Reading self‐help literature in Russia: governmentality,psychology and subjectivity

Self‐help has become a booming business over the past decades and an increasingly visible part of popular media culture worldwide. The paper analyzes the arrival and effects of this cultural technology in post‐Soviet Russia after more than seventy years of socialism. It examines how Russians are engaging with popular psychology self‐help as a technology of the self and how they are making it meaningful in their lives. Drawing on a set of one‐to‐one and focus group interviews conducted with self‐help readers, it examines how these individuals negotiate the new ethics and the normative models of personhood put forward by the self‐help genre. It argues that popular psychology has offered a new language for making sense of the self and the social world, and highlights how the readers critically engage with the normalizing power of popular psychology by drawing on a number of local historically sedimented discourses.     

Managing the micro-self: the governmentality of real name registration policy in Chinese microblogosphere

This paper investigates the real name registration (RNR) policy introduced by Chinese authorities in 2011 to regulate its vibrant microblogosphere by encouraging users to manage their ‘micro-self'. Foucault's concept of governmentality is adopted to understand how the Chinese state ‘governs at a distance' its colossal microblog population through technologies of the state and technologies of the self. We provide a critical case study of the governmentality of the RNR policy in Chinese microblogosphere by detailing the broad range of user experiences based on 22 in-depth interviews conducted in 2012 and 2013 with users and weibo editors. Shedding a new light on the practices of Chinese Internet regulation through the perspective of governmentality, we challenge the notion of the Chinese state as an omnipotent agent, contest popular media's portrayal of the Chinese microblog subject as either obedient or resistant, and foreground the importance of Internet firms in mediating the negotiation between the state and users.     

Constructing Humanitarian Selves and Refugee Others

Contributing to ongoing debates about what happens when feminism is institutionalized in global governance, this article examines how gender equality is given meaning and applied in humanitarian aid to refugees, and what the implications are with regard to the production of subjectivities and their positioning in relations of power. Drawing on Foucauldian and postcolonial feminist perspectives, the analysis identifies two main representations of what it means to promote gender equality in refugee situations. Gender equality is represented as a means to aid effectiveness through the strategic mobilization of refugee women's participation, and as a project of development, involving the transformation of “traditional” or “backward” refugee cultures into modern societies. The subject positions that are produced categorically cast refugees as either passive or problematic subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions, while humanitarian workers are positioned as rational administrators and progressive agents of social transformation. In effect, gender equality is used to sustain power asymmetries in refugee situations and to reproduce global hierarchies.     

The Europeanization of Nordic Gender Equality: A Foucauldian Analysis of Reconciling Work and Family in Finland

In this article, we analyse the case of reconciling work and family as a particularly illuminative example of the effects of soft Europeanization. We focus on one particular policy instrument of the EU, namely projects co‐funded by the European Social Fund (ESF), which have sought to develop family‐friendly arrangements in Finnish workplaces. Our analysis suggests that this soft law instrument can result in significant changes in member states, even in cases where the member state's own policy is well entrenched. Theoretically, our contribution is to connect soft Europeanization to the Foucauldian theory on power, and the literature on Analytics of Government specifically. From this perspective we argue that the ESF development projects function as Foucauldian ‘technologies of involvement’. We find that by stabilizing and normalizing project techniques and managerial rationalities untypical for previous gender equality and work–family policies in the country, the ESF projects in our case partly challenge some established principles of Nordic welfare policies, such as universalism and state responsibility for welfare measures. Moreover, as ESF projects have managed to involve mainly female‐dominated organizations and women as participants, we pose the question whether this kind of soft‐law instrument that trusts the self‐regulation capacities of actors can bring about change in gendered conventions.     

Faster,harder, longer,stronger – management at the threshold between work and private life: The case of work place health promotion

This paper studies Work Place Health Promotion at two international corporations as an example of an unobtrusive control that targets employees’ lifestyles. It uses Michel Foucault's concepts of neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control to show how Work Place Health Promotion breaks with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of unobtrusive controls in organizations. While discipline is centripetal, correcting employees’ misconduct so that they freely keep within prescribed norms, Work Place Health Promotion is centrifugal, targeting employees’ lifestyles and promoting those existing faculties and inclinations that may increase their activity, performance and their health. It hereby emerges as less restrictive than organizational discipline, but also as more discriminating. For not only does it subject employees’ lifestyles to an economic logic of investment and disinvestment, it also contributes to an exclusion of employees that fail in this regard in the name of their lack of health.     

‘Language Background Other Than English’: a problem NAPLaN test category for Australian students of refugee background

Since 2008 Australia has held the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (known as NAPLAN) for all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Despite the multilingual character of the Australian population, these standardized literacy and numeracy tests are built on an assumption of English as a first language competency. The capacity for monitoring the performance of students who speak languages other than English is achieved through the disaggregation of test data using a category labelled Language Background Other than English (LBOTE). A student is classified as LBOTE if they or their parents speak a language other than English at home. The category definition is so broad that the disaggregated national data suggest that LBOTE students are outperforming English speaking students, on most test domains, though the LBOTE category shows greater variance of results. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, this article explores the possible implications of LBOTE categorisation for English as a Second Language (ESL) students of refugee background. The article uses a quantitative research project, carried out in Queensland, Australia, to demonstrate the potential inequities resultant from such a poorly constructed data category.     

Accounting for equality: Gender budgeting and moderate feminism

This article sheds light on the relationship between quantification and calculative practices of accounting and moderate feminism. Drawing on a case of gender budgeting in Austria and the literature on social studies of accounting, I show how gender equality initiatives are translated into practice and come to codify the governance of gender relations through calculative practices that further the logic of neoliberal governmentality, rather than fundamentally challenging it. As such, this article provides an account of one site of the neoliberal recuperation of feminist critique through technologies of quantification and accountability.     

Whose English gets paid off?—Neoliberal discourses of English and ethnic minority students’ subjectivities in China

The study traces the trajectories of Uyghur college students’ subjectivity construction and transformation from Foucault's governmentality perspective. Drawing on ethnographic data of two telling cases, it explores how minoritized students’ subjectivities were linked to neoliberal discourses of English and constituted by power techniques, self-technologies, and affective dispositions embedded in wider institutional transformations. Participants were found experiencing a shift to the individualistic subjectivity associated with academic achievement and performance in English away from the collective identity of “authentic Uyghur” symbolized by the Uyghur language. Two salient discourses of English, i.e., English as constraints, and English as academic excellence, emerging from the neoliberal-oriented institutional English language education policies and practices, shaped the participants either as incompetent English learners or elite subjects. Participants learned to responsibilitize themselves through such self-technologies as confession and preaching, and affective practices. Yet, technologies of hope and optimism became for a few the enjoyment of experiences and performance of elitism while projecting a majority disadvantaged as affectively problematic others. The self-technologies and affective responses without recognition of larger structures of inequality could further reinforce the neoliberal logic. The affective labor of sense of solidarity, commitment to community, empathy for the deprived ones with critical reflection and collective action, nevertheless, may counter neoliberal logic and point to an alternative path to meaning-making and social relations.     

Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest

The influence of Foucault on studies of social movements, dissent and protest is not as direct as might be imagined. He is generally regarded as focusing more on the analysis of power and government than forms of resistance. This is reflected in the governmentality literature, which tends to treat dissent and protest as an afterthought, or failure of government. However, Foucault's notion of ‘counter-conducts’ has much to offer the study of dispersed, heterogeneous and variegated forms of resistance in contemporary global politics. Using the protests that have accompanied summits including Seattle, Johannesburg, Prague, London and Copenhagen to illustrate an analytics of protest in operation, this article shows how a Foucauldian perspective can map the close interrelationship between regimes of government and practices of resistance. By adopting a practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilize the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between dominant power relationships and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt and reinforce the status quo, at the same time.     

Paradoxes of late-modern autonomy imperatives: Reconciling individual claims and institutional demands in everyday practice

Governmentality studies and social theories agree that in contemporary societies the idea of autonomy is no longer simply an ideal or an individual aspiration but a social obligation. In an attempt to clarify the meaning of autonomy in this day and age, this paper asks how individuals perceive and negotiate the various dimensions of autonomy and how this affects the functioning of late-modern institutions. The empirical insights derived from a qualitative study provide a differentiated picture of how individuals pursue their claims to autonomy and comply with institutional demands for autonomy in everyday practice. By presenting seven types of late-modern “autonomy managers,” the analysis evinces a usurpation of autonomous agency that renders individuals the institutional editors of the contemporary contradictions, deficits, and tensions that occur in their everyday interactions. This comes at the price of notionally free but exhausted actors running short of all kinds of resources.