In this paper I will argue for the ethical and political virtue of a form of critique associated with the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s tryptich of essays on critique---namely ”What is Critique?’ ”What is Revolution?’ and ”What is Enlightenment?’---develop a formulation of critique understood as an attitude or disposition, a kind of relation that one bears to oneself and to the actuality of the present. I suggest that this critical attitude goes hand in hand with a mode of intellectual (...) practice realized rhetorically in the form of the interrogative and methodologically in ”problematology’. But, in addition to highlighting the habitus of critique suggested by Foucault, I also want to consider the entanglement of this critical enterprise in the conditions of the present that it attempts to diagnose. Specifically, I ask, in what way is a critical enterprise in the interrogative mood itself imbricated in the trope of interrogation that fills so much of our current political and public landscape? (shrink)

This paper stages an encounter between Foucault and Althusser on the question of strategy. By contrasting a few passages in La Volonté de savoir with some of Althusser’s writings on Machiavelli and Lenin, I propose an alternative between the two thinkers according to a schema of strategic thought (Foucault) and a philosophy for strategy (Althusser). This narrow focus enables me to generate a working definition of strategy as the anticipation of an encounter which modifies, abolishes, or otherwise alters the relations (...) constituting its conjuncture. By staging the encounter between the Foucault and Althusser, I propose this definition as a reflection on the phrase “intervention into conjuncture,” and conclude by sketching implications concerning theory, practice, and the discipline of the conjuncture. (shrink)

Conservation biology is a branch of ecology devoted to conserving biodiversity. Because this discipline is based on the assumption that knowledge should guide actions, it endows experts with a power that should be questioned. The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault can be seen as a relevant conceptual resource to think these aspects of conservation biology through. I critically analyse the relevance of the Foucauldian approach to conservation. I argue that Foucauldian arguments are deeply ambiguous, and therefore useless for (...) conservation purposes, unless they are supplemented with unsaid assumptions that are, depending on the case at hand, untenable, or at least at odds with basic assumptions underlying conservation biology. In any case, the prospects of using the Foucauldian approach for conservation purposes are deeply undermined. However, the Foucauldian reasoning contains some ideas that can be important and useful for conservation purposes, if they are duly clarified. (shrink)

This paper examines recent forms of post-identity thought within contemporary gender theory, specifically the works of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Bobby Noble. Despite the many insights that these theories offer, I argue that they suffer from what Lois McNay has labelled ‘social weightlessness’ insofar as their models of subjectivity and agency are disconnected from the everyday realities of social subjects. I identify two ways in which this social weightlessness is manifested in radical gender theories that endorse a post-identity politics: (...) they overlook the social and political importance to many individuals of establishing stable, coherent identities; they are unable to offer a satisfactory account of agency. I suggest that these issues arise, at least in part, from the anti-recognition stance adopted by such radical gender theorists. I argue that by incorporating a properly nuanced model of recognition back into their theories they can imbue their accounts with a properly grounded model of the subject that is responsive to the inequalities and oppressions that infuse the particular concrete contexts in which we experience and live out our identities. (shrink)

This article considers Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberal and neoliberal governmental reason and its reorganization of social relations around a notion of enterprise. I focus on the particular idea that the generalization of the enterprise form to social relations was conceptualized in such exhaustive terms that it encompassed subjectivity itself. Self as enterprise highlights, inter alia, dynamics of control in neoliberal regimes which operate through the organized proliferation of individual difference in an economized matrix. It also throws into question conceptions of (...) individual autonomy that underpin much political thought and upon which ideas about political resistance are based. Self as enterprise also problematizes the viability of Foucault’s later work on ethics of the self as a practice of resistance. I go on to argue that Foucault’s discussion of an unresolved clash in civil society between monarchical and governmental power, between law and norm, offers an elliptical but more promising account of opposition to normalizing bio-power. (shrink)

This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race (...) and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies. (shrink)

Domination as opposed to what? Michel Foucault’s works on power and subject formation uncover the subtle ways in which disciplinary power structures create opportunities for domination. Yet Foucaul...

This article draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how recent political moves to legalise ‘flexibility’ mobilises education authorities to make ‘community’ a technical means of achieving the political objective of schooling the child. I argue that ‘flexibility’ in this sense is a neo‐liberal strategy that shifts relations between the governed and the State. In this way, it transforms the idea of schooling from a State run institution for the purpose of ‘community building’ to a community run institution for (...) the purpose of making parents governable by both instrumentalising and institutionalising individualism through the force of community membership. Rather than a form of liberation from bureaucratic rule, the paper exposes how ‘flexibility’ acts as a normalising strategy that works with difference to entangle parents as community members in the process of schooling the child through the moral obligation of the contract. (shrink)

For the later Foucault, as for the early Foucault, the dream represents a privileged disclosure of the ethics of the self, and the relation to truth. What, then, is the function of the dream in the...

ABSTRACT:Corporate social responsibility has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are (...) engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them ‘from’ or ‘to.’ Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved (...) are engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about ‘women’ and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to ‘empower’ them ‘from’ or ‘to’.Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the Self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

Organisational politics traditionally gets a ‘bad press’. It has generally been under-researched mainly because of concerns about image. Managers dislike discussing subjects such as organisational politicking, believing that it reflects badly on themselves as managers and on their organisation and they cling to a purely rationalist model of decision-making. Sometimes, even the presence of politics is denied. But, as this paper argues, while some managers may claim to have no taste for politics they readily engage in it and justify it. (...) The processes of managing organisational change more often than not result in conflict and resistance, requiring political engagement in response. This paper analyses political activities in the context of change, using an ethical decision-tree to examine practical cases. It presents them in the managers’ own terms and assesses them against three criteria: utility, rights and justice. The findings raise questions about how managers themselves construe ethical behaviour and about the adequacy of the criteria they use. There is room for further research in this area and analysis of the ethical frameworks used to evaluate what managers do. (shrink)

In this article I will combine Erving Goffman’s sociology with some of the main aspects of Actor-Network Theory in order to outline a theatrical conception of social power. My first aim is to try to summarize the sociological perspective introduced by Kenneth Burke and then improved on by Erving Goffman to understand the face-to-face interactions of everyday life. Secondly, I will try to use the theatrical metaphor underlying this theoretical framework to describe power-over relations in everyday life. Thanks to the (...) combination of the dramaturgical theory proposed by Erving Goffman and the ‘object turn’ given to social theory by Actor-Network Theory, a theatrical conception of power allows the episodic, dispositional and systemic dimensions of power relations to be mapped respectively depending on the actors’ performances, their roles of power and the institutionalized scripts. Moreover, this theatrical representation of power-over relations is a defaced understanding of the phenomenon that enables us to investigate not only its different directional forms, but also their possible variants. (shrink)

This paper examines the power relations in “patient-centred communication”. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault I argue that while patient-centred communication frees the patient from particular aspects of medical power, it also introduces the patient to new power relations. The paper uses a Foucauldian analysis of power to argue that patient-centred communication introduces a new dynamic of power relations to the medical encounter, entangling and producing the patient to participate in the medical encounter in a particular manner.

The principal aim of this article is to examine the relations between positioning and belonging in terms of the potential for critique of existing social conditions. The underlying purpose is to inform social scientific engagement with social life in order to illuminate the potential for social transformation via reflexivity. These discussions will be informed by the division of reflexivity into two dimensions: endogenous and referential. It is argued that this enables the social scientist to highlight the pre-reflexive world and render (...) it problematic and demonstrates how the objectivity of the social world is both a presupposition and ongoing achievement of everyday interactions. To that extent, the possibility for social conditions to be otherwise is then open to scrutiny. (shrink)

Following Foucault, ‘critique’ could be regarded as being the art not to be governed in this way or as a project of desubjectivation. In this paper it is shown how such a project could be described as an e‐ducative practice. It explores this idea through an example which Foucault himself gave of such a critical practice: the writing of ‘experience books’. Thus it appears that such an e‐ducative practice is a ‘dangerous’, public and uncomfortable practice that is not in need (...) of pastoral care but requires generosity, presence and attention. As such it demands a pedagogy of experience which is to be invented in order to ‘make’ oneself into a question, to transgress the limits of a governmental regime. (shrink)

This paper addresses issues of agency and self-identity on the basis of a phenomenology of embodiment. It considers a tension in accounts of embodiment between, on the one hand, the body as the locus of subjectivity, lived experience, and agency, and, on the other hand, the body as constructed, as the site where discursive regimes of power are inscribed. In exploring this tension I consider Frantz Fanon’s and Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological accounts of racism to illustrate the ways in which social (...) power and violence come to be implicated in these conflicts within our embodied identities. I also consider Foucauldian “power” in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “institution.” I argue that only the phenomenological concept of institution, by drawing our attention to the ambiguities of lived embodiment, succeeds in offering us resources for thinking about the interplay between passivity and agency in the life of the subject, and, in particular, about a form of agency not wholly reducible to the effects of power. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a Foucauldian critique of Habermas’s theory of law and democracy. Quite famously Habermas viciously attacked Foucault’s positions on law and power in modernity. Those attacks will be taken into consideration here in order to show some deficiencies in Habermas’s own reading of modern law and democracy. My suggestion is that the formal nature of Habermas’s communicative approach fails to take into adequate consideration the question of subjectivity formation. More precisely I will (...) demonstrate that Habermas’s own works show a troublesome ambivalence with regards to the possibility that individuals can participate as ‘unencumbered selves’ to the public life of their community. As a consequence his account turns a blind eye to certain dynamics of power in our society that a Foucauldian approach seems more apt to frame and explore. (shrink)

While the ethics of technology is analyzed across disciplines from science and technology studies, engineering, computer science, critical management studies, and law, less attention is paid to the role that firms and managers play in the design, development, and dissemination of technology across communities and within their firm. Although firms play an important role in the development of technology, and make associated value judgments around its use, it remains open how we should understand the contours of what firms owe society (...) as the rate of technological development accelerates. We focus here on digital technologies: devices that rely on rapidly accelerating digital sensing, storage, and transmission capabilities to intervene in human processes. This symposium focuses on how firms should engage ethical choices in developing and deploying these technologies. In this introduction, we, first, identify themes the symposium articles share and discuss how the set of articles illuminate diverse facets of the intersection of technology and business ethics. Second, we use these themes to explore what business ethics offers to the study of technology and, third, what technology studies offers to the field of business ethics. Each field brings expertise that, together, improves our understanding of the ethical implications of technology. Finally we introduce each of the five papers, suggest future research directions, and interpret their implications for business ethics. (shrink)

This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this intertwinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to face historical (...) changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. (shrink)

This article explores the thesis that novelty is central to a wide and diverse range of French philosophers in the twentieth century. Often these philosophers are seen on different sides of philosophic divides, but novelty brings them together. I will explore some of the fruitful areas for dialogue between French and process philosophy, particularly around the theme of novelty.

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 537-554, December 2021.

This article interprets the state of “subjection,” which Foucault took to be characteristic of the modern subject of power/knowledge, as an abiding psychic disposition analogous to Heidegger’s “inauthentic self-understanding.” The author begins by arguing, against prevailing orthodoxy, that in Discipline and Punish, Foucault is already centrally concerned with the power effects of forms of psychic self-relation. He then argues that the psychic state of subjection should not be understood as a constellation of ideas, beliefs, or other “representations” but along de-essentialized (...) Heideggerian/aristotelian lines as a “habit” of the soul—the effect of training and technology rather than ideology. (shrink)

The Occupy movements in 2011 – this essay focuses mainly on Spain and the United States – have been more than moments of grassroots or direct democracy: they have been collective political practices testing forms of non-representationist democracy in the Europe of representative democracy to an unusually great extent. The precarious subjects of post-Fordism rejected political representation, and at the same time they struggled for a ‘real’ democracy. This oxymoron between representation and democracy structures the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière (...) and corresponds with his well-known distinction between police and politics. This is one of the reasons why his thinking is helpful to understand them as decidedly political ones. However, the assembly as one of the central topoi of theories of democracy plays no prominent role in Rancière’s political philosophy. In contrast to this, I focus on the central practice of the assemblies in the Occupy movements and develop a concept of presentist democracy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; (...) and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today. (shrink)

This paper raises the question whether language and violence are internally connected. It starts from the experience of violence and from its theoretical interpretation as violence in the context of political forms of life which are challenged by complaints about violence. Such forms of life have to confront this issue because they are supposed to be responsive to claims and demands of others who articulate violence as an experience of violation. Whether a kind of responsive ethos may be based on (...) the suspected inner connection between language and violence is being discussed at the end. (shrink)

This paper raises the question whether language and violence are internally connected. It starts from the experience of violence and from its theoretical interpretation as violence in the context of political forms of life which are challenged by complaints about violence. Such forms of life have to confront this issue because they are supposed to be responsive to claims and demands of others who articulate violence as an experience of violation. Whether a kind of responsive ethos may be based on (...) the suspected inner connection between language and violence is being discussed at the end. (shrink)

Tendencies and efforts have shifted from genome description, DNA mapping, and DNA sequencing to active and profound re-programming, repairing life on genetic and molecular levels in some parts of contemporary life science research. Mirroring and materializing this atmosphere, various life engineering technologies have been used and established in many areas of life sciences in the last decades. A contemporary progressive example of one such technology is DNA editing. Novel developments related to reproductive technologies, particularly embryo editing, prenatal human life engineering, (...) and germline engineering need to be analyzed against the broader social and structural background. The crucial analytical scope for this paper is a specific field: the life-editing technologies used in reproductive medicine and performed experimentally on viable human embryos, particularly CRISPR/cas9 technology. This text argues that germline editing technologies, as a representative part of contemporary biomedicine, are merging ideas of treatment and enhancement to avoid future risks. Using this specific life manipulation of embryos and gametes, the text analyzes these processes within the concept of power over life—biopower and the specific governing rationality that imagines, classifies, and governs contemporary societies. The text specifically focuses on the potential to create, define, and manage future risks and uncertainties related to prenatal life. (shrink)

Neo- pragmatists Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish have recently argued that philosophy has no consequences for legal practice (except, in the case of Fish, insofar as it carries rhetorical force). They have asserted not only that philosophy cannot provide absolute metaphysical foundations for legal practice, but also that philosophy cannot be used to criticise law. This essay examines Fish and Rorty's reasons for denying the practical force of philosophy. Although I agree with Rorty and Fish's non-foundationalism, I argue that in (...) practice lawyers employ discursive categories and concepts that can be described as philosophical. I suggest also that philosophy has a critical function and that the characterization of philosophy offered by these theorists amounts to a conservative assertion of the formal completeness and substantive justice of existing liberal legal systems. Against Fish and Rorty, I argue and selectively demonstrate that lawyers can usefully draw upon 'public ironists' such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida to criticise and improve upon extant legal practices. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(1) 2003: 82-97. (shrink)

It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to ‘experience’ to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality. However, the interest in experience also decisively shaped Foucault’s analysis of the ‘critical attitude’ that he explicitly started to address at about the same time. The article argues that Foucault’s notion of critique is informed by a specific reading and understanding of ‘experience’. Experience is conceived of (...) as dominant structure and transformative force, as existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond historical limits. Foucault defines experience as a dynamic interplay between games of truth, forms of power and relations to the self. Accordingly, the Foucauldian account of critique is characterized by three aspects: the activity of problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination, and the audacity to expose one’s own status as a subject. While the first section of the article briefly reconstructs the trajectory of ‘experience’ in Foucault’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s, the main part discusses the dimensions and implications of this ‘experimental’ critique. (shrink)

In vernacular understandings or conversations about resistance as it occurs with students in public schools, it is frequently viewed as a negative action or set of behaviours to be changed or curtailed. This paper puts forward an argument that allows for the possibility of seeing moments of resistance as something to be recognized and celebrated with students. I do not suggest that resistance must always or only be viewed in this manner, but rather that it might be viewed thus, and (...) thereby allow for multiple understandings of an action such as resistance. Beginning with my own hegemonic understanding of resistance as a necessarily bad/undesirable characteristic or behaviour, I then build on Foucault’s relational approach to understanding power (and its operations), leading then to a discussion of student engagement as also a relational process and one that has more than one possible form. By offering a possibility of understanding student engagement as a process that works both within and outside the structures that produce and maintain the White, middle class, heterosexual, abled, Christian, male child as the defacto subject of schooling, I build an argument that opens a more fluid conception of resistance than the necessarily negative action it is often perceived to be. (shrink)

Appealing to theorists such as Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Bibi Bakare-Yusef, the aim of the following is to show that, despite ongoing critique, Cartesian dualism continues to haunt our analyses of the relationship of the subject to embodiment, particularly with respect to the experience of pain. Taking Bakare-Yusef's critique of Elaine Scarry's account of institutionalized violence (slavery) as an example, I will argue, first, that the dualistic impulse which Bakare-Yusef identifies in Scarry's view has deep (...) historical roots in, for instance, Aristotle's hylomorphic concept of the subject. Second, I will consider the specific relevance of poststructuralist analyses of subjectification to our conceptions of violence. Lastly, I will explore some contemporary examples of pain in light of the question: can violence 'deconstruct the body' without desubjectifying the subject? I think that the answer is a qualified 'yes'. (shrink)

The ethical issues introduced by excessive uses of ubiquitous information technology at work have received little attention, from either practitioners or ethics scholars. This article suggests the concept of technological ill-being and explores the ethical issues arising from such ill-being, according to the individual and collective responsibilities associated with their negative effects. This article turns to the philosopher Michel Foucault and proposes a renewed approach of the relationship among IT, ethics, and responsibility, based on the concepts of practical rationality, awareness, (...) and self-engagement. This article reports a case study of an international automotive company actively engaged in both corporate social responsibility and ubiquitous IT deployment. Technological ill-being is an expression of the tension between an individual’s social attributes and aspirations when using modern IT and a system of norms, rules, and values imposing constraints on him or her. We identify the reasons for the lack of consideration of technological ill-being in CSR through identification of the inclusion–exclusion principle. The resulting critical, comprehensive approach to corporate responsibilities and IT uses incorporates the ethical implications of the latter, highlights the practical rationality of their relationship, and demands both individual and collective responses, through a call for collective ethical awareness and self-engagement. The findings prompt a Foucauldian ethics of IT use in organizations, which emerges in a mutually constitutive relationship between the self, as a moral subject of own actions, and broader organizational principles, in which CSR appears as a techne. (shrink)

This article explores the Foucauldian notions of practices of the self and care of the self, read via Deleuze, in the context of Iyengar yoga (one of the most popular forms of yoga currently). Using ethnographic and interview research data the article outlines the Iyengar yoga techniques which enable a focus upon the self to be developed, and the resources offered by the practice for the creation of ways of knowing, experiencing and forming the self. In particular, the article asks (...) whether Iyengar yoga offers possibilities for freedom and liberation, or whether it is just another practice of control and management. Assessing Iyengar yoga via a ‘critical function’, a function of ‘struggle’ and a ‘curative and therapeutic function’, the article analyses whether the practice might constitute a mode of care of the self, and what it might offer in the context of the contemporary need to live better, as well as longer. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen an increase in the influx of asylum-seekers in Scandinavia, and in Denmark this has led to ever-tighter immigration control. This article discusses emerging practices of refugee solidarity and resistance to migration policy in Danish civil society in the wake of what has been referred to as the European refugee crisis. To accomplish this purpose, I analyse how participants in Facebook discussions construe topoi and attitudes when facing the ethical dilemma of respecting the law versus showing concern (...) for humans in need, in line with what Foucault, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) has referred to as ‘ethical self-formation’. This is illustrated through a case study of an incident from September 2015, when a member of a Danish City Council offered private shelter to immigrants on their way to Norway. The incident led to legal proceedings in August 2016 for what the defendant referred to as ‘the offense of helping fellow human beings in need’. The study is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis. Analysing Discourse. Textual analysis for social research. London and New York: Routledge; Wodak, R.. The politics of fear. London and New York: Sage) and governmentality theory. The subject and Power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Foucault, M.. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78.. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; McIlvenny, P., Klausen, J. Z., & Lindegaard, L. B.. Studies of Discourse and Governmentality. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins). Data include media representations and facebook comments published during 2016. The analytical approach combines topos analysis.. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage; Wodak, R.. The politics of fear. London and New York: Sage) and appraisal analysis to tease out evaluative meaning. (shrink)

The Danish health care sector currently undergoes changes that imply a gradual transition from an evidence‐based activity model to a value‐based quality model centered on patient involvement and value‐based governance. The patient naturally occupies a central position in health care, and the transition therefore raises important questions about health care quality and how successive national health quality strategies value quality and ascribe roles and agency to patients. To explore the complexity of these quality strategies, we analyze and discuss how political (...) discourse moments influence the contents of the national health quality strategies and how variation in the construal of patient roles and agency indicates discursive struggle in Danish national health care policy. Underlying theoretical concepts are informed by New Public Management, the welfare state, health communication, and discourse theory. Our analytical approach is inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis and combines content analysis with linguistic analysis. (shrink)

Colin Hay’s and Vivien Schmidt’s responses to my previous critical engagement with their respective versions of neo-institutionalism raise the issue of how scholars may account for the ideational power of political processes and how ideas may generate both stability and change. Even though Hay, Schmidt, and I share a common philosophical ground in many respects, we nevertheless diverge in our views about how to account for ideational power and for actors’ ability to navigate a social reality that is saturated with (...) structures and meaning. There continues to be a need for an analytical framework that incorporates discourse and a constitutive logic based upon the power in ideas. Post-structural institutionalism (PSI) analyzes discourse as knowledge claims by means of the concept of a constitutive causality, analytically identified in respect to institutions, such that the substantive content of ideas/discourse provides ideational power and generates immanent change. (shrink)

This article offers a critical analysis of representations of loneliness and singlehood, embodied in the narrative of the ‘old maid’s’ lonely death. The study contributes to a complex understanding of single women and the resignification of emotions conventionally ascribed to this category. By bridging the gap between two rarely linked bodies of knowledge – singlehood and the sociology of emotions – the authors do not ask what loneliness is, but, following Sara Ahmed’s work, rather what loneliness does. To this end, (...) this article employs a content analysis of versatile media texts, focusing on the acclaimed television series Six Feet Under, a polysemic text which juxtaposes both conservative and subversive meanings. The study contributes both to the vibrant discussion of social emotions as well as to the existing critical scholarship about singlehood, and seeks to challenge the limited set of representations attached to single women, and hegemonic ideals of family and solitary life. (shrink)

BackgroundUndocumented migrants experience multiple institutional and legal barriers when trying to access healthcare services. Due to such limitations, healthcare workers often experience ethical dilemmas when caring for undocumented migrants. This article aims to understand how individual healthcare workers who regularly take care of undocumented migrants deal with these dilemmas in practice. So far, the role of healthcare workers in this context has mainly been theorized through the lens of biopolitics, conceiving of healthcare workers as merely obedient instruments of humanitarian government (...) or gatekeeping.MethodsBased on semi-structured, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with healthcare workers in Belgium, we explore how they ascribe meaning, reflect upon and give shape to care practices in relation to undocumented migrants. We use Foucault’s later work on care of the self to interpret the accounts given by the healthcare workers.ResultsHealthcare workers in clinical roles exercise a certain degree of freedom in relation to the existing limitations to healthcare access of undocumented migrants. They developed techniques such as purposefully being inattentive to the undocumented status of the migrants. They also try to master their affective responses and transform their bodily attitude towards undocumented patients. They perform practical mental exercises to remind themselves of their role or position in the wider healthcare system and about their commitment to treat all patients equally. These techniques and exercises are inspired by colleagues who function as role models, inspiring them to relate in an ethical way to limitations in healthcare access. The developed care practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes transform the legal and institutional limitations to care for undocumented migrants.ConclusionsThe findings nuance the biopolitical analysis regarding the role of healthcare workers in healthcare delivery to undocumented migrants that has been dominant so far. Theoretically this article provides a reconceptualization of healthcare ethics as care of the self, an ethical practice that is somewhat independent of the traditional professional ethics.Trial Registration Medical ethics committee UZ Jette, Brussels, Belgium – Registration date: 18/05/2016 – Registration number: B.U.N. 143201628279. (shrink)