This article draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how recent political moves to legalise ‘flexibility’ mobilises education authorities to make ‘community’ a technical means of achieving the political objective of schooling the child. I argue that ‘flexibility’ in this sense is a neo‐liberal strategy that shifts relations between the governed and the State. In this way, it transforms the idea of schooling from a State run institution for the purpose of ‘community building’ to a community run institution for (...) the purpose of making parents governable by both instrumentalising and institutionalising individualism through the force of community membership. Rather than a form of liberation from bureaucratic rule, the paper exposes how ‘flexibility’ acts as a normalising strategy that works with difference to entangle parents as community members in the process of schooling the child through the moral obligation of the contract. (shrink)

It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to ‘experience’ to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality. However, the interest in experience also decisively shaped Foucault’s analysis of the ‘critical attitude’ that he explicitly started to address at about the same time. The article argues that Foucault’s notion of critique is informed by a specific reading and understanding of ‘experience’. Experience is conceived of (...) as dominant structure and transformative force, as existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond historical limits. Foucault defines experience as a dynamic interplay between games of truth, forms of power and relations to the self. Accordingly, the Foucauldian account of critique is characterized by three aspects: the activity of problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination, and the audacity to expose one’s own status as a subject. While the first section of the article briefly reconstructs the trajectory of ‘experience’ in Foucault’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s, the main part discusses the dimensions and implications of this ‘experimental’ critique. (shrink)

The four sections of this article are reactions to a few interconnected problems that Mario Bunge addresses in his The Sociology-Philosophy Connection , which can be seen as a continuation and summary of his two recent major volumes Finding Philosophy in Social Science and Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective . Bunge’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences has been sufficiently acclaimed. (See in particular two special issues of this journal dedicated to his social philosophy: "Systems and (...) Mechanisms. A Symposium on Mario Bunge’s Philosophy of Social Science," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34, nos. 2 and 3.) The author discusses therefore only those solutions in Bunge’s book that seem most problematic, namely, Bunge’s proposal to expel charlatans from universities; his treatment of social laws; his notions of mechanisms, "mechanismic explanation," and systemism; and his reading of Popper’s social philosophy. Key Words: theory • laws • mechanism • explanation • Popper. (shrink)

This article critiques the concept and discourse of social responsibility in terms of theoretical coherence, empirical salience, normative viability, and power/knowledge implications from a Marxist-institutionalist perspective. The social responsibility concept and discourse is found to be problematic along each of the above dimensions. The basic point can be stated succinctly: The concept and discourse of social responsibility are viable only in the absence of a historically grounded understanding of capitalist political economy. At the same time, however, the article argues that (...) social responsibility constitutes an influential ideology with material implications for stakeholder groups. (shrink)

This thesis constructs a model of the material causes of the capacity of individuals to act at work, by using the ontology of scientific realism to facilitate a synthesis between Marx and Foucault. This synthetic model is submitted as a solution to the long-standing problem of Industrial Relations theory, now manifest in the deconstruction of the organon of 'control'. The problems of 'control' are rooted in the radical concept of power and traditional, base/superstructure, interpretations of Marx. Developing an alternative to (...) the last provides the means of transcending the limitations of the first and the second. A realist, chronological-bibliographic reading of Marx provides an alternative to traditional interpretations, by creating a novel concept of his object, his initial explicandum and his putative explicans. This reading identifies a fresh problem with his model of capital: it cannot explain how labour is organized into a productive power and subsumed to capital. Foucault provides the means of resolving these deficiencies of Marx's explicans. A realist interpretation turns Marx and Foucault around to face each other, renders them compatible and establishes points of contact between their work. Together they constitute a model of the operative logic of production relations capable of explaining the organization of labour, its subsumption to capital and the materialism of civil society and the idealism of the state. On this basis, the contemporary form of the problem of Industrial Relations theory is explained. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two controversialissues that occurred in two different centuriesbut that are inextricably linked with eachother – the 1835 murder committed by a Frenchpeasant, Pierre Riviere and documented byMichel Foucault and the 1990's debate regardingthe controversial methods of FacilitatedCommunication used with students labeledautistic in the United States. In this paper Iargue that both controversies foreground thecrisis of the humanist subject. In other words,I argue that both controversies are generatedby a seemingly simple question: Are personsidentified as mentally disabledcapable/incapable (...) of representing themselves?In response to this question, I will use amaterialist analysis to explore theimplications that the poststructuralistdepiction of the humanist subject as a fictionholds for both the Riviere case and theFacilitated Communication debate. (shrink)

The four sections of this article are reactions to a few interconnected problems that Mario Bunge addresses in his The Sociology-Philosophy Connection, which can be seen as a continuation and summary of his two recent major volumes Finding Philosophy in Social Science and Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. Bunge’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences has been sufficiently acclaimed. (See in particular two special issues of this journal dedicated to his social philosophy: “Systems and Mechanisms. A (...) Symposium on Mario Bunge’s Philosophy of Social Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34, nos. 2 and 3.) The author discusses therefore only those solutions in Bunge’s book that seem most problematic, namely, Bunge’s proposal to expel charlatans from universities; his treatment of social laws; his notions of mechanisms, “mechanismic explanation,” and systemism; and his reading of Popper’s social philosophy. (shrink)