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Since the 1990s, European welfare states have undergone substantial changes regarding their objectives, areas of intervention and instruments of use. There has been an increasing move towards the prioritisation of the involvement of citizens and the participation of civil society. This book focuses on the altered (powerful) conditions for encounters between citizens and welfare workers. It uses the concept of soft power, which, inter alia, allows for the investigations of the ways in which individuals manipulate each other in an effort to achieve their desired goals. The first part of the book discusses extracts from state-of-the-art research on professions and expertise, and the perception of power that guides the analyses. It also discusses the overall theoretical positioning when analysing encounters between welfare workers and citizens as co-productive and interactionist. The second part presents analyses to show how a bureaucratic context affects the encounter between administrators and clients, and how a market context affects the encounter between service providers and consumers/customers. The analysis of how a psychology-inspired context affects the encounter between coaches and coaches is also provided. All three contexts are to be perceived as Weberian ideal types, in other words, theoretical constructs based on observations of the real world. The concluding part of the book emphasises on the role of the principles of the bureaucracy, the norms from psychology, and the values of the market in the welfare encounter. Key points of the book are summarised in the conclusion.
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
the IR literature, but few serious rivals. The contributions to this volume confirm the importance of continuing to engage with the concept of polarity in theory, and the use and abuse of the concept in practice, as part of any attempt to make sense of the changes under way in the global order. Collectively, the chapters paint a complex picture of an inter-state order in flux in which perceptions of power and status diverge across different national contexts. Therefore contestability must be something that the polarity analysis literature can both account for and
the present introduction – extracts from state-of-the-art research on professions and expertise (Chapter 2), the perception of power that guides the analyses (Chapter 3) and the overall theoretical positioning when analysing encounters between welfare workers and citizens as co-productive and interactionist (Chapter 4). Part II presents a number of analyses that can be organised in accordance with three sets of principles and norms which impact the encounters between welfare workers and citizens today: firstly, analyses that show how a bureaucratic context affects
–agency debate (e.g., Hayward and Lukes 2008) will emphasise both the structural conditions (such as legislation, economy and norm-systems; the resources of the field) and agency (the ways in which citizens and welfare workers create, interpret, manipulate and react to these structural conditions). In recognising the critique of ‘totalising theories of power’ (Haugaard 1997), such as Foucauldian theory-laden analyses (which are often criticised for being empirically insensitive), and in having certain reservations about applying too rigid a perception of power, as presented in
contemporary UK security policy, owing to the post-2010 design of the National Security Risk Assessment from which all other policy plans purportedly follow. Blagden, ‘The flawed promise’. 47 Benjamin Zala, ‘Polarity analysis and collective perceptions of power: the need for a new approach’, Journal of Global Security Studies , 2:1 (2017), 2–17. 48
interpersonal and micro-power relationships. In contesting vigorously what was meant to be the “best way” of obtaining compensation, both the coal miners and fieldwork assistants expressed highly different subjectivities which featured interactions between the rule-guided and causally induced practices, conditioned by both parties’ intentionalities and different perceptions of power relations. While the peasants’ actions were guided by their understanding of the tacit norms and particular tactics of practicing compensation in specific contexts, my fieldwork assistants simply
interests, which entails massive 3-D and 4-D social control to block all potential dissent. Power as variable-sum: zero-sum and positive-sum power As argued by Baldwin ( 2015 ), the negatively evaluative perception of power (power as domination) was not inherent in Dahl’s conceptualization of power. Rather, it was a later attribution. If we emphasize only the negative aspects of power, only domination, understanding why actors often consent to power-over becomes difficult. The perception that power-over is necessarily dominating comes from the assumption that power
Mongols. Meanwhile, the contemporary Russian narrative celebrates the establishment of Moscow and the unique identity of the people of the nation. The destruction brought about by the Mongol Horde in Russia had a drastic impact on the development of their cultural perceptions of power. Due to the deportation of the merchants, Moscow began to bloom economically. Later on, because of the Mongol threat to neighbouring cities, Moscow was isolated from Byzantium and Europe, encouraging the people of Moscow to conjure up
–318. 13 Benjamin Zala, ‘Polarity analysis and collective perceptions of power: The need for a new approach’, Journal of Global Security Studies , 2:1 (2017), 2–17. In our understanding of ‘ordering’ in this book, however, we are interested not only in current debates about who is ‘at the top’, but also the sometimes less-considered issues concerning the quality and complexity of the assets and resources – broadly defined – that underpin a pole's capacities