Governmentality

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Understanding governmentality requires understanding Foucault's critique of conventional conceptionsofpower. Inhisalternativeconceptualization, power is dispersed in society, related to knowledge, and productive rather than repressive. This means that government is understood to rely at least partly on the production of “truths” about different activities and institutions in society, and that these truths give people subject positions to inhabit, in ways that ideally are productive for themselves and society.

What the term governmentality refers to can be interpreted as a combination of government and, alternatively, mentality or rationality. Both interpretations are valid, as governmentality should be understood as a certain mentality of government that is guided by specific rationalities rather than explicit ideologies. A governmentality perspective in turn focuses on how certain governmental rationalities are mobilized in order to enable the regulation of people's conducts. It typically aims to understand and describe the art of government deployed in contemporary societies in order to direct human behavior and manage populations at a distance. The reason that emphasis is put on populations relates to a biopolitical understanding of the population as a sort of natural collectivity characterized by specific regularities and trends that government needs to create knowledge about in order to be at all able to govern.

Governmentality analyses have been applied mainly to the political rationality of liberalism, which can be understood as an art of governing rather than a doctrine. Liberalism differs from other governmental rationalities notably because it takes into account the need for people not to feel governed: It is meant to govern free people. Liberalism also introduces a distinction between state and society, explicitly aiming at the better good for the latter rather than the former. For its assessment of the societal better good, liberal governmental rationality mainly relies on political economy, which is considered the appropriate knowledge base for regulating the population as a whole. Liberal political programs are in turn informed by this type of knowledge, the views of experts who participate in its production, and the many indicators it produces, which makes reality intelligible in such a way that political action can be seen to influence it directly.

The liberal problematic of governing free people tends to be central in governmentality studies. In liberal societies, the technologies of domination, relying for instance on disciplinary power, cannot be exclusively relied upon. In order for free people to conduct themselves in ways that are desirable for society as a whole, these conducts also need to be personally desirable. For this purpose, appropriate technologies of the self, offering ways for people to fulfill themselves while being somehow productive for society, need to be provided with the subject positions that are made available. Under advanced liberal government, subjects ideally regulate themselves along the values associated with the positive notion of freedom, which means that they strive to be as enterprising and self-responsible as possible. In a society that relies on this type of ethical government of the self, organizations can also be governed at a distance through technologies involving standards of best practice and processes of bench-marking and accreditation.

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