Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

governmentality: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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governmentality1 CONSTRUCTGovernmentalityFOUCAULT · GOVERN CONDUCT

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Political sociology

The rationalities and techniques through which authorities govern the conduct of populations

Michel Foucault introduced the term in a lecture of 1 February 1978, delivered in his course Security, Territory, Population at the Collège de France and later published in English as the chapter Governmentality (1991), to name the organised ways of thinking and acting through which authorities seek to shape and guide the conduct of a population. The word joins governing to a mode of thought, or rationality, so a governmentality is at once a mental frame that defines what is to be governed and why, and a set of practical techniques, including statistics, administrative procedures, laws, and expert knowledge, that act on people indirectly rather than by direct command. Foucault used it to describe a historical shift, from a sovereign power centred on territory and the ruler's right to command, toward a form of power whose object is the population and its health, wealth, birth rate, and security, managed through political economy and the apparatuses of the state. In the English-speaking social sciences the concept was consolidated as a book-length framework by Mitchell Dean (1999) and reviewed across law, sociology, and political science by Nikolas Rose, Pat O'Malley, and Mariana Valverde (2006), who trace how it has been applied to liberal and welfare states. What makes governmentality distinctive as a construct is its analytic scope: rather than locating power in a single institution or actor, it treats government as the calculated shaping of conduct that spans the state, the professions, and the self, and it supplies a vocabulary of rationalities, technologies, and the conduct of conduct for studying how populations are governed.[1][2][3]

Unit
An analytic of power: the rationalities and techniques by which a government takes the population as its object and conduct as its target
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Traced through historical and discourse analysis of the programmes, texts, statistics, and administrative techniques by which authorities frame and act on conduct

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Nearby constructs

power6 fields · 13 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsdiscipline4 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsgovernance4 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, four constructs

References

  1. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87–104). University of Chicago Press. (Original lecture 1978)
  2. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. Sage Publications.
  3. Rose, N., O'Malley, P., & Valverde, M. (2006). Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2, 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.2.081805.105900

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