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)

A case is made for cultural political economy by exploring the constitutive role of semiosis in economic and political activities, economic and political institutions, and social order more generally. CPE is a post-disciplinary approach that adopts the “cultural turn” in economic and political inquiry without neglecting the articulation of semiosis with the interconnected materialities of economics and politics within wider social formations. This approach is illustrated from the emergence of the knowledge-based economy as a master discourse for accumulation strategies on (...) different scales, for state projects and hegemonic visions, for diverse functional systems and professions, and for civil society. He is best known for his contributions to state theory, the regulation approach in political economy, the study of Thatcherism, governance and, most recently, the future of capitalism, the capitalist state, and welfare regimes. His recent publications include: The Future of the Capitalist State and STATE/SPACE, co-edited with N. Brenner, M. Jones, and G. MacLeod. He is now working on the nature and contradictions of the knowledge-based economy. (shrink)

This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy (...) documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to trans-disciplinary research on social change. (shrink)