The story of blue pee: ignorance and a new mode of governing in contemporary Japan

This paper explores a change in a mode of governing in Japan during the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001–2006) through an examination of what I call the story of blue pee. The story circulated among people engaged in implementing child welfare policies at the local level, and implied that mothers today were ignorant in the ways of raising children. Situating the story within the context of the Koizumi administration's reforms, this study suggests that the manner in which people discussed the story of blue pee signaled the deployment of a type of neoliberal governmentality. The notion of ignorance was employed not to educate and normalize ‘ignorant mothers’, but to motivate Japanese to help these mothers raise children. Ultimately, helping mothers was touted as a method of creating community by fostering acts of self-management and self-reliance.     

Workfulness: governing the disobedient brain

ABSTRACT

The Scandinavian telecommunication company Telenor recently introduced the notion of Workfulness by adapting digital detox to the workplace. Workfulness is a management program aimed at technology-intensive companies that rely strongly on digital media. The program encompasses strategies of disconnection for employees, including mobile and email-free work hours and technology-free meetings, in order to enhance focus and efficiency. This article investigates Workfulness as one prominent example of managerial approaches that are based on neuroscientific assumptions about human decision-making. Drawing on textual materials and interviews, the analysis shows that Workfulness manages digital distractions in the workplace by establishing a form of stimulus-control rather than appealing to rational self-control. Workfulness alludes to the necessity of making choices, but it considers unconscious behavior, which is explained with reference to preconscious workings of the brain. The human brain becomes a battleground between rational and impulsive decisions, and it is the disobedient brain that needs to be governed in order to become an efficient employee. We situate the Workfulness program as part of and at the same time extending the biopolitical economy by incorporating advances in neurosciences into modes of governance.     

Constituting neoliberal subjects? ‘Aspiration’ as technology of government in UK policy discourse

Since the 2000s, successive governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have embraced the idea of ‘raising aspiration’ among young people as a solution to persisting educational and socio-economic inequalities. Previous analyses have argued that these policies tend to individualise structural disadvantage and promote a ‘deficit’ view of working-class youth. This paper adopts a novel approach to analysing aspiration discourses combining Michel Foucault’s four dimensions of ‘ethics’ and Mitchell Dean’s notion of ‘formation of identities’. Applying Foucault’s and Dean’s work in this way provides a new lens that enables an examination of how policy encourages particular forms of subjectivation, and, therefore, seeks to govern individuals. The findings presented in the paper complicate previous research by showing that raising aspiration strategies portray disadvantaged youth both in terms of ‘deficit’ and ‘potential’, resulting in a requirement for inner transformation and mobility through attitudinal change. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the identity formation of young people and for conceptualising contemporary forms of governmentality.     

Conceptualising the compulsory education policy apparatus: producing and reproducing risky subjectivities

A governmental research inquiry was conducted into the policy to raise the school leaving age in Western Australia. The study aimed to problematise the policy so as to identify and examine the rationale and intervening practices with young people who were deemed to be at-risk of not meeting the new school leaving age requirements. Drawing on interviews and policy documents, this paper elaborates the concept of ‘apparatus’ as defined by Foucault and Agamben to identify the contexts and consequences of the way the policy produced and reproduced an ‘at-risk’ youth subjectivity. The paper shows how a binary between school completers and non-completers emanated from a context about a crisis in falling retention and early school leaving, myopically focusing on NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) subjectivities as both the cause and solution to the policy objectives. Consequently, the policy apparatus is productive of the very circumstances it seeks to address, and therefore it recursively cycles around a problem it does not solve.     

Macau higher education expansion in flux: a critical spatial perspective

In the former Portuguese colony, Macau, higher education is gaining more importance in the post-1999 era in local talent-building and regional integration to safeguard its socioeconomic sustainability. This paper is based on a recent and ‘innovative’ development in the arena of higher education in the territory, a creation of new space in mainland China for a local public university. By adopting a critical spatial perspective, we examine this idiosyncratic Macau model in three aspects: (1) What kind of power/knowledge production occurs in this new creation of space? (2) How does this new space (re)configure Macau higher education development in both local and global contexts? (3) In what ways does this emergent space re-order the relations between the state, society and school? In employing this spatial stance, we aim to open up understanding of how spatiality affects diverse possibilities in the case of Macau, in global higher education movement more broadly.     

From the moral to the neural: brain scans,decision-making,and the problematization of economic (ir)rationality

Advances in brain imaging techniques have opened new fields of investigation and often challenged conventional assumptions concerning human behaviour. This ‘neuromolecular gaze’ [Rose, N. &; Abi-Rached, J. (2013) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] also heralds new ways of intervening in the regulation of social phenomena, based on the objectification of the cerebral processes that underlie individual conducts. Neuroeconomics applies this brain-centric perspective to the study of economic decision-making. This paper engages with the two dominant approaches in neuroeconomics. The first section concentrates on the work of Paul Glimcher, who considers economic models and their correlative notion of ‘utility maximization’ as providing the neurosciences with a theoretical framework as to how the brain solves decision problems. The second section discusses the findings of behavioural neuroeconomics, which attempts to model departures from the rationality axiom by measuring the cognitive and emotional biases that have their sources in the brain’s complex architecture. Whereas both strands of neuroeconomics rely on a benchmark of economic rationality, this paper argues that they reformulate in allegedly neutral neuroscientific terms a behavioural norm that is basically moral in nature. If rational decision-making conditions economic and indeed evolutionary survival, and yet if most people regularly fail as utility optimizers, then understanding the neural causes of such failures should help people better themselves and behave as good homines ?conomici.