Gary Wickham
Biographic Data
| ID | 93731 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gary Wickham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gary |
| FAMILY NAME | Wickham |
| SIGNATURE | WICKHAM G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Murdoch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5758-7979 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 253 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Post-nationalism, sovereignty and the state
The term 'post-national formations' is a product of some of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas. In using this term, Habermas highlights what he regards as a laudatory trend in social and political research. This is the trend away from an intense focus on the role of nation-states - a role he believes to be unconducive to progressive politics - and towards a focus on the role of new configurations - a role he believes to be much more conducive to …
The state and civility: A crucial nexus
The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this b…
Expanding the 'social' in 'social identity
Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analy…
Australian Sociology: Fragility, Survival, Rivalry
Battered and bruised by injuries (often self-inflicted) sustained in the first half of the twentieth century since 1950 sociology in Australia has fought its way back into the academic mainstream. Thi
Hobbes's commitment to society as a product of sovereignty: A basis for a Hobbesian sociology
There is a commitment in Thomas Hobbes's work which is largely neglected by sociology, a commitment to society as a product of sovereignty. Hobbes makes this commitment in line with his strident opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature. For Hobbes, society is not based on natural reason. Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean anthropology, he argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enou…
Ethics, Morality and the Formation of Cultural Studies Intellectuals
This article is not so much concerned with the history of cultural studies as with the way in which aspects of its history are used in forming a particular type of cultural studies intellectual, one for whom ethics is subsumed into a morality directed to the necessity of engaging in a politics of empowerment. The article's concern, this is to say, is to problematise the taken-for-grantedness of this type of intellectual, something it seeks to do …
Money, Financial Regulation and the Fragility of Civil Peace: Maintaining Order in the Face of Chaos
In most Western countries, the ongoing global financial crisis is causing economic insecurity manifesting as market volatility and fear of escalating defaults. In many of these countries, it is also producing social and political upheaval. A growing number of commentators use terms like ‘catastrophe’, ‘abyss’ and ‘brink’ to describe the consequences of potential financial meltdown. But they usually do so only figuratively, in describing the many …
The core object 'society' and sociology's public relevance: History versus theory
The recent collection Sociological Objects: Reconfigurations of Social Theory provides plenty of evidence in support of the proposition that there is not a strong mood within sociology today to conduct an ongoing productive debate about 'society' as the core object of the discipline, in the way that, for example, economics conducts such a debate about 'the economy'. Instead, sociology is much more likely to have disparate debates, each organized …
Sociology's object(s) and the discipline's relevance: Introduction to the Special Issue
Dousing the dragon's fire
After suggesting that Stephen Turner's work is characterized by a determination to offer viable alternatives to blockages generated by adherence to dogmas, particularly those generated by adherence to Kantian metaphysics, this review article concentrates on his recent book Explaining the Normative. The article sets out the book's descriptions of a wide variety of positions, 'each of which accounts for a different kind of normativity'. Perhaps the…
Foucault's Monsters and the Challenge of Law by Andrew N. Sharpe
Sociology, the public sphere, and modern government: A challenge to the dominance of Habermas
There is an unfortunate tendency within some branches of sociology - particularly those usually called 'critical', that is, those associated with 'critical social theory'- to treat with disdain the understanding of the public sphere that many modern governments use daily in making and implementing public policy. The majority of sociologists in those branches seem to prefer, as part and parcel of their normative commitments, Jürgen Habermas's Kant…
Protecting Law from Morality’s Stalking Horse: The ‘socio’ in much socio-legal studies
Invited a few years ago by one of the field’s leading journals ‘to stimulate discussion about the nature, role and future of socio-legal studies’ ( JLS Editors 2002: 632), Roger Cotterrell (2002) and Paddy Hillyard (2002), two leading socio-legal scholars, stress the connection between the legal and the moral. Morality, they believe, is the heart and soul of the law. For them, only when socio-legal studies allows the law-morality connection to be…
The social must be limited: Some problems with Foucault's approach to modern positive power
Focusing on Foucault's distinction between an older, superseded model - the juridical/sovereignty model - and a newer one - which he refers to by a variety of names, such as disciplinary bio-power, art of government and governmentality - this article seeks, first, to demonstrate that his account of modern positive power is an unsatisfactory explanation of this type of power. It does this by contrasting it with an account that locates modern posit…
Competing Uses of History in Researching the Social: A Reply to Peter Baehr
Some Additional Knowledge Conditions for Sociology
If the conventional position that sociology emerged in the 19th century is accepted, then two 18th- and/or 19th-century rationalist knowledge conditions - 'positivism gives way to theory' and 'the centrality of modern rational philosophy' - can be accepted as the conventional knowledge conditions for the discipline's emergence. While acknowledging that this conventional position and these two conventional knowledge conditions form an important pa…
Expanding the Classical in Classical Sociology
If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the so…
The Law-Morality Relation Revisited: A Challenge to Established Traditions by the Australian Sceptical Approach
Three long-established, competing frameworks for understanding the law-morality relation — the individual reason-based tradition (represented here by Rawls), the communitarian tradition (MacIntyre and Cotterrell) and the utilitarian or positivist tradition (Austin and Hart) — are challenged by some research into early modern thinkers like Hobbes, Hale, Pufendorf and Thomasius. More specifically, I use some work by Ian Hunter and David Saunders to…
Foucault, Law, and Power: A Reassessment
After raising doubts about Foucault's approach to law‐power, in the light of various acts of religion‐inspired violence on and after 11 September 2001, a case is made against this approach, based on the charge that Foucault ties law far too tightly to what he calls negative power. He makes law part of juridico‐sovereignty power, a form of power he regards as outmoded, with an outmoded commitment to sovereignty and the state. It is argued that in …
Commentaries on Hook, ‘Genealogy, discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the work of critique’
This article is one of the four commentaries published as Commentaries on Hook, ‘Genealogy, discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the work of critique’ \n in the journal, Qualitative Research in Psychology [Taylor and Francis © Edward Arnold (publishers) Ltd.]. The definitive version is available at; http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1478088705qp026cm
Calculating ‘Public Interest’: Common Law and the Legal Governance of the Environment
Drawing inspiration from O’Malley’s very recent attempt to introduce greater subtlety into governmentality thinking about the operation of the common law of contract (O’Malley, 2000), this article seeks to explore some of the nuances of the common law’s way of calculating interests. O’Malley argues that the law of contract developed in a more pragmatic fashion than an understanding of law within liberal economic theory allows. He says that contra…
Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering
Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of `doing' cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering
Using Foucault's Methods
Using Foucault's Methods provides a clear, straightforward guide to those who want to apply the work of Foucault to their own field of interest. The authors employ an accessible style to encourage readers to engage with Foucault's work (and other Foucaultian thought) by tackling those questions and issues that students often raise about his work. They are then shown the many ways Foucault's methods have been used in the analysis of social order. …
Modern Urban Government: A Foucaultian Perspective
This paper provides a theoretical framework around Foucault's notion of governmentality and illustrates it with some evidence about modern urban government. We aim simply to indicate the possibilities of this approach to readers of the journal. In examining certain knowledge developments around modern urban life and tracing some connections between these developments and certain techniques of modern urban government, both diect and indirect, we h…
Bringing Foucault into Law and Law into Foucault
The announced purpose of Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham 's book Foucault and Law, is "to demonstrate the pertinence of [Michel] Foucault for contemporary issues in legal studies. " In this review essay, I acknowledge the important contributions Hunt and Wickham have made, both in introducing basic Foucaultian concepts to a legal academic audience, and in identifying the defects in Foucault's explicit discussions of law. Yet, I contend, the authors tu…
Using Foucault's Methods
Using Foucault's Methods provides a clear, straightforward guide to those who want to apply the work of Foucault to their own field of interest. The authors employ an accessible style to encourage readers to engage with Foucault's work (and other Foucaultian thought) by tackling those questions and issues that students often raise about his work. They are then shown the many ways Foucault's methods have been used in the analysis of social order. …
Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance
Power and power analysis: Beyond Foucault
This paper is an attempt to develop a framework for non-essentialist power analysis. By ‘non-essentialist analysis’ I mean analysis which does not understand its object in terms of an all-important essence (like the economy, the state or the creative individual). As Barry Hindess describes it: Essentialism.... refers to a mode of analysis in which social phenomena are analysed not in terms of their specific conditions of existence and their effec…
Hobbes's commitment to society as a product of sovereignty: A basis for a Hobbesian sociology
There is a commitment in Thomas Hobbes's work which is largely neglected by sociology, a commitment to society as a product of sovereignty. Hobbes makes this commitment in line with his strident opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature. For Hobbes, society is not based on natural reason. Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean anthropology, he argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enou…
Sociology, the public sphere, and modern government: A challenge to the dominance of Habermas
There is an unfortunate tendency within some branches of sociology - particularly those usually called 'critical', that is, those associated with 'critical social theory'- to treat with disdain the understanding of the public sphere that many modern governments use daily in making and implementing public policy. The majority of sociologists in those branches seem to prefer, as part and parcel of their normative commitments, Jürgen Habermas's Kant…
The core object 'society' and sociology's public relevance: History versus theory
The recent collection Sociological Objects: Reconfigurations of Social Theory provides plenty of evidence in support of the proposition that there is not a strong mood within sociology today to conduct an ongoing productive debate about 'society' as the core object of the discipline, in the way that, for example, economics conducts such a debate about 'the economy'. Instead, sociology is much more likely to have disparate debates, each organized …
Foucault, Law, and Power: A Reassessment
After raising doubts about Foucault's approach to law‐power, in the light of various acts of religion‐inspired violence on and after 11 September 2001, a case is made against this approach, based on the charge that Foucault ties law far too tightly to what he calls negative power. He makes law part of juridico‐sovereignty power, a form of power he regards as outmoded, with an outmoded commitment to sovereignty and the state. It is argued that in …
Australian Sociology: Fragility, Survival, Rivalry
Battered and bruised by injuries (often self-inflicted) sustained in the first half of the twentieth century since 1950 sociology in Australia has fought its way back into the academic mainstream. Thi
Some Additional Knowledge Conditions for Sociology
If the conventional position that sociology emerged in the 19th century is accepted, then two 18th- and/or 19th-century rationalist knowledge conditions - 'positivism gives way to theory' and 'the centrality of modern rational philosophy' - can be accepted as the conventional knowledge conditions for the discipline's emergence. While acknowledging that this conventional position and these two conventional knowledge conditions form an important pa…
Expanding the Classical in Classical Sociology
If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the so…
Sociology's object(s) and the discipline's relevance: Introduction to the Special Issue
The political possibilities of postmodernism
Postmodernism is currently being debated as if it were a panacea for a range of cultural, political and theoretical ills. This paper argues that postmodernism has possibilities, but that these possibilities are far fewer than either its proponents hope or its opponents fear. Moreover, the paper argues that far too many contributions to debates about postmodernism - both pro and anti - are very careless about the way they construct the politics of…
Post-nationalism, sovereignty and the state
The term 'post-national formations' is a product of some of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas. In using this term, Habermas highlights what he regards as a laudatory trend in social and political research. This is the trend away from an intense focus on the role of nation-states - a role he believes to be unconducive to progressive politics - and towards a focus on the role of new configurations - a role he believes to be much more conducive to …
The state and civility: A crucial nexus
The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this b…
Expanding the 'social' in 'social identity
Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analy…
The social must be limited: Some problems with Foucault's approach to modern positive power
Focusing on Foucault's distinction between an older, superseded model - the juridical/sovereignty model - and a newer one - which he refers to by a variety of names, such as disciplinary bio-power, art of government and governmentality - this article seeks, first, to demonstrate that his account of modern positive power is an unsatisfactory explanation of this type of power. It does this by contrasting it with an account that locates modern posit…
Calculating ‘Public Interest’: Common Law and the Legal Governance of the Environment
Drawing inspiration from O’Malley’s very recent attempt to introduce greater subtlety into governmentality thinking about the operation of the common law of contract (O’Malley, 2000), this article seeks to explore some of the nuances of the common law’s way of calculating interests. O’Malley argues that the law of contract developed in a more pragmatic fashion than an understanding of law within liberal economic theory allows. He says that contra…
Bringing Foucault into Law and Law into Foucault
The announced purpose of Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham 's book Foucault and Law, is "to demonstrate the pertinence of [Michel] Foucault for contemporary issues in legal studies. " In this review essay, I acknowledge the important contributions Hunt and Wickham have made, both in introducing basic Foucaultian concepts to a legal academic audience, and in identifying the defects in Foucault's explicit discussions of law. Yet, I contend, the authors tu…
Power and power analysis: Beyond Foucault
This paper is an attempt to develop a framework for non-essentialist power analysis. By ‘non-essentialist analysis’ I mean analysis which does not understand its object in terms of an all-important essence (like the economy, the state or the creative individual). As Barry Hindess describes it: Essentialism.... refers to a mode of analysis in which social phenomena are analysed not in terms of their specific conditions of existence and their effec…
The Currency of History for Sociology
The politics of the uses of history and sociology can be quite dramatic. Questions about the way different knowledges of social practices have been and continue to be operational in a variety of sites are crucial questions for those engaged in these sites, especially if the sites are specialised knowledge arenas like institutions of higher education. My main concern in this essay is the politics of the operation of some of these knowledges in spe…
The political possibilities of postmodernism
Postmodernism is currently being debated as if it were a panacea for a range of cultural, political and theoretical ills. This paper argues that postmodernism has possibilities, but that these possibilities are far fewer than either its proponents hope or its opponents fear. Moreover, the paper argues that far too many contributions to debates about postmodernism - both pro and anti - are very careless about the way they construct the politics of…
Sport, manners, persons, government: Sport, Elias, Mauss, Foucault
The former Arsenal manager and Watford director, Bertie Mee prides himself on his reputation for teaching professional soccer players a ‘rigorous outlook. . . towards all aspects of their lives’. This includes schooling players ‘in everything from which knife and fork to pick up first in expensive restaurants to how to contend with the carnal temptations of trips overseas. Mee took raw, new recruits from the backwoods on educational visits to the…
Governance and failure: On the limits of sociology
Failure is an ubiquitous and central feature of social life. Yet much sociological inquiry focuses not on failure but on success. This paper adopts a sceptical approach to sociological theory, advancing an account of the necessary limits of sociological inquiry and defending the idea of the primacy of failure on two fronts: first, through the examination of a sociological approach currently developing around the Foucaultian idea of 'governmentali…
Modern Urban Government: A Foucaultian Perspective
This paper provides a theoretical framework around Foucault's notion of governmentality and illustrates it with some evidence about modern urban government. We aim simply to indicate the possibilities of this approach to readers of the journal. In examining certain knowledge developments around modern urban life and tracing some connections between these developments and certain techniques of modern urban government, both diect and indirect, we h…
Bringing Foucault into Law and Law into Foucault
The announced purpose of Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham 's book Foucault and Law, is "to demonstrate the pertinence of [Michel] Foucault for contemporary issues in legal studies. " In this review essay, I acknowledge the important contributions Hunt and Wickham have made, both in introducing basic Foucaultian concepts to a legal academic audience, and in identifying the defects in Foucault's explicit discussions of law. Yet, I contend, the authors tu…
Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance
Using Foucault's Methods
Using Foucault's Methods provides a clear, straightforward guide to those who want to apply the work of Foucault to their own field of interest. The authors employ an accessible style to encourage readers to engage with Foucault's work (and other Foucaultian thought) by tackling those questions and issues that students often raise about his work. They are then shown the many ways Foucault's methods have been used in the analysis of social order. …
Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering
Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of `doing' cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering
Calculating ‘Public Interest’: Common Law and the Legal Governance of the Environment
Drawing inspiration from O’Malley’s very recent attempt to introduce greater subtlety into governmentality thinking about the operation of the common law of contract (O’Malley, 2000), this article seeks to explore some of the nuances of the common law’s way of calculating interests. O’Malley argues that the law of contract developed in a more pragmatic fashion than an understanding of law within liberal economic theory allows. He says that contra…
Commentaries on Hook, ‘Genealogy, discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the work of critique’
This article is one of the four commentaries published as Commentaries on Hook, ‘Genealogy, discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the work of critique’ \n in the journal, Qualitative Research in Psychology [Taylor and Francis © Edward Arnold (publishers) Ltd.]. The definitive version is available at; http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1478088705qp026cm
The Law-Morality Relation Revisited: A Challenge to Established Traditions by the Australian Sceptical Approach
Three long-established, competing frameworks for understanding the law-morality relation — the individual reason-based tradition (represented here by Rawls), the communitarian tradition (MacIntyre and Cotterrell) and the utilitarian or positivist tradition (Austin and Hart) — are challenged by some research into early modern thinkers like Hobbes, Hale, Pufendorf and Thomasius. More specifically, I use some work by Ian Hunter and David Saunders to…
Foucault, Law, and Power: A Reassessment
After raising doubts about Foucault's approach to law‐power, in the light of various acts of religion‐inspired violence on and after 11 September 2001, a case is made against this approach, based on the charge that Foucault ties law far too tightly to what he calls negative power. He makes law part of juridico‐sovereignty power, a form of power he regards as outmoded, with an outmoded commitment to sovereignty and the state. It is argued that in …
Expanding the Classical in Classical Sociology
If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the so…
Protecting Law from Morality’s Stalking Horse: The ‘socio’ in much socio-legal studies
Invited a few years ago by one of the field’s leading journals ‘to stimulate discussion about the nature, role and future of socio-legal studies’ ( JLS Editors 2002: 632), Roger Cotterrell (2002) and Paddy Hillyard (2002), two leading socio-legal scholars, stress the connection between the legal and the moral. Morality, they believe, is the heart and soul of the law. For them, only when socio-legal studies allows the law-morality connection to be…
The social must be limited: Some problems with Foucault's approach to modern positive power
Focusing on Foucault's distinction between an older, superseded model - the juridical/sovereignty model - and a newer one - which he refers to by a variety of names, such as disciplinary bio-power, art of government and governmentality - this article seeks, first, to demonstrate that his account of modern positive power is an unsatisfactory explanation of this type of power. It does this by contrasting it with an account that locates modern posit…
Competing Uses of History in Researching the Social: A Reply to Peter Baehr
Some Additional Knowledge Conditions for Sociology
If the conventional position that sociology emerged in the 19th century is accepted, then two 18th- and/or 19th-century rationalist knowledge conditions - 'positivism gives way to theory' and 'the centrality of modern rational philosophy' - can be accepted as the conventional knowledge conditions for the discipline's emergence. While acknowledging that this conventional position and these two conventional knowledge conditions form an important pa…
Foucault's Monsters and the Challenge of Law by Andrew N. Sharpe
Sociology, the public sphere, and modern government: A challenge to the dominance of Habermas
There is an unfortunate tendency within some branches of sociology - particularly those usually called 'critical', that is, those associated with 'critical social theory'- to treat with disdain the understanding of the public sphere that many modern governments use daily in making and implementing public policy. The majority of sociologists in those branches seem to prefer, as part and parcel of their normative commitments, Jürgen Habermas's Kant…
Dousing the dragon's fire
After suggesting that Stephen Turner's work is characterized by a determination to offer viable alternatives to blockages generated by adherence to dogmas, particularly those generated by adherence to Kantian metaphysics, this review article concentrates on his recent book Explaining the Normative. The article sets out the book's descriptions of a wide variety of positions, 'each of which accounts for a different kind of normativity'. Perhaps the…
Money, Financial Regulation and the Fragility of Civil Peace: Maintaining Order in the Face of Chaos
In most Western countries, the ongoing global financial crisis is causing economic insecurity manifesting as market volatility and fear of escalating defaults. In many of these countries, it is also producing social and political upheaval. A growing number of commentators use terms like ‘catastrophe’, ‘abyss’ and ‘brink’ to describe the consequences of potential financial meltdown. But they usually do so only figuratively, in describing the many …
The core object 'society' and sociology's public relevance: History versus theory
The recent collection Sociological Objects: Reconfigurations of Social Theory provides plenty of evidence in support of the proposition that there is not a strong mood within sociology today to conduct an ongoing productive debate about 'society' as the core object of the discipline, in the way that, for example, economics conducts such a debate about 'the economy'. Instead, sociology is much more likely to have disparate debates, each organized …
Sociology's object(s) and the discipline's relevance: Introduction to the Special Issue
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Social science (11 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (10 works) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics (10 works)