Foucault News

Tauzer, J., CSR and the Hermeneutical Renovation of Foucault’s Toolbox
(2023) Sustainability (Switzerland), 15 (5), art. no. 4682, .

DOI: 10.3390/su15054682

Abstract
This article aims to examine Foucault’s conceptual toolbox (methodology, conceptual tools, and conceptual meta-tools) in relation to the socio-historical analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and of the corporation. The article has a bidirectional purpose: it aims to use Foucault’s toolbox to analyze CSR, and to use the occasion of applying Foucault to CSR to reflect on the interpretation, critical potential, and adequacy of Foucault’s conceptual toolbox. It starts with some preliminary work: a review and rework of an interpretation of Foucault’s conceptual toolbox by Koopman and Matza. With this interpretationally revised toolbox in mind, it then initiates a Foucauldian approach to the research field of ‘the corporation’ and the sub-field of CSR. Most of the first half of this article demonstrates that Foucault’s toolbox offers a fruitful start to tackling these fields. The second half of the article takes up a counterpoint in the reverse direction, namely that Foucault’s toolbox is not equipped for adequately apprehending the interpretative play and flexibility operating within CSR discourse. This leads to a suggestion of three ways to incorporate hermeneutic tools into Foucault’s toolbox, and to an exemplification of how such toolbox renovation sheds new light on the tactics and power dynamics of CSR discourse. © 2023 by the author.

Author Keywords
concepts; corporation; CSR; discourse; dispositive; Foucault; hermeneutics; methodology

Index Keywords
corporate social responsibility, corporate strategy, hermeneutics, tool use, type of article

Brosnan, C., Tickner, C., Davies, K., Heinsch, M., Steel, A., Vuolanto, P.
The salutogenic gaze: Theorising the practitioner role in complementary and alternative medicine consultations
(2023) Sociology of Health and Illness.

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.13629

Abstract
Research on why people use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) shows clients value the CAM consultation, where they feel listened to and empowered to control their own health. Such ‘empowerment’ through CAM use is often theorised as reflecting wider neoliberal imperatives of self-responsibility. CAM users’ perspectives are well studied, but there has been little sociological analysis of interactions within the CAM consultation. Specifically, it is unclear how user empowerment/self-knowledge relates to the CAM practitioner’s power and expert knowledge. We address this using audio-recorded consultations and interviews with CAM practitioners to explore knowledge use in client-practitioner interactions and its meaning for practitioners.

Based on our analysis and drawing on Foucault (1973), The Birth of the Clinic: an archaeology of medical perception and Antonovsky (1979), Health, Stress and Coping, we theorise the operation of power/knowledge in the CAM practitioner-client dyad by introducing the concept of the ‘salutogenic gaze’. This gaze operates in the CAM consultation with disciplining and productive effects that are oriented towards health promotion. Practitioners listen to and value clients’ stories, but their gaze also incorporates surveillance and normalisation, aided by technologies that may or may not be shared with clients. Because the salutogenic gaze is ultimately transferred from practitioner to client, it empowers CAM users while simultaneously reinforcing the practitioner’s power as a health expert. © 2023 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.

Author Keywords
clinical consultations; complementary and alternative medicine; Foucault; patient empowerment; power/knowledge; salutogenesis

Index Keywords
alternative medicine, archeology, article, consultation, drawing, gaze, health promotion, human, human experiment, interview, patient empowerment, perception, physician, physiological stress

Salmenkari, T., Aldawoodi, S.
Papers of the Paperless: Governmentality, Technologies of Freedom, and the Production of Asylum-Seeker Identities
(2023) International Migration Review.

DOI: 10.1177/01979183231154502

Abstract
Refugees become asylum-seekers not only because the receiving country gives them the bureaucratic-legal status but also because they start to identify with the status. This article examines how refugees learn to be asylum-seekers even when they question asylum decisions. It uses Foucault’s idea of governmentality to assess how governmental policies become translated into asylum-seekers’ collective and personal conducts as asylum-seekers, sometimes in ways that undermine the official policy. This article introduces the idea of papered governmentality, in which the production of papers is a governmental technology to manage not only populations but also personal identities and conducts. It investigates how asylum-seekers’ own role in papered governmentality as receivers, producers, and users of various papers in the asylum process transforms their conducts and identities in ways that reshape how they are governed. The empirical research site was an asylum-seekers’ protest in Finland where the first author conducted participant observation about how papers included in the asylum process were collected, read, discussed, circulated, and co-produced. The article finds that when migration control utilizes laws, bureaucratic documents, and other liberal governmental technologies designed to modify autonomous individuals’ own decisions to migrate, it produces not only control but also identification with the host country and some freedom to choose how to act with governmental decisions. © The Author(s) 2023.

Author Keywords
anthropology of documents; asylum-seekers; counter-conducts; governmentality; technologies of freedom

Di Pierro, M. (2022). Archaeology or interpretation: Michel Foucault and Claude Lefort. Constellations, 29, 434– 446.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12606

INTRODUCTION: LA POLITIQUE AND LE POLITIQUE
On February 2, 1983, during his lecture at Collège de France, Michel Foucault criticizes the concept of the political (le politique). According to Foucault, the shift from politics (la politique) to the political masks “the specific problem and set of problems of politics, of dunasteia, of the practice of the political game, and of the political game as a field of experience with its rules and normativity, of the political game as experience inasmuch as it is indexed to truth-telling and involves a certain relationship to oneself and to others for its players” (2010, p. 159). According to Foucault, le politique is an unnecessary dimension of transcendence that covers the comprehension of politics in its relationship between dunasteia and politeia. The first term indicates the constitutional framework that defines the statute of citizens and their rights, as the rules of the political game. The second, instead, names the actual exercise of power, the political game as it happens, as experience. These two spheres determine what politics is in a democratic society. Therefore, the dimension of the political is not necessary at all and hides politics as actual experience.

Foucault’s text is an explicit attack on the positions of Claude Lefort, who in those same years worked on defining his theory of the political. According to Lefort, le politique shows the structure of modern and democratic society on which the actual rules of politics depend. It is the name of a symbolic dimension, a framework of references, that explains the difference of modern society to the society of the Ancien regime, which is marked by a religious and organic structure. In other words, if an external and transcendent reference founded premodern society, the political is the characteristic of modern societies without foundation. In the latter, conflict replaces an already impossible unity.

[…]