Search results

This paper aims to offer a critical pathway to understanding recent changes and improvements in organizing and managing healthcare – such as the emerging “patient‐centred care” (PCC) approach.

The research is based on fieldwork performed as a mobile ethnography of translations of everyday healthcare work at a Swedish healthcare institution in which an analysis of the significance of contemporary accounting practices for disciplining action and thought was carried out.

Accounting is increasingly interlinked with medical practices today, with more and more people involved in translating action and thought into accounting‐based terms and values at all levels of their work lives; as this happens, accounting “produces” a way of thinking and valuing that even modifies professional identities. The discipline of medical knowledge is played out differently as accounting‐based valuation measures become internalised into the performance of medical professionals and as additionally their images of themselves and their patients change. Patient‐centred care is thereby seen not as a means of generating a pure or positive value for patients, expressed in the form of greater efficiencies and nation‐wide performance indicators. The loosely coupled forms of patient‐centred care are about how nurses, having translated accounting practices into their work and selves, use them as a means of managing the constraints and “cracks” in the PCC approaches.

Accounting allows the dynamics of the PCC approach to be understood and acted on in new ways. Accounting as a discipline involves both accounting professionals and medical professionals who circulate accounting numbers and values. Accounting, thus, is an activity that takes place inside and outside the self.

Using Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a guide, the purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of considering the library as place, and specifically as a place that has the “curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault, 1986a, p. 24).

The paper draws upon a range of literary examples and from biographical accounts of authors such as Alan Bennett, Michel Foucault, and Umberto Eco to show how the library space operates as a heterotopia.

The paper finds that drawing together the constructs of heterotopia and serendipity can enrich the understanding of how libraries are experienced as sites of play, creativity, and adventure.

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is offered as an original and useful frame that can account for the range of experiences and associations uniquely attached to the library.

Turkey has been an active member of the Bologna Process (BP) since 2001. This chapter focuses on the impact of the BP on higher education (HE) in Turkey by outlining the reforms that were carried out and the narratives surrounding the changes. The focus of the chapter will be on how the BP has been accommodated, negotiated debated or rejected in Turkey and the societal and political tensions surrounding the process. The chapter is based on the findings of semi-structured interviews conducted with the Bologna experts and the officials of universities in Turkey, who were responsible for the reforms between 2009 and 2016, as well as a review of updated data and the analysis of secondary literature and official texts, such as the National Reports of the BP and the relevant policy documents in Turkey. After a very intense reform process, the policy transfer in Turkey slowed down, and Turkey's discussions, specifically about the BP both at the policy and the university level, became close to non-existent. The chapter aims to analyse the reasons behind the loss of interest in the BP in Turkey by focusing on the critical voices and discussions surrounding the neoliberalisation of HE. The chapter will also refer to how Euroscepticism in Turkey impacted the reform process in HE.

This purpose of this paper is to investigate the introduction of French theory into English language accounting research and to assess the impact of the work of French social theorists on the accounting research domain.

The paper presents a citation analysis of articles appearing in selected English language accounting research journals for a sample of French authors, during the periods from the inception of the journals to mid‐2009. In performing this citation analysis, 39 French authors who are well known as social theorists, philosophers, economists or sociologists were included. The accounting research journals chosen for analysis included the top four journals listed in many league tables for accounting research along with several journals that regularly publish research in accounting history or that focus on alternative research paradigms.

The citation analysis identified the following French authors as being the most frequently cited: Michel Foucault, followed by Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu. The citation analysis also identified the English language accounting research journals in which French social theorists have been most often cited. The two most significant journals have been Critical Perspectives on Accounting and Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, followed by Accounting Organizations and Society, Management Accounting Research and European Accounting Review. The analysis also shows the effects of mimeticism, which seems to have produced a sort of isomorphism in the styles of publication. Accounting, Organizations and Society, appears to be the standard‐setter of the critical‐interpretive field of accounting research.

This paper is the first known to provide a comprehensive analysis of the introduction of French theory into English language accounting research.;

Considerable research on the experiences of contemporary workers theorizes everyday acts of resistance as inconsequential, emphasizing their limited impact on overarching structures of inequality. This chapter offers a different perspective. Drawing on a feminist interpretivist paradigm, I argue that such characterizations of everyday resistance fail to account for the ways in which workers themselves make sense of power dynamics at work. Incorporating such accounts complicates conventional understandings of low-income workers engaged in everyday resistance as either dupes, as is often suggested by academic research, or schemers, as is frequently articulated by the self-perceived targets of worker rule-breaking – their managers. Based on 10 months of ethnographic observation and interviews with nurses and nursing assistants in a long-term care facility, I demonstrate that while workers recognize the constraints within which they act, they nonetheless make sense of their acts of everyday resistance as defiant. The realities of precarious labor and family responsibility do not combine to prevent resistance at work for these women; they combine to transform it. Asserting their agency through a series of relatively mundane and covert acts that gain them autonomy and dignity, workers readily acknowledge their policy refusals while at the same time recognizing the factors that shape them. Describing subversions of authority as strategic collaborations, the constrained agency these workers articulate hinges on their own and their coworkers’ identities not just as workers, but in many cases as low-income working mothers.

This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.

The debate concerning the Quantified-Self Movement (QS) has been extremely polarised. As Tamar Sharon has pointed out, each aspect of the lifestyle promoted by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly has provoked opposite reactions, generating a debate that revolves around some basic conceptual dichotomies: empowerment versus surveillance, self-awareness versus reductionism, and personalised healthcare versus disintegration of public assistance (Sharon, 2017). The aim of this chapter is to provide a critique of QS, namely an assessment of its limits and its (technological and social) conditions of possibility. In particular, the author’s analysis will focus on the relationship between technology and subjectivity, and its main theoretical framework will be Michel Foucault’s research on the notion of ‘care for the self’ (Foucault, 1986, 2005). Quantification is an essential and unescapable aspect of our present technological environment. The devices that make our onlife (Floridi, 2014) possible are connected with a complex technological system made of GPSs, satellites, computers, and networks. Health is no longer managed through a distinct set of practices within the limits of a well-defined space (the hospital or the ambulatory), but it rather becomes a dataset integrated into a system where all aspects of life (health, law, leisure, work, social relations) are treated and managed simultaneously. This technological condition implies a new form of cognitive and practical delegation (Ippolita, 2016; Morozov, 2013), which makes the very notion of ‘self-tracking’ at least problematic. Individuals do not track themselves anymore: on the contrary, they are tracked by prosthetic extensions of their own bodies. This, however, does not mean that they do nothing. Our digital devices require a specific set of practices, a determinate way of life. The author will argue that these practices are the product of design, understood as a specific way of conceiving and organising the interaction between subject and technical object (Flusser, 1999). Through our technological environment, design reshapes the social and political function of bodies, their interaction and the set of practices connected to them (Bratton, 2015; Dyer, 2016; Vial, 2014). Automated quantification is an aspect of our designed user experience. As such, this chapter discusses design as a key element to understand the role of quantification in our digital milieu. It analyses the QS movement as a specific way of responding to our new technological condition. The main research question will be the following: is QS to be regarded as a simple acceptance of a new form of delegated – and thus alienated – subjectivity, or is it a kind of practice that allows the subject to overcome his passivity, and to take part in the process through which quantification is designed and managed? Is it possible to understand QS as a technology of the self (Foucault, 1988, 2005)?

The ongoing global pandemic poses significant challenges for researchers, personally and professionally, as it does for all people. However, even if we cannot safely leave our home to gather qualitative data by directly meeting with people, opportunities abound for engaging in discourse analysis. After all, people have not stopped talking or writing, even if much of that is now via Zoom, social media or some other technology platform rather than face to face. What people are talking and writing about at this time matters greatly because language use profoundly shapes how people interpret reality, perceive themselves and others and act. Quite literally, then, the discourse people engage in and are influenced by during the pandemic may help to save or imperil lives and livelihoods. While there are many possible approaches to discourse analysis, this chapter focuses on some key insights French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault offers for such endeavors. It offers an introductory account of his key concepts and methods, followed by a brief case study to demonstrate their application to discourses that reject scientific knowledge and advice about COVID-19.

The aim of this paper is to provide insights into how information (IS) practitioners can develop further their awareness on ethical issues. In the context of the paper, awareness means able to identify and deal with issues of ethics in activities of information systems planning, development and use. The paper begins by presenting two areas which IS practitioners can initially explore to develop their ethical awareness. These areas are: (1) IS Methodologies and (2) Codes. The first area emphasises ethical awareness by using methodologies. The second element aims to encourage ethical awareness by following principles. In both areas, self‐reflection is identified as a key element for awareness. Using Foucault’s ideas on power and ethics, a critical understanding of ethical awareness based on self‐reflection is presented to complement ethical awareness developments. This understanding is defined in terms of two elements of inquiry: (a) Power relations analysis and (b) ways of being ethical. With these two elements, the paper argues that IS practitioners can exert their critical thinking and create their own ethics, while still following IS methodologies and codes.

This article uses Michel Foucaultʼs theoretical work in examining relations of power within the unique context of street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980). Through Foucaultʼs techniques of discipline (1995), it analyzes how employees and managers are both objectified and selfproduced within collective bargaining agreements from street level organizations. Findings show that ‘managers’, ‘employees’ and ‘union representatives’ are produced but also constrained within these documents. These collective bargaining agreements also serve to ‘fix’ relationships discursively affirmed as unequal. Constrained by this ‘reality’, any potential for changing relationships between managers and employees through prescriptions that ask street-level bureaucrats to be ‘leaders’; “responsible choice-makers” (Vinzant & Crothers, 1998, p. 154) rather than policy implementers simply carrying out management directives are largely futile.