Foucault News

Marco DÍAZ MARSÁ / Jorge DÁVILA ROJAS, De la historia del pensamiento y de sus principios. Aproximación a Michel Foucault, REVISTA LOGOS. ANALES DEL SEMINARIO DE METAFÍSICA, Vol. 47 2014, pp. 81-109.

(Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España / Universidad de los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela)

On the History of Thought and its Principles. Approach to Michel Foucault

“De la historia del pensamiento y de sus principios. Aproximación a M. Foucault“.

Resumen: 

Este estudio se define y articula a partir de la pregunta por el significado, sentido y estructura de la noción de “historia del pensamiento”, tal como ésta emerge y actúa desde los últimos pronunciamientos e intervenciones de Foucault, de un modo singularmente claro y revelador a partir de la primera versión del Prefacio a la “Historia de la sexualidad” (1984), texto del que nos ocupamos con atención prioritaria a lo largo de este trabajo.

Palabras clave: Problematización, actualidad, historia, crítica, ontología, filosofía,política, principio.

Abstract

This study is defined and articulated on grounds of the question about the meaning,sense and structure of the notion of “history of thought” as it rises and functions from Foucault’s last declarations and interventions, in a particularly clear and illuminating way after the first version of the Préface à l’“Histoire de la sexualité” (1984), which we will mindfully approach along this work.

Keywords: Problématisation, actuality, history, critique, ontology, philosophy, politics, principle.

Steven Hutchinson, Intelligence, reason of state and the art of governing risk and opportunity in early modern Europe, Economy and Society, Volume 43, Issue 3, 2014

DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2014.883796

Abstract

Drawing upon primary and secondary historical material, this paper explores the role of intelligence in early modern government. It focuses upon developments in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, a site-specific genealogical moment in the broader history of state power/knowledges. Addressing a tendency in Foucauldian work to neglect pre-eighteenth-century governance, the analysis reveals a set of interrelated processes which gave rise to an innovative technique for anticipating hazard and opportunity for the state. At the intersection of raison d’État, the evolving art of government, widespread routines of secrecy and a post-Westphalia field of European competition and exchange, intelligence was imagined as a fundamental solution to the concurrent problems of ensuring peace and stability while improving state forces. In the administrative offices of the English Secretary of State, an assemblage of complex and interrelated procedures sought to produce and manipulate information in ways which exposed both possible risks to the state and potential opportunities for expansion and gain. As this suggests, the art of intelligence played an important if largely unacknowledged role in the formation and growth of the early modern state. Ensuring strategic advantage over rivals, intelligence also limited the ability of England’s neighbours to dominate trade, control the seas and master the colonies, functioning as a constitutive feature of European balance and equilibrium. As the analysis concludes, understanding intelligence as a form of governmental technique – a way of doing something – reveals an entirely novel way of thinking about and investigating its myriad (historical and contemporary) formations.

Taylor, W.G., Piper, H., Garratt, D.
Sports coaches as ‘dangerous individuals’-practice as governmentality
(2014) Sport, Education and Society. Article in Press.

Abstract
Recent concern surrounding sports coaches’ interaction with young people has reflected a fundamental change in the way coaches and others regard the role of sports. In this paper, we consider the identification and definition of the contemporary sports coach (whether acting in a professional or volunteer capacity) as, in Foucault’s term, a ‘dangerous individual’. We suggest that the mainstream discourse of child protection and safeguarding, variously interpreted and applied, has contributed to a culture of fear in sports coaching practice. Drawing on data from a recently completed Economic and Social Research Council-funded research project, we argue that contradictions in policy and practice, which serve to privilege a particular discourse, have cast the coach as both predator and protector of young sports performers. This has undermined the role of the coach, led to intergenerational fear, created doubt about coaches’ intentions and promoted their adoption of defensive and protective practices. Utilising the concept of governmentality, we argue that, as a consequence, fundamental trust-based relationships, necessary in healthy athlete – coach engagement, have been displaced by a discourse embodied in sterile delivery and procedure governed by regulation and suspicion.

Author Keywords
Defensive coaching practices; Deprofessionalisation; Fear of the coach; Foucault; Governmentality

DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2014.899492

Hutchinson, M., Jackson, D.
The construction and legitimation of workplace bullying in the public sector: Insight into power dynamics and organisational failures in health and social care
(2014) Nursing Inquiry. Article in Press.

Abstract
Health-care and public sector institutions are high-risk settings for workplace bullying. Despite growing acknowledgement of the scale and consequence of this pervasive problem, there has been little critical examination of the institutional power dynamics that enable bullying. In the aftermath of large-scale failures in care standards in public sector healthcare institutions, which were characterised by managerial bullying, attention to the nexus between bullying, power and institutional failures is warranted. In this study, employing Foucault’s framework of power, we illuminate bullying as a feature of structures of power and knowledge in public sector institutions. Our analysis draws upon the experiences of a large sample (n = 3345) of workers in Australian public sector agencies – the type with which most nurses in the public setting will be familiar. In foregrounding these power dynamics, we provide further insight into how cultures that are antithetical to institutional missions can arise and seek to broaden the debate on the dynamics of care failures within public sector institutions. Understanding the practices of power in public sector institutions, particularly in the context of ongoing reform, has important implications for nursing.

Author Keywords
Care failures; Horizontal violence; Nursing workforce; Power; Public sector; Uncaring; Workplace bullying

DOI: 10.1111/nin.12077