Re-Imagining ‘Event Management’
On Governmentality and its ‘Afterlife’
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22172012 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tony Blackshaw (0000-0002-4267-923X, Sheffield Hallam University, corresponding author), Willem Coetzee (0000-0003-1294-5637, University of Otago) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 369-387 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2520-8683 • E-ISSN: 2520-8691 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s41978-020-00066-z |
| OpenAlex | W3081382953 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
In an important collection of publications Chris Rojek (2013a, 2013b and 2014) raises some apposite questions pertaining to ‘Event Management’ as a source of ideological power that surrounds both the staging of Mega Events and ‘Events’ as a subject field. The present article begins by elaborating on the key themes emerging from Rojek’s unconventional understanding of ‘Event Management’ which provides the backdrop against which it advances its own arguments. The rest of the discussion develops a novel framework of analysis which suggests that we should substitute ‘governmentality’ for ‘ideology’. It is argued that ‘performative governmentality’ achieves the rule of the ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘knowledge’ as the ruling force in a new way, through ‘efficiency’. The article provides a familiar theoretical framework and equips it with some new conceptual tools. Performative governmentality emerges as the ‘afterlife’ of Foucauldian governmentality, demonstrating that its capability is released only when the context in which it originally existed has disappeared, when it lingers precariously on the verge of disappearance. The article posits a mutual ‘fit’ between sport and the ‘social gradient’ in health and the tasks these pose to individuals under the dramaturgical conditions of the ‘performativity criterion’: to produce for themselves in their leisure the knowledge and the techniques of ‘fitness’ or ‘well-being’. Thereafter it explores how control operates with the societal shift from ‘hierarchy’ and ‘normalization’ to ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, arguing that existential insecurity and ontological uncertainty – the products of the fear of invisibility – have become functional to performative governmentality, which appears capable of conjuring conformity through impulses we conventionally associate with empowerment
Aesthetics · Afterlife · Epistemology · Governmentality · Ideology · Performative utterance · Performativity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Recreation, Leisure, Wilderness Management · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts
The Politics of Aesthetics
Human Nature and the Social Order
Discipline and Punish
Hiding in the Light
How To Do Things With Words
Legislators and interpreters
Event Power
Critical Event Studies
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
Identity in the globalizing World1
Seeing Like a State
Critical event studies
Global Event Management
Human Nature and the Social Order
Imagined communities
The origin of German tragic drama
Discipline and Punish
The Postmodern Condition
The Center out There
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
Seeing Like a State
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |