Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199580750
- eISBN:
- 9780191723179
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580750.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Theory
This chapter explores what many observers suggest are the leading present-day forms of interpretive social science: postmodern theories of discourse. First, we challenge the belief these approaches ...
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This chapter explores what many observers suggest are the leading present-day forms of interpretive social science: postmodern theories of discourse. First, we challenge the belief these approaches have a shared paradigm stemming from anti-foundational philosophy. Instead, we suggest that anti-foundationalism is compatible with all kinds of approaches to political science, and these approaches arose out of distinctive socialist or radical traditions, not mainstream political science. Second, we argue that much post-Marxist discourse theory still relies on structuralist and occasionally even determinist forms of explanation associated with modernist-empiricism. There is a clear tension between this lingering structuralism and historicist genealogies. Third, we suggest that discourse introduces several new topics to the theory of the state. These topics include governmentality, collective identities, ideologies, and resistance in governance.Less
This chapter explores what many observers suggest are the leading present-day forms of interpretive social science: postmodern theories of discourse. First, we challenge the belief these approaches have a shared paradigm stemming from anti-foundational philosophy. Instead, we suggest that anti-foundationalism is compatible with all kinds of approaches to political science, and these approaches arose out of distinctive socialist or radical traditions, not mainstream political science. Second, we argue that much post-Marxist discourse theory still relies on structuralist and occasionally even determinist forms of explanation associated with modernist-empiricism. There is a clear tension between this lingering structuralism and historicist genealogies. Third, we suggest that discourse introduces several new topics to the theory of the state. These topics include governmentality, collective identities, ideologies, and resistance in governance.
Claire Edwards and Eluska Fernández (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719095870
- eISBN:
- 9781526128607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719095870.001.0001
- Subject:
- Public Health and Epidemiology, Public Health
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning international literature which develops the potential of Foucauldian-inspired notions of governmentality to understand the construction of health problems, ...
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Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning international literature which develops the potential of Foucauldian-inspired notions of governmentality to understand the construction of health problems, policies and practices. This book bring these insights to bear on the Irish health policy arena through a range of empirical examples, including smoking, obesity, child health, ageing, mental health and disability, and even approaches to the dead body. It explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish state, and considers the strategies, discourses and technologies involved in the art of governing health in advanced liberal democracies. Through these examples, the book demonstrates how governmentality, as a social theoretical approach, can be operationalised and utilized to reframe the way we think about health problems and practices in Ireland, and how we ‘do’ heath policy analysis. Building on the dialectic between social theory and policy, the volume also reflects on the potential of govermentality for developing a critical politics of health policy in Ireland.Less
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning international literature which develops the potential of Foucauldian-inspired notions of governmentality to understand the construction of health problems, policies and practices. This book bring these insights to bear on the Irish health policy arena through a range of empirical examples, including smoking, obesity, child health, ageing, mental health and disability, and even approaches to the dead body. It explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish state, and considers the strategies, discourses and technologies involved in the art of governing health in advanced liberal democracies. Through these examples, the book demonstrates how governmentality, as a social theoretical approach, can be operationalised and utilized to reframe the way we think about health problems and practices in Ireland, and how we ‘do’ heath policy analysis. Building on the dialectic between social theory and policy, the volume also reflects on the potential of govermentality for developing a critical politics of health policy in Ireland.
Rafael Sánchez
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823263653
- eISBN:
- 9780823268887
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263653.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope ...
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Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors, but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations return to the nation’s public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to Latin America, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the populist “monumental governmentality” that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation’s representatives, or “dancing Jacobins,” recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing—or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation’s general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic’s institutions and constructs, from the sovereign “people” to the nation’s heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and last, but not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds that they otherwise set out to mould, enframe, and address.Less
Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors, but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations return to the nation’s public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to Latin America, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the populist “monumental governmentality” that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation’s representatives, or “dancing Jacobins,” recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing—or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation’s general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic’s institutions and constructs, from the sovereign “people” to the nation’s heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and last, but not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds that they otherwise set out to mould, enframe, and address.
Richard Iton
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195178463
- eISBN:
- 9780199851812
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178463.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
When trying to establish the identity of something, one does not automatically refer to the aspects that do not involve the subject, or to attributes from which the subject is exempted. That being ...
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When trying to establish the identity of something, one does not automatically refer to the aspects that do not involve the subject, or to attributes from which the subject is exempted. That being said, and the word citizen being taken into consideration, it is therefore essential to know the values and limitations that this term is to assume. We have to identify a field that would dictate the styles of engagement and interpellation, agendas, and the goals and orders of politics. Looking into Foucault's notion of governmentality and biopolitics, this chapter concentrates on welfare policy and the movement that resulted in the removal of federal financial support for Americans who earn lower level incomes. More so, we study how the black community has reacted through popular culture to such political and cultural issues.Less
When trying to establish the identity of something, one does not automatically refer to the aspects that do not involve the subject, or to attributes from which the subject is exempted. That being said, and the word citizen being taken into consideration, it is therefore essential to know the values and limitations that this term is to assume. We have to identify a field that would dictate the styles of engagement and interpellation, agendas, and the goals and orders of politics. Looking into Foucault's notion of governmentality and biopolitics, this chapter concentrates on welfare policy and the movement that resulted in the removal of federal financial support for Americans who earn lower level incomes. More so, we study how the black community has reacted through popular culture to such political and cultural issues.
Paul Sargent
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719089169
- eISBN:
- 9781781706626
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089169.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Law, Crime and Deviance
This book is the first history of juvenile justice in Ireland. Utilising a ‘governmentality’ framework, it charts the emergence of juvenile justice from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the ...
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This book is the first history of juvenile justice in Ireland. Utilising a ‘governmentality’ framework, it charts the emergence of juvenile justice from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It unearths the underlying rationalities, technologies and forms of identity that are employed to govern the child and young person within the modern Irish juvenile justice system. In Ireland, the state was to a large extent absent from the practicalities of regulating children for most of the twentieth century, abdicating its responsibilities to religious and voluntary organisations. Also, for almost a century there was little in the way of legislative or policy development in this area. With this in mind, it makes little sense to concentrate primarily on the state in order to explain how we arrived at the youth justice system. By utilising a governmentality approach the book takes the focus away from an analysis of the ‘state’ and concentrates on an analysis of the ‘problematics’ of government. The book charts the changing mentalities or lines of government in a wide range of documents, including reports of inspectors of reformatory and industrial schools, reports from prison authorities, police reports, reports of commissions of inquiry, reports from lobbyists, individual testimonies, academic studies, policy or strategy documents, management guidelines and training and practice manuals.Less
This book is the first history of juvenile justice in Ireland. Utilising a ‘governmentality’ framework, it charts the emergence of juvenile justice from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It unearths the underlying rationalities, technologies and forms of identity that are employed to govern the child and young person within the modern Irish juvenile justice system. In Ireland, the state was to a large extent absent from the practicalities of regulating children for most of the twentieth century, abdicating its responsibilities to religious and voluntary organisations. Also, for almost a century there was little in the way of legislative or policy development in this area. With this in mind, it makes little sense to concentrate primarily on the state in order to explain how we arrived at the youth justice system. By utilising a governmentality approach the book takes the focus away from an analysis of the ‘state’ and concentrates on an analysis of the ‘problematics’ of government. The book charts the changing mentalities or lines of government in a wide range of documents, including reports of inspectors of reformatory and industrial schools, reports from prison authorities, police reports, reports of commissions of inquiry, reports from lobbyists, individual testimonies, academic studies, policy or strategy documents, management guidelines and training and practice manuals.
Jacopo Martire
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474411929
- eISBN:
- 9781474435215
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411929.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is ...
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Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is it possible to analyse law through Foucauldian lenses if Foucault himself claimed (albeit cursorily) that law, in modernity, has been colonised by other disciplines and ousted from the locus of power? Building on Foucault’s ideas about power, freedom, and subjectivity, the present book tackles this problem through a critical genealogy of the philosophico-political ideas at the basis of modern law, delineating the historical emergence of the implicit regulative conditions of our legal present. The book proposes that modern law and modern forms of power – which Foucault termed biopolitical because they sort, train, and tame persons and populations with the aim of normalizing society – developed symbiotically and that, to the extent that modern law establishes the existence of a universal legal subject, law’s functioning is made possible by the homogenization of society through normalising practices. We are however fast moving towards the absolute limit of this normalizing complex. As normalising strategies are progressively unable to homogenise a social body which is increasingly composed by “fluid” subjects, modern law faces two interconnected challenges – a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiated fluid individuals?) and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate such new protean social body?) – which put into question the very foundations of our legal discourse.Less
Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is it possible to analyse law through Foucauldian lenses if Foucault himself claimed (albeit cursorily) that law, in modernity, has been colonised by other disciplines and ousted from the locus of power? Building on Foucault’s ideas about power, freedom, and subjectivity, the present book tackles this problem through a critical genealogy of the philosophico-political ideas at the basis of modern law, delineating the historical emergence of the implicit regulative conditions of our legal present. The book proposes that modern law and modern forms of power – which Foucault termed biopolitical because they sort, train, and tame persons and populations with the aim of normalizing society – developed symbiotically and that, to the extent that modern law establishes the existence of a universal legal subject, law’s functioning is made possible by the homogenization of society through normalising practices. We are however fast moving towards the absolute limit of this normalizing complex. As normalising strategies are progressively unable to homogenise a social body which is increasingly composed by “fluid” subjects, modern law faces two interconnected challenges – a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiated fluid individuals?) and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate such new protean social body?) – which put into question the very foundations of our legal discourse.
Christine Hentschel
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816694310
- eISBN:
- 9781452952475
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816694310.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
Security in the Bubble is about the struggles of urbanites to come to terms with life in the city as dangerous. This book examines newly emerging aesthetic, affective and inclusionary spatialities of ...
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Security in the Bubble is about the struggles of urbanites to come to terms with life in the city as dangerous. This book examines newly emerging aesthetic, affective and inclusionary spatialities of security governance. Urban South Africa is an especially pertinent site for such an endeavour: post-apartheid South Africa has reinvented space, using it as a technique of governance in more “positive” and sophisticated ways that ultimately alter the landscape of urban fragmentation. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid nor to a new class segregation, this fragmentation is now better conceptualized as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of (imagined) safety. Security in the Bubble is about the political dilemma that this landscape of bubbles creates: Security can only be achieved through particularistic strategies against the commons of the city. The book traces two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban: handsome space and instant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to make places safe. Instant space addresses the personal crime-related “navigation” systems of urban residents as they circulate through the city. In both regimes, security is not conceived as a public good, but as a situational experience. The logic of these regimes cuts across distinctions of private and public places or informal and formal actors of security governance and follows remarkably similar rationales of ordering, whether in a bar, a city improvement district, or an informal parking lot.Less
Security in the Bubble is about the struggles of urbanites to come to terms with life in the city as dangerous. This book examines newly emerging aesthetic, affective and inclusionary spatialities of security governance. Urban South Africa is an especially pertinent site for such an endeavour: post-apartheid South Africa has reinvented space, using it as a technique of governance in more “positive” and sophisticated ways that ultimately alter the landscape of urban fragmentation. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid nor to a new class segregation, this fragmentation is now better conceptualized as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of (imagined) safety. Security in the Bubble is about the political dilemma that this landscape of bubbles creates: Security can only be achieved through particularistic strategies against the commons of the city. The book traces two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban: handsome space and instant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to make places safe. Instant space addresses the personal crime-related “navigation” systems of urban residents as they circulate through the city. In both regimes, security is not conceived as a public good, but as a situational experience. The logic of these regimes cuts across distinctions of private and public places or informal and formal actors of security governance and follows remarkably similar rationales of ordering, whether in a bar, a city improvement district, or an informal parking lot.
Brian Lund
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781447327073
- eISBN:
- 9781447327097
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447327073.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, UK Politics
Housing has been labelled a ‘wicked’ problem: complex, territorial, open-ended and intractable. This book underscores the role of politics in generating this ‘wickedness’, highlighting the ‘actors’ ...
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Housing has been labelled a ‘wicked’ problem: complex, territorial, open-ended and intractable. This book underscores the role of politics in generating this ‘wickedness’, highlighting the ‘actors’ engaged in the process within their political institutions and the entrenched territorial electoral politics involved in the ‘housing question’. It concentrates on the preparing, disputing and implementing policy rather than on policy outcomes and the social and economic determinants ― industrialisation, capitalism, globalisation ― of continuity and change. The major theoretical approaches framing its content are the ‘new institutionalism’, social constructionism and public choice theory. The sub-title reflects the book’s themes. Power is acquired formally through the electoral system but is exercised through a variety of mechanisms including ‘governmentality’ ― the techniques that regulate and order behaviour. Planning draws attention to attempts to modify the role of markets in housing outcomes and includes land use planning and the influence of alleged ‘rational’ solutions applied to ‘the housing problem’ manifest in housing design and specific interventions aimed at mitigating housing problems. Protest concerns the ‘outsiders’ in the political system and their attempts to secure a voice often outside the normal institutional channels approved by authorities and perhaps eventually become the power holders.Less
Housing has been labelled a ‘wicked’ problem: complex, territorial, open-ended and intractable. This book underscores the role of politics in generating this ‘wickedness’, highlighting the ‘actors’ engaged in the process within their political institutions and the entrenched territorial electoral politics involved in the ‘housing question’. It concentrates on the preparing, disputing and implementing policy rather than on policy outcomes and the social and economic determinants ― industrialisation, capitalism, globalisation ― of continuity and change. The major theoretical approaches framing its content are the ‘new institutionalism’, social constructionism and public choice theory. The sub-title reflects the book’s themes. Power is acquired formally through the electoral system but is exercised through a variety of mechanisms including ‘governmentality’ ― the techniques that regulate and order behaviour. Planning draws attention to attempts to modify the role of markets in housing outcomes and includes land use planning and the influence of alleged ‘rational’ solutions applied to ‘the housing problem’ manifest in housing design and specific interventions aimed at mitigating housing problems. Protest concerns the ‘outsiders’ in the political system and their attempts to secure a voice often outside the normal institutional channels approved by authorities and perhaps eventually become the power holders.
Maiken Umbach
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199557394
- eISBN:
- 9780191721564
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557394.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History, European Modern History
This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism, which first emerged in late 19th‐century Germany, and remained influential throughout the inter‐war years and beyond. Its supporters saw ...
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This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism, which first emerged in late 19th‐century Germany, and remained influential throughout the inter‐war years and beyond. Its supporters saw themselves as a new elite, ideally placed to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation‐state. They defined themselves as bourgeois, and acted as self‐appointed champions of a modern consciousness. Focusing on figures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, and Karl‐Ernst Osthaus, and the activities of the Deutscher Werkbund and other networks of bourgeois designers, writers and ‘experts', this book shows how bourgeois modernism shaped the infrastructure of social and political life in early 20th‐century Germany. Like the project of liberal governmentality described by Foucault, bourgeois modernism exercised its power not so much in the realm of ideas, but by transforming the physical environment of German cities, from domestic interiors, via consumer objects, to urban and regional planning. Drawing on a detailed analysis of key material sites of bourgeois modernism, and interpreting them in conjunction with written sources, this study offers new insights into the history of the bourgeois mindset and its operations in the private and public realms. Thematic chapters examine leitmotifs such as the sense of locality and place, the sense of history and time, and the sense of nature and culture. Yet for all its self‐conscious progressivism, German bourgeois modernism was not an inevitable precursor of neo‐liberal global capitalism. It remained a hotly contested historical construct, which was constantly redefined through its performance in different geographical and political settings.Less
This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism, which first emerged in late 19th‐century Germany, and remained influential throughout the inter‐war years and beyond. Its supporters saw themselves as a new elite, ideally placed to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation‐state. They defined themselves as bourgeois, and acted as self‐appointed champions of a modern consciousness. Focusing on figures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, and Karl‐Ernst Osthaus, and the activities of the Deutscher Werkbund and other networks of bourgeois designers, writers and ‘experts', this book shows how bourgeois modernism shaped the infrastructure of social and political life in early 20th‐century Germany. Like the project of liberal governmentality described by Foucault, bourgeois modernism exercised its power not so much in the realm of ideas, but by transforming the physical environment of German cities, from domestic interiors, via consumer objects, to urban and regional planning. Drawing on a detailed analysis of key material sites of bourgeois modernism, and interpreting them in conjunction with written sources, this study offers new insights into the history of the bourgeois mindset and its operations in the private and public realms. Thematic chapters examine leitmotifs such as the sense of locality and place, the sense of history and time, and the sense of nature and culture. Yet for all its self‐conscious progressivism, German bourgeois modernism was not an inevitable precursor of neo‐liberal global capitalism. It remained a hotly contested historical construct, which was constantly redefined through its performance in different geographical and political settings.
Tom Boland and Ray Griffin (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719097904
- eISBN:
- 9781781708903
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097904.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
Unemployment is not just the absence of work, but a specific experience, formed historically by various forms of governmentality. Indeed, only those who meet the official criteria are registered as ...
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Unemployment is not just the absence of work, but a specific experience, formed historically by various forms of governmentality. Indeed, only those who meet the official criteria are registered as unemployed, and thereafter have their lives shaped and managed by governmental institutions. Generally, social science understands unemployment as the absence of work, particularly through the ‘deprivation theory’. However, this volume demonstrates how these cultural values actually reflexively shape the experience of unemployment and even inform governmental practices. Drawing from multiple studies with diverse methods, the book fleshes out the complex experience of unemployment. Then, we turn to the various forms, organisations and sites which governmentally define and shape unemployment, including claims forms, welfare offices, social policy and job-seeking advice. Finally, we examine how unemployment is constituted publicly through the performative measures of official statistics and the relatively limited range of narratives and values within print media coverage. Taken together, these chapters constitute a new perspective on unemployment as a diverse experience, reflexively shaped by the idea that individuals are shaped decisively by the absence of a job, but most particularly shaped by governmental interventions which have accumulated historically over decades and centuries. While drawn from the context of recent Irish experience, this perspective is relevant to any contemporary welfare state.Less
Unemployment is not just the absence of work, but a specific experience, formed historically by various forms of governmentality. Indeed, only those who meet the official criteria are registered as unemployed, and thereafter have their lives shaped and managed by governmental institutions. Generally, social science understands unemployment as the absence of work, particularly through the ‘deprivation theory’. However, this volume demonstrates how these cultural values actually reflexively shape the experience of unemployment and even inform governmental practices. Drawing from multiple studies with diverse methods, the book fleshes out the complex experience of unemployment. Then, we turn to the various forms, organisations and sites which governmentally define and shape unemployment, including claims forms, welfare offices, social policy and job-seeking advice. Finally, we examine how unemployment is constituted publicly through the performative measures of official statistics and the relatively limited range of narratives and values within print media coverage. Taken together, these chapters constitute a new perspective on unemployment as a diverse experience, reflexively shaped by the idea that individuals are shaped decisively by the absence of a job, but most particularly shaped by governmental interventions which have accumulated historically over decades and centuries. While drawn from the context of recent Irish experience, this perspective is relevant to any contemporary welfare state.
