Abstract Jane Addams took an ambiguous view of work in the industrializing society of her day. She saw mechanized factory work as stifling human potential and atomizing workers, who were isolated on assembly lines. Nevertheless, she also believed that work could engender individual and collective growth. To explore Addams’s view on work, labor unions, and progress, one must consider the social and intellectual context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Addams’s rejection of violent labor struggle and her hope for “industrial peace” must be understood as stemming from her Christian mindset, which emphasized human kindness as driving social harmony, and from evolutionist thinking, which situated institutions, such as labor unions, in a progressive history. Addams was concerned that industrial production risked depriving workers of a sense of community in the workplace and of the act of working as learning experience.

Michel Foucault's concept of the dispositif is increasingly salient in sociological scholarship. We identify and criticise an 'anonymous' emphasis in this scholarship, which often presents the dispositif as an anonymous network that acts without human agents. To remedy this tendency we develop an agent-inclusive version of the dispositif for sociological research. Turning to Foucault's work from the 1970s, we recover descriptions of how social groups act as instigators of dispositifs through their invention of tactics and techniques. We develop these into an agent-inclusive version of dispositional analytics and suggest five steps to pursue in empirical analysis. We exemplify these steps through a historical case of protesting. Finally, we show how our revisionist version of the dispositif meets critiques of Foucault's agentless approach and discuss the implication for a further integration of sociological research with dispositional analytics.

Michel Foucault’s essay ‘The Subject and Power’ has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault’s shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault’s research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser’s thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser’s thesis and Foucault’s diagnosis of the welfare state as a ‘matrix’ of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault’s essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen ‘internally subjugated’ by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a ‘flat’ subject of governance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault’s newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state’s role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault’s analytical ‘matrix’ to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling.

Abstract Chapter 1 clarifies Foucault’s use of concepts, and especially his conceptual inventions around the theme of technology, which demands some work of reconstruction. The chapter begins by examining the role of concepts in Foucault’s work, explicating that Foucault uses concepts to open up an empirical field for description. The chapter then traces Foucault’s gradual shift during the 1970s from his rather unspecific use of the term ‘technology’ to the refinement of ‘the dispositif’, which increasingly comes to substitute for ‘technology’. Towards the end of the 1970s, Foucault clarifies that technology is not a ‘thing’ but rather a nexus of interlinked elements. These elements include institutional practices, techniques, and forms of knowledge that together create a particular strategic disposition in the social body, for example towards normalization. Finally, the chapter highlights that dispositifs develop in dynamic interplay through which techniques first belonging to one dispositif can be reutilized and transformed when appropriated by another dispositif.

This article compares Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology, taking its clue from Agamben's claim that Gestell and dispositif are 'perfectly corresponding' concepts. So far, however, the task of a detailed comparison of Gestell and dispositif remains unresolved. At first glance, the two terms appear compatible, designating how we moderns began objectifying nature as well as ourselves as manipulatable raw material. Significant for the discussion is Heidegger's and Foucault's contrasting readings of Nietzsche - the 'last metaphysician' versus 'the first genealogist' which present modern technology as humanity's nearly inescapable condition, or as 'functionally indeterminant', evolving in multiple, intersecting, and unexpected ways.

Abstract Chapter 5 explores two questions central to the overall task of this book: what are the critical implications of Foucault’s technological approach, and how does one carry out this inquiry in concrete terms? Tackling the underexplored problem of properly explicating the methods of analysis, I reconstruct a set of methodological principles from Foucault’s works. Foucault offers few general definitions of how to study a dispositif, and instead describes the historical emergence of dispositifs like discipline, sexuality, or security. Given this avoidance of generalizable methods, I define Foucault’s approach as a strategy of genealogical ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’, which also contrasts with forms of critique that universalize, generalize, and denounce. At the centre of Foucault’s analytical critique are not actions, policies, or ideologies, but evaluative frameworks. Here, Foucault echoes Nietzsche, insofar as his strategy is to open up the frameworks of evaluation themselves, provoking the reader to reflect on their adequacy and consider possible alternatives.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has spurred extensive governmental reactions worldwide, such as the closure of borders, the lockdown of entire countries, unprecedented economic stimulus packages, and the invention of digital tracking devices that enable authorities to monitor infection rates and the movements of infected individuals. An important question is to what extent the more detailed surveillance of citizens established by health authorities and governments in many countries will outlive the COVID-19 crisis. What does the pandemic tell us about the ease by which governments have revived the timeworn instruments of state sovereignty, such as territorial closure, restrictions of access to public spaces, and the privileging of national populations as the ultimate object of government? Do we witness a certain convergence between countries considered liberal-democratic and authoritarian regimes in terms of the parallel enhancements of citizen surveillance, rule by appeals to fear, and restrictions of our freedom in terms of governments' use of personal data? In their chapter, 'Obedience in Times of COVID-19 Pandemics: A Renewed Governmentality of Unease?', Didier Bigo, Elspeth Guild and Elif Mendos Ku?konmaz (2021) offer a series of timely reflections on the above questions. The chapter has the format of an essay in which the authors offer their thoughts on three themes related to the COVID-19 pandemic: the exercise of state power; the relation between medical expertise and governance; and the significance of digital surveillance technology. The analyses are tentative and, given the ongoing and open-ended unfolding of the pandemic, more contextualised research will be required to substantiate the chapter's, at times, sweeping claims and conclusions.

During the last decade, ESG has become a globally widespread doctrine of good investment principles. ESG defines investing for broader, extra-financial goals by the use of "environmental, social and governance" (ESG) factors. While commentators generally agree that ESG has become a crucial arena for defining responsible investment, research is so far scarce on the conceptual development of the ESG discourse as well as how companies articulate it in their public communication. By analysing ESG concepts, this article combines methods derived from corpus linguistics with dispositional analytics, inspired by Michel Foucault. The data material consists of 281 annual reports, which contain the self-representation of 24 Danish large-cap companies, including how they communicated their ESG policies from 2010 to 2021. The analysis displays the proliferation of specific ESG keywords as well as changes over time in their frequency, proportional to each other. We supplement the quantitative analyses with dispositional analytics, considering how the dispositives of law, discipline, and security condition Danish companies' adoption of ESG. We also discuss how companies use ESG concepts 'tactically' to navigate a context, in which the dispositives 'over-determine' urgent environmental, social, and governance issues.

Pandemic modelling functions as a means of producing evidence of potential events and as an instrument of intervention that Tim Rhodes and colleagues describe as entangling science into social practices, calculations into materializations, abstracts into effects and models into society. This article seeks to show how a model society evinced through mathematical models produces a model not only for society but also for citizens, showing them how to act in a certain model manner that prevents an anticipated pandemic future. To this end, we analyse political speeches by various Norwegian ministers to elucidate how various model-based COVID-19 responses enact a 'model citizen'. Theoretically, we combine Rhodes et al.'s arguments with Foucault's concepts of law, discipline and security, thus showing what a model society might imply for the model citizen. Finally, we conclude that although the model society is largely informed by epidemiological models and liberal biopolitics that typically place responsibility on individual subjects, sovereign state power remains manifestly present in the speeches' rhetoric.

A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault’s ‘agentless position’ for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault’s writings, which allows space for ‘human agency’, including individuals’ pursuit of tactics, attempts at solving problems, reactions to unexpected events and their reflexive work on their own subjectivities. The revised analytical framework, ‘dispositional analytics’, integrates the study of self-techniques with the analysis of dispositifs. Recognizing that Foucault’s work eschewed an adequate consideration of individuals’ capacity to affect the forces that bear upon them, the article discusses the sociopolitical conditions for self-formation. Finally, a case study of ‘voice-hearers’ who use self-techniques to reconstitute themselves in opposition to institutional psychiatry is reinterpreted through the framework of dispositional analysis.

At first glance, Michel Foucault might appear as an unexpected companion for a Special Issue on the themes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate sustainability [...]

Although Jane Addams has long been recognized as a pioneer in North American pragmatism, efforts to develop her thought into a distinct research program have been limited. This article develops Addams's work as a method of sociological inquiry by focusing on her notions of "perplexity," "moral adjustment," and "sympathetic understanding." Emphasizing the essential role of language in moral conflicts and reconstruction, the article incorporates Charles Wright Mills's concept of "vocabularies of motives." Together, these notions offer a framework for exploring the moral dilemmas that care workers experience when responding to the imposition of standardization of their working practices. A case study demonstrates how care workers, while coping creatively with the effects of a service reform, develop motive vocabularies in defense of their professional ethics. Such situated creativity on "the shop floor" of social services remains relatively under-explored and under-theorized.

There is widespread agreement that despite the general scarcity of women among classical sociologists, Jane Addams was the first and probably most influential of early American sociologists. Apart from being a leading figure in the settlement movement, she carried out early sociological research in the Chicago slums and had close ties to contemporary pragmatist thinkers like William James, John Dewey, and George Hebert Mead. This chapter reconsiders the general designation of Addams as an “early sociologist.” It discusses which criteria are adequate to define someone as a sociologist and considers Addams’s activities and writings in light of such criteria. Significant in this assessment is Addams’s inspiration from the Christian tradition, evident in her invocation of Christian ethics as a regenerative force and her echoing of principles from social gospel theology. The chapter concludes that Addams’s work, both as a turn-of-the-century social critic and intellectual, was shaped as much by Christian values as by activities that would merit the term “sociologist.” Paying attention to how Addams articulated notions like “Christian renaissance,” “social salvation,” and “brotherly love” complicates assessments of her as a pioneer in pragmatist, empirical sociology. Addams’s blend of Christian ideas and early social science discourse is not unique but resonates with streams of reformist, sociological writing around the turn-of-the-20th-century North America and Europe. This chapter concludes that rather than constituting a stumbling block for the development of modern sociology, Christian inspirations can be an impetus for critical sociological practice in times of fragmentation and instrumentalization of sociological research.

This article explores recent HIV prevention campaigns for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), focusing on how they integrate pleasure and desire in their calls for self-discipline through a continual use of pharmaceuticals. This emerging type of health promotion, here represented by ads promoting the preventive use of pharmaceuticals, no longer simply approaches target groups with demands to abstain from harmful substances or practices and thus control risks, but also includes messages that recognize individuals’ habits, values, and their desires for pleasure. Drawing on Foucault’s work concerning discipline and security, we suggest that a novel, permissive discipline is emerging in contemporary HIV prevention. Further guided by Barthes’s theory of images, we analyse posters used in prevention campaigns, scrutinizing their culture-specific imagery and linguistic messages, i.e. how the words and images interact. We conclude that these campaigns introduce a new temporality of prevention, one centred on pleasure through the pre-emption and planning that PrEP enables.

Foucault’s notion ‘the dispositive’ has been introduced in organization studies as a highly promising concept. However, its analytical and empirical potentials remain to be fully explored. This article develops dispositional analytics which conceives of organizations as pervaded by multiple dispositives that interact, reinforce or contradict one another. In this reconstruction, particular emphasis is given to the visibility produced by dispositives, through which subjects and object emerge in a particular prescriptive light. Furthermore, analytical privilege is given to relations over substance. This means foregrounding the interrelations between dispositives as well as the dispositive’s ‘internal relationality’, that is, the relations established by each dispositive out of which organizational problems arise and transform. The framework’s potentials are explored in a study of care workers’ responses to a management reform that disciplined and depersonalized care-giving. The difficulties that care workers faced in straddling legal demands, service standardization and care ethics are understood as a situation of heterogeneous dispositions. In this context, care workers and their managers tactically reconstructed their subjectivities, relating to the dispositives in diverse and unexpected ways.

People who arrive at the borders of the United States and European countries without a visa or the right to entrance are variously termed "illegal immigrants," "irregular immigrants," or even "unwanted immigrants." Those immigrants who are granted residency based on family reunification or their status as refugees are sometimes described as "risky," signaling that they carry various potential hazards for the receiving country. Corresponding to this notion of risk are recent metaphors that express the need to protect ourselves from immigrants: the "war" or "fight" against immigration; the building of "Fortress" Europe; the interception of "immigration routes"; "flanking measures"; "frontline states"; and the idea of prioritizing assistance to distant "buffer zones". To be sure, risky immigrants are the subject of intense public discussion across the affluent parts of the world. This chapter takes inspiration from Foucault's lectures on governmentally, analyzing Danish migration policies during the last four decades as straddling between the rationalities of law, discipline, and security. 1

Abstract This essay tells the story of how Denmark transformed from a very welcoming and tolerant country to one whose prime ministers reassure its residents, “We have the strictest Alien Act possible.” The approach is genealogical, following Michel Foucault, and the empirical focal point is Danish immigration policies as they evolved from the late 1960s until today. This development culminates in the emergence of the “restrictionist policy paradigm,” which associates immigrants with risks like economic burdens, high unemployment levels, crimes, undemocratic attitudes, and the development of ghettos. From the perspective of the welfare project, the immigrants became “risky” as they were profiled in terms of their higher probability of developing suboptimal or dysfunctional behaviors that endanger the welfare state. The Danish experience is analyzed from a broader thesis on the welfare state as caught up between welfarist universality, industrial-capitalist expansion, and sovereign territoriality. Drawing on Foucault’s work, these different logics of statehood are analyzed as evolving constellations of law, discipline, and security. Danish immigration policy mutates over time so that policies of security premised on free circulation gradually give way to discipline and legal sovereignty that block, filter, and segregate immigrants. Alongside this movement toward territorial enclosure, the discursive construction of the immigrant changes fundamentally.

This article explores the adoption of new technology in organisations that provide senior citizen care. Inspired by Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, we study how technology reduces complexity by identifying client needs and ensuring predictability in service delivery. However, how technologies are adopted in practice is not determined by technology since it is also structured by care-workers' continuous decision-making. Against this backdrop, we explore how technologies alter the conditions for decision-making in two settings of elderly care, and we describe how care workers seek to adapt technologies to their practical needs as well as conception of care ethics. Developing a systems theory approach, the article eschews a priori assumptions of technological constraint on care-workers' professional autonomy, offering a more open-ended exploration of diversified strategies for coping with new technology. Our case studies show that employees develop diversified strategies for technology adoption, including both non-usage, heated resistance, excessive embrace, and creative adaption.

Critics lament that corporate social responsibility has failed to significantly change business practices and that it became ‘de-radicalized’ once embraced by corporate business management. Using historical analysis, this article reevaluates this de-radicalization thesis, questioning whether corporate social responsibility ever was as inherently radical as the thesis assumes. The article demonstrates that early corporate social responsibility was already invested with a strategy of pragmatism, an investment that traces back to a group of late 19th and early 20th century American Christian reformists, also known as the social gospel movement. They promised that industrialism would unify Christian ethics and capitalist production, thereby reconciling the conflict between profitseeking and social solidarity. The discourse they advanced already contained what would later become key corporate social responsibility components, including (1) the notion of ethical businessmen, (2) the corporation as a morally conscious being and (3) collaboration as the pathway to ‘industrial peace’. Theoretically, the analysis finds inspiration in Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s thesis on modern capitalism’s capacity to assimilate the critiques it faces, supplemented by Michel Foucault’s fine-grained analyses of the transformation and ‘tactical polyvalence’ of discourse. The two positions complement each other in their assumptions regarding the dialectical relationship between capitalism/critique (Boltanski and Chiapello) and power/resistance (Foucault). Tracing the origins of corporate social responsibility’s pragmatism further back in time than the conventional starting point in the 1950s casts new light on the de-radicalization thesis. In particular, corporate social responsibility emphasizes personal ethics as the key to industrial peace, a social gospel legacy that has steered corporate social responsibility away from demands that fundamentally challenge corporate capitalism.