This article examines the technological construction of political power, as well as resistance to political power, by means of an "ideal-typical" model called a technolog ical drama. In technological regularization, a design constituency creates artifacts whose features reveal an intention to shape the distribution of wealth, power, or status in society. The design constituency also creates myths, social contexts, and rituals to legitimate its intention and constitute the artifact's political impact. In reply, the people adversely affected by regularization engage in (...) myth-, context-, or artifact-altering strate gies that represent an accommodation to the system or a conscious attempt to change it. A technological drama, in short, is a specifically technological form of political discourse. A key point is that throughout all three processes, political "intentions," no less than the facticity and hardness of the technology's "impact," are themselves constituted and constructed in reciprocal and discursive interaction with technological activities. Technology is not politics pursued by other means; it is politics constructed by technological means. (shrink)

Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology (...) of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies. (shrink)

Formal tools are attributed central roles in organizing work within many modern workplaces. How should one comprehend the power of these tools? Taking the medical record as an example, this article builds on recent calls to overcome the dichotomy between the formal and the informal and proposes an understanding of the generative power of such tools that does not attribute mythical capacities to either tool or human work. To do so, it is important to look both at the history offormal (...) tools and to their real-time use in concrete work practices. These steps toward a sociology of the formal are crucial for a more comprehensive understanding and evaluation offormal systems in practice. (shrink)