations at our business school, we observe three layers of responsibilization of the individual: responsibilization for self-enhancement, responsibilization for economic prosperity and responsibilization for social and environmental sustainability. We find that these three layers of responsibilization impact business school subjects in several problematic ways: excessive moral burdening of consumers, overburdening of self-managing employees and fantasmatic gripping of prospective entrepreneurs. Our contribution to critical studies of responsible management learning and education is twofold: (1) we show how explicit responsible management learning and education curricula tend to extend the neoliberal HC, and (2) we complement studies calling for re-politicizing responsible management learning and education by suggesting transformative learning ways to generate explicitly ethico-political imaginations that can help in resisting individual responsibilization in business school education.

TOWARD INTIMATE DATA: RE-THINKING DIGITAL, SOCIAL, POLITICAL RELATIONS

Digital technologies enable the mass datafication of human activity in new and intimate ways, allowing for both active and passive tracking bodily functions, physical movements, consumption habits, social encounters, and even moods and feelings. Despite the seeming newness of these developments, however, Internet scholars recognize that data production and use has always been bound up with broader relations between individuals, communities, and claims to the privateness or publicness of certain bodies, spaces, and behaviors. Most recently, critical data scholars have illuminated the complex, often surreptitious contexts in which datafication occurs, offering a range of conceptual frameworks to contend with the meanings and implications of these deeply personal digital-human entanglements. In this paper we take up and recast the notion of “intimate data.” Elsewhere denoting a particular category of tracked activities deemed private or sensitive, we instead consider intimacy as marking a set of (often unequal) socio-political relationships. That is, we mobilize “intimate data” to attend to the processes by which individuals and collectives are datafied in ways that have repercussions for knowledges about oneself and others. In so doing, we sidestep hermetic liberal conceptions of data that center ideals like consent and exchange to think about data collection as eliciting confessions , vulnerabilities, monetizable practices, and new possibilities for governing (inter)personal and other relations. We advance different, alternative political responses, focusing specifically on (1) the (racialized, gendered, classed, sexualized) normativity of intimate data, (2) (re)considerations of privacy and surveillance, (3) tensions around visibility, and (4) responsibilization of individuals to police spaces.

Desistance and the State: Revisiting the Individualization Thesis in Criminology and Criminal Justice

The growing influence of neo-liberalism in crime policy and practice has resulted in the responsibilization of individuals: criminality and risk tend now to be seen as operating at the individual level, rather than the structural level. Individuals are solely responsible for their actions, not only in starting offending but also in stopping, and are to blame for their own predicament (an epistemological fallacy). Herein, we argue that structural barriers to rehabilitation and reintegration were erected by political decision making from the 1980s. This resulted in criminal justice practitioners increasingly focussing on individual-level factors (cognition, agency, employability) and neglecting the structural causes of offending. We thus propose that the state take a more proactive stance in reducing reoffending and fostering opportunities for reintegration through broader social welfarism, rather than penal policies.

The makings of an exclusive community: students' perceptions of dangerous others.

Contemporarily, universities are perceived as neoliberal entities, self-absorbed, driven by corporate interests, markets and economic goals, rather than perceived as providing a public good, concerned for the wider world (del Cerro Santamaria in Review of European Studies, 12(1), 22–38, 2020). This perception of universities as individualised communities rather than collective communities (Rousseau in Social Currents, 7(5), 395–401, 2020) accentuates the responsibilisation of individuals who are viewed as responsible for solving their own problems (Martinez and Garcia in What is neoliberalism, 2000), including ensuring their own safety (Garland in The British Journal of Criminology, 36(4), 445–471, 1996). Set against this social-political backdrop, this paper, using data from an online survey about students’ perceptions of on-campus safety at a university in the north of England, shows how some students, particularly women students, view others as dangerous, rather than view them as vulnerable groups who are residing on the margins of an inequitable society. The porous borders of the university campuses amplify some students’ perceptions of dangerous others and students’ suggestions for campus security to keep out such others arguably serve to aggravate rather than relieve their perceptions of unsafety. Yet the porous borders of the campuses should be seen as advantageous because an ecological university can connect its students to the wider world to help facilitate care for the other (Barnett in The ecological university, 2018). In doing so, this may enhance students’ own sense of well-being and safety in the urban environment. This is a timely argument amidst a global pandemic, where the university restricts access to unauthorised others and, in doing so, facilitates the makings of an exclusive community.

The rise of education‐featured gated communities in Chinese cities: (Re)producing the enterprising self via the entrepreneurial local state–capital nexus

AbstractSince the 1990s, an emerging form of gated communities (GCs) packaging K‐12 schools with tailor‐made residential services, termed education‐featured gated communities (edu‐featured GCs) by the author, has transformed the residential and education landscapes in Chinese cities. Encapsulating fundamental issues of urban entrepreneurialism, privatisation of public goods, social reproduction, education and housing inequalities, the rise of edu‐featured GCs poses a series of unexplored research questions beyond education and housing/GCs per se. Drawing on an empirical investigation mainly in the birthplace of edu‐featured GCs, Guangzhou, this research examines how the entrepreneurial local state leverages private investments and orchestrates the (re)production of the enterprising self to give rise to edu‐featured GCs. Specially, the entrepreneurial state strategically forms a nexus with private capital at different stages to serve different (re)development priorities and thus gives rise to various types of edu‐featured GCs. Meanwhile, the enterprising self is forged by a process of neoliberal responsibilisation of individuals to produce a competitive labour force feeding into the needs of domestic economic restructuring and global capitalism. Middle‐class households seemingly harvest a great fortune through their investment in education and housing markets, yet they are involuntarily being mired in a vicious circle of “involution” that reproduces the enterprising self in a hypercompetitive manner. Foregrounding the indispensable role of the state in shaping the new residential form entwining housing and education choices, this study epitomises how education and housing offer critical prisms to examine broader and more profound urban and geographical issues. It enriches the scholarship of critical geographies of education through introducing a four‐dimensional — upward‐, downward‐, outward‐ and inward‐looking — prism. Specifically, edu‐featured GCs is shaped by both the powerful state–capital nexus (upward‐looking) and individual choices for social reproduction (downward‐looking), and links middle‐class parents' expectations and choices of schooling (inward‐looking) with the wider impacts on urban (re)development (outward‐looking).

“Be a better version of you!”: A corpus-driven critical discourse analysis of MOOC platforms' marketing communication

This study examines the representation, reconstruction, and promotion of the 'ideal subject' of the job market in the promotional materials of the online/life-long learning platforms known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). We take a corpus-driven critical discourse analysis to investigate the marketing language in the subscription e-mails and websites of six English-medium MOOC platforms. The analysis shows that the platforms use an array of promotional persuasion strategies, including advice-giving, autonomization and responsibilization of individuals and reinforce a self-betterment discourse to create marketable employees. Through the use of a distinct blend of higher education, marketing, and self-help discourses, the skills-oriented language explicitly references job insecurity and urges the individual to (re)build oneself tirelessly to remain demandable/marketable, neglecting an intellectual advancement angle. This ideology legitimizes the neoliberal demands for the enterprising-self and employability and feeds into one's fear of failure, ranking individuals in the society based on a value-adding/detracting practice.

Authorship and creation for university students

The aim of this study was to investigate the meanings of creation and the possibilities of authorship for students from two public universities. Reading and writing workshops with students, which were recorded via audio recordings and fieldnotes constituted the field of study. The analyses were based on the theoretical perspectives of Bakhtin and Vygotski and focused, from the students’ point of view, on the social places institutionally occupied by professors and students and the meanings about the academic practices and their consequences for the possibilities of authorship and creation. The results indicate places of inequality in the relationship between peers from public and private education, the individual responsibilization of the students for their trajectories within the university and the signification of academic authorship as responsive to the productivist logic guided by the commodification of scientific production.

Personalisation policy in the lives of people with learning disabilities: a call to focus on how people build their lives relationally

Social care provision across high-income countries has been transformed over the last ten years by personalisation – a policy agenda to give people with eligible support needs more choice and control over their support. Yet the ideological underpinnings of this transformation remain highly mutable, particularly in the context of reduced welfare provision that has unfolded in many nations advancing personalisation. How the policy has manifested itself has led to an expectation for people to self-build a life as individual consumers within a care market. This article draws on a study exploring how people with learning disabilities in England and Scotland are responding to the everyday realities of personalisation as it is enacted where they live and show the relationality inherent in their practices. We propose that the personalisation agenda as it currently stands (as an individualising movement involving an increasing responsibilisation of individuals and their families) ignores the inherently relational nature of care and support. We propose that social care policy needs to recognise the relational ways in which people build their lives and to advocate a redistribution of responsibility to reduce inequalities in the allocation of care.

Critical Clinical Social Work and the Neoliberal Constraints on Social Justice in Mental Health

Despite a strong history of social justice–based social work professional education in Canada, there has not been an intentional integration of direct critical clinical mental health practice with social justice–based theory. Progressive social work has tended to view clinical work as focusing on the individual and failing to contribute to social change. In this article, I elaborate upon a critical clinical social work approach influenced by postmodern critique, and feminist-, narrative-, and collaborative-based practice rooted in critical theory. Critical clinical practice disrupts the individual/social binary through counterviewing unhelpful dominant social discourses and producing counterstories that participate in social resistance. I explore the constraints of neoliberalism on social work mental health practice and its influence on the ability of social workers to practice social justice–based social work. Neoliberalism constrains social workers’ ability to address the social and structural determinants of mental health through its focus on economic rationalization, biomedicalization, and individual responsibilization, alongside rationalized practices that emphasize evidence-based and short-term efficiency-based models. I argue that social work is facing a crisis as a disempowered profession, as it attempts to reconcile its commitment to social justice and the importance of addressing inequity, marginalization, and oppression while often working in settings that demand the subordination of social work knowledge to neoliberal biomedicalism. Under these conditions, a critical clinical approach to mental health practice is needed now more than ever.

The connections between crisis and war preparedness in Sweden

Contemporary liberal and democratic states have ‘securitized’ a growing number of issues by advancing the notion of societal security. This is coupled with a proactive stance and the conception of building societal resilience in order to withstand future crises and disturbances. The preemptive logic of contemporary security and crisis management calls for a new type of resilient neoliberal subject who is willing to accept uncertainty and shoulder greater individual responsibility for her own security. This article offers a genealogical analysis of this development in Sweden since the end of the Cold War, highlighting the role now assigned to citizens within social and national security planning. I argue that seeking a return to a more traditional notion of ‘total defence’ blurs the previously important war/peace and crisis/security distinctions. While war preparedness in previous eras was an exceptional aspect of human life and citizenship, the conceptions of security now evolving bind together societal and national security such that civil and war preparedness are merged into an ever-present dimension of everyday existence. The analysis also reveals that the responsibilization of individuals introduces a moral dimension into security and generates new forms of citizen–citizen relations. These extricate the sovereign powers of the state and the liberalist social contract between the state and its citizens.

Neoliberalism, individual responsibilization and the death positivity movement

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the loosely defined death positivity movement. Death positivity presents itself as oppositional and liberating, gaining legitimacy by reference to the narratives of death taboo and death denial. I show how the movement encourages extending continuous, self-reflexive engagement in identity and lifestyle to dying and death, arguing that death positivity employs and advocates a particular enterprising culture and furthers a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibilization. To make my argument, I look more closely at the death-positive discourse as it is furthered by two North American initiatives in particular; Death Over Dinner as presented by its founder Michael Hebb in the 2018 book about the initiative, and selected videos published by Order of the Good Death, spearheaded by mortician, author and YouTube personality Caitlin Doughty.

‘There is a lot of good in knowing, but there is also a lot of downs’: public views on ethical considerations in population genomic screening

Publics are key stakeholders in population genomic screening and their perspectives on ethical considerations are relevant to programme design and policy making. Using semi-structured interviews, we explored social views and...

Entangled alternatives: political-economic conditions constructing farmer training programs as solutions to the farming crisis

This article contributes to debates about the potential of alternative food networks and their contradictions using sustainability-oriented farmer training programs as a case study. I provide an empirical account of the political-economic structures at play in the construction of farmer trainings as a solution to the farming crisis, as well as the possibilities and tensions herein. I argue that that the main rationale framing the farming problem in the public-institutional discourse – namely the apolitical production of a scarcity of farmers – and its discursive usage in popular and institutional circles directs the solution towards the urgent production of more farmers who will farm sustainably and independently of the current structural conditions in which farming is embedded. On the ground, this apolitical ecology is sustained by philanthropism and consumption elitism. In addition, the making of FTPs as an intervention to solve the farming crisis is determined by neoliberal governance structures that promote the devolution of power into the NGO sector and responsibilization of individuals. I finally call for a broader and non-binary vision to alternatives, in which political ecology perspectives bring relevant tools and insights. The case of FTPs throws light into the particular governmentalities, forms of governing at-a-distance, and whiteness associated with sustainable farming and agriculture, and the way society thinks of it.Keywords: farmer training programs, emergent farmers, sustainable agriculture, alternatives, alternative food networks, NGOization of farming, power, privilege, California

When the illiberal and the neoliberal meet around infectious diseases: an examination of the MERS response in South Korea

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates infectious disease mismanagement as a way of understanding the mixture of neoliberal and illiberal governance in public health. While acknowledging the significant role of neoliberalization in public health, we call for tracing geographies of illiberalism in relation to various actors, and through various scales and processes of governance, such as private power and state absence. Through a case study of the spread of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) throughout South Korea in 2015, this research demonstrates how neoliberal transformations in public health and illiberal practices of disease management allowed a severe outbreak of MERS, while being of benefit to a few private actors. In the MERS response, state absence via non-response such as cover-ups and censorship exacerbated state violence such as drastic quarantine and othering. Further, the South Korean government–chaebol nexus has profoundly privatized both disease management and public health, as well as intensified the responsibilization of individuals. By explaining how illiberal and neoliberal processes and particular actors came to matter in politics of infectious diseases in Korea, this paper contributes to the sociopolitical understanding of infectious diseases and public health in a mixture of authoritarianism and neoliberalism.

Uneasy Neoliberal Governance in a Low-Trust Society: Barriers to Responsibilisation in the Czech Republic

In our research, we examined how, if at all, a neoliberal responsibilisation of individuals is under way in the Czech Republic – a society characterised by low trust in its institutional system. Drawing on Giesler and Veresiu’s model of three-step consumer responsibilisation, we carried out a qualitative analysis of data generated primarily through an originally designed card-matching game and individual interviews, further complemented with field observation. The findings revealed that distrust in market institutions is generally a barrier to responsibilisation of citizens, leading to several kinds of semi-responsibilised subjectivities instead: restrained subjectivity, partially neoliberally responsibilised subjectivity, and economically responsibilised subjectivity. Lack of confidence in established institutions may effectively weaken or change the process of neoliberal responsibilisation of individuals, in particular in non-economic areas such as the environment, health, and social solidarity.

Socialist responsibilization: the government of risk factors for cardiovascular diseases in the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s

ABSTRACTThe article explores the importance of responsible self-government in a ‘non-liberal’ society. Drawing on governmentality and critical ability studies, it argues that the governmental technique of individual responsibilization usually associated with a (neo-)liberal social order constituted an important means of state-socialist rule as well. Furthermore, this article shows that applying such an analytical framework to the investigation of the German Democratic Republic’s government of cardiovascular diseases significantly enhances our understanding of power relations between the state and the individual. Cardiovascular diseases had become a major focus of health policy by the late 1960s. East Germany’s orientation toward the World Health Organization strongly favored the adoption of the risk factor approach originally developed by US epidemiological research. According to this paradigm that centered on individual behaviors as risk factors, health education campaigns sought to enable citizens to modify their self-conduct. Focusing on the problematization of too little physical activity, this article examines cardiovascular able-bodiedness as a norm and vanishing point of responsible self-government on the basis of a detailed analysis and contextualization of health education films. Finally, it argues that the performance of a successful government of individual risk factors was rewarded by increased recognition as a good and productive citizen as well as a ‘socialist personality.’

Responsibilization in contemporary Swedish crisis management: expanding ‘bare life’ biopolitics through exceptionalism and neoliberal governmentality

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to investigate the changing relations between individuals and public authorities within the Swedish crisis management system from 1995 to 2017. After the end of the Cold War, Sweden adopted a broader understanding of security that utilizes alternative governance strategies beyond sovereign means and focuses upon domestic security and the protection of vital systems. This has resulted in the emergence of collaborative arrangements involving public and private actors and as well as the extensive responsibilization of individuals. The latter has taken place since emergency and exceptionalism persist as vital concepts also in domestic security management. The present discussion argues that these two concepts restrict possibilities for democratizing security management and provides the means for harnessing the inclusion of volunteers while not granting them due voice in collaborative governance arrangements. However, responsibilization strategies include ‘activation’ which in turn may invoke critical agency and reflection as well as enable resistance toward the current apolitical notion of crisis management.

Neoliberal reform and family engagement in schools: An intersectional gender analysis

This article presents an exploration of the work of family engagement in a racially- and linguistically-diverse, high-poverty, urban school district in a state of continuous neoliberal reform. Drawing from qualitative research methods, it is argued that family engagement is being reshaped by the imperatives of educational neoliberalization while, at the same time, remaining out of touch with the needs and concerns of families who are racially stigmatized, linguistically diverse, and experiencing extreme economic insecurity. It is further argued that school personnel charged with family engagement carry out exploited, invisible, and emotional tasks that increase in quantity and intensity as the social safety net declines under neoliberalism. Applying an intersectional gender analysis of emotional labor and the re-privatization of social reproduction offers an illustration of how family engagement in neoliberal schools both exploits and reinforces hierarchies of race–class–gender while obscuring these processes through neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization.

Configuring climate responsibility in the city: carbon footprints and climate justice in Hong Kong

Climate action is increasingly marked by the responsibilisation of individuals. In this context, carbon footprints have gained traction as a means of both quantifying individual responsibility for climate change and for motivating individual action through changes in behaviour. However, these mechanisms raise questions for climate justice in terms of how such moral and political responsibility is configured and distributed within the city. Drawing on a case study of Hong Kong, this paper explores the ways in which carbon footprinting configures responsibility for climate action by juxtaposing carbon footprints and the associated techniques of quantification alongside a discussion of the everyday practices of residents in a low‐income neighbourhood. It argues that carbon footprints offer important opportunities for measuring the impacts of carbon‐intensive activities and generating discussions about the allocation of responsibility for addressing climate change. However, it also demonstrates that individual carbon footprints ignore the uneven nature of carbon emissions in cities as well as obscuring important questions about the roles and responsibilities of other actors. In conclusion, the paper calls for an approach centred on common but differentiated responsibilities for carbon production and consumption to enable a more nuanced configuration of climate justice in the city.