Government Studies Research Articles

Emotion regulation as affective neoliberal governmentality.

Emotion regulation is central in many therapy models, including couple and family therapy models. This article draws on poststructuralist governmentality studies and processual affect theory to offer insight into how the therapeutic concept of emotion regulation may reflect and support neoliberal affective forms of self-governance. We suggest that couple and family therapy-through using professional discourses and affect-oriented techniques or interventions-may be another site wherein neoliberal governmentality is implemented and extended in contemporary westernized neoliberalized societies. In facilitating emotion regulation, we argue that there is a risk that therapists may implicitly promote a neoliberal worldview that encourages clients to mobilize neoliberal techniques to become self-improving, entrepreneurial subjects, responsible for their happiness and well-being. Conditions of precarity associated with individualist, neoliberal capitalist ideologies and policies (e.g., unemployment, job insecurity, forced migration, wealth inequalities, mass incarceration, social isolation) generate emotional burdens for people to manage that professional techniques or interventions may normalize as clients' self-management tasks. We theorize emotion regulation as an affective governmentality tactic of power and suggest that couple and family therapy can offer points of resistance to individualization and responsibilization and opportunities for creating or affirming alternative subjectivities and affectivities.

Sexuality Education Between Biopolitics and Psychopolitics: A Critical Inquiry into Chile’s Youth Friendly Spaces Program

This paper analyzes the population management logics present in the YFS framework, delving into its power dynamics, prioritization processes, and the (in)visibility of themes that influence its configuration and outcomes. Through a Governmentality Studies lens, it analyses the program’s shift from biopolitical to psychopolitical rationalities. A qualitative document analysis of 43 documents reveals the program’s strategies in addressing youth sexuality: the translation of youth sexuality, the identification of social determinants, the execution of extitutional action, and the fostering of participation as competence. These findings illustrate a sophisticated governance of sexuality education, leveraging psychopolitical tactics for nuanced youth engagement, emphasizing accountability, and fostering skill development. The analysis underscores the significance of evolving sexuality education practices toward more inclusive and adaptable approaches.

Sabotaging ordoliberal communitarianism: for a critical discursive political economy of ‘the local community’ in neoliberal Europe

The commentary aims to provoke a discussion in Critical Political Economy (CPE) about local articulations of neoliberalism, proposing the concept of ordoliberal communitarianism as a theoretical practice to sabotage the hegemonic essentialisation of ‘the local community’ within the context of EU neoliberal constitutionalism. This conceptual proposal is a plea to critical scholars who assume a pre-existing local community to instead enquire from whom, how and why the necessity of appealing to ‘the local community’ emerges to strategically essentialise socio-historically contingent political forms. To support this argument, I first discuss the relationship between ‘the community’ and the global political economy by combining sociology of knowledge, CPE and governmentality studies. This discussion leads to a consideration of ordoliberal communitarianism as produced by and through dominant institutions and translating hegemonic concepts in and through local contexts. As an indicative case emerging from research on the interpellation of local communities in the current Italian competitive strategy, I offer some notes for a history of Italian ordoliberal communitarianism as a transnational socio-historical experience to investigate the formation of local developmental coalitions led by EU governance. The commentary concludes by recalling the role of critical scholars in semantically sabotaging the hegemonic essentialisation of ‘the local community’.

The Concept of Authoritarian Governmentality Today

ABSTRACT The paper examines “authoritarian governmentality”. It argues that there are salient differences between the contemporary intellectual and political context and those of the 1990s when it was first developed. Chief among these is the confidence by which we can approach liberal governing itself as the norm of contemporary governmentality. The first wave of governmentality studies identified authoritarian governmentality in both non-liberal regimes and in the consequences of liberalism’s norm of the self-responsible subject and its governing through civil society. This paper extends these observations: first by proposing an analysis of the kinds of order that different rationalities and technologies invoke, and secondly, by arguing for the linking of an analytics of government to both the practical capacities of sovereignty and the practices through which supreme authority is constituted. While liberal and authoritarian governmentalities are far from mutually exclusive, the absent concept of authority helps clarify what is at issue.

New urban spaces under Modi’s digital India – digitization of urban governance and state-citizen relationship

Few studies have examined how Indian ULBs have responded to the government’s informationization agenda, particularly the use of geospatial technologies for urban governance. Drawing upon insights from Critical GIS, neoliberalization and governmentality studies, this article addresses this gap by examining the case of Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) and the evolution of their modernization efforts that have progressed from office automation practices to active use of GIS technology for urban governance. SMC’s regional and political environment have favored their modernization efforts. However, as ULBs are expected to manage a diverse urban population and shoulder responsibilities with fewer resources they must adapt. Surat Municipal Corporation has adapted by aligning local political agenda with national agenda and adopting a strategy that echoes the dominant political discourse of utilizing technology to govern from a distance and as a modality of biopolitics. Use of geospatial technologies serves as an important tool for the ULB to introduce new modes of bureaucratic governmentality.

Free Milieus, Creative People: An Investigation of Creative City Policy in Istanbul from the Perspective of Governmentality

This paper analyzes the creative city policy for Istanbul, which has recently become a popular throughout the world. Cities are expected to be creative milieus that foster free circulation of people, ideas, and interactions for economic growth, global competitiveness, and social development. Drawing on Foucault and governmentality studies, this paper first argues that the creative city policy is a neoliberal political rationality that seeks to stimulate individuals' creative capacities through structuring urban space. Neoliberalism includes the de-governmentalization of state and the active participation of non-state actors in the governing processes. Second, using examples from street gentrification, industrial heritage re-functioning, and co-working spaces in Istanbul, this paper dissects how creativity, freedom, and economic growth intersect in urban space and how a broad coalition of political parties, state agencies, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, small-scale cultural entrepreneurs, and creative professionals have been formed around the creative city. As a result, creative city policy is a form of governmentality that includes official documents as well as spatial strategies of a heterogeneous coalition of state and non-state actors.

‘Because of People Like You…’: Banal Politics in the Making of the Pandemic Governmentality in Italy

At first sight, social media comments seem to be the place where anti-vaxxer discourse and mocking regularly occurred during the global pandemic. Based on an exploratory analysis of comments that were published on the social media account of the Italian Department of Civil Protection from February 2020 to December 2021, this paper argues that social media comments can also help to detect the subjectivity augured by discourses of COVID19 crisis management: the responsible subject. Drawing on governmentality studies and a social semiotic understanding of social media comments as ‘banal politics’, this paper discusses the reconfiguration of the political during and beyond the global pandemic. It looks at the reconstitution of a new political subject that emerged throughout the COVID19 crisis: the responsible, a subject who does not limit herself to following the governmental rules but also reproduces and enforces them on a molecular communication scale.

Audit marketing system: an analysis of the roles of trust, based on macromarketing and governmentality studies

Resumo O presente ensaio traz uma análise a respeito da confiança e das relações de poder no sistema de mercado de auditoria. Utilizando a teoria do macromarketing sobre sistemas de mercado e os estudos sociológicos sobre governamentalidade, analisa o papel da confiança como técnica de governamentalidade, mecanismo social e objeto de mercado. O contexto do fenômeno se verifica nos serviços ofertados pelas empresas de auditoria, com ênfase nos demonstrativos contábeis, que geram confiança nos mercados e, dessa forma, interferem nos processos estratégicos e na modelagem dos sistemas de mercado. Estratégica nas relações de poder nos sistemas de mercado, a confiança perpassa o fator intrínseco de mecanismo social e se torna um escasso instrumento para a governança dos sistemas, transformando-se num atributo de estimado valor no mercado. Por fim, espera-se que as contribuições dos distintos papéis da confiança sejam relevantes para outros estudos no campo do macromarketing.

A situated governmentality approach to energy transitions: technologies of power in German and Indian smart grid strategies

Abstract. Around the world, smart grids are emerging as a universal tool to address a wide range of social and technical problems facing energy systems. Despite considerable research on these systems, the ways they differ in the local (re)production of power relations have so far been little discussed. This paper fills this gap by developing a “situated governmentality approach” in conversation with the critique of Foucauldian governmentality studies. By applying this approach to smart grid strategies in Germany (Smart Energy Showcases – Digital Agenda for the Energiewende, SINTEG) and India (National Smart Grid Mission, NSGM), we identify different ways in which power is mediated through situated governmentalities. While SINTEG employs technologies of power that promote a disciplinary regime, the exercise of power in the case of the NSGM displays many elements of a digitally enhanced sovereign approach. The findings reveal the range of governmental programmes that can be realized through smart grids and open up a perspective on the situated functioning of smart grids in energy transitions.

Beyond surface diversity: Unmasking the flaws of Multicultural education in the Afro-Colombian curriculum

In this study, I critically examine the Afro-Colombian ethno-educational curriculum, exploring its conception of multiculturality, pedagogical practice, and knowledge production. Utilizing Iterative Critical Discourse Analysis, the study investigates the 2006 “Curriculum Guidelines for Afro-Colombian Studies.” It reveals that despite its advances in addressing some of the issues of the multicultural question in Colombia, the curriculum is marred by essentialism, a celebratory approach, and Eurocentric biases that undermine the liberatory purpose of this multicultural approach to education in the country. These flaws reflect a superficial representation of Multicultural Education, perpetuating neoliberal mechanisms of domination and failing to challenge prevailing power structures adequately. This paper posits the necessity to re-envision ethno-education in light of these findings, recommending incorporating Culturally Responsive Teaching, promoting self-reflexivity in the classroom, and developing Third Spaces for a more robust and transformative approach to Multicultural Education in Colombia. The study is theoretically grounded on Critical Multicultural Education and postcolonial and governmentality studies.

Staying in the Game: Activation, Vigilance, and Normalization of Emergency Calls in Austria

Influential accounts of vigilance and lateral surveillance assume that the shift from centralized to more dispersed, governmental forms of surveillance is driven by postmodern tendencies towards an almost unlimited proliferation of suspicion and surveillance. In contrast to former research, this analysis of Austrian public discourse on police emergency services highlights attempts to control, limit, and normalize civil vigilance. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of governmentality studies, the paper shows that emergency services are a paradigmatic field for the analysis of participatory surveillance because they align interventionist police power with people’s security activities. With the proliferation of an activation paradigm in Austrian policing their role shifts significantly. In this paradigm, a double-sided responsibilization and mobilization of citizens and police is propagated. On one side, active vigilance is discursively promoted to link local subjective awareness of anomalies and (dis)order with rapid police response. On the other side, in a phase of intense criticism, emergency services are subject to reconfigurations themselves: preemptive interventions, a normalization of response time, efficiency-oriented reorganization of its structure, and their application for the management of police resources and forces. However, it is shown that vigilance and response are always controlled, for example, by public rejections of particular kinds of hypervigilant activities. Emergency service discourse not only fosters but also limits vigilance. Therefore, normalization of oversteering hypervigilance points to paradoxes of governmental practices of activation in crime control.

Naming the city: on the governing forces of narratives in the formation of security dispositifs

ABSTRACT Narratives, it is often said, help us make sense of the world. They structure reality and reduce complexity. Yet narratives, we argue, are also visionary. They open up worlds, they allow us to imagine alternative realities and render a matter urgent. In our study of counterterrorism exercises for the German police we examine the ‘governing forces’ of narratives: Narratives help to connect the dots and create a sense of how new forms of terrorism have entered urban life, thus making new forms of security responses seem indispensable. They also help bring the police trainees close to the realness of a threat as well as of the training situation. ‘Naming the city’ where terror attacks have happened works like a vehicle that transports the experience. Bringing approaches of narrative criminology into dialogue with studies of governmentality allows us to capture the forms of subjectivity that the trainings produce. Rather than a top-down endeavour of the state, security is better understood in how it is put into practice – and how the unforeseeable is meant to be embodied.

STUDY OF TRENDS IN THE ETIOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF NOSOCOMIAL INFECTIONS BEFORE AND DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN THE RUSE REGION FOR 2017-2021

The most important and very difficult thing is to establish the cause (etiology) for the occurrence of nosocomial infections in medical facilities in the country and the world. Objective: To study the frequency and structure of nosocomial infections before and during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Ruse region for 2017-2021. Materials and methods: A retrospective analysis of the data on the registered nosocomial infections for a period of five years (2017 - 2021), reports, analyses, and laboratory studies of Regional Health Inspectorate Ruse, from national governmental studies, normative documents and literature are applied. Results: The analysis of the data from the etiological diagnosis of nosocomial infections in the Ruse region is from 9 medical facilities included in the national electronic system for the control of nosocomial infections (NIs). The etiological structure of NIs in the Ruse region is represented by 39 microbial species. The relative share of the untested varies from 10.59% in 2017 to 15.75% in 2021. For the etiologically unproven, it is from 2.39% for 2019 to 1.68% for 2021, with a decreasing trend. Conclusions: The analysis of the isolated microbial species by group shows that for the entire period, the proportion of gram-negative flora was 62% of the isolates (2017), followed by 23.02% of gram-positive microorganisms (2017), and the relative proportion of fungi and viruses was ~ 3 %.

Sustaining Significance of Confessional Form: Taking Foucault to Attitudinal Research

This paper offers a conceptual reconstruction and empirical case study of an often-eclipsed concept of Michel Foucault’s genealogical project, confession. Departing from Foucault’s dictum that his core research interest rests in the experience of the subject, I argue that, without a detailed understanding of diverse modalities of the confessional form, various subjectivation processes and epistemological procedures could not be fully grasped. In the first part, I systematise Foucault’s incoherent confessional account against the backdrop of his entangled genealogies of modern man and the human sciences. Subsequently, I introduce a case study of a quantitative attitudinal survey based on face-to-face interviews to test Foucault’s model of confession in present-day circumstances and demonstrate its sustaining analytical significance by disclosing the cognitive technique of coding behaviour. Thus far, governmentality studies have confronted positivistic methods in social sciences to display their objectifying functions. In contrast, I use the technique of coding behaviour to immerse into these scientific practices. Such a perspective delivers a fine-grained exposure of epistemological strategies in social sciences that are enabled by the appropriation of the confessional model and that constitute subjective identities on an individual and mass scale.

Governing the Extraterritorial: Global Environmentalities of China’s Green Belt and Road Initiative

This article proposes a global environmentality framework to critique efforts to “green” the Belt and Road Initiative (or Green BRI) by examining the Chinese state’s environmental governance of extraterritorial spaces. The article transcends a focus within governmentality studies on domestic processes to reveal the relations between governance techniques and environmental subjects, including state and nonstate actors, beyond sovereign borders. Drawing on interviews, observations, and analysis of policies and reports, we identify three ways in which global environmentalities operate and are negotiated through the Green BRI. First, the Chinese state is embracing international sustainable development criteria to gain global legitimacy while seeking to export its domestic environmental governance model, making the Green BRI a dialectic policy. Second, the state is targeting and disciplining BRI participants, including Chinese financial institutions, construction companies, the renewable industry, and foreign state actors in BRI countries. Third, Chinese and BRI partner country participants’ variegated subjectivities arise out of the negotiation of their own interests, Chinese state interests, and BRI host country concerns. Our analysis contributes to understanding of how China, as a rising power, engages in global environmental governance and produces extraterritorial environmental subjects.

Children’s technologies of the self within neoliberal governmentality at the educational transition to Gymnasium in Zurich

ABSTRACT Over the last two decades, research in children’s geographies and governmentality studies have contributed significantly to the study of children’s experiences in neoliberal educational contexts. This paper furthers this debate by examining the ways children govern and are governed within the neoliberal governmentality at the educational transition to Gymnasium: the only school that offers a direct path to university education within the state-funded school system in Switzerland. Drawing on an ethnography with eight students aged 13–15 during their preparation for the selective entrance examination to Gymnasium in Zurich, this article makes two points: Firstly, it demonstrates how Zurich’s education system thrusts students into taking individual responsibility for their educational success at this transition. Secondly, the article draws on Foucault’s later work to explore the particular ‘technologies of the self’ that children adopt coping with this individualized responsibility. This paper argues that these technologies reveal insights into the neoliberal governmentality of this educational transition. Finally, the article argues to critically examine children’s technologies of the self to understand their relationships with the education systems they navigate. This line of inquiry serves as a pathway to answer and expand earlier calls to grant children an active voice in research on education.

The anatomo-politics of affect: An investigation of affective governmentality

The present inquiry concerns ‘affective governmentality’ and is guided by the following question: How did affects become intelligible objects of knowledge and what enabled a scientific conception of affect to turn into a distinctive government of affect? In answering this question, the article first outlines how a lineage of thinkers used the speculative tools of geometry to conceptualize and deduce human affects. Through an analysis of Spinoza’s Political Treatise, the article then investigates how this geometric conception of affect enabled a productive and indirect government of affect. The article’s contribution to the study of affective governmentality is twofold: First, it advances the methodological claim that the proper register to study affects in governmentality is anatomo-political rather than biopolitical. Second, the analysis of the Political Treatise exemplifies, nuances and substantiates our understanding of how desires and affects were reconceptualized geometrically to conceive a government of bodies and souls.

Use of positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) scan in cancer patients: A single Canadian academic oncology center experience.

e18691 Background: PET-CT scan is key tool in the diagnosis and follow up of cancer patients. In 2017, a governmental study demonstrated that the use of PET-CT scans in the province of Quebec, Canada was two times more elevated than other Canadian provinces, and similar to the United States (507 vs 510 PET-CT scans per 100,000 persons, respectively). In Quebec, the governmental agency Institut national d’excellence en santé et en services sociaux (INESSS) published recommendations for judicious use of PET-CT scans, derived from evidence-based literature and publications from international oncology societies . We sought to evaluate the use of PET-CT scans in our institution with regards to INESSS guidelines. Methods: A total of 1561 PET-CT scans were performed for oncologic purposes at the CHUM between September 1st and November 30th 2019. TEP-CT scans from patients under 18 years of age or who were not followed at our center were excluded. 975 PET-CT scans respected our criteria. We reviewed disease and clinical characteristics of patients, adherence to 2017 INESSS guidelines, imaging indication (staging, response to treatment, or follow up), and type of specialties requesting the exam. Results: Oncologic PET-CT scans were most frequently prescribed by surgeons (39%), followed by oncologists (29%) and radiation-oncologists (12%). 530 (54%) PET-CT scans followed guidelines, 377 (39%) did not, and 68 (7%) were not included in INESSS guidelines. Adherence to guidelines was similar between oncologists and surgeons (54% and 53%, respectively). PET-CT scans ordered by radiation-oncologists followed guidelines in 67% of cases. Lung (29%), breast (19%), and gastro-intestinal cancers (16%) were the sites for which the exam was most requested. Whereas 77% of PET-CT scans requested for lung cancer followed guidelines, only 17% of breast cancer PET-CT scans did. Misuse of this imaging tool was also observed in the investigation of cancer of unknown origin, where only 17% of ordered PET-CT scans followed guidelines. Conclusions: In our institution, 39% of PET-CT scans prescription did not follow guidelines. Variability in adherence to guidelines was significantly more noticeable between primary cancer sites compared to types of specialties requesting the exam. To avoid wasting of resources, we advocate for respecting guidelines and discussing in tumor-boards the off-label use of PET-CT scans. Judicious use of PET-CT scans is particularly important in a public health system for appropriate allocation of resources.

Policing the In/Exclusion of Social Marginality: The Preventive Regulation of Public Space in Urban Switzerland

Urban spaces are always contested and, as such, permeated by processes of inclusion and exclusion. Since the 2000s, new types of governmental public order services have been established in Switzerland specialized in dealing with socially marginalized individuals, groups, or areas. Without having police powers, they proceed with socio‐communicative methods typical in outreach social work. Based on our ethnographic research and drawing on Foucault‐inspired governmentality studies we elucidate the socio‐preventive risk management of two types of order services: While the welfare type aims to protect public spaces of attractive urban centers from social marginality, the neighborhood watch type is concerned with improving the coexistence of residents of marginalized housing developments. As the former wants to keep socio‐spatial in/exclusion of social marginality in motion and prevent its fixation in certain places, the latter works towards the inclusive socio‐spatial entrenchment of residents in segregated housing developments. Both dynamics—inclusion and exclusion—are closely intertwined and utilized for the governance of public spaces. The “inclusive city” should not be celebrated as a dull ideal and must be confronted with its own socio‐spatial mechanisms of exclusion.

Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst “Failed” Governmentality in Burma and India

AbstractIn part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were “reified” and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing “reification” through the concept of governmentality to distinguish modes of regulation and the kinds of social responses incited, suggesting that India and Burma stand as respective exemplars of distinct governmental forms. Specifically, scholarship represents Indian population groups (of caste, tribe, ethnicity, etc. permutations) as being reified by dense and reinforcing applications of knowledge/power. Even when these various and interlinking regulatory apparatuses “fail” to accurately describe social reality, they interpellate a response from subject populations, a process that operates to dialectically reinforce the categories. Conversely, similar governmental apparatuses desultorily implemented in Burma have operated differently. While they have succeeded in making South Asian and Muslim subjects into Burma’s self-perceived constitutive outside, governmentality has “doubly failed” on itstaingyintha(indigenous) subjects. Poor knowledge of these Burmese peoples has foreclosed intensive projects of knowledge production, leading to “misinterpellation,” a form of metapragmatic awareness in which subjects recognize that discourses misdescribe them, and then strategically maneuver with(in) those labels. Ethnic emblems become hollow integuments navigable with comparative ease, as individuals modify their particular bodily and dispositional indices. The article concludes by encouraging comparative postcolonial governmentality studies that would delineate particularities in a concept (governmentality) that often remains unnuanced.