Showing papers in "Journal of political power in 2013"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors re-examine the politics of engagement of the UK mental health service user and survivor movement by focusing upon the mental health "expert-by-experience".
Abstract: This article re-examines the politics of engagement of the UK mental health service user and survivor movement by focusing upon the mental health ‘expert-by-experience’. Using qualitative data, I illustrate how the service user and survivor movement is able to draw upon an experiential authority that is rooted in practices of self-help and peer-support. I do this by bringing an experimentalist reading of self-help and peer-support practices into dialogue with a model of traditional authority. As such, the personal can be linked up to the political in ways that emphasise the value of self-help and support practices as forms of political participation, while highlighting modes of engagement that are predicated on the capacities, rather than the needs, of the movement.
121 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the agential and structural forms of the EU's power projection in the world with a particular focus on the African, Caribbean and Pacific Countries, and show that the EU operates within a hierarchical, centre-periphery relationship with these countries and projects forms of power such as coercion, mobilization of bias, manipulation, exploitation and attraction.
Abstract: By drawing from theories of imperialism and power, this paper examines the agential and structural forms of the EU’s power projection in the world with a particular focus on the African, Caribbean and Pacific Countries. As evident in the areas of trade, agriculture, energy and security, the EU operates within a hierarchical, centre-periphery relationship with these countries and projects forms of power such as coercion, mobilization of bias, manipulation, exploitation but also attraction, features that are all associated with imperialism. This has broader implications on how we understand the EU as a polity as well as how power is embedded in the concept of imperialism.
38 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that biological knowledges and economism create new groundworks of politics, citizenship and authority, and argued that authority is essentially an objectivist concept for coming to terms with the diversity of power.
Abstract: Authority is a powerful concept for coming to terms with the diversity of power. This article reframes the concept of ‘authority’ and articulates its continued relevance in a context of radical contingency and biopolitics. It argues that authority is essentially objectivist. Biopolitics is conceived as a historical process of constituting biological life and economic forces as objectivity. The paper addresses the question of whether biological-type relations destroy or foster capacities for politics. Arguing against Arendt’s diagnosis of the fate of authority in modernity, the article maintains that biological knowledges and economism create new groundworks of politics, citizenship and authority. This suggests that politics is instigated not simply through breaking given aesthetic orders (dissensus), but also through aesthetic productions of objectivity.
31 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, trust is defined as a resolve to bear an experienced risk by confiding in the new and unknown, and trust is a confidence in the unknown that can be expressed as an exercise of power and an anticipatory affect.
Abstract: Taking an approach that avoids comprehending power and trust as entities to be studied apart, the article insists on elucidating trust and power as they are enacted in their intimate and delicate relationship to each other and to other human and social phenomena of similar importance, such as knowledge and experience, gift-giving, hope, freedom and agency. To permit us to understand power and trust as interdependent dimensions, the article confronts the notions of power as command, coercion, control and calculation and develops a conception of power as a capacity. This permits us to consider trusting as an exercise of power and an anticipatory affect. Trust is a resolve to bear an experienced risk by confiding in the new and unknown.
27 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the relationship between authority-production and experience through a consideration of the emergence of certain figures as authorities on particular matters as a result of extraordinary experiences that they have undergone is discussed.
Abstract: This paper discusses the relationship between authority-production and experience through a consideration of the emergence of certain figures as authorities on particular matters as a result of extraordinary experiences that they have undergone. It argues that analysis of such figures of experiential authority can help us to identify ‘objectivities’: foundational tenets upon which their authority is based and to which it ultimately refers. With reference to Harry Patch, a veteran of the First World War and Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racially motivated attack at a bus stop, I contend that the authority carried by these figures testifies to certain socially produced objectivities which elicit an affective response, an embodied demand that they are listened to.
27 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the micro-politics of citizen engagement in two participatory governance spaces in Brazil and found that different forms of power shape the process of democratic spaces and cultures of politics in practice.
Abstract: Brazilian democratic innovation is gathering considerable international attention, spawning a growing interest in replicating the institutional designs of its participatory governance institutions in countries with very different political histories and cultures of governance. Drawing on ethnographic research in the north and north-east of the country, sites to which innovations developed in the south of Brazil have been institutionalized in very different political and cultural landscapes, this article examines the micro-politics of citizen engagement in two participatory governance spaces. Understanding the contributions that Brazilian experience can make to democratic theory and practice, we suggest, requires a more nuanced examination of how democratic spaces and cultures of politics are mutually constructed in practice, and how different forms of power shape this process.
25 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop a functionalist theory of social domination to compete with current theories of this kind of social power that have arisen with and from the work of Philip Pettit.
Abstract: In this paper, I develop a functionalist theory of social domination to compete with current theories of this kind of social power that have arisen with and from the work of Philip Pettit. In the latter view, the basic structure of domination is seen as the capacity for ‘arbitrary interference’ of one agent in the life choices of another agent. According to this account, domination is performed by agents, acting arbitrarily, within structured social relationships, but is not seen as being caused by those social structures or systems themselves. On my alternative account, modern forms of domination need to be seen as outside of the interests of agents themselves and instead as part of the functions of the social systems and institutions within which agents are socialized, live, work, and to which they become adapted. In this view, domination becomes not a property of agency, but a central property of the social facts that make up the process of socialization itself. Domination is social and systemic, in th...
23 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that resistance is generally both irrational and rational depending on its relation to power, and that there is no such thing as an irrational resistance, whereas one tendency has been to irrationalise the "other" and their resistance in order to construct a subaltern identity position.
Abstract: This article will examine irrationality in relation to the concept of resistance. Is there such a thing as an irrational resistance? While one tendency has been to irrationalise the ‘other’ and their resistance in order to construct a subaltern identity position, within the social sciences, an opposing tendency can also be identified; there is a trend to try to rationalise what seems to be people’s irrational behaviours. In this article, however, we will take a different stance by arguing that resistance is generally both irrational and rational depending on its relation to power.
23 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse the significance of compassion as an emotion in its relationship to various manifestations of power within the organisational context, and provide a conceptualisation of organisational compassion enmeshed with various modes of power exercised in and by organisations.
Abstract: In this paper, we analyse the significance of compassion as an emotion in its relationship to various manifestations of power within the organisational context. We critique those theories of compassion that assume that compassion in organsational contexts is motivated only by a noble intent. The paper draws on a study of organisational responses to the flood that devastated the City of Brisbane Australia on the morning of 11 January 2011. We use a framework of ‘circuits of power’ to provide a triple focus on interpersonal, organisational and societal uses of power together with a model of coercive, instrumental and normative organisational power. We present our findings in a framework constructed by overlapping these frameworks. The unique contribution of this paper is to provide a conceptualisation of organisational compassion enmeshed with various modes of power exercised in and by organisations.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on a recent human rights movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation (TJ&R) and the War against Impunity and pose the question of the emotional regimes that have accompanied its emergence and institutionalization.
Abstract: The text at first focuses on a recent human rights movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation (TJ&R) and the War against Impunity. It briefly presents power structures, values, events and mobilizations that have led to some key forms of its institutionalization, such as the Truth Commissions (TCs), International Crime Tribunals (ICTs) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It then poses the question of the emotional regimes that have accompanied its emergence and institutionalization. It does so in a threefold manner: it asks what feeling rules have been proposed by the Western armchair critics of the West as appropriate for dealing with past/distant human suffering. It then focuses on the activists – the humanitarian and human rights movements active where the suffering takes place – to see what they propose as appropriate feeling rules. Finally, it reproduces some elements of a broader, transnational debate concerning TJ&R to tease out the feeling rules advocated for victims and pe...
20 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship between power and emotion in a junior school context and argued that the conceptualisation of anger as a problem belonging to angry individuals works to separate the expression of anger from wider social contexts and legitimises the spatial exclusion of "angry boys".
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between power and emotion in a junior school context. I consider emotions to be constructed in social interactions within which power relations are produced, sustained and contested. In this paper, I consider the ways that power and emotion are implicated in children’s struggles for social recognition through their interactions with both adults and other children. To do so, I focus on an example of a boy with the ascribed emotional identity of an ‘angry boy’ from an ethnographic study in a junior school. I suggest that the conceptualisation of anger as a problem belonging to angry individuals works to separate the expression of anger from wider social contexts and legitimises the spatial exclusion of ‘angry boys’. The paper shows how ascribed emotional identities are reflective of the ways that institutional power plays out within children’s school lives, and in social interactions between adults, children and their peers. I argue that while children resist these ident...
TL;DR: In this article, a genealogical reading of the cultural experiments of the artistic community of late nineteenth century Montmartre is used to build an analysis of the affective and perceptual structures of immanent authority.
Abstract: This article develops an account of the aesthetic structure of ‘immanent’, non-foundational forms of authority. It argues for the need to develop a positive account of decentralized authority as an important constitutive form of social bond. Through a genealogical reading of the cultural experiments of the artistic community of late nineteenth century Montmartre, it builds an analysis of the affective and perceptual structures of immanent authority. Authority, it argues, operates across three axes of experience: amplitude, gravity and distance. Although the artistic experiments and cultural politics of fin-de-siecle Montmartre were politically naive, they offer an illuminating lens through which to view the emerging experiential structures of authority in the twentieth century.
Abstract: This paper seeks to critically reimagine the relationship between power and resistance. The aim is to better understand how resistance aids in the construction, exercise and often reproduction of power. These efforts open the space for a new perspective of power linked to the production of the resistance subject. Specifically, it is argued that hegemonic power relations create in their wake dominant forms of resistance, which ironically provide individuals with a stable social identity. Power operates, in turn, by creating a ‘safe’ resistance that preserves the ontological security individuals’ gain as resistance subjects within these dominant power relations. Yet, while all resistances are to an extent ‘safe’, this does not mean they are necessarily ‘safe’ to an existing hegemony.
TL;DR: In this article, the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is used to argue that the governmentality approach, while drawing out the forms of power that fill the sphere of community-oriented politics, does not recognise the important role played by the loss of community.
Abstract: This article addresses how the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy might inform our understanding of ‘social authority’; an authority generated in everyday practices. It argues that the ‘governmentality’ approach, while drawing out the forms of power that fill the sphere of community-oriented politics, does not recognise the important role played by the loss of community. The article thus sets out how Nancy’s work, in re-framing this ‘loss’ as the constantly occurring fragmentation of the community, allows for a productive and augmentative approach to authority, highlighting its contingent production in moments of creativity and contestation. A final section sets out how, in light of these considerations, such a ‘social authority’ may be seen as essential to a democratic politics.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the emotional aspects of memorial ceremonies at schools and highlighted the power relations that are marshaled to mobilize certain emotions for particular versions of national memory in Greek-Cypriot schools.
Abstract: This paper explores the emotional aspects of memorial ceremonies at schools and underscores the power relations that are marshaled to mobilize certain emotions for particular versions of national memory. To show the entanglement of emotion and power, the paper is divided into two segments. The first is analytic-conceptual and theorizes school memorial ceremonies as vehicles of emotion and power in the formation of national memory; to this end, the author draws on the work of Foucault, Collins and Billig. The second part of the paper is empirical and draws on the author’s ethnographic research on emotion and national memory in Greek-Cypriot schools. The analysis shows not only how some emotions become ‘sedimented’ through ritual practices in schools and relations of power but also how emotions become contingent and challenge hegemonic versions of national memory.
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and other race-related scandals in the UK is presented.
Abstract: Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and of other ‘race-related’ scandals in the UK. In proposing media scandals’ wider sociological significance regarding the dynamic, multi-accented relationships between emotions and power, it analyses how England’s prevailing climate of ‘postcolonial guilt’ was reinforced and conveyed through social media networks.
TL;DR: The authors argue that reason and emotion are inseparable and cognitive judgement is intrinsically receptive to affective techniques of persuasion, and that a rhetorically inclined democracy acknowledges the political role of emotions in securing public attention and allegiance, and negotiating power relations strategically.
Abstract: Emotions are an inescapable yet persistently troubling presence in democratic life. Typically, this emerges in relation to controversies over rhetoric, especially anxieties over the potential of speech to mobilise irrational and antidemocratic sentiments. Such is the view of ‘deliberative democrats’ who denounce rhetoric as emotional manipulation, subverting the neutral space of rational dialogue. However, research inspired by neuroscience and psychoanalysis suggests reason and emotion are inseparable and cognitive judgement is intrinsically receptive to affective techniques of persuasion. A rhetorically inclined democracy, I argue, acknowledges the political role of emotions in securing public attention and allegiance, and negotiating power relations strategically.
TL;DR: In this article, a special issue marks an attempt to reunite two core concepts (power and emotion) in an illuminating, diverse and fruitful way, in an effort to connect power and emotion.
Abstract: This special issue marks an attempt to reunite two core concepts – power and emotion – in an illuminating, diverse and fruitful way. Power has been described as ‘the central concept of the social s...
TL;DR: The first collaborative publication by the Authority Research Network (ARN) is the first special edition as discussed by the authors, which aims to contribute to the reinvigoration of thinking on authority or new authority studies.
Abstract: This special edition is the first collaborative publication by the Authority Research Network (ARN) and aims to contribute to the reinvigoration of thinking on authority – or new authority studies ...
TL;DR: The authors investigates the discursive trope of "People of the Real World" (PRW) as it was launched by the leader of the Swedish Christian Democrats, Goran Hagglund, during a political campaign week on the Island of Gotland in 2009.
Abstract: The article investigates the discursive trope of ‘People of the Real World’ (PRW) as it was launched by the leader of the Swedish Christian Democrats, Goran Hagglund, during a political campaign week on the Island of Gotland in 2009. Sociological and cultural theories of local vs. cosmopolitan identity, of emotions, and of space, are used to analyse the speech and a selection of newspaper articles from 2009. The PRW discourse defends local, sedentary communities against globalization and cosmopolitanization. It draws on the collective emotional resources of ‘normals’ as they feel threatened by the social and political advancement of previously marginalized groups, undermining the former group’s power to define social space. It thus contributes to the social and political cultivation of resentment among those who identify with conservative, anti-cosmopolitan values.
TL;DR: In this paper, the social basis of the Chinese concept of xin (heart-mind) is considered, and a discussion of a characteristic Chinese conception of power is also presented.
Abstract: A historical consequence of power relations in European culture has been a dichotomy of reason and emotion. This pattern did not arise in China, one of the oldest and most enduring structures of power in human history. The social basis of the Chinese concept of xin (heart-mind) is considered in this paper, and a discussion of a characteristic Chinese conception of power is also presented.
TL;DR: It is not the significance of the author, but the author's work that has been "thoroughly consigned to oblivion" as declarations of an author's productivity, popularity, and visibility increasingly crowd out the authors' declarations.
Abstract: Lately one seems to encounter a number of authors about whom much is said without ever encountering what has been said by the authors themselves. It is not the significance of the author but the significance of the author’s work that has been “thoroughly consigned to oblivion” as declarations of an author’s productivity, popularity, and visibility increasingly crowd out the author’s declarations. It is not uncommon to learn an author’s name, rank, and awards before one learns what it is that they are writing for. One can quickly discover the “400 most-cited political scientists”3 or the “102 most-cited works in sociology.”4 Publishers rank their most-viewed and most-cited authors on a monthly basis5 and the most-productive authors are celebrated in “Super Author” campaigns.6
TL;DR: In this article, the distinction between the political (le politique) and politics (la politique), following Claude Lefort, is used to frame an evaluation of the retreating of the concept of authority.
Abstract: In this short response piece, I use the distinction, following Claude Lefort, between the political (le politique) and politics (la politique) to frame an evaluation of the retreating of the concept of authority as presented in this special edition. The piece takes up Jean-Luc Nancy’s presentation of a different regime of thought for politics that takes the actuality of singular experience as that which keeps open the constitution of any political act, event or space in its infinite potential. Arguing that the concept of the event plays to the heart of our questioning of politics, I spotlight the disruptive and unpredictable space at the cusp of the (as yet) inconceivable threshold of conscious awareness which points towards the space of politics attuned to the molecular beat of habit, affect and plasticity.
TL;DR: Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman and Sanford Schram as mentioned in this paper, 2012, 320pp, ISBN 9-781-107-000-254, £55.00 (hardback),
Abstract: Real social science: applied phronesis, edited by Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman and Sanford Schram, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 320 pp., ISBN 9-781-107-000-254, £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9-780-5...
TL;DR: A complex normative political theory for liberalism; an ethnography of a life; reflections on the ontological nature of human being as consciousness, body, and being in the world; a defence of the ideology of science as a norm of reason; a critique of identity politics, an opposition to all fundamentalisms; an account of the importance of manners for the civilizing process, and a reflexive account of being Jewish as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A complex normative political theory for liberalism; an ethnography of a life; reflections on the ontological nature of human being as consciousness, body, and being in the world; a defence of the ideology of science as a norm of reason; a critique of identity politics, an opposition to all fundamentalisms; an account of the importance of manners for the civilizing process, and a reflexive account of being Jewish – these are the concerns of this book. Clearly, it ranges far and wide, something that hardly makes it an easy book to review.
TL;DR: Nathan Jun, New York, NY, Continuum, 2012, 250 pp., ISBN 978-1441140159 (hardback), ISBN 978 978-1-4411-6640-1 (paperback) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: by Nathan Jun, New York, NY, Continuum, 2012, 250 pp., ISBN 978-1441140159 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4411-6640-1 (paperback) Within anarchist scholarship – and there has been a lot of this appearing i...
TL;DR: In this article, the relationship between domination and resistance is discussed in everyday discourse, and it is assumed that relations of power constitute relations of domination and that resistance is a form of resistance.
Abstract: The central theme of this issue of the Journal is the relationship between domination and resistance. In everyday discourse, we assume that relations of power constitute relations of domination and...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the key problem facing the Immanent Authority project is that of the techniques or modes by which the "nothing" of community may be realized in the absence of transcendent figures of authority.
Abstract: The attempt to think community today is necessarily marked by the legacy of communal belonging understood as a sharing of identity and the mobilization of totalizing figures, a legacy which, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, is irrevocably tainted by the experience of German National Socialist community. Nancy’s analysis of the ‘nothing’ or absent essence of community understood ontologically as ‘being-with’ poses the challenge of how we may come to think and produce community outside of any totalizing logic of shared identity and in the absence of transcendent figures of authority. Elaborating further on Nancy’s thinking of eco-technicity, this response argues that the key problem facing the Immanent Authority project is that of the techniques or modes by which the ‘nothing’ of community may be realized.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the consequences of the conventional nature of authority relations especially with regard to the field of politics, and a field of law and justice, and argue that authority is conventional through and through, this fact does not necessarily have the dramatic, relativist consequences sometimes ascribed to it.
Abstract: These remarks explore a few of the consequences of the conventional nature of authority relations especially with regard to the field of politics, and the field of law and justice. The argument is that although authority is conventional through and through, this fact does not necessarily have the dramatic, relativist consequences sometimes ascribed to it. More of a problem is that of finding stable and agreed rules of recognition for particular forms and formulae of authority in modern, complex political societies.