Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka vilka normer kring hälsa och ohälsa som förmedlas i tidningsartiklar under året 2012 och sedan koppla dem till ett maktperspektiv utifrån Foucaults tankar om governmentality. Avsikten är att se hur normer och makt samspelar samt att undersöka hur man kan förstå ”hälsohets” utifrån ett maktperspektiv. Detta undersöker vi med hjälp av diskursanalys. Resultaten visar att det finns ett flertal starka normer som verkar. Bland annat bedöms hälsa utifrån kroppens utseende, kroppen kopplas ihop med olika karaktärsdrag och det finns en press på att vara hälsosam. Det visar sig också att de som sprider ”hälsohetsen” många gånger är chefer och arbetsgivare som själva tränar som elitidrottare. Utifrån Foucaults maktanalys kan vi utläsa att flertalet personer i artiklarna känner sig styrda av sina arbetsgivare att vara hälsosamma, andra är mer styrda genom normer och diskurser även om de själva inte är medvetna om det. Det framkommer också exempel som påvisar att arbetsgivare inte styr sina anställda medvetet för att disciplinera dem, utan snarare handlar omedvetet utifrån de normer och diskurser som råder. Arbetsgivarna följer då dessa normer endera oreflekterat eller för att de gör vad de tror är rätt. Man kan därför inte förstå ”hälsohetsen” som enbart ett resultat av governmentality. I diskussionen förs medias roll fram vad gäller skapandet och upplyftandet av ”hälsohets” till ett samhällsproblem. Vår slutsats blir följaktligen att det som pågår är en fortgående civiliseringsprocess. / The purpose ofthis essay is to examine the norms of health and unhealthinesst hat is conveyed in newspaper articles during the year 2012 and then connect them to a power perspective from Foucault's thoughts on governmentality. The intention is to see how norms and power interact and to explore how to understand “hälsohets” (the almost obsessive focus on health, similar to “bodyism”) from a power perspective. The method we use is discourse analysis.The results show many powerful norms such as; health is assessed by body appearance, body appearance is connected to character features and there is pressure to be healthy. Italso turns out that “hälsohets” is spread by managers and employers who themselves are training like elite athletes. Based on Foucault's power analysis, we can deduce that the majority of people in the articles feel controlled by their employers to be healthy. Others are guided by norms and discourses, even if they themselves are not aware of it. There are also examples showing that the employers do not control its employees deliberately to discipline them, they are rather unaware of the norms and discourses that prevail. Employers follows these norms either unreflective or because they do what they think is right. Therefore one can not understand the "hälsohets" as simply a result of governmentality. Governmentality is a conscious exercise of power and "hälsohets" appears to be based both conscious and unconscious actions. The discussion highlights the role of the media in terms of creation and upliftment of "hälsohets" to a societal problem. Our conclusion is that “hälsohets” is an ongoing of the Civilizing Process.

Friskvård inom företag och dess effekter är väldokumenterat inom forskningen, och organisationer har under de senaste åren satsat mycket pengar på att upprätthålla friskvårdsarbetet. Ett universellt argument verkar vara att detta gör att lönsamheten i verksamheten ökar. I denna studie undersöktes hur friskvården ser ut i en kommunal verksamhet sett ur ett diskursanalytiskt och självstyrningsperspektiv. Detta var intressant eftersom den kommunala verksamheten styrs av politiska riktlinjer, samtidigt som den är skattefinansierad. En ytterligare anledning att studera detta var att kommunal sektor generellt sett hade fler sjukskrivningar än privat sektor. Mer specifikt syftade studien till att förstå hur avdelningschefer uppfattar friskvård i den egna verksamheten, hur processer ser ut för chefers arbete med detta, samt hur de skulle vilja att den framtida utvecklingen ser ut. Detta åstadkoms genom kvalitativa intervjuer med nio kommunala avdelningschefer. Några viktiga resultat var att organisationen använde friskvårdsförmåner för att locka och behålla medarbetare, samt för att respondenterna uppfattade en extern press från samhället att ta ett visst ansvar över sina medarbetares hälsa. Hur cheferna arbetade med att motivera sina anställda var något av en balansgång. De flesta tyckte det var viktigt att motivera och skapa goda förutsättningar för medarbetarna, medan de ansåg att det inte var möjligt att styra dem för mycket eftersom friskvården bedrivs på fritiden. Därför var ett av utvecklingsförslagen som uppkom att integrera friskvården på arbetstid. På detta sätt skulle cheferna få bättre kontroll och kunna ställa högre krav på sina medarbetare att faktiskt använda sig av friskvårdsförmånerna.

The thesis analyses the Finnish immigration apparatus through a Foucaultian governmentality framework and critiques the way immigration has been problematized. The immigration apparatus, ranging from discourses to various administrative regulations and their rationalities, is examined through the Finnish Aliens Act, Schengen visa regulations, and Finnish Immigration Services implementation documentation as well as through the related governmental bills and reports and parliamentary discussions and committee statements between 1999 and 2010. The thesis argues that the governmentality of immigration is a socio-evolutionary governmentality that relies on largely taken-for-granted conceptualisations of how society needs to be governed. The thesis shows that immigration control cannot be understood solely through the discourses of nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism, but that these discourses themselves need to be understood in the light of a state racist socio-evolutionary constellation of power/knowledge at the heart of liberal governmentality and its naturalism. In the first instance, this claim is supported by a discourse theoretical analysis of the functioning of power/knowledge in immigration-related discourses. Additionally, the claim is supported by contrasting the analysis of discourses and rationalities of governing with an analysis of technologies of governing, i.e. rules and regulations of immigration control. The thesis then questions the governmentality of the immigration apparatus through various epistemological tools of decentring. These tools highlight how a commonsensical truth about immigration and its governing is produced through methods, such as utilising explanations relying on psychologism, historicism, naturalisation, market veridiction and universalism/particularism, which enable a silence and scarcity of meaning around the taken-for-granted modes of knowing immigration and its governing. Finally, this claim about state racist governmentality of immigration is evidenced by a comparison of the contemporary way of problematizing immigration with the way immigration was problematized by early American race hygienic immigration policies. This comparison insists that eugenics and social Darwinism should not be exceptionalised, but that their rationalities of governing should be evaluated in terms of the logic of making live and letting die that they propose. The thesis concludes that unacknowledged and taken-for-granted modes of knowing the world in socio-evolutionary terms and specifically in social Darwinist terms emphasizing social position as a measure of fitness and human worth and entailing an all-inclusive logic of racialisation have an impact on contemporary liberal ways of governing immigration both in general and in Finland in, at the point at which we think how immigration should be governed so that it promotes the health and wealth of the population and defends it from degeneration.

Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, this dissertation addresses how the sovereign's command over life intersects with contemporary global governmentality. Particular attention is given to the geographically sedimented normative dimensions entailed in this intersection. Two broad questions emerge from this focus: 1) How are the perceived and actual boundaries of U.S. responsibility for distant (non-national) life formed; and 2) How do emotional sentiments of care and concern within the U.S. populace for distant life impact the sovereign's geopolitical calculations.The case of Sudan, especially Darfur, is utilized to help illuminate these questions. With regard to sovereign power, I analyze the Darfur related discourse being produced by the U.S. executive. I argue that this discourse is part of a bio-normative geopolitics aimed at maintaining the U.S. claim on the valuation of global life, while at the same time challenging the privileged status of the concept of genocide within our contemporary global governmentality. With regard to the societal constitution of global governmentality, I investigate two partially overlapping cases, one on the globally focused Christian Right and the other on the faith based movement to "save Darfur".In the former case, I consider how norms, values, and feelings of care contribute to the facilitation and construction of geographical knowledge, which, in turn, helps to inform particular engagements with the space of Sudan. In the latter case, the question of caring for distant others is taken up from the perspective of the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, who ultimately posits the inherent need to circumvent sovereign power within any form of normative activism. Addressing this problem, I suggest the possibility of establishing alternative communities of care, which are not only grounded on a recognition of our global intersubjectivity, but also on our common predicament in the face of a universally prevalent sovereign power.

This thesis investigates the role of accounting information in the automotive industry restructuring of 2008 and 2009 in Canada. The crisis in the automotive industry led to government-funded restructurings for two of the top manufacturers in North America, effectively adding the government as a third party to the negotiations. Following a series of negotiations that occurred between AutoCo and UnionA, I conduct a case study that examines the individual actors’ use of accounting inscriptions in negotiations, as well as explore the dynamic interaction between accounting and trust at the negotiation table. The use of actor network theory highlights the individual actors, their actor-networks, accounting inscriptions and the continuous translation process inherent in labour-management negotiations. Accounting inscriptions are shown to play a central role in negotiations, particularly as a forum for bringing the actor-networks together. Furthermore, I explicate the notion of tactical trust, as it emphasizes the assessment, monitoring, and adjustment inherent in decisions to trust actors within dynamic business contexts. I also investigate the roles that the Canadian government played throughout the restructuring of the automotive industry. Through an in-depth case study of the restructuring from its antecedents through to outcomes, the research focuses on the roles of the government officials in the negotiations between the company and the unions, and their use of accounting information. The empirics highlight that the government not only acted at a distance but utilized sovereign power and direct intervention to achieve their objectives in the automotive industry restructuring. I find that the accounting served as the flexible substitute for the government’s presence at the negotiations table while they were acting at a distance and is used as an immutable parameter when the government directly intervened. This paper extends the governmentality literature by highlighting the coercive character of government actions, technologies and programs, and the notion of government in action. I consider the implications of these research findings on the labour-management negotiations, accounting, actor network theory and governmentality literature. In conclusion I also highlight various avenues of future research. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2013-10-09 20:46:13.009

This thesis emerges in the context of recent developments in the field of charity fundraising. In particular, in order to increase, or simply maintain, fundraising levels charities have had to develop innovative devices which both take charity giving into the spaces in which individuals carry out their daily activities, and provide mechanisms through which they are able to give to charity in their daily lives. This thesis focuses on one such attempt. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate both the practices of constructing alternative giving and the materials which result from this, and the practices of giving and receiving an alternative gift. Alternative giving refers to a fundraising device which is built around a range of gift cards or certificates produced by the charity, each of which represent one particular item or service provided by the charity to its beneficiaries. The cards or certificates are then sold at a price which is designed to mirror the actual cost of providing the item or service represented and are intended to be used by the purchaser as a gift for a friend or relative. As such, alternative giving, as a form of fundraising used by international development charities, raises a number of questions, particularly in terms of how it affects the relationships between individuals and charities, and individuals and the specific beneficiary. Therefore, this thesis draws on literatures around ethics, governmentality, consumption and gift theory to examine the implications of alternative giving for these relationships. Having drawn these literatures into conversations with empirical research based around interviews with charities and those engaging in alternative giving, and a range of textual materials surrounding this, the thesis argues that practices of alternative giving are carried out by ethical subjects who are situated within broad sets of social relations, and which matter to how connections in the charitable act are manifest.

This Thesis is a theoretical attempt to analyze the emergence of Autism as a discourse and, through it, the emergence of the Autistic Subjectivity. My primary aim is to create a kind of history of the different modes by which autistic persons become subjects. I am following a post-structuralist methodology, based on Michel Foucault’s work on the birth of psychiatry and institutions, his analysis of power relations, his ideas on the objectification and subjectification of the individual, and finally his notions of governmentality and bio-power. More specifically, I am making use of the Foucauldian techniques of Archaeology and Genealogy in order to investigate the birth of Autism through, the psychiatric discipline, psychoses, classificatory systems and the Asylum of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth century. Under the same methodological strand, I am treating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), in relation to Autism, as a disciplinary tool and as a discursive event. I present the existing knowledge on Autism and more specifically on the ‘impairment in social interaction’ and ‘in pragmatic language’. Finally, I attempt an analysis of Autism as a apparatus, through its episteme, mechanisms, and elements. I give an overview of the two main epistemologies on Autism, that of psychoanalysis and TOM (Theory of Mind) and I introduce the notions of bio-power and governmentality as drive mechanisms, which inform the elements of the apparatus and turn them into regulators of the autistic subjectivity. I am making an analysis of specific elements that I recognize as most important for the objectification and subjectification of the autistic individual; these are: autobiographies and educational institutions. Moreover, I discuss how through a continuum of truth discourses, strategies of intervention, and modes of objectification, the Autistic individual finds itself in a battle of modes of power, where it either consents to normalization or shields its ‘pathology P’ by disobedience and resistance. Finally, I argue that the deconstruction of existed discursive entities and their reconstruction upon a different epistemological basis leads to a rethink of Autism in terms of Education. What is needed is an emphasis to the notion of παιδεία (paideia), which aims to the creation of free and self-fulfilled human beings, rather than exclusively to the notion of εκπαί δευσις (ekpaideusis), that gives emphasis to the development of capabilities, and in the case of autistic children, to the creation of docile, marginalized bodies.

This thesis explores tensions within UK childcare policy and welfare reform. Through an ethnographic study of policy implementation, I examine themes of government, governance and governmentality. The evidence based policy movement assumes that the nature of evidence is self-evident but ethnographic data reveals how implementers draw on cultural resources of interpretive repertoires, myth and symbolism to make sense of policy. Central Government structures the policy implementation process with a “core offer”, hypothecated funding, a timetable and targets. Local policy actors manage implementation partly through tick box performative practices but they stretch time and juggle money. Implementation practices comprise branding, reification and commodification processes and the design of elastic policy products. Change and stasis are both in evidence with time-scales experienced variously as tight, as long running or as plus ça change. The community is produced as subject and object of governance, as an agent of change and a site for policy intervention. This glosses over childcare as women’s issue, market tensions and social class determinants of child poverty. Drawing on a range of theoretical resources and using the analogy of a palimpsest I show how discursive governance achieves a temporary policy settlement. This is neither workfare nor welfare but an unanticipated creative set of outcomes, exemplified in a circus project. I reveal some relatively hidden aspects of public policy and analyse give-away artefacts as hyper-visible policy manifestations. Commitment to a public service ethos is in evidence with policy implementers exercising their discretion in the interstices of market and state bureaucratic governance regimes. The Sure Start brand moves on from a flagship programme to Sure Start Children’s Centres but a novel Community Learning Partnership struggles to tug the oil tanker of children’s welfare services in a radically new direction or solve the wicked issue of child poverty.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Gregory J. Eiselein / The presence and persistence of ethnicity in Sri Lanka has led scholars such as Jayadeva Uyangoda to describe Sri Lanka as an “ethnocracy” and is identified as one of the major challenges for attempts to reconcile communities after a 26-year-long civil war that ended in 2009. The emphasis on ethnicity, however, often makes it difficult for scholars to examine the discontinuities that have shaped the emergence of ethnicity as the most significant social category in the country. This thesis addresses this lacuna by providing a careful re-reading of the conditions under which ethnicity became the focus of both politics and epistemology at the turn of the 20th century in colonial Ceylon. Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality enables this examination by demonstrating how ethnicity became the terrain on which political rationalities and governmental technologies were deployed in order to shift how populations were constructed as the focus of colonial governance between 1901 and 1911. Colonial political rationalities are explored through an examination of the debate that emerged in the Census reports of P. Arunachalam (1902) and E.B. Denham (1912) over whether Ceylon is constituted by many nationalities or by one nationality—the Sinhalese—and many races. The emergence of this debate also coincided with the Crewe-McCallum Reforms of 1912 which aimed to reform the colonial state in response to the demands of the local population. Like the debate between Arunachalam and Denham, what is at stake in the reforms of 1912 is the question of whether the Island is constituted by many racial populations or a single population. The terms of these debates over ethnicity that took place over a century ago, continue to shape the tenor of Sri Lanka’s post-war political landscape and therefore provides a pathway for understanding how Sri Lanka’s post-war challenges are imbricated in the dilemmas of inhabiting its colonial present(s).