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PurposeDrawing on the literature on pastoral power, a term introduced by Foucault that denotes a specific form of authority based on the subordinate's open communication regarding aspirations, interests and personal concerns, having the full faith in the leader's care of the subordinate's welfare, this article report empirical material from a study of Swedish construction industry.Design/methodology/approachLeadership practices are contingent on context and situation, and over time, authoritative leadership practices have been complemented by relational leadership that increasingly emphasizes the bilateral communication between manager and subordinate. The more communicative and “soft” leadership idiom may have both benefits and incur unanticipated consequences and conditions that need to be studied on basis of empirical materials.FindingsManagers in the construction industry emphasize how subordinates increasingly turn to their closest managers to address a variety of concerns. Even though managers recognizes the value of providing personalized support, there is a risk that such a leadership idiom distract both managers and subordinates, i.e. counseling activities consume too much resources, making agents less prone to fully attend to proper project goals.Originality/valueTo consider contemporary leadership practices as partially premised on pastoral power provides new analytical possibilities that shed light on how leadership practice needs to correspond with new demands in the corporate setting.

Michel Foucault acknowledged that the Reformation was a pastoral battle and a reorganization of pastoral power. He did not, however, analyze Protestantism much further. This article broadens the scope of critical research on Protestantism, focusing on Lutheranism. Preaching is a fruitful way to overcome overemphasis on confession. In this endeavor I apply Foucault's concept of "master's discourse." I argue that while, in Lutheranism, conversion through comprehensive soul-searching is an individual matter, at the same time it relies on technologies aimed at a collective audience, such as preaching. Since preaching is divine speech, the Lutheran priest wields enormous spiritual power: the preacher is the truth-teller and the subject is required to listen to and internalize the proclaimed truth, instead of confessing their sins.

Since the end of the Cold War, the content, scope, and extent of extraterritorial human rights obligations has become a pressing concern for international lawyers. On one end of the debate, mainstream scholarship argues that jurisdiction is primarily territorial, identifying a limited range of situations in which jurisdiction (and responsibility) is triggered. On the other end, critical scholars suggest that Empire still haunts jurisdiction. By reconstructing the history of this doctrine, they show that the imperial reach has always been extra-territorial and that the intimate linkage between state, territory, and population is of a rather recent and tenuous origin. In both of these narratives, however, lies the assumption that jurisdiction operates as a secularized power. Even if empires/states were once religious, faith’s legacy remains confined to the past. In this article, conversely, I trace a critical genealogy of Christian authority as a jurisdictional structure, in which territoriality was never presumed. After all, one cannot forget that Catholicism and Universalism were forged in the same etymological crucible. By drawing from Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power, I argue that international law has deep roots in Christianity’s claims of governmentality upon ‘men and souls’ instead of over defined territories.

The power granted to persons in Christian pastoral leadership is delegated for benevolent exercise. Yet with this power may also come the temptation to exercise power in self-interest. In this pape...

Using a Foucauldian perspective, we explicate the systems of power which shape the lives of women in or at risk of ‘food poverty’. We develop a theoretical framework of power for analyses of contemporary food poverty, which we apply to data from focus groups with women on low incomes in two cities in the north of England. Our data underlines the repressive power of the state as well as the broader chronicity of state surveillance. We argue that, while disciplinary and pastoral power may characterise the majority of food banks, alternative logics of mutual aid are evident within some food aid providers. We underline the power of governmental discourse in constituting gendered subjectivities and find that the most potent form of coercion is derived from self-regulation. The article closes by exploring possibilities for praxis via discursive resistance.

Food banks across the UK are offering basic food supplies and a range of support services to people who have been affected by years of welfare cuts and the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. Despite a growing research interest in the drivers and experiences of food bank use, their own role in constructing and managing poverty as a social problem has been neglected. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, this study critically explored how power is exercised and subjects are formed inside three UK food banks. The localised care for the poor is shown to work through a pastoral power, which requires confessions of crises and obedience to an expert regime in the diagnosis and treatment of poverty as an individual condition. By making food aid conditional on active engagement with other support agencies, volunteers negotiate and translate neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and active citizenship. Findings are linked to a wider critique of neoliberal government, which works through therapeutic discourses and retains disciplinary and paternalistic elements in managing poverty at a distance.

Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power as “a power of care” challenges us to think of modern medical institutions and practices in terms of political theology by emphasizing their continuities with...

This paper confronts the medieval Church with Foucault´s conceptualization of Christendom in his writing on governmentality. In order to do so, this paper analyzes the formation of an ecclesiastical dual rule –jurisdiccional and pastoral– from the perspective of a genealogy of western political forms. For this purpose, a critical dialogue is stablished with Foucault’s analytics of pastoral power and of the subjectivation technologies involved in it. While the transformations supported by the pontifical power gave rise to the first western juridical system, the ecclesiastical institution implemented services of cura animarum throughout Christianity. Further, this salvation economy leaned on an unprecedented legal rule that turned pastoral power into a twofold rule, both sovereign and governmental. This paper argues that such an interpretation expounds the problems of the dichotomy government/sovereignity, on which Foucault founds his analytics of pastoral power and his genealogy of governmentality. Este artículo pone en contraste analítico el singular histórico de la Iglesia plenomedieval con la conceptualización del cristianismo ofrecida por Michel Foucault en sus estudios sobre la gubernamentalidad. Para ello se analiza la constitución de la Iglesia romana entre los siglos XI y XIII como una potestad dual –jurídica y pastoral–, desde la perspectiva de la genealogía de las formas políticas occidentales. El análisis se estructura a través de un diálogo crítico con la analítica foucaultiana del poder pastoral y las tecnologías de subjetivación que despliega. Mientras que las transformaciones auspiciadas por el gobierno pontificio dieron lugar al primer sistema jurídico occidental en los siglos centrales del Medioevo, la institución eclesiástica implementó servicios de cura animarum uniformados por toda la cristiandad. Más aún, esta economía de salvación se apoya en el nuevo sistema jurídico, convirtiendo al pastorado medieval en una potestad tanto soberana como gubernativa. El artículo trata de mostrar cómo esta interpretación histórica problematiza la dicotomía gobierno/soberanía sobre la que se funda la categoría de poder pastoral de Foucault y su genealogía de la gubernamentalidad.

This paper explores the governance practices that external providers of school wellbeing programs employ in their contribution to the subjectification function of education. In neoliberal times whe...

This paper contributes to inquiries into the genealogy of governmentality and the nature of secularization by arguing that pastoralism continues to operate in the algorithmic register. Drawing on Agamben’s notion of signature, I elucidate a pair of historically distant yet archaeologically proximate affinities: the first between the pastorate and algorithmic control, and the second between the absconded God of late medieval nominalism and the authority of algorithms in the cybernetic age. I support my hypothesis by attending to the signaturial kinships between, on the one hand, temporality and authority in our contemporary conjuncture, and, on the other, obedience and submission in Christian thought from late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. I thereby illustrate the hidden genealogical continuities between theological-pastoral technologies of power and technocratic-algorithmic modalities of governance. I conclude by suggesting that medieval counter-conducts may be redeployed in our present circumstances for emancipatory ends.

The primary purpose of this essay is to analyze Thomas More’s Utopia in terms of biopolitics and governmentality that Michel Foucault theorized in his lectures at College de France. More’s story of an imaginary commonwealth is an illustration of early modern pastoral power that foreshadows the rise of (early) modern “governmentality.” Pastoral power as a sort of governing technology claimed that people should be governed just as Christ as an ideal pastor governs his flock (Christian subjects), and its economic ideology is the core of what St. Paul called oikonomia. Yet this religious governmentality began to be secularized from the sixteenth century and formed secular governmental rationality, and I would argue that More’s Utopia is a discussion of this governing technology developed from this pastoral power. This essay, in this light, has a dual purpose. First this article surveys and analyzes pastoralism and governmentality that operate as biopower in More’s work. Utopia has been read as a discussion of ideal state and a society based on proto-communism, but seen from a different angle it is a representation of Renaissance England’s governmentality. Nonetheless, a more important project of this essay is to critically anatomize the paradox of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics by surveying Utopia from a biopolitical perspective. Foucault was not able to properly answer why a power that “make[s] live and let[s] die” uncannily transforms into thanato-political and sovereign power that “take[s] life or let[s] live.” Reading More’s discussion of an ideal commonwealth allows us to grasp that a society aiming at utmost security based on biopolitics uncannily transforms into an extremely controlled society ruled by thanato-politics.

This article advances critical migration theory by exploring how pastoral power works through relational life courses. Extending governmentality accounts, we posit and trace the circulation of use, exchange, and surplus values across the life courses of migrants from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Field evidence shows how practices of migration, remitting, and familyhood are associated with dependent social relations and concealment, and negotiated through tests of truth of prayer, biographical management, and family remitting. This conduct of everyday life simultaneously invokes life courses as registers of resources and possibilities and subjects of the multiple governmentalities associated with recent discourse and European and Georgian migration policy initiatives, including “Safe Migration” and migration management systems. We conclude that studying how pastoral power works through relational life courses expands understanding of migration and, in the case of Georgia, highlights the importance of gender, family, and religious organisations for contemporary migration issues.

The transposition of biopower from the state to the individual has been a major preoccupation of biopower scholarship in recent decades. While some researchers have found grounds for optimism in the diminution of state control over people’s bodies, others see the change as merely a more sophisticated version of state control which has become, if anything, more invasive of individual lifestyle choices. In this paper I show how the institutionalization of hierarchical power relations does justify optimism about ways of confronting the complex mechanisms of control entailed in modern biopower. I claim that the crux of control in our information society derives from the transposition of the pastoral power described by Michel Foucault to the modern state and that the institutionalization of hierarchical power relations can constitute an effective countermeasure to that power. Hierarchical power exchanges can generate a social and cultural framework which, while operating according to the logic of biopower, expands modes of thought and practice beyond the unified thinking that contributes significantly to the modern state’s control over the individual.

Guided by Michel Foucault's concept of “pastoral power,” this article examines the ways in which contemporary discourses within official narratives in China portray the state in a paternal fashion to reinforce its legitimacy. Employing interdisciplinary approaches, this article explores a number of sites in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), in order to map how a coherent official narrative of power and authority is created and reinforced across different spaces and texts. It demonstrates how both history and the present day are depicted in urban Xinjiang in order to portray the state in a pastoral role that legitimates its use of force, as well as emphasizing its core role in developing the region out of poverty and into “civilization.”

From 1977 to 1978, the Philadelphia Police Department established a blockade around the MOVE house. Eventually, this blockade became a starvation blockade, when the mayor, Frank Rizzo, determined that the best way to end the standoff was to starve MOVE people into surrendering. During this standoff, respected religious leaders representing various faith traditions negotiated between MOVE and the city. These religious leaders initially came to MOVE’s defense. Some of them believed that MOVE was a religion, and that the city’s actions threatened religious freedom in the city. As the negotiations wore on, however, MOVE lost their initial support. The religious leaders who previously defended MOVE decided that MOVE was not, in fact, a religion and sided with the city. In so doing, these religious leaders articulated a series of claims about the nature of “true religion” to explain why MOVE was not, in their view, a religion.

Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality has been hugely influential in sociology and other disciplinary fields. However, its application has been criticised by those who suggest it neglects agency, and gives overwhelming power to governmental discourses in constituting subjectivities, determining behaviour and reproducing social reality. Drawing on posthumously translated lecture transcripts, in this article the authors suggest that Foucault’s nascent concept of pastoral power offers a route to a better conceptualisation of the relationship between discourse, subjectivity and agency, and a means of understanding the (contested, non-determinate, social) process through which governmental discourses are shaped, disseminated and translated into action. The authors offer empirical examples from their work in healthcare of how this process takes place, present a model of the key mechanisms through which contemporary pastoral power operates, and suggest future research avenues for refining, developing or contesting this model.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a management technique which seeks to constantly innovate business processes to improve customer service while reducing costs. While much IS research has looked at the design and implementation of BPM, including its critical success factors, methodology and processes, until recently little IS research has looked at the broader organizational issues associated with BPM. This paper looks at one organizational issue in particular, that of organizational culture in BPM. Based on an action research study of one BPM project, our findings reveal that BPM’s current conceptualization of organizational culture is potentially problematic. Using Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary and pastoral power, we suggest that BPM faces a challenge in trying to balance disciplinary and pastoral power.

This paper draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore the role of accounting in the Australian disability welfare reform. We provide an example of the use of individualising and totalising power against a backdrop of neoliberal reform. Our analysis reveals the centrality of accounting practices in transforming the identity of people with disabilities into one consistent with the intentions of neoliberalism ideology. Our findings demonstrate that accounting practices associated with disability welfare reform have been integral in exercising pastoral power. We further demonstrate that accounting, as a technology of the self, facilitates individualising and totalising control and, through a perpetual extraction of truth, constructs an individual’s conduct.

In many countries government policy is becoming increasingly reliant on citizens taking greater responsibility for their health and wellbeing and limiting their consumption of public services. In this paper I develop Foucauldian perspectives on the work required to create and maintain responsibilised subjects, focusing on the role of 'pastors' - specialists, experts and therapists who promote desirable subjectivities (Waring and Latif ). Drawing from ethnographic research, I consider how government policies for the promotion of self-care within the English healthcare system not only place increased emphasis on patients taking responsibility for their own health and wellbeing, but also seek to constitute new pastoral subjectivities as responsible for conducting the conduct of patients. I look at efforts to constitute pastoral subjectivities through an assemblage of management knowledge, educational practices and training materials. I argue that efforts to enrol and train pastors are unlikely to accomplish governmental objectives because of the availability of alternative guides for action drawn from professional training, established routines, and forms of social belonging.

Michel Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power has generated a large body of work in many different disciplines. Much of it has considered the paradox of the power of “each and all” or has seen pastoral power as an extension of the disciplinary gaze into welfare state policy. The political economy of the pastorate and the mutual dependence of sovereign and pastoral power, by contrast, are both relatively neglected. This article focuses on the exercise of pastoral power in a moral and political economy and examines the “arts of government” through which the Catholic Church attempted to claim that pastors lived from the flock only to live for it. While there is heuristic value in Foucault’s diagram of pastoral power, in practice that power cannot be separated from class relations and political sovereignty. Empirical material is drawn from the novel attempt of Britain to govern its Quebec colony through the Catholic Church.

Following the 2014-15 ‘migration crisis’, the European Union and national governments focused their efforts on the efficient management of migrants arriving in large numbers. Accordingly, migrant integration has become a key challenge for EU member states. This research focuses on the Italian context and investigate discourses and practices of integration within Italian refugee reception centres. It examines the organisations supporting migrants’ resettlement and explores the link between how social workers talk about migrant integration (discourse level) and how they ‘do’ integration (practice level).\ud This study draws on a six months ethnographic research, conducted within two Reception Centres of the national refugee protection system (SPRAR), to understand their activities and the power/knowledge relations bonding migrants, social workers and local communities. The data produced consists of field notes and interviews with employees and migrants. Theoretically it adopts a Foucauldian-inspired framework, drawing from concepts of ‘microphysics of power’, ‘governmentality’ and ‘pastoral power’ to analyse the microprocesses of subjectification unfolding within the integration projects. The research addresses the following research questions: By which means are migrants and refugees constituted and constantly reformed as subjects suitable to live in Europe according to the Italian ways of being? How do pressures from the extra-organisational environment affect the discourses of integration and the activities carried out within the refugee reception centres?\ud Finding shows that the SPRAR centres can be seen as pastoral organisations on the threshold between various tensions characterising macro- and micro-politics of integration and inclusion. Integration is promoted through the professionalisation of the pastoral relationship aimed at constituting self-governing migrant subjects. Despite the will to promote multiculturalism, the conflicted relationship between centres and extra-organisational environment pushes employees towards discourses and practices of covert-assimilationism targeting migrants’ everyday life. This thesis extends Foucault’s pastoral power and offers an alternative perspective on integration focused on the micro-processes affecting migrants’ subjectification.

In his conceptualisation of pastoral power, Michel Foucault argues that modern healthcare practices derive a specific power technique from pastors of the early Christian church. As experts in a position of authority, pastors practise the care of others through implicitly guiding them towards thoughts and actions that effect self-care, and towards a predefined realm of acceptable conduct, thus having a regulatory effect. This qualitative study of healthcare workers from two Christian faith-based organisations in Papua New Guinea examines the pastoral rationalities of HIV prevention practices which draw together globally circulated modern medical knowledge and Christian teachings in sexual morality for implicit social regulation. Community-based HIV awareness education, voluntary counselling and testing services, mobile outreach, and economic empowerment programs are standardised by promoting behavioural choice and individual responsibility for health. Through pastoral rationalities of care, healthcare practices become part of the social production of negative differences, and condemn those who become ill due to perceived immorality. This emphasis assumes that all individuals are equal in their ability to make behavioural choices, and downplays social inequality and structural drivers of HIV risk that are outside individual control. Given healthcare workers’ recognition of the structural drivers of HIV, yet the lack of language and practical strategies to address these issues, political commitment is needed to enhance structural competency among HIV prevention programs and healthcare workers.

This article examines the rhetoric of an important, yet understudied, figure in the history of public relations, Bruce Barton. I argue that Barton attempted to mobilize those in the business community to adopt public relations in the creation of a more socially responsible free enterprise through a discourse of evangelical capitalism. Barton’s rhetoric, I argue, positions the corporation as a benevolent shepherd and the public as a submissive and adrift flock in need of salvation. This submissive relationship between public and corporation dovetailed with the technocratic understanding of politics espoused by Walter Lippmann that portrayed the public as a bewildered herd to be guided and mobilized as political leverage by managerial elites, ultimately providing ideological scaffolding for the maintenance and legitimization of corporate power through the appropriation of progressive rhetorics.

Foucault’s conceptualization of “pastoral power” is important in the development and application of the notion of “governmentality” or the regulation of mass populations. However, Foucault’s exploration of pastoral power, especially in the form of confessional practice, owes a good deal to his Roman Catholic heritage. Hints in his work, which were never developed, suggest some aspects of Protestant forms of pastoral power. These hints are taken up to explore one Protestant tradition, that of Scottish Presbyterianism, in detail. Based on the history of the church in the eighteenth century, four aspects of Protestant pastoral power are outlined: examination, accountability, ecclesiology, and organizing as a good in its own right.

An examination of the practice of self-examination in Scottish Presbyterianism shows the value of following the later Foucault in the examination of religion as a social practice. His attention to the influence of pastoral power on governmentality is shown to have been embedded in a Roman Catholic heritage leading to a stress on the confessional. By contrast, an examination of one aspect of Protestant pastoral power indicates the genealogy of practices of self-help. An historical examination of both the structure of the Scottish church and the diaries of believers indicates the emphasis placed in this tradition on accountability. This focus then influenced developments in the United States; attention to this tradition opens up questions for contemporary practices.

This article draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to understand Filipino men’s care work and the making of migrant masculinities in Saudi Arabia. Feminist scholars have indicated the gendered nature of pastoral power and emphasized what Young refers to as the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ that characterizes the contemporary security state. However, the notion of pastoral power invites further consideration of the taken for granted cultural assumptions about the way that hegemonic masculinity and forms of homosociality are characterized mainly by aggression, competition and dominance. Men’s talk about and practical involvement in assisting fellow migrants in diasporic settings foregrounds the way that an ethics of care runs up against and is entangled with the competitive bonds of masculine solidarities. While markers of material success are privileged in measuring migrant men’s accomplishments in country of origin, practices of care become central to men’s achievement of symbolic power and social legitimacy especially among their peers in the diaspora. That spatialization is also linked to temporally shifting models of masculinity and normative expectations about men over the life course.

Foucault identified the roots of governmentality in religious beliefs and religious history with its genealogical core the equivalent of pastoral power, the art of governing people by relying on a dualistic logic; individualization and totalization. This technology of power arose and matured within the Roman Catholic Church and provided a model for many states in the achievement and exercise of power. Informed by the work of Foucault on pastoral power the present work examines the genealogical core of governmentality in the context of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of great crisis in the 15th century when the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing reform instituted by Pope Eugenius IV (1431–1447). The contributions of accounting to pastoral power are shown in this study to have been pivotal in restoring the Church's standing and influence. Accounting was one of the technologies that allowed the bishops to control both the diocese as a whole and each priest, to subjugate the priests to the bishops’ authority and, thereby, to govern the diocese through a never-ending extraction of truth.

This chapter focuses on M. Foucault’s concept of “pastoral power” to consider how networks of practices are shaped through the activities of “network leaders.” Public policies increasingly suggest that networks need, in some sense, to be managed or steered to navigate these and similar challenges. The National Health Service has been at the forefront of change within UK public service governance. Policies see leaders as transformational and leadership as dispersed through the networks of service organisation and delivery. The emphasis on transformational leaders has evolved to consider the contribution of more distributed leadership, where the capacity to engender change is diffused amongst organisational groups. Emerging from the inscription practices, safety leads undertook a series of collective practices that sought to (re)define the boundaries of the community and, in turn, to instigate and maintain activities within that community that reinforce appropriate subjectivities.

Informed by the work of the work of Michel Foucault, Ian Hunter, and Ansgar Allen, this paper argues that I/MLEs are not the creation of a ‘modern’ or ‘innovative’ learning environment but rather t...

Advertisements commissioned by official ministries make ideal sites for investigating how media discourses are informed by state ideologies. Teacher recruitment advertisements, in particular, may be seen mobilising an ideologically charged vision of teacher professionalism that is at once reductive and productive. This chapter critiques the ideological discourses underlying the narrative representation of professional teacher identity in a Singapore teacher recruitment video advertisement entitled Mrs. Chong which features a caring teacher going out of her way to help an economically disadvantaged student and concludes with the romantic suggestion that the path to success stems from personal inspiration and determination. This chapter illustrates how neoliberal governmentality attempts to place the notion of care under an affective technology. Where the hardships of teaching are as its own rewards, the governmental representations suggest idiosyncratic caring engaging in a privatised form of social work that fails to question larger socio-political forces. The establishing of a critical space for the role of caring and emotions within education is also explored.

Surveillance features routinely in discussions of migration in terms of boundary crossing and border policing; that is, of how states and state-like entities seek to limit and control movement, often at a distance. What is less frequently examined is how migrants who are excluded from care by forms of selective non/surveillance have to rely on their own informal social networks, referred to here as embodied infrastructures, to provide both care and the forms of watching that enable that care. Drawing together Foucault’s (2009) notion of pastoral power and Simone’s (2004) notion of ‘people as infrastructure’, I explore ethnographically the way that surveillance features in and is gendered by migrant Filipino practices of care in Saudi Arabia, an overlooked but vital part of the way that people create ‘platforms for living’, as well as enact social control and normative conformity, in sometimes precarious situations.

Invasive non-sedated clinical procedures such as gynaecological examinations are normalised; however, there is limited research highlighting the relational and technical skills required for clinicians to ensure patients' continued consent. A considerable body of research emphasises that women dislike examinations, leading to their non-compliance or a delayed follow up for gynaecological and sexual health problems. However, medical research focuses on 'problem' women; the role of clinicians receives limited appraisal. This article draws on interviews with sexual health clinicians in New Zealand, from metropolitan and provincial locations. The gynaecological care of women in New Zealand attained international notoriety with the 1988 publication of Judge Cartwright's inquiry into ethical shortcomings in cervical cancer research at the National Women's Hospital. Judge Cartwright's recommendations included patient-centred care in order to ensure informed consent had been received for clinical procedures and research participation. This article's critical analysis is that, although clinicians' language draws on humanistic notions of patient-centredness, Foucault's notion of secularised pastoral power enables a more nuanced appreciation of the ethical work undertaken by clinicians when carrying out speculum examinations. The analysis highlights both the web of power relations present during examination practices and the strategies clinicians use to negotiate women's continued consent; which is significant because consent is usually conceptualised as an event, rather than an unfolding, unstable process.

© 2017 In his conceptualisation of pastoral power, Michel Foucault argues that modern healthcare practices derive a specific power technique from pastors of the early Christian church. As experts in a position of authority, pastors practise the care of others through implicitly guiding them towards thoughts and actions that effect self-care, and towards a predefined realm of acceptable conduct, thus having a regulatory effect. This qualitative study of healthcare workers from two Christian faith-based organisations in Papua New Guinea examines the pastoral rationalities of HIV prevention practices which draw together globally circulated modern medical knowledge and Christian teachings in sexual morality for implicit social regulation. Community-based HIV awareness education, voluntary counselling and testing services, mobile outreach, and economic empowerment programs are standardised by promoting behavioural choice and individual responsibility for health. Through pastoral rationalities of care, healthcare practices become part of the social production of negative differences, and condemn those who become ill due to perceived immorality. This emphasis assumes that all individuals are equal in their ability to make behavioural choices, and downplays social inequality and structural drivers of HIV risk that are outside individual control. Given healthcare workers’ recognition of the structural drivers of HIV, yet the lack of language and practical strategies to address these issues, political commitment is needed to enhance structural competency among HIV prevention programs and healthcare workers.

Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual. By Susan Marie Smith. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2012. viii + 152 pp. $18.00 (paper).How does one bring the theological and liturgical resources of the church into situations of transition, celebration, and loss that are not clearly described in official denominational worship resources? This is the question that Susan Marie Smith addresses in Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual. Smith offers principles drawn from the fields of ritual studies and liturgical theology that will give lay people and clergy the confidence to create "rites of transition and healing that may be one-time events particular to a person, a congregation, or a situation" (p. 2).Smith begins by observing that ritual has often been construed as compulsive or manipulative at worst and arid at best. This ritual myopia has led to lost opportunities for pastoral care due to a lack of confidence and imagination on the part of lay and clergy leadership. Smith urges readers to "practice ritual resourcefulness, but only with ritual competence," which requires "the ability to know when and how to ask for, plan, lead, or support rituals that mediate healing, transition, and life" (p. 17).As a counterpoint to common misunderstandings of ritual, Smith argues that ritual can be creative and generative, and that the church needs to reclaim its role in encouraging new rites for specific occasions that are essential to the "process of conversion in faith and growth in Christ" (p. 14). Caring Liturgies draws upon scholarship within the discipline of ritual studies, particularly using the work of Catherine Bell and Ronald Grimes, to describe how to create rites that speak to situations in which an appropriate liturgical response is unclear. The book progresses from defining and describing the nature of a creative rite (chapter 1), to suggesting who should take part in shaping and executing them (chapter 2). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe how to create actual rites, and chapter 6 concludes with the bigger picture of why creative rites are important, grounding them in the paschal mystery of Christ as "the lens through which to look at the focal persons life" (p. 124).A particularly helpful insight is Smiths proposal that creative rites be shaped around one central, "defining metaphor" (p. 74). Smith employs a Ricoeurean understanding of metaphor and symbol to make the distinction that metaphors are a product of language, while symbols are expressed through "things, people, and actions" (p. …

This article presents a genealogical analysis of the ‘epistemic authority’ practices by social scientists in the public-university field in Mexico. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and his concept of pastoral power, I will argue that there is a contested, partial yet pervasive continuity between the pastoral techniques of government and education implemented by the Catholic Church and clergy in colonial Mexico and both the current authority practices by secular social scientists and the secular constitutional principles of public education in this country. In arguing this, I will also criticise Foucault’s Eurocentric theorisations by accounting for an overlooked modality of pastoral power.

This article analyses the images of the criminal that Swedish prison chaplains developed during the 19th century. Following Michel Foucault, such images and relations are conceptualized as pastoral power. In the 19th century prison chaplains occupied a very important position within prisons, due partly to their status as clergymen, but also to their increasing influence on debates about crime and punishment. This article argues that in many respects prison chaplains came to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the criminal and the complexities of criminality, compared to many early psychiatrists and criminal anthropologists. This understanding was primarily the result of knowledge-gathering which took place within the penitentiaries. In the mid-nineteenth century prison chaplains generally depicted crime as morally determined and as caused by the lack of knowledge and insights into the truths of Christianity. However, during the last quarter of the century, references to social and structural factors were increasingly included in broader and more heterogeneous explanations for crime. However, if non-moral factors played such a central role as the prison chaplains gradually came to assign to them, then their own authority as experts on crime as well as the status of religion within the prison system was undermined.

Whilst care imperatives have arisen across the breadth of Western societies, within the education sector they appear both prolific and urgent. This paper explores the deployment of care discourses within education generally and draws upon the case of Australian Health and Physical Education (HPE) more specifically, to undertake a Foucauldian interrogation of care. In so doing I demonstrate the usefulness of Foucault's pastoral power lens and its capacity to provide insight into the moral and ethical work conducted by caring teachers on behalf of the state (Acker, 1995). Following a brief overview of the advocacy, challenges and debates surrounding the issue of caring teaching within education, I draw on the work of Hunter (1994) and three case studies from a genealogical interrogation of HPE that employed Foucualt's ethical fourfold as a heuristic device to reveal the ethical practices and objectives of the good HPE teacher. Drawing on this genealogical work, I argue that HPE teachers and their colleagues...

The purpose of this paper is to bring Foucault’s elaboration on ‘the pastoral modalities of power’ into play in order to rethink alienation in digital culture. Pastoral power is not displacing other conceptions of power, but provides another level of analysis involved in the forging of reasonable responsible subjects willing and able to sustain other conceptions of power. We will draw particularly on the early writings of Marx and the more recent poststructuralist developments concerning hegemony and superstructure in relation to technology. Technology as such is analysed in terms of repercussions of ‘design of the machine’ in industrial technological contexts and ‘design of digital culture’ in digital technological contexts. Pastoral power not only directs our focus to the making of technologies, but also to the making of individuals capable of taking on the responsibilities of technologies. This means that it is necessary to take on the notion of effective power of ideologies and their material reality.