Syfte: Uppsatsens syfte är att ge en fördjupad förståelse för hur arbetstagare styrs i en organisation där de har stort eget ansvar och frihet. Häri vill vi synliggöra vad som, i brist på tydliga riktlinjer och direktiv från en auktoritet, styr arbetstagarnas prioriteringar i det dagliga arbetet samt analysera eventuella effekter av dessa styrningsformer. Metod: Uppsatsens empiriska material bygger på kvalitativa intervjuer av fyra kundansvariga på Företaget X. Företaget X arbetar med uthyrning av barnvakter till familjer i Stockholmsområdet. Materialet analyserades och diskuterades utifrån Governmentality som teori samt tidigare forskning. Resultat/Slutsats: Trots att de kundansvarigas arbete byggde på eget ansvar och frihet var de ändå styrda. De styrmedel som var mest framträdande i deras prioriteringar i det dagliga arbetet var kvantitativa mål, företagets tre värdeord, kunden samt möten och uppföljningar. En rad samlade faktorer vilka kan kopplas till det nya arbetslivet och nya styrningsformer kunde få respondenterna att känna att det ”blev för mycket”.

This thesis begins with the simple observation that the term ‘green consumption’ would have appeared, at the very least, oxymoronic to those concerned with environmental issues some thirty years ago. Yet now it is a commonplace aspect of popular, academic and policy discourse in the global north. In recognizing the diversity of products and services that fall under the rubric of ‘green consumption,’ this project situates it as a form of discursive positioning and a potential set of a practices that indicate a ‘friendly’ or benign association between consumption and the environment. The thesis has three components. Firstly, it reviews the literature on consumer culture and environmentalism, highlighting relevant thematic debates concerning the critique of consumer culture and its potential effects upon the environment. Secondly, the thesis constructs a post-Foucauldian ‘analytics of green consumption’ in order to understand such a radical shift in representations of consumption and environmental thinking. Thirdly, the thesis employs this analytics to examine two dominant ‘environmentalities’ or programmes of green consumption – Eco Labelling and the Ecological Footprint – wherein the advanced liberal rhetorics of ‘choice,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’ are found to operate in different ways. Drawing upon the work of Rose (1999), Barry et al. (1996) and others, the thesis shows how these ‘informational’ techniques are predicated upon and reproduce specific conceptions of consumer behaviour, encouraging the formation of ‘green consumer-subjects.’ It is argued that the terrain of consumption has become the primary locus where political, social, economic and cultural elements overlap to shape the decisions of consumers. The field of consumption is being restructured around lifestyle choice-driven models of responsible subjectivity, with consumption becoming the key means for shaping the conduct of individual citizens. The thesis goes on to argue that such a market-based approach to engendering green consumption is problematic in terms of its conception of how consumer choice and freedom are constrained, raising difficult issues for policy efforts in this area. The thesis also points toward the limits of post-Foucauldian analyses of green consumption, especially the impossibility of knowing whether, and for what reasons, practices of green consumption are taken up by consumers. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-25 08:48:47.876

Michel Foucault is often is taken to represent human beings as products of insidious structures of power that lie beyond control and perception. This is an unfair characterisation since a deeper reading into his work reveals reflections and even insistences on creativity, resistance and freedom as fundamental components of human experience. My aim is to unify these two aspects of Foucault's thought so as to provide a positive account of political resistance to power relations in contemporary neo-liberal society.

This thesis explores how symbolic ideas embedded in an accounting instrument come to be enacted in practice: detailing the processes through which they are realised by actors. It draws on theories of governmentality and the institutional logics perspective to develop a holistic theorisation of how programmes, ideas or ‘logics’ come to be enacted in practice as individuals interact with a performance appraisal process. It seeks to develop a theorised narrative that unpicks the various realities which actors construct in a particular assemblage. The story is informed by an abductive case study of one branch of John Lewis Department Stores. It develops a model which details the factors which influence the effective performativity of the accounting instrument. As such it explores how governance occurs as non-local ideas are prescribed to, and then enacted in, a local domain. The model describes how actors interact with a ‘mediating instrument’ and thereby constitute multiple realities based on three moderating factors: underlying ties to existing logics, self-interest and others’ influence. In outlining these moderating factors the thesis also highlights that multiple logics are more likely to be enacted when they are added or merged to existing sense making, in comparison to when they are framed or reframed according to those existing framings. As such it contributes to governmentality by detailing the process of governing and unpacking the factors which influence whether a mediating instrument is effectively performative. Additionally it contributes to institutional theory by providing a more nuanced understanding of how the symbolic elements of logics come to be enacted in practice through interactions with such material artefacts and how actors come to recognise the legitimacy of alternatives.

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Iraqi women living in Amman, Jordan view the city as a temporary residence, and their lives there are characterized by uncertainty and isolation. Iraqi social history, Jordanian policies on immigration and citizenship, and economic hardship all contribute to the production and maintenance of this uncertainty. These factors also prevent the formation of a cohesive Iraqi community in Amman, and thus the development of a shared understanding of the violence and displacement that this group has experienced. Given these circumstances, the manner in which Iraqi women articulate their relationship to their country of origin is highly idiosyncratic and responsive to the demands of their daily lives in Jordan as they prepare mentally either to return to Iraq or to resettle in a third country.

Representations of prostitution are often used to negotiate changing meanings of gender and economy during times of turmoil. This dissertation examines the Brazilian films, O Céu de Suely (2006), Baixio das Bestas (2007) and Deserto Feliz (2008) and two Mexican films El Callejón de los Milagros (1995) and ¿Quién diablos es Juliette? (1996) to better understand how they deal with representations of prostitution in a rapid transition to neoliberalism. In order to better understand this process, I develop a concept called "incomplete resistance." This term connotes the practice of denouncement without indictment. That is, the existence of prostitution and the conditions that compel women to sell sex are lamented, but without identifying the real underlying causes. Additionally, several of the films examined in this dissertation decry the conditions that lead women to be prostituted, but simultaneously encourage the viewer to take pleasure in the process. By contextualizing the films within the changing film industries of Brazil and Mexico, I seek to illuminate the connections between gender, prostitution films and governmentality.

This dissertation critically explores the governance of disability, social marginalization, and spatial exclusion in highland Ecuador. Since the 1990s, disabled Ecuadorians have moved from a state of social neglect and physical isolation to wider societal participation, fueled in part by national campaigns aimed at promoting disability rights. Many have joined grassroots organizations through biosocial networks based on the collective identity of shared impairment. However, their incorporation into the labor market, educational systems, and public sphere has been uneven and impeded by underlying spatial and cultural barriers. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research I conducted among people with physical and visual disabilities in the city of Cuenca, this research analyzes narratives of disablement within the local disabled community. I focus on the consequences of living with embodied differences considered to be anomalous within environments designed for nondisabled citizens. The study extends current scholarship on the social context of disability to a Latin American country with significant ethnic and economic hierarchies, exploring disability as an important dimension of social stratification that is both produced and remedied by the state. In Ecuador, the social category of people with disabilities has emerged through historical processes and campaigns that emphasize the prevention of impairment and chronic disease, promotion of equal rights, and inclusive labor markets - all of which are part of a broader aspiration toward modernity. I argue that disability is often an overlooked but important, cross-cutting form of bodily and behavioral difference that creates multiple marginalities. Emphasizing social practices and structural dimensions of disability shifts the attention away from approaches that foreground individual, psychological, or medical aspects of disablement and instead contributes to wider anthropological understandings of disability as socially produced, constructed, managed and enacted. In analyzing disability as a cross-cutting category, this research reframes disability as contingent on local constructions of normativity, highlighting how bodies come to be recognized as "abled" or "disabled" within particular productions of space and systems of un/marked subjects.

In this thesis the aim has been to analyse changes and continuity in the governing of economic behaviour in small-scale credit schemes in colonial Nyasaland and independent Malawi from 1930 until 2010. Furthermore, how the effects of history in terms of how colonial and post-colonial development discourses and practices have been rephrased and reused in the early 21st century are discussed. The study focuses on the teaching and fostering of borrowers’ economic behaviour in order to reach increased living standards. The genealogical approach to the history of small-scale credit has made it possible to analyse a selection of colonial and post-colonial small-scale credit programs and microcredit organisations operating in the early 21st century. To analyse the governing of economic behaviour in the small-scale credit schemes, three aspects of the Foucauldian concept of governmentality are used: problematics of government, political rationality and governmentality technologies. The findings of the thesis, which are based on interviews, unofficial and official written sources, show that the genealogy of governing economic behaviour through small-scale credit schemes has varied over time depending on perceptions of the ideal actor’s economic behaviour. Despite this, some continuities have been identified. For example, there is a continuity in the problematics of government, the analysis of the perceived development problem and how small-scale credit was to be a solution. The study indicates that a linear and universal financial history is used in theory and practice and consequently that the local Malawian national history of small-scale credit has been ignored. Despite different political rationalities during the period there is a continuity in funding small-scale credit with external money, and the government’s interest in small-scale credit has also persisted. One effect of history is that small-scale credit seems to be politically efficient, but economically inefficient. In the colonial period and in more recent times, it seems like governmentality technologies regarding lending are quite ad hoc, for example regarding the supervision and distributions of loans. One effect of history is subordinated positions for borrowers and a governing towards economic responsibility, rather than entrepreneurship.