Copenhagen Business School: CBS Open Journals
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Governmentality, Science and the Media. Examining the “Pandemic Reality” with Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard
Get PDFThis article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship between science and a “performative game”, whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a “hyperreality” in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of “truth” as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale
Post-pandemic South Asian Governmentalities and Foucault: State Power and Ordinary Citizens
Get PDFAs the post-COVID world order necessitates a radical overhaul of the ways in which we understand the very notions of “health”, “care” and “security”, one must revisit Michel Foucault and his works in these shifting times to rethink biopolitics as a category viz-a-viz contemporary globalectics. Keeping that in mind, while reviewing two very interesting books by and on Foucault – South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings and Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens – the article attempts to highlight certain core Foucauldian concerns in different domains of human existence that the..
Foucault Meets Novel Coronavirus: Biosociality, Excesses of Governmentality and the “Will to Live” of the Pandemicariat
Get PDFThis essay situates Foucault`s ideas of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ within the Indian context of the Covid emergency, analysing how the excesses of ‘biopolitical’ and the authoritarian forms of ‘governmentality’ evoke a radical re-reading of Foucault within Covid-infested India. We argue how pre-existing ‘discursive’ conditions of biomedical, digital, and neoliberal India facilitated more majoritarian and undemocratic forms of (bio)politics during the Indian experience of the pandemic, exposing the migrant workers in particular to tremendous ‘precarity’ and turning them into pandemicariat. To meet our theoretical ends, we investigate through forging links between Foucauldian theory – consisting of a set of concepts like biopolitics, anatomo-politics, governmentality etc— and ideas like transmuted biosociality, truncated sociality, will to live, pandemicariat etc. Current conditions of truncated sociality render human bodies more ‘discursively’ available for ‘biomedical’ and ‘biopolitical’ interventions, disempowering people’s capacity to sustain the more synthetic biosocial substances of conviviality. However, following Agamben’s early controversial stance for braving the virus, we would like to envisage “life” to be more than “survival” alone. We would also argue that the hard times of the pandemic invoke a new grammar of the “will to live” that was practised by the pandemicariat against heavy odds
Productive Uneasiness as a Driver of Knowledge Creation Processes in Humanities-Business Collaborations
Get PDFOver the last few decades, Danish humanities researchers have become increasingly expected to engage in business collaborations that have an impact beyond academia. Although there is great willingness to work together, humanities-business collaborations are often tense affairs. This calls for a deeper understanding of the collaboration and knowledge creation processes. In this article, we develop the concept of productive uneasiness as a sensitizing tool to show how humanities scholars enable specific knowledge engagements. Examining three empirical examples, we discuss how emerging tension, discomfort, and the like come into play in business-humanities collaborations, and how accepting and engaging in this uneasiness can become productive, eventually leading to innovation. The aim of the article is to provide a tool for reflection for humanities and social science researchers wishing to engage in humanities-business collaborations and, more generally, to spark a discussion on how one of the core elements of the humanities – in-depth analysis of the intangible – can leverage business processes
Cooperative Entrepreneurship: Future Back Thinking, Translation, and Digital Organizational Change in the Credit Union Space
Get PDFIn this essay, I examine cooperative entrepreneurship’s role in driving digital organizational change in a Southern California credit union that caters to a mobile university population. Drawing on Joseph Schumpeter’s interpretative approach to entrepreneurship, I highlight the pivotal role of an innovative CEO in combining a new technology, AI chatbots, with the credit union’s existing technologies to create a new means of production in a contact center: AICCs or Artificial Intelligence Contact Center Agents. I extend Schumpeter’s theory by showing both how future-back thinking can generate ideas for new methods of production, and how acts of translation can help align these methods with local organizational values, overcoming resistance to change. I suggest that such combinatorial activity can help credit unions to sustainably compete against a new breed of financial technology companies known as fintechs
Pasts of the Present: Iconicity and Authentication at Two Reconstructed Heritage Sites in Japan
Get PDFIn light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming the sites, turning them into museums and exhibition spaces and giving rise to thorough reform of the surrounding urban fabric. In this paper I trace the involved agents’ motivations to engage in historical reconstruction from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of important historical locations to boost city attraction values. In this way, I link these two unfolding projects in Nara and Nagasaki to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realities. Approaching the reconstructions as contemporary heritage in traditional guise, the paper argues that both sites revolve materially, spatially and thematically around the master-metaphors of flow, growth and intercultural connectivity that characterise the present age. Elucidating processes of authentication and intersections of ideological and economic interests in and around the two sites, the paper asks in what ways Japanese cities exploit lost iconic localities and reconstructed heritage under post-industrial conditions marked by globalisation and intense cultural-economic competition
Engagerede kærlighedsliv: En kvalitativ analyse af refleksive unges forelskelse, og selvidentitets- og relationsarbejde
No full textI det nuværende samfund præges menneskers kærlighedsliv af tendenser som online dating, singlekultur og en skilsmisserate tæt på 50 %. Dette leder ifølge fremtrædende sociologer som Zygmunt Bauman og Eva Illouz til opløsningstendenser, hvor senmoderne mennesker tilsyneladende søger jegcentreret nydelse og ’frihed’ fra forpligtelser. Men samtidig drømmer de stadig om forelskelse, tosomhed og længerevarende parforhold. I denne artikel undersøger vi – med afsæt i et fem måneders feltarbejde blandt universitetsstuderende i Sydney – en gruppe unge menneskers forestillinger om kærlighed, og hvordan de handler i romantiske relationer. Vi fokuserer analytisk på to hovedtematikker: 1) Forelskelse og spænding, og 2) Udforskende selvidentitetsarbejde og forpligtende relationsarbejde i parforhold. Analysen viser, at unges kærlighedsliv kendetegnes ved en søgen og længsel efter forelskelse samtidig med et undersøgende selvarbejde og et forpligtende engagement i romantiske relationer. Artiklen udfordrer således gængse, sociologiske opløsningsfortællinger, som primært betoner unges egocentriske nydelsesorientering og episodiske involvering i romantiske eller seksuelle relationer
