Governing economic life

“Hence, governing techniques, like best practices, cannot simply be understood as a matter of the implementation of ideal schemes in reality (Miller & Rose, 1990).”

“These devices have materialised and consolidated modern rationalities of ‘action at a distance’ (Latour, 1987: 219) and ‘government at a distance’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 9).”

“Peter Miller and Nicholas Rose ( 1990 , 14) point out that governmental programs are idealized schema for ordering of social and economic life, which ‘presuppose that the real is programmable’ (Rose and Miller 1992, 183).”

“Within this context, accounting technologies are not only important tools for rational decision making but also considered important tools for legitimization purposes (Miller and Rose, 1990; Power, 2003).”

“This emphasis on ‘repetition’ and ‘throughput’ seems incompatible with enterprise that aims to turn ‘autonomy into an ally of economic success’ (Miller & Rose, 1990: 26).”

“…government should not be equated with the notion of the State; for Foucault’s work on governmentality takes us beyond the State, by emphasizing, as Miller and Rose (1990) note, the diversity of forces, as well as groups, whose aim is to regulate and order the lives of individuals and the…”

“In this chapter I examine how a number of devices were devised and distributed by experts in order to serve as ‘technologies of government’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 8), and how certain things were encountered and appropriated as ‘technologies of the self ’, which as Foucault states: permit…”

“…Foucauldian-inspired studies of government, the governmental exercise of power involves more or less rationalized attempts to shape, regulate, control and conduct the conduct of others and oneself toward particular ends (see Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992; Stenson, 1993; Rose, 1999).”

“See, in general: Foucault (1991); Miller and Rose (1993); Dean (1994a); Barry et al. (1996); Dean and Hindess (1998); Bennett (2000).”

“This view of environment and economy relations shows considerably continuity with perspectives on growth such as ecological modernisation (Mol and Spaargaren, 2000).”

“As recognised byMiller, ‘the ability to deploy scientific and other forms of expert reasoning has become increasingly essential to effective participation in international governance’ (Miller 2007, 348).”

“As Foucault ( 1991 ) and others (Miller & Rose, 1990 ; Rose, 1999 , 2000 ; Rose & Miller, 1992 ) have shown, there is nothing new in this governmental challenge since questions about how to govern in a way that is neither excessive nor laissez-faire have long been posed by political authorities.”

“What this means is the processes of governmentality, of contemporary forms of ‘rational’ governing, are both inscribed and contested in the subjectivities of subjects (see Miller & Rose, 1993; Rose, 1991).”

“A key to understanding this polysemy is a recognition that language serves as a 'translation mechanism', a way in which a particular rationality of government is linked to particular regulatory aspirations (Miller and Rose 1990).”

“There is, however, a very different way of thinking of accountancy, one which has been developed within a literature of `critical accountancy' (Miller and Rose, 1990; Arrington and Francis, 1993; Boland, 1993; Shearer and Arrington, 1993; Cooper and Puxty, 1994; Hopwood and Miller, 1994; Miller and…”

“…response to numerous political, economic and cultural developments and crises that have played out on a global stage (Barry, Osborne, & Rose, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990), signalling a diminishing role of the state and a shift of power towards private actors in contemporary political economies…”

“…of globalization (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Larner, 1998; Leyshon, 1997; Herod et nl., 1998)' the analysis herein is more concerned with the forms of expertise and techniques through which economic objects and subjects are being constituted in new forms (Dean, 1999; Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose, 1999).”

“In this respect Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s deliberations on problematics of government are particularly instructive (Miller and Rose, 1990a, 1990b, 1995; Rose and Miller, 1992; Rose, 1996).”

“However, because governance relies on a particularframing of knowledge (in this case, knowledge of environmental risk and of corporate decisionmaking) governance can never completely capture reality and is always prone to failure (Miller and Rose, 1990: 11).”

“Critical scholars (e g Miller and Rose 1990; Donzelot 1991; O’Malley 1996; Miller and Rose 1997; Rose 1999) have pointed out that general shifts in the distribution of responsibility—from the government to the private and civil sectors—have occurred in a number of countries and policy areas…”

“Habermas shares Foucault’s concern on the practice of normalisation and surveillance (Power & Laughlin, 1996), within which linguistic action forms a technology of governance (Miller & Rose, 1990).”

“Such “ humble and mundane mechanisms, which appear to make it possible to govern ” (Miller and Rose 1990, 8), are worth exploring because they turn reality into some-thing that is governable and can be acted upon.”

“…the interrelations of accounting and the State have been integral in a number of recent studies of accounting change (see, e.g. Miller, 1986, 1990; Miller and Rose, 1990, 2008; Rose, 1991; Álvarez-Dardet et al., 2002; Baños et al., 2005; Sargiacomo, 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Yayla, 2011; Sharma et…”

“…the governmentality programme: ‘The “failure” of one policy or set of policies is always linked to attempts to devise or propose programmes that would work better ... [and] is thus a central element in governmentality’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 4, emphasis added; see also Hunt and Wickham, 1994: 88).”

“Miller and Rose (1990) describe this as thementality of rule.”

“Governmentality, in this sense, refers not only to the activities of sovereign authorities but also to how governing is widely dispersed throughout society, infusing everyday relationships such as those between employer and employee, teacher and student, parent and child (Miller and Rose 1990 ).”

“…or, indeed, a driver, but are also integral to the various attempts of governments, law enforcement and environmental agencies, manufacturing companies, advertisers, and others to effect c̀ontrol' or `action at a distance' (Latour, 1987; Law, 1986; Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992).”

“…to both represent what is occurring and put forward directions for policy, as ‘before one can seek to manage a domain such as an economy it is first necessary to conceptualise a set of processes and relations as an economy which is amenable to management’ (Miller and Rose, 1993, p 80).”

“The first meaning, associated with Michel Foucault, refers to the disciplining, policing, and regulating of individuals (Rose 1988; Miller and Rose 1990; Miller and O’Leary 1987).”

“At the same time and paradoxically, individuals also internalise the effects of power and regulate themselves towards ends that are congruent with the forms and effects of power deployed by the state (Miller & Rose, 1990 , p.”

“…moving down a series of lending agreements and then finally a case study of a single project, we were able to show how mentalities of government (Miller & Rose, 1990) informed the design of specific lending programs, and then finally how these programs were enacted within the field via…”

“…the normalisation of psychological expertise into everyday functioning, and the naturalisation of the ideology that there will be times in which every person should succumb to the ‘expert knowledge’ of ‘accredited and skilled persons professing neutrality and efficacy’ (Miller and Rose 1990, 28).”

“…instrument in this way has moved beyond a purely technical practice that aspires to measure performance to become a technology of government (Miller and Rose 1990), we have shown here how rankings and policy have both been ‘in motion’ and provide for a coordination with only limited control.”

“The population was both subject as well as object––they were the target of regulation and laws aimed to manage ‘wealth, health, longevity, its capacity to wage wars, and to engage in labor, and so forth’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 2).”

“…stressing both closer supervision and self-discipline.1 In recent sociologies of production, recourse to Foucauldian theories of governmentality (Miller and Rose 1990, Larner 2000) has been useful in drawing attention to the degree in which workers of all kinds are hailed as self-regulating…”

“…in the use of negative sanctions among some organizational psychologists, much sociological literature in this field has been heavily influenced by Foucault (1977) and has concentrated on the manufacture of consent through the creation of the ‘self disciplining subject’ (Miller and Rose, 1990).”

“I have no doubt that these changes could easily be explained as straightforward responses to changes in global capitalism and to the development of what has been termed an information economy and society (Mintz & Schwartz, 1986; Montagna, 1986; Miller & Rose, 1990).”

“The presence of WRC staff who regularly helped Chinese Benteng women contributed to what Miller and Rose [58] defined as the “technique of the self”, involving self-regulating the capacities of “normalized” subjects through the power of expertise.”

“The programme also aims to improve the community fire patrol’s capacity by creating more knowledgeable, technologically savvy and disciplined subjectivities (Miller and Rose, 1990).”

“This tension is also historically constituted through notions of governmentality (Miller and Rose 1993) whereby university procedures, techniques and knowledges have already defined, labeled and characterised communities as marginalised, poor, disempowered and in need of care.”

“Similarly, the governmentality of the state through `government at a distance' produces failure tendencies (Miller and Rose, 1990).”

“Such visions of the autonomous individual enchant in the sense that George Ritzer uses in Enchanting a Disenchanted World (1999). The process of enchantment involves the creation of pleasurable dreams and fantasies around an array of time, space, self-image, social relations, and material products.”

“But such subjectivation, typically associated with Western (neoliberal) governmentality (e.g. Miller & Rose, 1990), clearly takes a modified form here: the creation of market subjects and their taming takes place within the moral framework of ‘sincerity’ and ‘honesty’ as defined by the Chinese…”

“This relationship, we will aim to show, can best be understood through the notion of governmentality, as expressed in the later work of Foucault (1982) but also developed extensively by Miller and Rose (1990).”

“Through these mechanisms, authorities try to shape, normalise and conform to their expectations the thoughts, behaviours and actions of citizens and other organisations in order to achieve their aims (Miller and Rose, 1990: 8).”

“Such governable spaces may be “the social” (Rose, 1996), “the economy” (Miller & Rose, 1993), “the family” (Donzelot, 1997), or in our case “the drug scene.””

“Professional power, it is also constructed through discourse practices (Evetts, 2006; Fournier, 1999) that govern ‘‘at a distance’’ (Miller and Rose, 1990) and shape identity concepts.”

“Lifelong learning is a policy discourse that is mobilized in part as part of governing, as one of those intellectual technologies acting at a distance in the administration of populations (Miller & Rose, 1993; Edwards, 2002).”