Search results

This paper discusses the challenges that two doctoral researchers faced while researching religious minorities and women in a culturally sensitive society such as Pakistan. Their shared interest in sensitive topics related to gender and minorities in Pakistan led both researchers to collaborate in this study to provide a better understanding of issues in qualitative research in the same research context. They discuss the challenges of interviewing participants within the educational context. They also suggest some ways to overcome such challenges.

Based on Foucualt's writings on regimes of truth, discourse and systems of exclusion, the authors in this study analyze how patriarchal and faith-based regimes of truth constrain some discourses that affect participants’ willingness and insights to reflect on the issues freely.

While reflecting on their experiences in data collection, authors report that qualitative researchers struggle to access participants to investigate issues related to gender subjectivities and minority faiths in educational contexts in developing societies like Pakistan. Researchers face a variety of problems, from their own positionality to participants’ access to their responses. The reason for this is patriarchal and religious regimes and also their intersecting relations that restrict participants’ ability to reflect on their issues. Minorities in Pakistan are often prevented from expressing their views freely by blasphemy fears. The discourses of gender are also sensitive. Therefore, the study suggests that in societies such as Pakistan, where religion and gender are emotive terms, the problem can be handled by counter-discourses that challenge truth regimes by conceiving research as a transformative practice. Moreover, such societies require a policy for protecting researchers and participants in the interest of knowledge production and dissemination.

This study is originally based on the primary data used in two doctoral studies.

The purpose of the article is to show the regime of truth in the institutional commissions that have the objective of restoring history by establishing a democratic, equitable, comprehensive, inclusive and fair criterion against the attempts of re-victimization and suppression of memory that Western political and cultural traditions have installed through their mechanisms of power.

Based on the analysis of the cases of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosendo Cantú, they establish the material conditions from which prejudices and hegemonic stereotypes are intertwined to reproduce serious violations of human rights in democratic political and epistemic frameworks. The colonial function of the truth commissions in Mexico is analyzed, which are presented as mechanisms for social development, political and colonial reproduction of liberal democracy.

The qualitative results allow considering the way in which the different truth commissions in Mexico have been strongly linked to epistemic mechanisms in which truth and justice favor the reproduction of established relationships based on race, social class and gender. Especially in the so-called democratic transition, violence, truth and justice come together to highlight power relations in situations that have been disavowed by the intelligentsia.

The limitations of the research are found in the historical configuration of the truth commissions in Mexico. The data, references and assessments are crossed by the initial function of the truth commissions and the establishment of apparatuses and mechanisms based on transitional justice. Based on this, it can be considered a methodological oversight to shift the analysis of truth commissions toward a critical assessment of the truth as a regime of government and hegemonic and colonization criteria from two very specific cases.

The originality of the work is found in the critical discernment of truth as a political category and the coloniality of power.

This paper aims to understand how training programs fostering discourses centred on individuals’ identity construction may turn resistance into a generative and enabling force to elicit more relationally and negotiated solutions of change.

The study used Foucault’s conceptualisation of “regimes of truth” to show how even potentially resistant public managers may generatively contribute to change processes if given the chance to restate the macro discourses of the hegemonic new public management movement at their own micro level. It relied upon an ethnographic approach based on verbal interviews, photo-elicitation, DiSC behavioural tests and observation of 29 Italian public managers participating in a training course.

The findings allow us to unveil how helping public managers to think about their self-identity in new ways enabled them to approach changing processes differently turning their resistance efforts into a generative force.

The paper offers a noteworthy contribution to the literature on public sector change by examining neglected issues relating to the identity of change agents and the implications of their multiple roles. It presents an alternative to the deterministic view of resistance as impeding or dysfunctionally shaping change under the new public management approach. This has important implications for both practice and policymaking.

Hiring management consultants as external support in organizational change is in the literature described as a socially and emotionally stressful activity for managers. Management consultants need to deal with these threatening aspects of their service. This paper aims to explore the subject positions management consultants offer managers in their self‐presentations on the World Wide Web.

The paper studies the self‐presentations on the www of four large management consultancies–Accenture, BCG, KPMG, and McKinsey & Co. Using a Foucault inspired discourse analytical framework, we analyze the subject positions offered to client‐managers in these self‐presentations and how these subject positions relate to the management regimes of bureaucracy and post‐bureaucracy.

The study identifies two different discursive practices–one normalizing practice, constructing the use of management consultants as a natural aspect of management and a second practice rationalizing the use of management consultants, providing arguments aimed at reducing the pressures on the manager. The normalizing discourse which draws on a post‐bureaucratic regime was found in Accenture and KPMG. The rationalizing discourse was found in McKinsey and BCG and draws on the bureaucratic regime.

This work highlights how consultants deal with the pressures their presence puts on managers. It illustrates how managerial truth regimes contribute to shaping the conditions for management consulting and the consultant‐client relationship.

This essay investigates the meaning of rationality in Michel Foucault's notion of “governmental rationality,” both in what he takes rationalities to be and in how they relate to practices of governing. I try to resolve these questions in a sympathetic manner by detailing some of the social dynamics implicit in practices of governing. Pierre Bourdieu provides means to connect such practices with a detailed understanding of social struggle and resistance to power. These insights reveal strong lines of continuity between governmental rationality and collective political resistance to it. On this basis, I suggest a new path of investigation into forms of popular sovereignty as relatively neglected examples of governmental rationality.

This study explores the reactions of different categories of actors within a university setting (academics, administrative staff, governance members, and students) to implementing performance management system (PMS) changes. The paper aims to understand how these actors dealt with PMS change by discursively reconstructing their roles and positions at institutional and individual levels.

The authors use Foucault's (1972/1989) conceptualisation of regimes of truths to analyse the case of an Italian university. Interviews with individual actors took place in the period 2012–2020. The data were contextualised with other data from publicly available reports, internal documents, and archival material.

The paper identifies the challenges actors face dealing with contrasting discourses and draws attention to the paradoxical changes triggering resistance. However, the findings show that when circumstances allow a generative resistance, dissent can be progressively replaced with a commitment on the part of actors, achieving alignment with organisational strategy.

The study challenges the commonly held view of resistance as a dysfunctional force that impedes change. It emphasises the importance of focusing on actors to make resistance a generative force shaping change towards more negotiated and agreed positions. This has implications for academics and practitioners seeking to implement PMSs.

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 argue that Economics is not a neutral science.

Post-structuralist perspective of Lyotard (1984), alongside the Pragmatics of Searle (1979) and Travis (1981) are useful for analyzing enunciations in mainstream Economics.

Economists use illocutionary acts expressed in formal language to achieve perlocutionary effects. Because of the importance attached to objectivity in mainstream Economics, the use of artificial languages is preferred to natural language. However, formal language is preferred regarding its perlocutionary effects on economists' community.

This paper puts together the Continental and the Analytical Philosophy and show, in an original manner, how their intersections and how they can be useful to better understand the epistemology of Economics.

The basic characteristic of knowledge‐based societies is that society organised according to simulations, codes and models replaces production as society's organising principle. Electronically operated global capitalism is structured with the help of information networks in a timeless space of financial flows. Money has become totally independent of production, escaping into the networks of high‐order electronic interactions. The ideas in this article come on the one hand from the Foucaultian poststructuralist and the Baudrillarian postmodernist perspective, and on the other hand they are based on a crietical accounting that belongs to Anglo‐Saxon critical thinking. In the centre of the analysis lies a provocative thesis that was advanced by N. Macintosh in his book Accounting, Accountants and Accountability (2002), that today's financial markets operate detached from reality in hyperreality, and there does not exist anything stable to support the financial economy in the «order of simulacrum». Consequently, vital accounting information no longer refers to real referents, which means that we live in the world of free floating signs. In «the simulation era of today's world», accounting, just like all other areas of knowledge, is faced with a crisis of representation. By introducing the poststructuralist perspective in the accounting area, critical accounting has opened up a debate on the presentation of accounting data, use of language and control of accounting discourse. Consequently, accountancy may be seen as a fundamentally social service which is especially evident in the situations when the private and public interests are opposed.

To provide a view of Rob Kling's contribution to socio‐technical studies of work.

The five “big ideas” discussed are signature themes in Kling's own work in the informatics domain, and of his intellectual legacy.

This paper conveys something of Kling's presence in social informatics (SI) thinking by focusing on a number of “big” ideas – “multiple points of view”, “social choices”, “the production lattice” (and its corollary, the problematization of the user), “socio‐technical interaction networks”, and “institutional truth regimes”.

A growing research community has demonstrated the power of SI techniques. It is essential that this body of work is sustained and developed, demonstrating how to undertake investigation and observation, that is not driven by instrumentalism but is informed by and leads to “technological realism”.

The SI corpus, exposing the dangers of naïve instrumentalism as an approach to information systems design and management, can guide practitioners on how to unpack the history of what is in view. This may be a specific technology, a social formation, or a sociotechnical circumstance. Practitioners may draw on the concepts presented, not as a prescriptive toolkit, but rather as a sensitizing frame to assist those who wish to re‐vision the workplace.

Central to the successful utilisation of computers in work, we argue, is the continuing development of a portfolio of interpretive concepts (such as STINs, regimes of truth, production lattices) that can consolidate Rob Kling's “big” ideas that are the core of this paper.