Copenhagen Business School: CBS Open Journals
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“Spiritual Gymnastics”: Reflections on Michel Foucault’s On the Government of the Living 1980 Collège de France lectures
Get PDFThis review locates the 1980 lectures within the context of the wider discussions of Foucault and religion; highlighting the influence of George Dumézil on the comparative and structural analysis. Assessing the problem of the historical accuracy of Christian history in Foucault’s work and the nature of the archaeological approach, the review explores what would be fair to ask of Foucault’s 1980 lectures on Christianity. The review focuses on the internal consistency, selections and theoretical tensions. While acknowledging that Foucault picks up the important shift towards external ritual performance of early Christian life, the review questions Foucault’s lack of appreciation of the notion of “sacramentum,” which informs the central interpretative framework of “truth acts.” The review suggests that Foucault’s thinking is shaped by an “expressionist theology” and operates on a false binary distinction between faith and practice. It shows the problematic reading of Tertullian and the indivisibility between acts and faith in his work and reveals the counter-conduct and freedom practices in Tertullian’s later Montanist commitment—which rejected church authority for inner commitment to God—and also suggests a gendered dimension to expressionist acts. The review reveals Foucault’s own inability to split the faith-practice dichotomy—on which his expressionistic argument depends—and highlights the tensions that persist in maintaining a “truth-act” model from early Christian life. It concludes by suggesting that the philosophy-theology relation in Foucault opens more questions than it resolves
Fine Chocolate, Resistance, and Political Morality in the Marketplace
Get PDFThis article takes the case of fine chocolate to explore resistance in the consumer practice of buying branded products labeled fair trade. Ethnographic research conducted in the US, Europe and Japan at two different points in time indicates that moral satisfaction now joins sensual enjoyment in consumer appreciation of fine chocolate. The article examines social processes shaping fine chocolate into a morally compelling one based on use of fair labor in producing cocoa beans. Looking at the cocoa commodity chain reveals how the marketplace is a locus for challenging status quo. Fine chocolate was transformed from deterritorialized product perceived to come from chocolatiers in West European countries like Belgium and France to reterritorialized product connected to cocoa bean growers in tropical regions of the world. I argue that resistance is not equated with free will located within the individual as an autonomous actor but constitutes a form of agency distributed in an assemblage. Consumers are enmeshed in assemblages that have force or momentum. Examining movements in the fine chocolate assemblage (including chocolate lovers and their senses, chocolate products, producers along the commodity chain, and institutional discourse from media, government and industry) identifies a trajectory of change and correspondence between ethical concern and sensual enjoyment
Grupper af fremmede - at sidde alene på café i København
Get PDFDenne artikel har til formål at diskutere den sociologiske figur ”den fremmede i storbyen” igennem en teoretisk bearbejdelse af Georg Simmels Storbyerne og det åndelige liv og af hans Ekskurs om den fremmede samt af Gernot Böhmes atmosfærebegreb. Konklusionerne underbygges af en kvalitativ analyse af storbyboere, der sidder alene på to udvalgte caféer i København. Artiklen argumenterer indledningsvis for, at ”den fremmede” indtager en afgørende rolle i markante storbysociologiske positioners måde at fortolke storbyens sociale liv på – og at forståelsen af dette liv tager udgangspunkt i den fremmedes ambivalente karakter og derved implicerer, at denne er en potentiel kilde til uorden. Dette syn sætter jeg spørgsmålstegn ved og argumenterer for, at oplevelsen af den fremmede ikke kun kan kendetegnes ved ambivalens og uorden, men også ved en mere umiddelbar oplevelse af vedkommende – trygheden i at fornemme og sanse den andens nærvær i en bestemt rumlig atmosfære. Endeligt argumenterer jeg for, at Simmels egen teori danner fundamentet for en sådan sanselig opløsning af ambivalens hos den fremmede i storbyen.
ENGELSK ABSTRACT:
Andreas Volquartz Overgaard: Groups of Strangers: Sitting Alone in a Café in Copenhagen
This article discusses the sociological concept of ”the stranger in the metropolis” by way of a theoretical discussion of Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental life and The stranger. Gernot Böhme’s concept of atmosphere is employed to broaden Simmel’s conceptual framework. The empirical basis is a qualitative analysis of city dwellers who sit alone in two cafés in Copenhagen. In the introduction, the article argues that ”the stranger” plays a crucial role in the way important urban sociological theoretical positions understand the social life of the metropolis – and that these positions base their arguments on the ambivalent character of ”the stranger”, thereby implying him to be a potential source for disorder. I question these perspectives and argue that the experience of the stranger can not only be described through ambivalence and disorder, but also through an immediate experience of the stranger – the safety in feeling and sensing the presence of the other in a specific spatial atmosphere. Finally, I argue that Simmel’s own theory creates the basis for such a sensory dissolving of the stranger’s ambivalence in the metropolis.
Keywords: Simmel, the stranger, the metropolis, atmosphere, the café
Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, translated by Matthew Barr (London, Tate, 2009; 2011)
Get PDFHydropower and End-Use Electrical Efficiency in China: State Support and Potential Contribution to Low-Carbon Development
Get PDFThis article examines Chinese state support for two 'new energies'—large hydropower and end-use efficiency—that aims to help meet ambitious national targets for renewable energy and emissions reduction. Large hydropower, while not particularly new, figures prominently in China's renewable energy targets and is considered key to achieving renewable output and carbon reduction goals. National policies promote widespread development of Gigawatt-scale hydropower cascades on China's major rivers, even though the negative impacts are significant and the operating capacities of large dams are often low. On transboundary rivers, China's dam development raises concerns downstream.
Increasing the end-use efficiency of electricity represents a more subtle approach that holds great promise for managing demand and potentially curbing new supply. China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has overseen experimentation with utility-scale 'efficiency power plants' that free up inefficiently-used electricity, resulting in greater power availability on the grid. A study by NDRC's Energy Research Institute (ERI) estimated that a high penetration rate of LED lighting by 2020, once China completes its phase-out of incandescent bulbs, would alone save as much electricity annually as the Three Gorges Dam produces. This article demonstrates the potential for an efficiency-led approach to meeting China's electricity needs
Anmeldelse af Thomas Olesen og Lasse Lindekilde: "Politisk protest, aktivisme og sociale bevægelser"
No full textGoldwater, Bush, Ryan and the Failed Attempts by Conservative Republicans to Reform Federal Entitlement Programs
Get PDFSocial Security and Medicare are federal entitlement programs that represent the current of modern liberalism in the United States. The countercurrent of conservatism has been represented by some Republican politicians who have tried to reform these programs. 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater suggested making Social Security voluntary. In 2005 President George W. Bush made partial privatization of Social Security a key component of his second-term domestic agenda. From 2010 to 2012 Congressman Paul Ryan advocated a reform of Medicare in which the federal government would give seniors vouchers to buy private insurance. Each of these proposals backfired. When conservative Republicans propose detailed alterations to the pillars of some of the Democratic Party’s main legislative accomplishments in the 20th century, they disaffect moderates and independent voters, and they fuel the liberal base of the Democratic Party. The proposals are a liability for Republicans in national elections because Americans fear that entitlement reform will jeopardize the benefits they receive
David Webb, Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013)
Get PDFCivil Society Organizations and Care of the Self: An Ethnographic Case Study on Emancipation and Participation in Drug Treatment
Get PDFFoucauldian analyses of civil society depart from classical approaches in that they don´t consider civil society to be a site of societal change or resistance as classical analyses do, but rather one of society’s multiple locations where so-called governmentality hits the ground. Although Foucauldian investigations have provided the prevailing discussion with a necessary departure from excessively idealistic images of civil society organizations as sites of resistance and societal transformation, what may have resulted in turn are overly pessimistic analyses that have overlooked the emancipatory aspects of civil society organizations as sites where Foucauldian “care of the self” becomes possible. This article provides the reader with an analysis of these kind of aspects in civil society organizations’ work and, more importantly, of the conditions of their existence. The study contributes to the prevailing discussion by offering examples of the possibilities that civil society organizations have to act as a counterbalance and addition to states institutions. The context is Finnish drug treatment policies that took a client-centered and user-friendly approach at the turn of 21st century. Since then new kinds of methods to work with drug users have been initiated, which have helped the users to recast their identities and find new ways of living as a drug user