Governing social practice

In this article, we extend the concept of technology beyond the conventional understanding of systems and artifacts as embodiments of particular functionalities that are variously enacted in local settings. Technological artifacts or systems epitomize operational couplings that extend beyond the human-technology interface. Such couplings entail multiple, unobtrusive, back-staged links that evade human interpretation yet are critically involved in the reproduction and control of social relations. Cast in this light, technologies emerge as complex rationalized embodiments for structuring social relationships and, in this quality, complement and occasionally compete with institutional modes of governance. We explore these ideas in the empirical context of cultural memory organizations (e.g., libraries, archives, museums). As the outcome of the technological developments that have marked the field over the last two decades, the operations of memory institutions increasingly mingle with those of information aggregators and search engines. These developments reframe longstanding professional practices of memory organizations and, in this process, challenge their institutional mandate.     

Governing multicultural populations and family life

Shortly after coming to power in Britain, the Conservative–Liberal Democratic alliance placed family life at the heart of their political agenda, and set out their plans to reform adoption. The paper draws upon debates about the reforms and considers them in articulation with concerns about health of the nation expressed in political pronouncements on ‘broken Britain’ and the failures of ‘state multiculturalism’. The paper considers the debates about domestic (transracial) and intercountry adoption, and uses feminist postcolonial perspectives to argue that we can only understand what are expressed as national issues within a transnational and postcolonial framework which illuminate the processes of state and institutional race‐making. The paper analyses three key instances of biopower and governmentality in the adoption debates: the population, the normalizing family and the individual. The paper argues that we need to understand the reforms as part of a wider concern with the ‘problem’ of multicultural belonging, and that the interlocking discourses of nation, family and identities are crucial to the constitution and regulation of gendered, racialized subjects.     

Governing Women's Capabilities in China's Urban Expansion

By the middle of the twenty-first century, China's urban population is likely to have grown by about 500 million, to more than 1.1 billion people. This article applies Amartya Sen's concept of capabilities to explore how the government of urban expansion is affecting the generation of rural women whose villages currently are being enclosed by cities and towns. Drawing on interviews, press reports and government and Women's Federation documents from Zhejiang province, it illustrates how local governments' economic growth strategies hinge, in part, on reconstructing gendered relations in the spatial organization, civic management, production and social reproduction in new metropolitan sites. The article concludes, first, that unless China's leaders commit to involving rural women's representatives in urban planning and management, enforcing women's rights to property and enabling women to decide whether and when to work and retire, the capabilities of this generation of rural women will expand little; and, second, that Sen's concept overlooks organizational and material conditions that are necessary for women to enhance their capabilities.     

Governing the transnational organic cotton network from Benin

In this article, we attempt to conceptualize the historical development and the governance structure of the transnational organic cotton network from Benin. We aim to discover how the organic cotton production‐consumption network is governed locally and internationally. Existing bodies of literature on international agricultural production networks, in particular the Global Value Chains (GVC) perspective, focus on economic dimensions, but find it difficult to incorporate the sustainability dimension. We favour widening the concept of GVCs beyond economics by acknowledging and including environmental rationalities and the representatives of their interests, not as external elements, but rather as co‐governing or co‐structuring factors (or actors) of sustainable value chains. Our findings reveal that beyond the traditional producer versus buyer dualism, intermediate stakeholders, namely transnational and local environmental NGO networks, are instrumental in the construction, maintenance and transformation of the organic cotton network. It is also apparent that farmers' leaders play an important role in mediating and (re)building trust among organic farmers, though they exert insufficient vertical power in the organic cotton network to control it.     

Governing police practice: limits of the new accountability

The advent of public-sector managerialism has brought with it a new principle of police accountability in Western democracies such as Australia and Britain. The new accountability gives emphasis to managerial rather than legal or public-interest standards, favours external oversight combined with self-regulation rather than centralized control, and promotes risk management rather than rule enforcement. This article makes use of the experience of an Australian police force to show that the new accountability has not been successful in holding police accountable, while elements of the old accountability have re-emerged to dominate public debates. It is argued that in the area of police governance, the neo-liberal state does not necessarily pursue a coherent strategy of 'acting at a distance' (cf. Miller and Rose 1990), partly because of the inability of accountability technologies to deliver substantially the promised policy outcomes and partly because of the sensitivity of its political arm to the public's moral outrage against corruption (cf. Garland 1996).     

Governing Ebola: between global health and medical humanitarianism

Medical humanitarianism and global health are two distinct but co-dependent spheres of global health security. Their actors differ in their units of analysis, understanding of neutrality, and organizational capacities. While health underpins the normative principles of humanitarian action, humanitarian ideas, and notably medical humanitarian organizations, are absent from global health security planning. This article develops the work of Lakoff [‘Two regimes of global health’, Humanity, 1(1), 59–79 (2010)], distinguishing between these two governance spheres and how this had stark consequences in the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone, framed as a problem of global health but which rapidly became a humanitarian crisis. Such a frame excluded medical humanitarian organizations from the initial global strategy and resulted in the creation of a new organization (UMMEER – United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response) and the involvement of militaries to bridge the health-humanitarian divide. Reconciling the distinct but co-dependent relationship between medical humanitarianism and global health is fundamental to effective delivery of global health security.     

Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime

Over the past two decades multinational corporations have been expanding ‘ethical’ audit programs with the stated aim of reducing the risk of sourcing from suppliers with poor practices. A wave of government regulation—such as the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act (2012) and the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015)—has enhanced the legitimacy of auditing as a tool to govern labor and environmental standards in global supply chains, backed by a broad range of civil society actors championing audits as a way of promoting corporate accountability. The growing adoption of auditing as a governance tool is a puzzling trend, given two decades of evidence that audit programs generally fail to detect or correct labor and environmental problems in global supply chains. Drawing on original field research, this article shows that in spite of its growing legitimacy and traction among government and civil society actors, the audit regime continues to respond to and protect industry commercial interests. Conceptually, the article challenges prevailing characterizations of the audit regime as a technical, neutral, and benign tool of supply chain governance, and highlights its embeddedness in struggles over the legitimacy and effectiveness of the industry-led privatization of global governance.     

Governing Sleepiness: Somnolent Bodies, Discourse, and Liquid Modernity

This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person's responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate condition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”     

Governing and managing higher education institutions: The quality audit contributions

This paper aims to evaluate the role and effects of national accreditation practices in the improvement and development of the Omani private higher educational institutions in term of Governance and Management. A documental collection, revision and analysis was performed in order to enhance our understandings of the impact of quality audit in terms of Governance and Management. The study focused on analysing the quality audit reports of 25 assessed Omani HEIs. It covered published reports of all private institutions who already completed the first stage of national accreditation process. From one side, the data analysis showed us that the majority of the Omani private higher education institutions operate their activities without having a clear strategic direction. Also, they don’t have performant governance and management systems. From another side, a progress was observed in terms of institutional Affiliations for Programs and Quality Assurance, Student’s grievance processes and Health and Safety management. Among other things, the findings revealed that the Omani HEIs perceive quality assessment programs as strategical imposed tool made under the constraint of accountability, rather than an effective mechanism of development.     

Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics

This article presents an analysis of the Canadian ethics review process by a member of a Research Ethics Board. The author suggests that the new formal system for regulating the ethical conduct of scholarly research is experiencing a form of ethics creep. This is characterized by a dual process whereby the regulatory system is expanding outward to incorporate a host of new activities and institutions, while at the same time intensifying the regulation of activities deemed to fall within its ambit. These tendencies are demonstrated through an analysis of: 1) the scope of research ethics protocols, 2) the concept of harm employed by these boards, 3) the use of informed consent provisions, and 4) the presumption that research participants will remain anonymous. To accentuate the nature of this ethics creep, comparisons are made between the ways in which identical knowledge generation activities are governed within journalism and the academy. The conclusion suggests that one effect of the increasingly formalized research ethics structure is to rupture the relationship between following the rules and acting ethically. Some of the reasons for this creep are highlighted along with the risks that it poses for scholarship.     

Governing the Quango: An Auditing and Cheating Model of Quasi-Governmental Authorities

The New Public Management has a paramount implication for thedelegation of authority to implement public policy, namely,that efficient delegations are designed according to the substanceof the task to be performed. In other words, the governmentmust be able to choose the best agent to carry out a particulartask, which implies that the set of agents must not be confinedto actors and departments within the bureaucracy. This flexibilityof form creates the incentives behind the quango, and increasesthe importance of ex ante design for the legislature to avoidmisuse of public funds. It also has the potential to increaseex post enforcement activity by the government. This articleexamines ex ante design from the perspective of auditing, presentinga formal model of the construction of auditing procedures asa response to expectations of the misuse of funds. By creatingrequirements such as the requisite submission of annual plans,reports, and accounts, governments attempt to create a compliance-inducingscheme much like that present in tax enforcement. The theoreticalmodel generates empirical predictions that are statisticallyexamined using data on public bodies in the Netherlands createdbetween 1946 and 1993. Empirical results demonstrate strongsupport for the theory.     

Governing at a distance: the elaboration of controls in British immigration

This article considers the possibility that aspects of recent thinking on governmentality could be applied to the delimitation of rights and elaboration of controls in the policy and practice of British immigration over the period of Conservative rule. First, the complex of external strategies which interact to control and inhibit migration, including the discursive assertion of sovereign boundaries in the face of moves towards a frontier-free Europe are reviewed. Then, turning to official expressions of concern over public funds, the centrality of this rationale in the drive for correspondence between benefit regulations and immigration rules is documented. This drive, it is argued, is a key tactic in the development of internal controls, both as a basis for interagency cooperation and the means by which service providers can be encouraged to police migration. Finally, the paper shows how the rationality dictating these changes has itself been questioned and further elaborates the limits of "governmentality" in practice.     

Governing Through Critique: Post-Conditionality and Bottom-Up Governance in the Merida Initiative

This article is about how the governmentality critique of top-down governance feeds into current interventionary policy thinking. Drawing on the Merida Initiative, a US–Mexican security cooperation agreement signed in 2007, the article brings out how neo-liberal civil society discourse continuously deconstructs the normative and analytical assumptions, categories, and concepts of modern liberal-universalism. In the Merida Initiative, civil society representatives were repeatedly delegitimized for being part of a detached internationalized NGO bubble. The goal was to enable idiosyncratic local knowledge-power to unfold its creative governing potential unencumbered by the oppressive and counterproductive reductions and exclusions of liberal-universal episteme. In this way, policy thinking actually coincides with the governmentality critique of standardized knowledge and top-down imposition. One of the negative implications is that international policy-makers lose their ability to arbitrate according to fixed normative standards.     

变频调速装置在安阳市直供井上的应用

结合安阳市直供井运行状况,对直供井变频调速方式进行了分析、论证。     

Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft

Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inquiry that facilitates statecraft. In light of these interdisciplinary perspectives, we wrestle with the implications of knowing—and thereby governing—voluntary collective organization in this manner. We conclude that this approach potentially disciplines the qualitative dimensions of democratic associational life and misrepresents the possibilities of social change.     

The Child of the Common: Governing Children in the Freetown Christiania,Denmark

Children in the intentional community of Christiania, Denmark, are seen as belonging to a flock. They experience a relatively high degree of freedom and autonomy as well as collective supervision/control. Departing from Foucault's conceptualisation of pastoral power and interviews conducted in Christiania, this article explores what the idea of the child as belonging to the common/collective may imply for the governance of children. A unique combination of freedom and supervision, individualism and collectivism, results in a form of responsibilisation that aims to strengthen the community, unlike neo‐liberal responsibilisation, which leaves the individual alone with the freedom to take care of herself.     

Governing Resilience through Power: Explaining Community Adaptations to Extreme Events in Coastal Louisiana

Scholars of socioecological resilience are calling for approaches that will aid understanding of the articulations of structure, power, and agency in adaptations toward resilience. This article presents a framework designed to guide analyses of structure and agency through three different forms of power: structural, differential, and systemic. It applies the framework to a case study of a fishery‐dependent Louisiana town, which was rebuilt and reimagined following over a decade of natural, technological, and economic shocks and disturbances. Data collection involved policy and document review and field research, consisting of observations and semistructured interviews. Findings demonstrate how the town’s adaptations toward resilience were produced by power operating through the legislated rights and responsibilities of the Twin Parish Port District; differential capacity of stratified groups; and systemic aspects of generalized values, norms, and preferences manifested through politics of place. In the context of successful community adaptations toward resilience, the article raises questions regarding sustainability and discusses the relevance of the power framework for explaining adaptive responses in cooperative, as well as conflictual contexts.