Search results for "mentality"
showing 10 items of 62 documents
‘Full power despite stress’: A discourse analytical examination of the interconnectedness of postfeminism and neoliberalism in the domain of work in …
2013
Stories and images of successful career women and support for women’s advancement in working life have become hallmarks of contemporary postfeminist media culture, and especially of women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan. While in previous research these features have been seen as signs for a new, popular feminism, more recently they have also been connected to the growing hegemony of neoliberal governance, a mode of power that ultimately aims at the economization of the social and is fundamentally exercised in and through discourse. The aim of this article is to investigate further the interconnectedness of these two phenomena, postfeminism and neoliberalism, in the domain of work, using …
Foucault, pastoral power, and optics
2015
The article shows that in Foucault’s late 1970s and early 1980s analyses of pastoral, conductive power—most essentially in early and medieval Christianity—the issue of sight and visual perception recurs and occupies a crucial status. In Foucault’s discussion, these Christian relations of power, knowledge, and truth are attached with a surveying gaze that is both totalizing as well as individualizing, one that is mobilized by the thrust towards perfect visibility, transparency, and illumination of the subject turned into an object. The intention is also to develop Foucault’s analysis further, by demonstrating how Christian, providential government can be and actually has been detached from …
Sources of governmentality
2012
The article scrutinizes Michel Foucault’s interpretation of Machiavelli in his famous lecture on governmentality. Foucault is slightly misguided in his search for the origins of governmentality, the article asserts. Foucault gives credit for the development of what he calls a new art of government to anti-Machiavellian treatises, but also follows those treatises in their distorted interpretation of Machiavelli. Consequently, Foucault’s analysis gets confused and regards as novel those arguments and developments that were essentially of ancient pedigree compared with Machiavelli’s ideas. The article discusses especially two points in Foucault’s interpretation of Machiavelli: Foucault’s insi…
Afterword [part 2]: governing bodies and minds
2019
This brief comment is intended to provide some remarks on the possibility of placing the particular entanglements of ‘bodies and minds’ presented in this special issue of History of Education in a ...
Governmentality through translation and sense-making
2015
Public education governance is currently subject to change in the Nordic countries because regulations, norms and values are changing. This in turn has transformed structures and positions and has thus compelled agents to change their behaviour, mindset and identity.
Language, (em)power(ment) and affective capitalism : the case of an entrepreneurship workshop for refugees in Germany
2022
Abstract This paper seeks to advance research on the nexus of language, work-related training and affective capitalism by focusing on an entrepreneurship workshop organized for newly arrived refugees in Germany. Despite the occupational orientation, the primary objective of the workshop was not establishing a business but “empowering” the participants by guiding them to adopt “an entrepreneurial mindset”. To delve deeper into this ‘will to empower’, the study brings together the perspectives of governmentality studies, ethnography, discourse studies and affect studies. To investigate in more detail the evocation of the ‘entrepreneurial mindset’, the study draws on ethnographic data collecte…
Basel Bank Limiting Policies as Foucauldian Power/Knowledge: Risk as Assemblages, The Case of Basel Bank Limiting Policies as Discourses
2023
I intend to write about Basel bank's limiting technologies from the point of view of trust, coming from the fact that banks have to adjust their risk understanding tools and test them constantly. It is not always known what exactly causes a risk. I am interested in risk-understanding technologies which do not govern this in advance but only require passing certain risk tests. Therefore, I will research the idea of Basel’s bank limiting technologies as assemblages that want connections only with other specified assemblages. For example, certain risk levels must be adjusted to form a harmonious whole that passes these tests. I will argue that by understanding Basel’s bank limiting technologie…
Believing in Hidden Plots is Associated with Decreased Behavioral Trust: Conspiracy Belief as Greater Sensitivity to Social Threat or Insensitivity T…
2022
Abstract Past research has demonstrated that conspiracy belief is linked to a low level of self-reported general trust. In four experimental online studies (total N = 1105) we examined whether this relationship translated into actual behavior. Specifically, since the decision to trust relies on the ability to detect potential social threat, we tested whether conspiracy believers are better at detecting actual threat, worse at detecting the absence of threat, or simply trust less, irrespective of any social cue. To this end, participants played multiple, independent rounds of the trust game, a behavioral measure for interpersonal trust. We manipulated social threat by presenting photographs …
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…
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 …