Suchergebnisse

For this project I describe the socio-historical development of a particular application of genetic prenatal diagnosis, in terms of changing social relations that govern an ethics of reproductive choice. I examine ways that medicine and government articulate prenatal diagnosis to problematise the maternal body and govern women's reproductive choices about chromosomal abnormality in the fetus. Since its introduction in the early 1970s, the major use of prenatal diagnosis has been to detect chromosomal abnormalities-in particular, Down syndrome-in the fetus. Medico-scientific knowledge claims negotiated in everyday practices in the genetic counselling clinic between health professionals and their clients are situated within broader social relations. Negotiations between medicine and government have produced technoscientific possibilities, realised with greater or lesser success in the co-construction of a workable prenatal diagnosis standardised package. I describe how these socio-technical relations have produced similarities and differences across time, and national and professional boundaries. My analysis draws on observations in three genetic counselling clinics, and of the health professionals' other work activities. I also draw on interviews with them and other actors in that arena, as well as claims made about prenatal diagnosis technologies in the medico-scientific literature. I analyse my data using concepts developed in social worlds/arenas theory within a Foucauldian framework of social relations that govern the body. Since the early formation of a standardised package of genetic counselling about amniocentesis, ethical decisions about prenatal diagnosis have identified multiple parts of the self to be governed. This ethics has relied on a duty to make genetically responsible decisions as a particular way to relate to oneself, although it has been expressed in different ways. Newer technologies have articulated greater ethical possibilities for governing the self by co-constructing new ways of ...

This article is based on a study of an organizational change program that sought to alter employees' self-perceptions, emotions and behavior through the use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a popular personality-typing tool. The program affords an opportunity to explore the various ways in which discourses advocating personal and organizational change work through employees' subjectivity. We argue that theoretical approaches that view the targets of such programs as passive - as either 'colonized' or constructed by discourses - fail to capture the complex and contradictory nature of organizational control, and subjects' changing positions within it. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, we argue that the power of discourses is mediated through an active, reflexive, and often emotional engagement on the part of individuals. Through their involvement, employees variously reproduce, resist or reconfigure power relationships which, during organizational change, are themselves unstable and inconsistent.

This article explores the value of investigating cultural change programmes as exercises in engineering deviance. It does so through a case study of an organizational development cultural change programme at Sprogwheels, a large Australian corporation. Drawing on and extending the classic work of Becker (1966), the article details how the programme combined a moral crusade against what it sought to have labelled as the 'deviant conservatism' of the existing organizational culture with social support for 'deviant radicalism', in the form of a counter-cultural, self-enterprising set of middle managers promoting corporate change. The article explores the complex and contradictory ideas of deviance that are deployed in such programmes, and examines the implications of a deviance analysis for an improved understanding of the dynamics of cultural change.