K Villadsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 51560 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Villadsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Villadsen |
| SIGNATURE | VILLADSEN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9966-942X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
More Productive Bodies Faster! Human Capital and Anti‐Intellectualism in Danish University Reform
This article examines the current Danish reform of master's programmes as a case of contested marketization in higher education. While the reform aims to produce "labour-market-relevant" graduates by shortening degrees, introducing corporate programmes, and reducing enrolment, it reveals a fundamental tension between two competing economic logics: a neoliberal conception of students as human capital and a conventional view of labour as quantifiab…
The dispositif is alive! Recovering social agents in Foucauldian analysis
Michel Foucault's concept of the dispositif is increasingly salient in sociological scholarship. We identify and criticise an ‘anonymous’ emphasis in this scholarship, which often presents the dispositif as an anonymous network that acts without human agents. To remedy this tendency we develop an agent‐inclusive version of the dispositif for sociological research. Turning to Foucault's work from the 1970s, we recover descriptions of how social gr…
Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology
This article compares Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology, taking its clue from Agamben’s claim that Gestell and dispositif are ‘perfectly corresponding’ concepts. So far, however, the task of a detailed comparison of Gestell and dispositif remains unresolved. At first glance, the two terms appear compatible, designating how we moderns began objectifying nature as well as ourselves as manipulatable raw material. Significant for the discus…
The Subject and Power’ – Four Decades Later
Michel Foucault’s essay ‘The Subject and Power’ has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault’s shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault’s research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser’s thesis on the ideologi…
Discipline for pleasure
This article explores recent HIV prevention campaigns for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), focusing on how they integrate pleasure and desire in their calls for self-discipline through a continual use of pharmaceuticals. This emerging type of health promotion, here represented by ads promoting the preventive use of pharmaceuticals, no longer simply approaches target groups with demands to abstain from harmful substances or practices and thus cont…
Pandemic modelling and model citizens
Pandemic modelling functions as a means of producing evidence of potential events and as an instrument of intervention that Tim Rhodes and colleagues describe as entangling science into social practices, calculations into materializations, abstracts into effects and models into society. This article seeks to show how a model society evinced through mathematical models produces a model not only for society but also for citizens, showing them how t…
Goodbye Foucault's 'missing human agent'? Self-formation, capability and the dispositifs
A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault's 'agentless position' for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault's writings, which allows space for 'human agency', including individuals' pursuit of tactics, a…
Jane Addams’s Pragmatist Method Extended
Although Jane Addams has long been recognized as a pioneer in North American pragmatism, efforts to develop her thought into a distinct research program have been limited. This article develops Addams’s work as a method of sociological inquiry by focusing on her notions of “perplexity,” “moral adjustment,” and “sympathetic understanding.” Emphasizing the essential role of language in moral conflicts and reconstruction, the article incorporates Ch…
‘The Dispositive’
Foucault’s notion ‘the dispositive’ has been introduced in organization studies as a highly promising concept. However, its analytical and empirical potentials remain to be fully explored. This article develops dispositional analytics which conceives of organizations as pervaded by multiple dispositives that interact, reinforce or contradict one another. In this reconstruction, particular emphasis is given to the visibility produced by dispositiv…
What is the new governmentality of the Covid-19 pandemic? A reply to Bigo et al
A reply to: "Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?" by Bigo, Didier; Guild, Elspeth; Kuskonmaz, Elif Mendos. In: Gobal Discourse (May 2021), vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 471-489
From social gospel to CSR
Critics lament that corporate social responsibility has failed to significantly change business practices and that it became ‘de-radicalized’ once embraced by corporate business management. Using historical analysis, this article reevaluates this de-radicalization thesis, questioning whether corporate social responsibility ever was as inherently radical as the thesis assumes. The article demonstrates that early corporate social responsibility was…
I Assure You, We Have the Strictest Alien Act Possible
This essay tells the story of how Denmark transformed from a very welcoming and tolerant country to one whose prime ministers reassure its residents, “We have the strictest Alien Act possible.” The approach is genealogical, following Michel Foucault, and the empirical focal point is Danish immigration policies as they evolved from the late 1960s until today. This development culminates in the emergence of the “restrictionist policy paradigm,” whi…
Technologies in caregiving
This article explores the adoption of new technology in organisations that provide senior citizen care. Inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, we study how technology reduces complexity by identifying client needs and ensuring predictability in service delivery. However, how technologies are adopted in practice is not determined by technology since it is also structured by care‐workers' continuous decision‐making. Against this backdrop, we …
Penis-whirling and pie-throwing
This article explores the drama performed around a self-proclaimed ‘anti-establishment’ executive at a Danish film company, Zentropa. The company prides itself on being against the existing ‘elitist’ and commercialized Danish film industry. Inspired by the thesis that modern capitalism develops by incorporating the critiques directed against it, the article analyses how Zentropa’s Chief Executive Officer invests a ‘progressive’, counter-cultural …
Jane Addams’ Social Vision
The settlement utopia
The Settlement movement, which originated in late nineteenth-century England, was a pioneer in bettering the conditions of the working poor. It pursued the utopian project of locating ‘settlements’ within poverty-ridden neighbourhoods where respectable students should meet slum dwellers on equal terms. This article explores the trajectory of the comparatively under-researched Danish offspring of the movement. It demonstrates the tempering and com…
Constantly online and the fantasy of ‘work–life balance’
Smartphones and other mobile communication devices are promoted with promises of enhancing professional competence and individual freedom in working life, and in work–life balance. However, an emerging stream of research demonstrates that the adoption of such technologies is accompanied by increasing stress, collective control and work intensification. This article provides a discussion of recent research on the effects of smartphone usage in con…
Tracing the roots of social citizenship
The modern social citizen is a dual figure: at one and the same time a legal-universal abstraction and a particular living being with specific capacities, proclivities and attitudes. The Settlement movement from the late nineteenth century articulated and shaped both universal and particular dimensions of social citizenship. It contained the imperative of guidance of individual conscience and the modern discourse of universal social rights. The a…
Health Promotion, Governmentality and the Challenges of Theorizing Pleasure and Desire
The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of 'non-authoritarian' health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a 'well-balanced subject' straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregroun…
Michel Foucault and the Forces of Civil Society
Michel Foucault has been presented as a unequivocal defender of civil society. He was particularly sensitive to diversity and marginality, aligned with local activism and bottom-up politics. This article re-assesses this view by demonstrating that despite his political militancy, Foucault never viewed civil society as an inherently progressive force. It traces Foucault's struggle against his own enthusiasm for anti-institutional and anti-rational…
Governmentality
Social theorist Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' has achieved significant importance within the social sciences and humanities. Foucault's articulation of the governmentality concept is as an attempt to contest contemporary political ideologies, but which nevertheless shared the 'over-valuation of the state', the conception of the state as the ultimate centre of power. Governmentality serves as an analytical perspective that has pav…
The naked manager
This article explores how an allegedly ‘non-hierarchical’ and aestheticized managerial practice reconfigures power relations within a creative industry. The key problematic is ‘governmental’ in the sense suggested by Michel Foucault, in as much as the manager’s ethical self-practice—which involves expressive and ‘liberated’ bodily comportment—is used tactically to shape the space of conduct of others in the company. The study foregrounds the mana…
Foucault, Maoism, Genealogy
Foucault’s inspiration from Nietzsche in terms of writing critical histories is difficult to overestimate. However, this article advances an interpretation of Foucault’s approach to history which focuses on another, less readily evident, dialogue partner, namely the Marxist tradition and, more precisely, French Maoism. The first part of the article details Foucault’s involvement in the Maoist-inspired activist group, Groupe d’information sur les …
The government of life
The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with di…
Corporate smart phones
This article explores how the adoption of company sponsored smart phones inflicts upon the lives of professionals. Drawing upon qualitative interviews at a law firm in B razil, the experiences of new smart phone users are reported upon in detail. Increased accessibility, accuracy and speed in exchanges gave the users a sense of autonomy and flexibility. However, the technology also helped to intensify the organisation's hold on employees outside …
The Emergence of 'Neo-Philanthropy
New concepts have emerged in social work and in social policy over the past 10-15 years: 'you must meet the clients where they stand', 'help must be self-help' and 'poverty is spiritual rather than material'. These axioms were core principles for the welfare of the poor that philanthropic and religious societies carried out in the late nineteenth century. Their current proliferation in all types of social work and in social policy discourse demon…
The government of life
The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with di…
Corporate smart phones
This article explores how the adoption of company sponsored smart phones inflicts upon the lives of professionals. Drawing upon qualitative interviews at a law firm in B razil, the experiences of new smart phone users are reported upon in detail. Increased accessibility, accuracy and speed in exchanges gave the users a sense of autonomy and flexibility. However, the technology also helped to intensify the organisation's hold on employees outside …
Who should do the talking? The proliferation of dialogue as governmental technology
This paper investigates the recent proliferation of appeals to 'dialogue' as a solution to problems in a broad spectrum of different organisational settings Instead of top‐down management and expert‐driven public services, we are told we need 'dialogue‐based' management, health treatment, elder care, social counselling, and so forth. Dialogue is often presented as a tool that will reverse the stifling dominance of authoritative expertise and lead…
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism
We begin by making two observations on our present. First, many governments in contemporary liberal and welfare states have, during the last 30 years, sought to limit the role of the state in the delivery of what were formerly considered public services. They are concerned to mobilize agents, movements, energies, and cultures outside of the state, and yet they are afraid that their programmatic attempts to do so may stifle these non-state agents.…
Michel Foucault and the Forces of Civil Society
Michel Foucault has been presented as a unequivocal defender of civil society. He was particularly sensitive to diversity and marginality, aligned with local activism and bottom-up politics. This article re-assesses this view by demonstrating that despite his political militancy, Foucault never viewed civil society as an inherently progressive force. It traces Foucault's struggle against his own enthusiasm for anti-institutional and anti-rational…
Freedom as self-transgression
This article takes as its starting point the growing prominence of what might be called ‘neo-philanthropic’ forms of knowledge in social work during recent years. Inspired by Foucault's concepts of genealogy and governmentality, the article presents an historical analysis including eighteenth century poor policies, philanthropy in the late nineteenth century, welfare planning in the 1960s and the emergence of neo-philanthropic social work from th…
Health Promotion, Governmentality and the Challenges of Theorizing Pleasure and Desire
The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of 'non-authoritarian' health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a 'well-balanced subject' straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregroun…
Foucault, Maoism, Genealogy
Foucault’s inspiration from Nietzsche in terms of writing critical histories is difficult to overestimate. However, this article advances an interpretation of Foucault’s approach to history which focuses on another, less readily evident, dialogue partner, namely the Marxist tradition and, more precisely, French Maoism. The first part of the article details Foucault’s involvement in the Maoist-inspired activist group, Groupe d’information sur les …
Technologies in caregiving
This article explores the adoption of new technology in organisations that provide senior citizen care. Inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, we study how technology reduces complexity by identifying client needs and ensuring predictability in service delivery. However, how technologies are adopted in practice is not determined by technology since it is also structured by care‐workers' continuous decision‐making. Against this backdrop, we …
Constantly online and the fantasy of ‘work–life balance’
Smartphones and other mobile communication devices are promoted with promises of enhancing professional competence and individual freedom in working life, and in work–life balance. However, an emerging stream of research demonstrates that the adoption of such technologies is accompanied by increasing stress, collective control and work intensification. This article provides a discussion of recent research on the effects of smartphone usage in con…
Pandemic modelling and model citizens
Pandemic modelling functions as a means of producing evidence of potential events and as an instrument of intervention that Tim Rhodes and colleagues describe as entangling science into social practices, calculations into materializations, abstracts into effects and models into society. This article seeks to show how a model society evinced through mathematical models produces a model not only for society but also for citizens, showing them how t…
Goodbye Foucault's 'missing human agent'? Self-formation, capability and the dispositifs
A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault's 'agentless position' for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault's writings, which allows space for 'human agency', including individuals' pursuit of tactics, a…
Jane Addams’ Social Vision
Tracing the roots of social citizenship
The modern social citizen is a dual figure: at one and the same time a legal-universal abstraction and a particular living being with specific capacities, proclivities and attitudes. The Settlement movement from the late nineteenth century articulated and shaped both universal and particular dimensions of social citizenship. It contained the imperative of guidance of individual conscience and the modern discourse of universal social rights. The a…
Protect the patient from whom? When patients contest governmentality and seek more expert guidance
Doing Without State and Civil Society as Universals
This article poses questions of power to social services provided by voluntary organizations. In particular, it examines the assumption that voluntary and local organizations represent ‘containers’ for a radically different social work rationality, where the marginalized are met in a more equal and attentive fashion, ‘on their own terms’. Thus, the world of volunteering and ‘friendly amateurism’ has been seen as a source of instructive ethics fro…
The dispositif is alive! Recovering social agents in Foucauldian analysis
Michel Foucault's concept of the dispositif is increasingly salient in sociological scholarship. We identify and criticise an ‘anonymous’ emphasis in this scholarship, which often presents the dispositif as an anonymous network that acts without human agents. To remedy this tendency we develop an agent‐inclusive version of the dispositif for sociological research. Turning to Foucault's work from the 1970s, we recover descriptions of how social gr…
What is the new governmentality of the Covid-19 pandemic? A reply to Bigo et al
A reply to: "Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?" by Bigo, Didier; Guild, Elspeth; Kuskonmaz, Elif Mendos. In: Gobal Discourse (May 2021), vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 471-489
Penis-whirling and pie-throwing
This article explores the drama performed around a self-proclaimed ‘anti-establishment’ executive at a Danish film company, Zentropa. The company prides itself on being against the existing ‘elitist’ and commercialized Danish film industry. Inspired by the thesis that modern capitalism develops by incorporating the critiques directed against it, the article analyses how Zentropa’s Chief Executive Officer invests a ‘progressive’, counter-cultural …
Ambiguous citizenship
This article discusses the classic welfare state problem of balancing universal values with an attention to particular individuals and needs. Welfare for marginalized citizens is addressed as a particular urgent case in point. The article first considers Baumann as emblematic for a postmodern position on welfare. In contrast, Luhmann's systems theory is then presented to form a program of observation of concrete welfare services, using the ‘rigou…
Filantropiens genkomst
Kaspar Villadsen: The reappearance of philanthropy: the break up of citizenship, community and freedom ? That article argues that philanthropic principles for social work have achieved growing prominence in social policy and social work during the last 10-15 years. As a result of this process, new ways of categorising and governing social clients have begun to prevail at the expense of currently existing ones. Therefore, we need to ask what kind …
Genealogi og socialpolitik - Foucault kontra marxistisk historieskrivning om socialpolitikkens opkomst
During recent years there has been a growing interest in the work of Michel Foucault and his way of doing historical sociology, in particular among young researchers and students. So far, however, discussions about the specific characteristics of this method have only been at a preliminary stage in the Scandinavian context. This article begins this debate by seeking to define the characteristics of genealogical method as it was practiced by Fouca…
Michel Foucault og kritiske perspektiver på liberalismen. Governmentality eller genealogi som analysestrategi
Kaspar Villadsen: Michel Foucault and critical perspectives on liberalism. Governmentality or genealogy as a strategy of analysis Although the literature on governmentality has produced a series of highly interesting studies focusing on questions of liberalism, government and the state, it is troubled by a number of problems. This paper suggests that some of these problems result from the unclear status of a core analytical concept within this li…
Hvor skal talen komme fra? Dialogen som omsiggribende ledelsesteknologi
Artiklen tager afsæt i den udbredelse af dialog som ledelsesinstrument, som har kunnet iagttages de senere år inden for mange forskellige velfærdsområder. Den fremlægger den påstand, at der er ved at ske en forskydning i ledelsesrelationerne, som indebærer, at den før talende ekspert — lægen, sundhedsrådgiveren, socialarbejderen, lederen — nu skal tale mindre, mens den førhen tavse — patienten, den udstødte, medarbejderen — nu skal tale mere. Her…
Skabelsen Af Det Moderne Subjekt
This article discusses the emergence of the modern subject by examining the work of Max Weber, Nobert Elias and Michel Foucault. It argues that their work each make key contributions to the genealogy of the modern subject, using a similar approach to history and sharing a similar focus and power in social life. Yet, there are also important differences that should be acknowledged when trying to unify the three criticial thinkers
The Emergence of 'Neo-Philanthropy
New concepts have emerged in social work and in social policy over the past 10-15 years: 'you must meet the clients where they stand', 'help must be self-help' and 'poverty is spiritual rather than material'. These axioms were core principles for the welfare of the poor that philanthropic and religious societies carried out in the late nineteenth century. Their current proliferation in all types of social work and in social policy discourse demon…
Har Casper Christensen og Frank Hvam læst Goffman? – om rollekompetence, kvindemoral og kynisk fornuft
Artiklen tager afsæt i hypotesen, at forfatterne bag sit-com’en “Klovn“ har været inspirerede af pointer hos Goffman, Žižek og Sloterdijk. Den viser gennem analyser af udvalgte afsnit af “Klovn“, hvordan den aktuelle socialitet synes gennemsyret af et særligt sæt “kønnede scripts“, som i markant grad styrer den sociale mikro-interaktion. Ikke mindst er de to mandlige hovedfigurer stærkt orienteret imod en særlig “kvindemoral“. Artiklen argumenter…
Doing Without State and Civil Society as Universals
This article poses questions of power to social services provided by voluntary organizations. In particular, it examines the assumption that voluntary and local organizations represent ‘containers’ for a radically different social work rationality, where the marginalized are met in a more equal and attentive fashion, ‘on their own terms’. Thus, the world of volunteering and ‘friendly amateurism’ has been seen as a source of instructive ethics fro…
Who should do the talking? The proliferation of dialogue as governmental technology
This paper investigates the recent proliferation of appeals to 'dialogue' as a solution to problems in a broad spectrum of different organisational settings Instead of top‐down management and expert‐driven public services, we are told we need 'dialogue‐based' management, health treatment, elder care, social counselling, and so forth. Dialogue is often presented as a tool that will reverse the stifling dominance of authoritative expertise and lead…
Freedom as self-transgression
This article takes as its starting point the growing prominence of what might be called ‘neo-philanthropic’ forms of knowledge in social work during recent years. Inspired by Foucault's concepts of genealogy and governmentality, the article presents an historical analysis including eighteenth century poor policies, philanthropy in the late nineteenth century, welfare planning in the 1960s and the emergence of neo-philanthropic social work from th…
Civilsamfundet i det foucaultske blik – magtens relæ eller magtkritikkens base
Denne artikel diskuterer civilsamfundets status i poststrukturelle magtanalyser med særlig fokus på governmentality studier. Den påpeger, at begrebet har en ambivalent status inden for denne tradition: Er det en diskursiv styringskategori? Er det et domæne bestående af bestemte institutioner? Er civilsamfundet et gennemstrømningspunkt for magten eller et sæde for social kritik og modmagt? Disse uklarheder udfordres af de senere års politisk-admin…
Modern Welfare And ‘Good Old’ Philanthropy
This article identifies a number of parallels between nineteenth-century philanthropy and contemporary social work that have so far received little attention in the ongoing debate on the relation between philanthropy and modern welfare. While adopting a critical perspective on social philanthropy, it does not take a definitive stance on the question of whether philanthropy cements marginality or constitutes a progressive agent for social change. …
Ambiguous citizenship
This article discusses the classic welfare state problem of balancing universal values with an attention to particular individuals and needs. Welfare for marginalized citizens is addressed as a particular urgent case in point. The article first considers Baumann as emblematic for a postmodern position on welfare. In contrast, Luhmann's systems theory is then presented to form a program of observation of concrete welfare services, using the ‘rigou…
Public Policy and Foucaultian Critique
This article suggests that certain intertwinements can be discerned between contemporary public policies and post-structural thinking, emblematically represented by Foucault and scholars drawing upon his work. The article demonstrates that the post-structural perspective on power, while recognising its strengths and efficacy, confines observers to a particular form of analytical critique, which sets specific limits for what can be observed and de…
Protect the patient from whom? When patients contest governmentality and seek more expert guidance
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism
We begin by making two observations on our present. First, many governments in contemporary liberal and welfare states have, during the last 30 years, sought to limit the role of the state in the delivery of what were formerly considered public services. They are concerned to mobilize agents, movements, energies, and cultures outside of the state, and yet they are afraid that their programmatic attempts to do so may stifle these non-state agents.…
Biopolitik, civilsamfund og ’politisk eskatologi’
Biopolitics, Civil Society and Political Eschatology: Foucault's distrust in the population's inherent forces Michel Foucault's scepticism toward discourses on the organic vitality of populations is not only explainable by his attention to the dark 'underside of biopolitics -the risks of persecution of individuals, who threaten the population's vitality from the inside . Moreover, it should be understood in light of Foucault's acute sensitivity t…
Corporate smart phones
This article explores how the adoption of company sponsored smart phones inflicts upon the lives of professionals. Drawing upon qualitative interviews at a law firm in B razil, the experiences of new smart phone users are reported upon in detail. Increased accessibility, accuracy and speed in exchanges gave the users a sense of autonomy and flexibility. However, the technology also helped to intensify the organisation's hold on employees outside …
Governmentality
Social theorist Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' has achieved significant importance within the social sciences and humanities. Foucault's articulation of the governmentality concept is as an attempt to contest contemporary political ideologies, but which nevertheless shared the 'over-valuation of the state', the conception of the state as the ultimate centre of power. Governmentality serves as an analytical perspective that has pav…
The naked manager
This article explores how an allegedly ‘non-hierarchical’ and aestheticized managerial practice reconfigures power relations within a creative industry. The key problematic is ‘governmental’ in the sense suggested by Michel Foucault, in as much as the manager’s ethical self-practice—which involves expressive and ‘liberated’ bodily comportment—is used tactically to shape the space of conduct of others in the company. The study foregrounds the mana…
Foucault, Maoism, Genealogy
Foucault’s inspiration from Nietzsche in terms of writing critical histories is difficult to overestimate. However, this article advances an interpretation of Foucault’s approach to history which focuses on another, less readily evident, dialogue partner, namely the Marxist tradition and, more precisely, French Maoism. The first part of the article details Foucault’s involvement in the Maoist-inspired activist group, Groupe d’information sur les …
The government of life
The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with di…
The settlement utopia
The Settlement movement, which originated in late nineteenth-century England, was a pioneer in bettering the conditions of the working poor. It pursued the utopian project of locating ‘settlements’ within poverty-ridden neighbourhoods where respectable students should meet slum dwellers on equal terms. This article explores the trajectory of the comparatively under-researched Danish offspring of the movement. It demonstrates the tempering and com…
Constantly online and the fantasy of ‘work–life balance’
Smartphones and other mobile communication devices are promoted with promises of enhancing professional competence and individual freedom in working life, and in work–life balance. However, an emerging stream of research demonstrates that the adoption of such technologies is accompanied by increasing stress, collective control and work intensification. This article provides a discussion of recent research on the effects of smartphone usage in con…
Tracing the roots of social citizenship
The modern social citizen is a dual figure: at one and the same time a legal-universal abstraction and a particular living being with specific capacities, proclivities and attitudes. The Settlement movement from the late nineteenth century articulated and shaped both universal and particular dimensions of social citizenship. It contained the imperative of guidance of individual conscience and the modern discourse of universal social rights. The a…
Sociology (39 works) · Political science (38 works) · Law (35 works) · Politics (29 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics (16 works) · Governmentality (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works)