This article sets out to test the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as it has been applied by social theorists working on the topic of neoliberal managerialism. It starts with a critical discussion of the 'good governance' agenda as developed by the World Bank. The question that the article poses is whether such technologies of governance are as successful in shaping new fields of intervention as assumed in the (managerial) governmentality literature. This question is answered negatively by way of a case study of an extensionist, working in an integrated rural development project in the Atlantic zone of Costa Rica, who developed his own 'participatory extension style of operation' for dealing with farmer beneficiaries. At a more theoretical level, the article takes issue with current notions regarding the malleability of the Self and the 'social'. The article concludes that the governmentality approach has perverse consequences for the anthropological project as it leads to an impoverished kind of ethnography.
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Critiquing governmentality
The social construction of participation and accountability in the Atlantic zone of Costa Rica
Pieter de Vries
Introduction
Mimetic Governmentality, Colonialism, and the State
Patrice Ladwig and Ricardo Roque
colonial state. Each article in this collection elaborates on the conceptual insights of mimesis differently and independently; each work adopts distinct approaches to state and government in colonial settings. Yet all articles share a similar trajectory
Fighting Fire with Fire
Resistance to Transitional Justice in Bahrain
Ciara O’Loughlin
added by Mitchell Dean’s (2010) Foucault-inspired analytics of government approach, which by identifying discrepancies between actors’ declared and actual intentions, assists in revealing less obvious manifestations of resistance. While the former type
In Conflict and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 125–141 (17 total)
The emergence of the global debt society
Governmentality and profit extraction through fabricated abundance and imposed scarcity in Peru and Spain
Ismael Vaccaro, Eric Hirsch, and Irene Sabaté
interests involved in it. Thus, we suggest debt in the era of financialization is something new, strange, and distinct. The contemporary debt paradigm has generated its own form of subjectivation and identity construction, a governmentality of sorts, in
Bringing the state back in
Corporate social responsibility and the paradoxes of Norwegian state capitalism in the international energy sector
Ståle Knudsen, Dinah Rajak, Siri Lange, and Isabelle Hugøy
understanding of what CSR does both for companies themselves and its target publics (whether local communities, employees, “host” or “home” governments). We argue positioning the politics of the state as key to the unfolding policy landscape of CSR results in
The Weatherman
The Making of Prepared Farmers and the Postcolonial Predictive State in Kenya
Martin Skrydstrup
planning (PSP) workshops, which were initiated in 2014 by the county government in Nyeri and conducted across the Central Province to prepare local farmers for extreme weather events in the name of El Niño. My research assistant, Joyce, took part in such a
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 271–281 (11 total)
Gil Hizi
participants’ emotional reactions as a means to buttress class identities and revolutionary commitments ( Y. Liu 2010 ; Perry 2002 ). Affect in this case study also does not precisely correspond to the Foucauldian model of market-driven governmentality
Nicoletta Bevilacqua
In its electoral programme, the new centre right government that
took office after the victory of 13 May 2001 had announced its
intention to stress the digitalisation of public administration, which
it considered to be a necessary requirement for ‘redesigning public
administration from the foundations and reinventing the state in
organisational and functional terms so as to seize the potential
offered by new technologies’. The programme identified a break
with the approach taken by centre left governments in the need to
place ‘the idea of service provision as well as the organisation itself’
at the heart of ‘e-government’ policy, as opposed to setting up a network
infrastructure such as RUPA (Rete unitaria della pubblica
amministrazione – Public Administration Unitary Network), which
had been acted on by the previous government and judged ineffective
‘due to the lack of an adequate plan of organisational reform’.
In Italian Politics
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2002
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 223–242 (20 total)
Policing production
Corporate governmentality and the Cultivation System
Albert Schrauwers
This article reexamines the Cultivation System in early nineteenth-century Java as part of an assemblage of Crown strategies, programs, and technologies to manage the economy—and more particularly, “police” the paupers—of the “greater Netherlands.” This article looks at the integrated global commodity chains within which the System was embedded, and the common governmental strategies adopted by the Dutch Crown to manage these flows in both metropole and colony. It focuses on the role of an early corporation, the Netherlands Trading Company, that also served as the administrator of poverty-relief efforts in the Eastern Netherlands where cotton cloth was produced. The article argues that corporate governmentality arose as a purposive strategy of avoiding liberal parliamentary scrutiny and bolstering the “enlightened absolutism” of the Crown. By withdrawing responsibility for the policing of paupers from the state, and vesting it in corporations, the Crown commercialized the delivery of pauper relief and reduced state expenditure, while still generating large profits.
Editorial Introduction
The Role of “Voluntariness” in the Governance of Migration
Reinhard Schweitzer, Rachel Humphris, and Pierre Monforte
The labeling of migration as either “forced” or “voluntary” has long been identified as a key dimension of how national governments respond to human mobility and, especially, how they “manage the undesirables” ( Agier 2011 ; see also Zetter 2007
In Migration and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2022
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–12 (12 total)