Search results

Drawing on the literature on pastoral power, a term introduced by Foucault that denotes a specific form of authority based on the subordinate's open communication regarding aspirations, interests and personal concerns, having the full faith in the leader's care of the subordinate's welfare, this article report empirical material from a study of Swedish construction industry.

Leadership practices are contingent on context and situation, and over time, authoritative leadership practices have been complemented by relational leadership that increasingly emphasizes the bilateral communication between manager and subordinate. The more communicative and “soft” leadership idiom may have both benefits and incur unanticipated consequences and conditions that need to be studied on basis of empirical materials.

Managers in the construction industry emphasize how subordinates increasingly turn to their closest managers to address a variety of concerns. Even though managers recognizes the value of providing personalized support, there is a risk that such a leadership idiom distract both managers and subordinates, i.e. counseling activities consume too much resources, making agents less prone to fully attend to proper project goals.

To consider contemporary leadership practices as partially premised on pastoral power provides new analytical possibilities that shed light on how leadership practice needs to correspond with new demands in the corporate setting.

Through an analysis of texts and interviews with sanctuary providers from sanctuary incidents in Canada, this paper first details how sanctuary is made possible by pastoral and non-state sovereign powers. It then argues at least three stories of law are instantiated in sanctuary discourse. Law is at times arbitrary and unpredictable. In other instances, a ‘higher’ law authorizes sanctuary. Law is also a broader game in which lawyers are relied upon and sanctuary becomes a tactic to ‘win’. These legal narratives work together to constitute sanctuary and are instantiations of pastoral and sovereign powers at the level of the subject.

Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.

The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).

We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.

The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.

Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.

Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.

This chapter contributes to the field of educational standardisation by critically discussing the recent preoccupation with social and emotional abilities as performance standards in education policies and curriculum. The chapter is philosophical-theoretical in scope and sheds light on standardisation of social and emotional abilities through the different theoretical layers of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. By bringing the writings of the late Foucault to the fore, I will argue that the power structures imbued in social and emotional standards are not merely oppressive and vertical structures of subjection, but can also be seen as enabling, relational and productive means for subjectivation. Thus, although social and emotional standards certainly can be seen as governmental measures in the production of a flexible, diligent, self-managing workforce, ensuring the kind of transferable non-cognitive skills that are so much needed in the knowledge economy, educators can ambiguously also construct public spaces for political-ethical self-creation and resistance in context of these ‘standards of the self’.

This paper aims to contribute to critical management studies (CMS) by developing an empirically grounded understanding of how post‐bureaucratic control operates implicitly, by seeping into the very identities of individual employees.

One longitudinal case study of multidisciplinary teamwork in a large insurance company was conducted during a five‐year period, beginning in the late 1990s.

Evidence from the case study shows how human resource management (HRM) techniques established among employees a desire to be recognised as a trustworthy member, on the one hand, and a constant fear of being unseen, on the other. This drove employees to continuously take initiatives that placed them in a self‐regulating limelight.

The study uses a single case study, which limits the scope of the findings

The paper provides interesting clues as to how post‐bureaucratic control is driven not only by the risk of being “caught misbehavin'”, as CMS primarily has it, but also by the risk of being unseen and by the desire to be recognised.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a reconceptualised view of public education, with specific reference to early twentieth-century Australia, and to revisit the significance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in this period. Further, in this regard, the paper proposes a neo-Foucaultian notion of philanthropic power, as an explanatory and analytical principle, with possible implications for thinking anew about the role and influence of American philanthropic organisations in the twentieth century.

The paper draws on mainly secondary sources but also works with primary sources gathered from relevant archives, including that of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

The paper concludes that the larger possibilities associated with the particular view of public education outlined here, referring to both public school and public libraries, were constrained by the emergence and consolidation of an increasingly professionalised view of education and schooling.

The influence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York on early twentieth-century Australian education has been increasingly acknowledged and documented in recent historical research. More recently, Carnegie has been drawn into an interdisciplinary perspective on philanthropy and public culture in Australia. This paper seeks to add to such work by looking at schools and libraries as interconnected yet loosely coupled aspects of what can be understood as, in effect, a re-conceived public education, to a significant degree sponsored by the Corporation.

The paper draws upon but seeks to extend and to some extent re-orient existing historical research on the relationship between Australian education and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its originality lies in its exploration of a somewhat different view of public education and the linkage it suggests in this regard with a predominantly print-centric public culture in Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century.

To provide an analysis of the notion of “information poverty” in library and information science (LIS) by investigating concepts, interests and strategies leading to its construction and thus to examine its role as a constitutive element of the professional discourse.

Starting from a Foucauldian notion of discourse, “information poverty” is examined as a statement in its relation to other statements in order to highlight assumptions and factors contributing to its construction. The analysis is based on repeated and close reading of 35 English language articles published in LIS journals between 1995 and 2005.

Four especially productive discursive procedures are identified: economic determinism, technological determinism and the “information society”, historicising the “information poor”, and the library profession's moral obligation and responsibility.

The material selection is linguistically and geographically biased. Most of the included articles originate in English‐speaking countries. Therefore, results and findings are fully applicable only in an English language context.

The focus on overlapping and at times conflicting discursive procedures, i.e. the results of alliances and connections between statements, highlights how the “information poor” emerge as a category in LIS as the product of institutionally contingent, professional discourse. By challenging often unquestioned underlying assumptions, this article is intended to contribute to a critical examination of LIS discourse, as well as to the analysis of the discourses of information, which dominate contemporary society. It is furthermore seen to add to the development of discourse analytical approaches in LIS research.

The role of call-centres during service recovery has attracted much attention in research. However, marketers know less about controlling customers during recovery interactions and consequences of such control. In order to address this gap and empirically ascertain whether service interactions are marked by customer centricity or by employees exerting control over customers, the aim of the authors was to organise an empirical research in two Brazilian call-centres.

The research consisted of direct, open observation and 33 semi-structured interviews with insiders (call-centre managers, supervisors and operatives).

Four key findings emerged during interviews with insiders. First, control over customers may be more widely practiced than assumed in certain sections of marketing academe. Second, such control is viewed positively by call-centre insiders and is sanctioned by management. Third, control does not disempower and demoralise call-centre staff but protects operatives. Finally, control does not seem to unavoidably generate lasting customer dissatisfaction. These findings are incorporated in a framework of call-centre management which incorporates control through scripting.

The discussion calls for the revisit of certain marketing concepts and philosophies, including customer orientation, by demonstrating that control over customers is practised and should not be viewed negatively or avoided altogether in practice and as a topic of analysis. A re-conceptualisation of call-centres as sites of control over customers is proposed.

Control and power are rarely analysed in services marketing. This is one of a few studies that makes sense of providers' (insiders') viewpoints and argues that control may play a constructive role and should be seen as a legitimate topic of services and call-centre analysis. As such it addresses a question of intellectual and practical importance which is rarely discussed and may be viewed as incongruous with an age when customers are assumed to have rights.

To provide a close, detailed analysis of the frequency, nature, and depth of visible use of Michel Foucault's works by library and information science/studies (LIS) scholars.

The study conducted extensive full-text searches in a large number of electronically available LIS journal databases to find citations of Foucault's works, then examined each cited article to evaluate the nature and depth of use.

Most uses of Foucault are brief or in passing. In-depth explorations of Foucault's works are comparatively rare and relatively little-used by other LIS scholars. Yet the relatively brief uses of Foucault encompass a wide array of different topics spread across a wide spectrum of LIS journal literature.

The study was limited to articles from particular relatively prominent LIS journals. Results might vary if different journals or non-journal literature were studied. More sophisticated bibliometric techniques might reveal different relative performance among journals and might better test, confirm, or reject various patterns and relationships found here. Other research approaches, such as discourse analysis, social network analysis, or scholar interviews, might reveal patterns of use and influence not visible in this literature sample.

This intensive study of both quality and quantity of citations may challenge some existing assumptions regarding citation analysis, plus illuminating Foucault scholarship. It also indicates possible problems for future application of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to similar depth-of-use studies.