Abstract
While often overlooked in discourse analysis, Foucault’s notion of governmentality and its elaboration in governmentality studies have been the focus of a small but increasing amount of research into discourse in society. This increase is due in part to the large role afforded to discourse in governmentality, and its conception of how social action is often organised through varying assemblages of truth, power and subject formation by the self or others (the ‘conduct of conduct’). Discourse is seen as central to governmentality’s diffuse notion of power, working as much through forms of representation, calculative practices and subject formation as through coercive methods.
Studies of discourse and governmentality brings together some of these recent studies employing discourse-analytic methods to examine governmentality. The papers in the edited collection are organised into three sections. Studies in Part 1 examine where governmentalities intersect with those that are governed, and where the ‘conduct of conduct’ may align with or conflict with its subjects. These cover areas such as welfare, climate change, and science and transparency. Part 2 looks at governmentality in worksites as well as prefigurative governmentalities, that is, the operation of governmentality in sites that seek to anticipate or change existing social and/or institutional governmentalities such as protests, leadership forums and online. Part 3 finally looks at connections between discourse, governmentality and policy.
The editors’ introduction provides a lucid and detailed contextualisation of where studies of discourse and governmentality sit within the two constituent areas. The operationalisation of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods for the study of discourse is examined, as is the role of discourse in notions of governmentality as developed by Foucault, Nikolas Rose and other scholars in the field. The relatively limited uptake of Foucault’s ideas in discourse analysis also receives detailed examination, as does the application of Foucault’s ideas in discourse analytics methods such as critical discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis, and ethnomethodological discourse analysis and conversation analysis (EMCA).
It is, however, in making the case for a combination of governmentality and EMCA that some issues arise. Rasmussen (Chapter 6) points out that small-scale analysis of talk-in-interaction can be quite different from Foucault’s more diachronic and historic genealogical approach. These issues become particularly pronounced when combining EMCA with governmentality. The import of concepts of governmentality in EMCA analysis runs the risk of violating notions of ‘ethnomethodological indifference’ of Garfinkel and Sacks, and could constitute a form of ‘theoretical imperialism’ imposed upon data, which would deny EMCA much of its analytic power. Methodological loci also differ substantially, with approaches such as conversation analysis (CA) generally eschewing the broader scale analyses of context that are common in the study of governmentality.
These issues come to the fore again in some of the studies that employ CA in the book. For example, Lindegaard’s article in Part 1, which examines ‘green driving’ through Foucault’s notions of the government of the self and others, relies on one short strip of interactional data to support its broader claims. While CA has much to say about what occurs at a microsociological level, making broader claims about the operation of governmentality based on such a small sample of interaction is problematic and may lack validity. McIlvenny’s chapter in Part 2, using CA and membership categorisation analysis in looking at the discourse and staging of faux-United Nations weapons inspection in protest at the Iraq War, fares a little better in this regard, but nonetheless these issues persist. While it has much to say about the staging and discourse of the protest, relying on a single atypical protest renders it problematic to make broader claims about prefigurative governmentality or Foucauldian ‘counter-conduct’.
This is not to say that CA or other analyses of talk-in-interaction cannot be used to explore governmentality. Solberg’s chapter in Part 1 on the discourse of vocational rehabilitation meetings demonstrates how CA can be used to elaborate and expand on how governmentality operates. Rather than relying on a single case, Solberg analyses action and recipient design in a collection of cases taken from recorded meetings between case officers and clients, resulting in greater reliability about claims made about how the conduct of clients is conducted by case officers but also resisted by clients.
Other studies in the book, while not CA in orientation, also triangulate data from one or more sets of interactional data with other data sets. Lassen and Horsbøl’s chapter draws on interactional data from meetings combined with interviews and other ethnographic data to show how citizen involvement in a renewable energy project moves beyond ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to power and instead involves differing conceptions of how to conduct citizens’ behaviour. Similarly, Rasmussen’s chapter in Part 2 draws on ethnographic approaches along positioning analysis in workplace safety meetings to show how risk management operates as a form of governmentality by employees’ subject positioning as responsible risk communicators. Finally, Colombo and Quassoli’s deployment of the Discourse-Historical method is a particular highlight of the book, showing how the method’s analysis of multiple data sets over an extended time frame can illustrate how an apparatus and rationality of governmentality work to create an ‘ideology of safety’ working through crime prevention policy in Milan.
Analysis of written texts more closely accords with Foucault’s methods, and the studies in the book looking at these and multimodal texts present some of the more interesting findings that extend our understanding of how governmentality adapts and evolves in different contexts. Hong and Allard-Huver’s chapter, for example, examines lexical uses of key terms in a scientific scandal surrounding GMO research to show how the notion of ‘transparency’ is mobilised as a form of governmentality to organise the conduct of citizens to audit the state. Wallace combines Fairclough’s notions of intertextuality with an analysis of rhetoric to show how the discourse of strategic planning in higher education is an example of governmentality as governments enforce it through policy documents and compliance regimes. Most innovative of all is Zhukova Klausen’s chapter on governmentality and transnational identity, which shows how multimodal and mediated discourse analysis of online sources can take the study of governmentality in new directions. Her study examines multimodal texts online to examine how they operate as prefigurative govermentalities conducting the behaviour of transnational subjects.
Overall, the studies in the collection show how discourse can be used to examine how assemblages of power, truth and identity formation coordinate social activity in a variety of settings. While not always successful, the studies demonstrate the productive affinity between studies of discourse and governmentality, as governmentality already acknowledges the large role discourse plays in both the maintenance of social order as well as counter-conduct.