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This article traces some administrative and media constructions of Australian surfing subculture in the early 1970s. Foucault's concept of `governmentality', which is concerned with techniques and technologies of discipline, is deployed to interpret the administrative categorization process that was used to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate unemployment benefit claims. Particular attention is paid to how some of the discourses surrounding unemployment benefit compared the unemployed surfing subject unfavorably with the idealized working citizen. Not only was `the surfie element' an object of discipline but, more importantly, `youths' as a social category were made to know themselves as potentially irresponsible at a time of growing unemployment.

This article responds to issues raised about global governmentality studies by Jan Selby, Jonathan Joseph, and David Chandler, especially regarding the implications of 'scaling up' a concept originally designed to describe the politics of advanced liberal societies to the international realm. In response to these charges, I argue that critics have failed to take full stock of Foucault's contribution to the study of global liberalism, which owes more to economic than political liberalism. Taking Foucault's economic liberalism seriously, that is, shifting the focus from questions of natural rights, legitimate rule, and territorial security to matters of government, population management, and human betterment reveals how liberalism operates as a universal, albeit not yet global, measure of truth, best illustrated by the workings of global capital. While a lot more translation work (both empirical and conceptual) is needed before governmentality can be convincingly extended to global politics, Foucauldian approaches promise to add a historically rich and empirically grounded dimension to IR scholarship that should not be hampered by disciplinary admonitions.

This article addresses the ontological status of nature in environmental politics by taking up the question of sustainable forest management in the Canadian boreal. In particular, it draws from Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality to argue that the historicity of "forest-nature" is indispensable for understanding the politics of sustainable forest management. In the end, it is argued that recent efforts to politicize the boreal should be regarded as an exercise of knowledge/power that rerepresents the boreal as a space of community and land stewardship, climate regulation, and biological diversity promotion, as opposed to simply a passive space of resource extraction. The article concludes by addressing some of the political implications of forest-nature for the practice of everyday life.

With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective, a potentially productive means of understanding the complexities of this sphere is through the lens of Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality—a concept that ties together the actions and preferred outcomes of the modern surveillance state with the microlevel actions of individual behavior. In this analytical framework, social norms are inculcated through subtle forms of coercion, where the state establishes the field of action in which state subjects ultimately perform self-discipline. This article argues that the first person shooter genre inculcates what I refer to as the governmentality of battlefield space: a form of discipline in which players adhere to gamic norms of performance—efficiency, proficiency, and masculine performativity—which are delineated by ludic structures and largely understood on terms which originate within the social ecology of gaming. The genre accomplishes this though disciplinary techniques such as informational verisimilitude, statistics, and masculinized "gamer" discourse, particularly during multiplayer instances, in which players constitute social understandings of what is "good" and "bad" play. It is on these terms that virtual combat performance and player performance become conflated in a kind of masculinized performance, which both adheres to and undermines traditional, hegemonic norms of (Western) military masculinity. This phenomenon transcends local social realities, and highlights the ways in which particular aspects of gaming and combat appear to have increasingly overlapping phenomenological and ontological qualities, working to produce a form of self-performance that may be required of tomorrow's soldiers.

Foucault identified the roots of governmentality in religious beliefs and religious history with its genealogical core the equivalent of pastoral power, the art of governing people by relying on a dualistic logic; individualization and totalization. This technology of power arose and matured within the Roman Catholic Church and provided a model for many states in the achievement and exercise of power. Informed by the work of Foucault on pastoral power the present work examines the genealogical core of governmentality in the context of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of great crisis in the 15th century when the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing reform instituted by Pope Eugenius IV (1431–1447). The contributions of accounting to pastoral power are shown in this study to have been pivotal in restoring the Church's standing and influence. Accounting was one of the technologies that allowed the bishops to control both the diocese as a whole and each priest, to subjugate the priests to the bishops' authority and, thereby, to govern the diocese through a never-ending extraction of truth.

The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.

This thesis drew on a methodological and analytical strategy bringing together Foucauldian (1980; 1984; 2001a; 2001b; 2007; 2008) onto-epistemological underpinnings and critical readings of the affective turn to explore the affirmative action policy in higher education in Chile. By critically deploying the frameworks of governmentality (Foucault, 2007; 2008) and affect (Massumi, 2002; Mazzarella, 2009), I explore the affirmative action policy as a dispositif configured by affective, discursive, and power relations that constitute the affirmative action policy and its regime of subjectification. This regime was primarily conceived as a field of forces that ambush and appeal to working-class subjects by establishing normative figures of neoliberal subjectivities that promise them broader possibilities of being recognised and desired by, in this case, respected historical formations such as universities and higher education.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the themes and aims of this Accounting, Auditing & Accountability (AAAJ) special issue and comments on the papers included in the issue. The paper provides a thematic outline along which the future researchers can undertake more empirical research examining how neoliberalism shapes, and shaped by, management accounting. Design/methodology/approach: This entails a brief review of the previous critical accounting works that refer to liberalism and neoliberalism to identify and highlight the specific themes and trajectories of neoliberal implications of management accounting has been and can be explored. This is followed by a brief commentary on the papers the authors have included in this special issue; these commentaries explain how these papers capture various dimensions of enabling and enacting neoliberal governmentality. Findings: The authors found that management accounting is now entering new territories beyond its conventional disciplinary enclosures of confinement, reconfiguring its functionalities to enable and enact a circulatory mode of neoliberal governmentality. These new functionalities then produce and reproduce entrepreneurial selves in myriad forms of social connections, networks and platforms within and beyond formal organizational settings, amid plethora of conducts, counter-conducts and resistances and new forms of identities and subjectivities. Research limitations/implications: This review can be read in relation to the papers included in the special issue as the whole issue will inspire more ideas, frameworks and methodologies for further studies. Originality/value: There is little research reviewing and commenting how management accounting now being enacted and enabled with new functionalities operating new territories and reconfiguring forms of governmentality. This paper inspires a new agenda on this project.

This paper sets out to evaluate several common theoretical frameworks employed in critical studies of brownfield redevelopment. Specifically, it analyzes the relevance of governmentality, the post-political, and non-essentialist materialism in that context. To do so, it explores how these theoretical frameworks map on to Bridgeport, Connecticut's BGreen 2020, and its approach to the redevelopment of vacant and underutilized land – and brownfields more specifically. It argues that these frameworks come up short when applied to this empirical case because they put forth untenable ontological claims regarding the constitution of the subject and political agency. Going further, it asserts that these frameworks fail to identify a way forward for those seeking emancipatory political interventions in the context of brownfield redevelopment and urban environmental politics. In closing this paper suggests that Jason W. Moore's recent writing on "capitalism as world-ecology" can provide a way forward where these other frameworks fail.

The figure of Oedipus haunted the thought of Michel Foucault from the outset of his tenure at the Collège de France, in association with several key philosophical and historical projects, and enduring until the conclusion of his career. However, it was with Foucault's account of an "Oedipus complex"—one that operated "not at the individual level but at the collective level; not in connection with desire and the unconscious but in connection with power and knowledge" ("Truth and Juridical Forms," 1973)—that Foucault was able to enlist Oedipus for a genealogy of "sexuality" and, furthermore, of "governmentality," such as would increasingly preoccupy him through the mid- to late 1970s. Foucault's attention to classical texts—in particular the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles and the Republic of Plato—thereby helped to clear a critical pathway through the conventional Marxism embraced by the "repressive hypothesis," and to arrive at a Nietzschean genealogy of sexuality and power.

In this article I draw on the later work of Michel Foucault to elaborate a governmentality framework for the study of international governmental organizations (IGOs). The main 'value added' of the proposed framework is that it brings into focus the micro-domain of power relations, thereby highlighting what mainline IGO studies fail to thematize. IGOs exercise a molecular form of power that evades and undermines the material, juridical and diplomatic limitations on their influence. They are important sites in the non-sovereign, microphysical workings of power that shape territorialized populations in unspectacular ways. In short, I argue that our understanding of IGOs remains incomplete if we do not pay attention to the effects of domination generated by their everyday governance tasks and good works. I develop this argument through a brief engagement with an innovative strand of IGO studies: research on international socialization, which is empirically illustrated through a brief exploration of the induction by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe of post-socialist countries into its embryonic security community.

This article aims to examine the potential transformation of practices triggered by the introduction of performance indicators in the water utilities in France in the late 2000s. We show that the transformative dynamic that, on the face of it, is brought about by this new governance tool is put into question by the multitude of brakes (political, economic, social and environmental) impeding its deployment. The article analyses the limits of the system by applying Foucault's governmentality approach, defined by the analytical framework of the management tools as reformulated by Lascoumes and Le Galès. Points for practitioners In particular, following the adoption of the Water Framework Directive in 2000, European states have had to streamline their drinking water and sanitation utilities. New methods of regulation, borrowing more markedly than in the past from market logics, have thus gradually taken hold. In this article, we examine the controversial performance indicators of the water and sanitation utilities, whose effectiveness and legitimacy are regularly questioned. We seek to clarify the structuring of the current debate and identify possible ways to improve their functioning on the basis of the French case.

This paper examines the proliferation of soft spaces of governance, focusing on planning. We move beyond more functional explanations to explore the politics of soft spaces, more specifically how soft space forms of governance operate as integral to processes of neoliberalisation, highlighting how such state for ms facilitate neoliberalisation through their flexibility and variability. Recent state restructuring of the planning sector and emerging trends for soft spaces in England under the Coalition government proposals are discussed.