Search results for "Governmentality"
showing 10 items of 49 documents
Shaping subjects of globalisation: at the intersection of voluntourism and the new economy
2016
Volunteer tourism is one of the latest branches of the ever expanding globalised tourism. The initiative Workaway, an expression of this trend, was established in the late 90s with the aim of promoting “cultural understanding between different peoples and lands throughout the world”. The figure of the workawayer as a new cosmopolitan subjectivity started to take shape. With the growth of the tourism industry, the Workaway scheme has started to be of interest also to tourism entrepreneurs, especially in the global peripheries such as northern Lapland, home to the indigenous minority language community of the Sámi. By signing up as a volunteer in a heritage tourism resort, the workawayer, the…
“Languaging the worker : Globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”
2016
In the introduction to the special issue “Languaging the worker: globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”, we take up the notion of governmentality as a means to interrogate the complex relationship between language, labor, power and subjectivity in peripheral multilingual spaces. Our aim here is to argue for the study of governmentality as a viable and growing approach in critical sociolinguistic research. As such, in this introduction, we first discuss key concepts germane to our interrogations, including the notions of governmentality, languaging, peripherality and language worker. We proceed to map out five ethnographically and discourse-analytically informed ca…
Internet-based Mental Health Services in Norway and Sweden: Characteristics and Consequences
2011
Published version of an article in the journal: Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10488-011-0388-2 Internet-based mental health services increase rapidly. However, national surveys are incomplete and the consequences for such services are poorly discussed. This study describes characteristics of 60 Internet-based mental health services in Norway and Sweden and discusses their social consequences. More than half of the services were offered by voluntary organisations and targeted towards young people. Professionals answered service users’ questions in 60% of the services. Eight majo…
Contesting Family in Finnish and Canadian Immigration and Refugee Policy
2012
Adopting a governmentality perspective, this article explores the multi-conceptuality of family in Finnish and Canadian immigration and refugee policy domains by analyzing official and political discourse. Contestation is found to typically manifest as conflict between Western ‘nuclear’ and non-Western ‘extended’ understandings of family. We argue that family is persistent in immigration and refugee policies of both countries because it continues to be thought of as an effective tool for biopolitical governance of national populations. A closer reading of the contestation over family also reveals competing neoliberal and neoconservative governmental rationalities situated within broader int…
Liberalism, Governmentality and Counter-Conduct; An Introduction to Foucauldian Analytics of Liberal Civil Society Notions
2015
This article gives an analysis of Foucault’s studies of civil society and the various liberalist critiques of government. It follows from Foucault’s genealogical approach that “civil society” does not in itself possess any form of transcendental existence; its historical reality must be seen as the result of the productive nature of the power-knowledge-matrices. Foucault emphasizes that modern governmentality—and more specifically the procedures he names “the conduct of conduct”—is not exercised through coercive power and domination, but is dependent on the freedom and activeness of individuals and groups of society. Civil society is thus analyzed as fundamentally ambivalent: on the one han…
Resilience, security and the politics of processes
2014
The prominence of resilience thinking in contemporary governance and security policies has received increasing critical attention. By engaging in dialogue with some of these recent critiques, predominantly leaning on biopolitics or neoliberal governmentality, this article develops an Arendtian reading of resilience as a temporal regime of processuality. Originating from life sciences such as ecology and complexity thinking, the increasingly malleable resilience discourse privileges the functioning of societal life processes over political action and human artifice. The article argues that this ‘rule of nobody’ is in danger of suffocating the concept of public space, so crucial for politics …
‘To Make a People Out of a Mere Population’: Sovereignty and Governmentality in Hegemonic Russian Cultural Policy
2022
Abstract The paper claims that contemporary Russian cultural policy has been determined by political transformations associated with the political project to establish sovereignty that has organized Putin’s regime since 2012. The idea behind it is traced to Putin’s 2006 intention ‘to make a people out of a mere population’. To understand that intention, and to explain the contribution of culture and cultural policy to its concretization, the paper draws on Foucault’s account of sovereignty and governmentality, and the development of the Gramscian notion of hegemony. The paper argues that Putin’s regime uses governmentality in its hegemonic project to establish sovereignty. To describe that …
Crítica de la economía biopolítica : dimensiones políticas del pensamiento médico / Criticism of the biopolitical Economics: political dimensions of …
2017
Resumen: El presente artículo efectúa un recorrido por distintas de las problemáticas entrelazadas que, en las investigaciones foucaultianas, atraviesan la historia de la medicina y la configuración de la gubernamentalidad biopolítica. En el momento en que la gestión de la población y el paradigma de la seguridad se hibridan con un “pensamiento médico que, más allá de los límites de la propia disciplina, constituye un razonamiento en base a lo normal y lo patológico, este va a funcionar en el seno de todo un conjunto de políticas que, desde la constitución y crisis del Estado del Bienestar a las problemáticas relaciones con las ciencias jurídicas, sitúan la cuestión de la salud, el cuerpo y…
Psychology and Management of the Workforce in Post-Stalinist Hungary
2019
Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal…
Neutral experts or passionate participants? Renegotiating expertise and the right to act in Finnish participatory social policy
2018
This article examines a case of participatory social policy in which former beneficiaries were invited as ‘experts-by-experience’ into Finnish social welfare organisations. It combines a governmentality perspective with the analytical tools of the sociology of engagements to explore as what the projects’ participants are engaged, and how the differing demands made on their ways of being are made to appear as legitimate. The article shows how different definitions of expertise are used to steer the participants’ forms of engagement, and how these definitions appear valid only within a specific frame of justifying civic participation. It concludes that the participants’ expertise is defined i…