Peter Triantafillou
Biographic Data
| ID | 97151 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Triantafillou |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Triantafillou |
| SIGNATURE | TRIANTAFILLOU P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Roskilde University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5807-6011 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 136 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
How Can Law Be Robust in the Face of Heightened Societal Turbulence
Taking its cue from the growing frequency of disruptive crises, new research argues that crisis‐induced turbulence calls for robust governance based on adaptation and innovation. While law plays a key role in the effort of governments to govern robustly, the robustness of law has received scant regard. To compensate for this gap, this article defines robust legality, analyzes its conditions of emergence, reflects on the different forms it might t…
Comparing the Implications of Strategies for Governing the Covid ‐19 Pandemic for the Political Robustness of Five European Political Regimes
How do the strategies that governments employ when they encounter crisis‐induced turbulence affect the robustness of the political regime in which they operate? Comparative studies of the connection between government strategies and political regime robustness under different cultural and institutional conditions are few and far between. This article studies the vaccination strategies that governments in Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, and It…
Legitimating collaboration, collaborating to legitimate
Two logics of democracy in collaborative governance
Collaborative governance is a promising supplement to traditional Weberian bureaucracy and New Public Management. However, the legitimacy and accountability of collaborative governance processes and outcomes is questionable. Based on a comprehensive mapping of the scholarly literature, we show that the sweeping multiplicity of accountability and legitimacy conceptions, types and critiques is structured by two democratic logics: an electoral one r…
Developing New Public Governance as a public management reform model
The concept of New Public Governance (NPG) has proven valuable as an umbrella term for cross-sector collaboration in public governance. Thus far, however, its conceptual development has mainly focused on the external relations of government. To develop NPG as a public management reform model, this article examines its internal dimension by specifying eight NPG reform tools for advancing collaboration within the public sector. We argue that the NP…
Facing the economic tribunal
The rise of new financial transaction schemes enabled new forms of tax fraud in Europe in the 2010s. Despite extensive public attention to this issue, the political measures adopted to strengthen taxation control have remained remarkably lax. The article analyses the emergence and spread of US neoliberal problematisations of administrative burdens to the OECD, and how these problematisations coalesced with the development of standardized regulato…
The ideational robustness of liberal democracy in the wake of the pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic sparked unprecedented political responses dramatically affecting societies, markets, and the lives of individuals. Under great uncertainty and turbulent conditions, governments adopted far-reaching political interventions to curb the pandemic. These interventions might therefore be expected to challenge key ideas underpinning liberal democracy. We analyze and compare how the political interventions seeking to curb the spread…
Legitimating collaboration, collaborating to legitimate
To address complex social problems, such as long-term unemployment, local authorities in many countries are developing 'holistic' or 'integrated' services, where multiple actors and professions collaborate with a view to better meet the needs of the individual citizen. By breaking with existing practices and regulations, collaborative services must be legitimized in new ways so as to appear acceptable not only in the eyes of the public and politi…
Discourse analysis and strategic policy advice
Discourse analysis (DA) has established itself as a widely accepted and legitimate approach to policy analysis. It is used to study issues such as the role of knowledge in policymaking, political cleavages and coalitions, and legitimacy. However, the proponents of DA have generally been reluctant to provide strategic policy advice. This reluctance limits the utility of DA for providing new and partly alternative policy ideas and advice on how to …
Introduction to the PMR special issue on accountability and legitimacy under collaborative governance
Biopower in the age of the pandemic
The exceptional forms of state power mobilized under COVID-19 have attracted scholarly attraction and created important insights on the pandemic politics. However, it seems that the current understanding tends to regard the states’ responses as a zero-sum game between two powers only, a game in which liberal rule in varying degrees is traded for raw sovereign power. Inspired by the notion of biopower, this article aims to provide a more nuanced a…
Accounting for what and to whom? Accountability tensions in collaborations addressing long‐term unemployment
Across Europe, public employment services are experimenting with more holistic and cross‐sector collaborations to tackle the wicked problem of long‐term unemployment. These collaborations operate in a context characterised by tensions produced by multiple demands for accountability. Based on case studies of the accountability relations and challenges in five such collaborations in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), Estonia, Scotland and Denmark…
Methodological reflections on Foucauldian analyses
This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses inform…
Neoliberal taxation regimes and the articulation of sovereign state power
After decades of consistent refusal to curb international tax evasion, the US Biden administration has recently proposed an international scheme for taxing the world’s largest transnational companies. This article seeks to better understand why it is so difficult to develop an international scheme controlling tax evasion by examining the role played by neoliberal governmentalities and their link to sovereign power. It is argued that neoliberal go…
Lifestylisation of the social
Since the 1970s, the public authorities of many OECD countries have emphasised the need for preventing lifestyle diseases and promoting the vigour of their populations. Based on the Foucauldian analytics of dispositive, we critically address some of the normative implications of the preventive interventions in the area of type 2 diabetes care. Through an analysis of public health documents from 1981 to 2016, it is shown that the government of lif…
Anmeldelse af Sundhed og Magt - Perspektiver på biopolitik og ledelsesteknologi
Playing a zero‐sum game? The pursuit of independence and relevance in performance auditing
Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are fundamental institutions in liberal democracies as they enable control of the exercise of state power. In order to maintain this function, SAIs must enjoy a high level of independence. Moreover, SAIs are increasingly expected to be also relevant for government and the execution of its policies by way of performance auditing. This article examines how and why the performance auditing of the Danish SAI pursues …
Neoliberal Power Public Management Reforms
This book examines contemporary public administration reforms seeking to promote accountability, credibility and evidence.It is argued that a particular form of constructivist neoliberalism play a pivotal role in these reforms
The Politics of Self-Governance
"Liberal democracies are experiencing a major transformation of public governance by which self-regulation, co-operation and negotiation between public and private actors and across different political-administrative levels play an increasingly important role for policy-making and implementation. Using the term 'governance imagery', or what a given society envisions to be the proper way of governing public affairs, this volume examines the emerge…
The Politics of Self-Governance
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book attempts to show how new self-governance imagery has obtained a hegemonic position. It focuses on how theoretical insights and public governance reform initiatives mutually influence each other in a complex process. After arguing that both Niklas Luhmann's and Foucault's analyses are best understood as histories of the emergence of m…
Politics of Self-Governance
The dependency and contingency of politics
Historical Institutionalism and genealogy are two strong analytical approaches that emphasise the importance of history in grasping contemporary politics that so far have lived in isolation from each other. This article, firstly, accounts for the similarities and differences between the two approaches with regard to their purpose, methodology and understanding of power and agency. Secondly, it discusses the analytical potentials and limitations o…
Enhancing Public Innovation by Transforming Public Governance
Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new ro…
Government by standards
New Forms of Governing
Contents Introduction Purpose and Concepts Methodological Challenges Governing the Performance of Governments Activating Government Life: New Forms of Public Health Labour: Employment and Activation Learning: The Making of Competent and Entrepreneurial Populations Conclusion
The Political Implications of Performance Management and Evidence-Based Policymaking
Over the last few decades performance management (PM) has invaded the public sector in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. More recently, we have seen increasing demands for evidence-based policymaking (EP). This article critically discusses the political implications of PM and EP by regarding them as particular forms of governing. Accordingly, PM may be viewed as a form of governing hinging on the regula…
Policing empowerment
This article analyses the attempts to promote economic and social development in the Third World through techniques of empowerment and participation. Based on Michel Foucault’s analytics of government - notably the notion of self-technologies - we analyse two empowerment projects for women. We argue, first, that empowerment projects seek to constitute beneficiaries as active and responsible individuals with the ability to take charge of their own…
Benchmarking in the Public Sector
How can we critically address benchmarking? By conceptualizing benchmarking as a normalizing governing technology, a space is cleared for analysing some of the power relations brought into play in benchmarking activities. As a device of power, benchmarking depends upon the production of normalizing knowledge and the freedom or self‐governing capacities of those who are benchmarked. The fruitfulness of this conception is illustrated through an exa…
Addressing Network Governance Through the Concepts of Governmentality and Normalization
This paper explores how network governance may be addressed through the notions of governmentality and normalization. I suggest that it is fruitful to address network governance as a specific form of rule that governs at a distance through norms of agency, efficiency and accountability. Such an analysis could illuminate the ways in which network governance hinges upon and reshapes particular constellations of power-freedom relations. In particula…
The Lisbon strategy and the alignment of economic and social concerns
This paper examines the economic and social thought that has evolved around the Lisbon strategy, which aimed to turn the European Union into the world’s most competitive knowledge economy by 2010. It argues that a new regime of rationality has emerged in which economic and social objectives, which were previously thought to be at odds with one another, have become increasingly aligned. The supposed antinomy between economic efficiency and social …
The Politics of Neutrality and the Changing Role of Expertise in Public Administration
This article explores and discusses the ongoing attempt to reinstate an ethos of neutrality in public administration. It focuses on the political benefits and costs of contemporary strategies in public administration for using expertise based on an ethos of neutrality. On the one hand, expertise may serve to allow a particular form of value neutrality that curbs abuse of political office, questions received wisdom on the efficacy of policy interv…
Discourse analysis and strategic policy advice
Discourse analysis (DA) has established itself as a widely accepted and legitimate approach to policy analysis. It is used to study issues such as the role of knowledge in policymaking, political cleavages and coalitions, and legitimacy. However, the proponents of DA have generally been reluctant to provide strategic policy advice. This reluctance limits the utility of DA for providing new and partly alternative policy ideas and advice on how to …
Playing a zero‐sum game? The pursuit of independence and relevance in performance auditing
Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are fundamental institutions in liberal democracies as they enable control of the exercise of state power. In order to maintain this function, SAIs must enjoy a high level of independence. Moreover, SAIs are increasingly expected to be also relevant for government and the execution of its policies by way of performance auditing. This article examines how and why the performance auditing of the Danish SAI pursues …
From performance measurement to learning
Over the last few decades accountability has accommodated an increasing number of different political, legal and administrative goals. This article focuses on the administrative aspect of accountability and explores the potential perils of a shift from performance measurement to learning. While this is inherently positive in its intentions, we argue that it might constitute a new source of government overload. We propose four explanations for why…
Methodological reflections on Foucauldian analyses
This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the exercise of power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed methodological schemata, which may be why so little has been written on the methodological implications of his analyses. While this article shares the premise that we should refrain from a standardized methodology, it argues that providing broad pointers for analyses inform…
Against all odds? Understanding the emergence of accreditation of the Danish hospitals
Lifestylisation of the social
Since the 1970s, the public authorities of many OECD countries have emphasised the need for preventing lifestyle diseases and promoting the vigour of their populations. Based on the Foucauldian analytics of dispositive, we critically address some of the normative implications of the preventive interventions in the area of type 2 diabetes care. Through an analysis of public health documents from 1981 to 2016, it is shown that the government of lif…
Biopower at the molar level
Biopower in the age of the pandemic
The exceptional forms of state power mobilized under COVID-19 have attracted scholarly attraction and created important insights on the pandemic politics. However, it seems that the current understanding tends to regard the states’ responses as a zero-sum game between two powers only, a game in which liberal rule in varying degrees is traded for raw sovereign power. Inspired by the notion of biopower, this article aims to provide a more nuanced a…
Governing EU employment policy
In the European Union (EU), employment policy is a prerogative of the member states. Therefore the EU’s ability to govern in this area depends on its capability to involve national governments and relevant stakeholders in a collaborative effort to formulate and implement shared policy objectives. Drawing an analytical distinction between cooperation, coordination and collaboration, the article analyses the formulation and implementation of EU emp…
The OECD's thinking on the governing of unemployment
Based on Foucault's notion of governmentality and problematisation, I analyse the problematisations, causal assumptions and policy recommendations found in the documents of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concerning labour market issues. The article shows that, since the mid-1970s, the OECD's strategies on employment have consistently evolved around the problematisation of ‘structural unemployment’. Demand manage…
Modern templates of happiness
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledge, this paper elaborates an analytical framework seeking to unsettle the authority of contemporary psychology. This framework focuses on the performative dimension of psychology and other ‘psy-regimes’, namely the practices and actions that may be undertaken on the basis of these forms of knowledge. We probe this framework by exploring the emergence, utilization and demise of spiritualism…
Legitimating collaboration, collaborating to legitimate
Legitimating collaboration, collaborating to legitimate
To address complex social problems, such as long-term unemployment, local authorities in many countries are developing 'holistic' or 'integrated' services, where multiple actors and professions collaborate with a view to better meet the needs of the individual citizen. By breaking with existing practices and regulations, collaborative services must be legitimized in new ways so as to appear acceptable not only in the eyes of the public and politi…
Accounting for what and to whom? Accountability tensions in collaborations addressing long‐term unemployment
Across Europe, public employment services are experimenting with more holistic and cross‐sector collaborations to tackle the wicked problem of long‐term unemployment. These collaborations operate in a context characterised by tensions produced by multiple demands for accountability. Based on case studies of the accountability relations and challenges in five such collaborations in the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), Estonia, Scotland and Denmark…
Government by standards
Doing things with numbers
Like the Supreme Audit Institutions of many other OECD countries, the Danish National Audit Office has stepped up its performance auditing of public administrations and agencies in order to ensure that they provide value for money. But how do performance audits contribute to making state institutions change their conduct? Based on the case of the Danish National Audit Office's auditing of the quality of teaching at Danish universities, this paper…
Decentralization as the exercise of power and autonomy
This paper addresses the power-autonomy relations implicated in instances of decentralization taking place in tandem with the adoption of performance measurement regimes. It argues that we may get a more adequate understanding of such instances of decentralization by regarding them as power exercised through autonomy, or as regulation of self-regulation, than by seeing them as zero-sum games in which power is transferred from central to local aut…
Histories and freedom of the present
[critiquefreedomlanguagemethod ]] This article compares the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Quentin Skinner’s historical analyses seek to unsettle the limits on present forms of freedom. We do so by comparing their ways of analysing discourse, rationality and agency. The two authors differ significantly in the ways they deal with these three phenomena. The most significant difference lies in their ways of addressing agency and its relationshi…
HIV, Constructionism and Biopower
In recent years we have seen the emergence of a wide range of critical analyses of political and social practices conducted under the heading of ‘constructionism’. Drawing on Michel Foucault's historical work on sexuality and the formation of the sexed body, a branch of constructionist analysis has taken as its primary task to question the cultural constructions of gender, sex and sexuality as ‘hetero-normative’ bearings. We argue that the sexual…
Asian Patterns of Environmental Politics. Grasping the Regulatory Capacity of the Central State Apparatus
Peter Triantafillou, ‘Asian Patterns of Environmental Politics. Grasping the Regulatory Capacity of the Central State Apparatus’, Forum for Development Studies, 1995:2, pp. 221–245. This article examines the politics of environmental policy in a number of relatively industrialised Asian countries and focuses on the regulatory capacity of the state apparatus. The influence of three international factors is examined: the internationalisation of the…
Modern Arts of Governing the Use of Pesticides in Malaysia
This article presents an analysis of contemporary struggles over the use of pesticides in Malaysian agriculture. Drawing on Michel Foucault's genealogical analyses of power/knowledge relations in modem societies in general, and governmental rationalities evolving around the management of populations (bio-power) in particular, the article presents three main arguments. First, in order to tell the truth about pesticide poisoning one had to resort t…
Policing empowerment
This article analyses the attempts to promote economic and social development in the Third World through techniques of empowerment and participation. Based on Michel Foucault’s analytics of government - notably the notion of self-technologies - we analyse two empowerment projects for women. We argue, first, that empowerment projects seek to constitute beneficiaries as active and responsible individuals with the ability to take charge of their own…
Governing Agricultural Progress
In correlation to the expansion and intensification of capitalist forms of agricultural production in the Malay states during the end of the nineteenth century, the British Colonial administration articulated the need to systematize the policing of agricultural production with increasing strength. The economic prospects of feeding the world market's increasing demand for natural rubber, combined with the objective of decreasing the Malay states' …
Rehearsing Citizenship
This article traces the sudden problematisation and governing of juvenile delinquency in British colonial Malaya in the decade preceding independence in 1957 whereby a juvenile court system, a network of institutions for delinquents, and a series of training and disciplinary practices were set up to rehabilitate the delinquent in order to turn him into a responsible citizen. Drawing on the analytics of disciplinary and ethical practices conducted…
Addressing Network Governance Through the Concepts of Governmentality and Normalization
This paper explores how network governance may be addressed through the notions of governmentality and normalization. I suggest that it is fruitful to address network governance as a specific form of rule that governs at a distance through norms of agency, efficiency and accountability. Such an analysis could illuminate the ways in which network governance hinges upon and reshapes particular constellations of power-freedom relations. In particula…
From Blood to Public Office
With the transformation from the Malay kerajaan rule based on economic extraction and the capability to take life to British colonial rule, Malays aspiring to govern others were now subject to a set of mundane disciplinary techniques seeking to promote a bureaucratic ethos that precipitated around academic merits, team spirit and above all the strange distinction between public and private spheres of action
Modern templates of happiness
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledge, this paper elaborates an analytical framework seeking to unsettle the authority of contemporary psychology. This framework focuses on the performative dimension of psychology and other ‘psy-regimes’, namely the practices and actions that may be undertaken on the basis of these forms of knowledge. We probe this framework by exploring the emergence, utilization and demise of spiritualism…
Politics have shown that the malays can change
(2005). “Politics have shown that the malays can change”: Corporate anthropology and the governing of entrepreneurial subjectivities in Malaysia. Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 207-224
Benchmarking in the Public Sector
How can we critically address benchmarking? By conceptualizing benchmarking as a normalizing governing technology, a space is cleared for analysing some of the power relations brought into play in benchmarking activities. As a device of power, benchmarking depends upon the production of normalizing knowledge and the freedom or self‐governing capacities of those who are benchmarked. The fruitfulness of this conception is illustrated through an exa…
Normalizing Active Employment Policies in the European Union
The paper examines some of the ways in which the problematic of activation is put into play in the European Employment Strategy (EES) and Danish employment policies. The limitations of causal analysis and convergence approaches are discussed and a different analytical framework based on the concept of normalization is proposed. It is argued that while various forms of activation were present in Denmark well before the launching of the EES in 1997…
HIV, Constructionism and Biopower
In recent years we have seen the emergence of a wide range of critical analyses of political and social practices conducted under the heading of ‘constructionism’. Drawing on Michel Foucault's historical work on sexuality and the formation of the sexed body, a branch of constructionist analysis has taken as its primary task to question the cultural constructions of gender, sex and sexuality as ‘hetero-normative’ bearings. We argue that the sexual…
The European Employment Strategy and the Governing of French Employment Policies
This article addresses the normalizing and government forms and mechanisms of power implicated in the European Employment Strategy's (EES) attempt to govern French employment policies. It does so by addressing power not as the causal capacity to make France change its political goals and norms, but as the set of actions and forms of knowledge that urge France to reflect upon the adequacy of its policies in terms of the problematic of employment. …
The politics of self-governance
Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Democratic Development in Nepal
Today, centres and programmes for the rehabilitation of torture victims are found all over the world. In Nepal, one of the world's poorest countries, the Centre for Victims of Torture (CVICT) has since 1990 provided advanced psychosocial rehabilitation programmes. These and similar psychosocial interventions have made critics proclaim that Western psychosocial expertise subjects the bereaved of the Third World to repressive administrative power b…
More of the same? The European Employment Strategy and the normalization of British employment policies
This article examines the ways in which the European Employment Strategy seeks to govern and further improve the performance of British employment policies. It is argued that by creating an epistemological and normalizing space for the problematization and governing of unemployment in terms of activation, the European Employment Strategy contributes to the legitimation of British employment policies. By addressing unemployment as a problem of str…
Biopower at the molar level
The Lisbon strategy and the alignment of economic and social concerns
This paper examines the economic and social thought that has evolved around the Lisbon strategy, which aimed to turn the European Union into the world’s most competitive knowledge economy by 2010. It argues that a new regime of rationality has emerged in which economic and social objectives, which were previously thought to be at odds with one another, have become increasingly aligned. The supposed antinomy between economic efficiency and social …
Histories and freedom of the present
[critiquefreedomlanguagemethod ]] This article compares the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Quentin Skinner’s historical analyses seek to unsettle the limits on present forms of freedom. We do so by comparing their ways of analysing discourse, rationality and agency. The two authors differ significantly in the ways they deal with these three phenomena. The most significant difference lies in their ways of addressing agency and its relationshi…
The OECD's thinking on the governing of unemployment
Based on Foucault's notion of governmentality and problematisation, I analyse the problematisations, causal assumptions and policy recommendations found in the documents of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concerning labour market issues. The article shows that, since the mid-1970s, the OECD's strategies on employment have consistently evolved around the problematisation of ‘structural unemployment’. Demand manage…
Decentralization as the exercise of power and autonomy
This paper addresses the power-autonomy relations implicated in instances of decentralization taking place in tandem with the adoption of performance measurement regimes. It argues that we may get a more adequate understanding of such instances of decentralization by regarding them as power exercised through autonomy, or as regulation of self-regulation, than by seeing them as zero-sum games in which power is transferred from central to local aut…
From performance measurement to learning
Over the last few decades accountability has accommodated an increasing number of different political, legal and administrative goals. This article focuses on the administrative aspect of accountability and explores the potential perils of a shift from performance measurement to learning. While this is inherently positive in its intentions, we argue that it might constitute a new source of government overload. We propose four explanations for why…
What’s in a Name? Grasping New Public Governance as a Political-Administrative System
New participatory, interactive, and less direct forms of governing seem currently to be unfolding in many liberal democracies. Some scholars have tried to conceptualize these forms of governing by using the notion of new public governance (NPG). While promising, the notion remains conceptually underdeveloped. This article first aims to develop NPG from an empirical to an analytical concept that enables categorization and evaluation of new forms o…
The Political Implications of Performance Management and Evidence-Based Policymaking
Over the last few decades performance management (PM) has invaded the public sector in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. More recently, we have seen increasing demands for evidence-based policymaking (EP). This article critically discusses the political implications of PM and EP by regarding them as particular forms of governing. Accordingly, PM may be viewed as a form of governing hinging on the regula…
Against all odds? Understanding the emergence of accreditation of the Danish hospitals
Political science (44 works) · Law (35 works) · Politics (31 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (21 works) · Public Administration (17 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (15 works) · Business (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (14 works)