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How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault's concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible. Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the controversy over nationwide homeless statistics in Germany and uses the conflict as a window through which to explore the spatial and historical ontology of political numbers. Since the 1980s, the German national government's refusal to collect statistical data on homelessness has pushed homeless advocates to fight for quantitative assessments of homelessness as a crucial form of recognition. The conflict has produced a series of studies concerned with the practicability of homeless statistics. These studies offer an insight into the critical relations between space and calculation and the governmental problematizations of calculable territory and populations. Problematizations of space in feasibility studies reflect how the phenomenon of homelessness is not only a social issue ignored by governmental knowledge production, but a real obstacle to conventional ways of data collection on the population. To analyse the controversy and the difficulties of establishing homeless statistics, the paper combines theoretical reflections on the relations between numbers and politics and on spaces of calculation with more recent attempts to highlight the political nature of ignorance. The paper argues that the difficulties to count homeless people represent a case of ‘ontological ignorance’ connected to modern sedentariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent scholarship in the field of sociology of childhood has analyzed the disciplinary and regulatory strategies for governing children's bodies in the name of “health” and “life” in North/Western Europe, North America, and Australia. These analyses problematize how formal and informal pedagogies are shaped by biomedical knowledge, popular media images, and neoliberal agendas in ways not always for the benefit of the children in question. Little research, however, has explored the body pedagogies developed within grass-roots movements concerned with children's health and well-being; furthermore, little research has explored these topics outside the North American or European space. Following a comparative ethnographic approach, I explore the differences in how and why children eat fruit and vegetables in a) public kindergartens and b) allotment gardens in Berlin, Germany, as well as in c) Landless Workers' settlements in Espírito Santo, Brazil. The qualitative analysis reveals that biopedagogical concerns often intermingle with ecological as well as broader societal issues, depending on the concrete context in question. This, in turn, poses new questions concerning our understandings of “biopower” and “biopolitics.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the 2006 Air Security decision rendered by the German Constitutional Court as an occasion to question typical assumptions in critical scholarship about the relations between sovereign power and biopolitics and about the kinds of political spaces these logics can generate. After a brief overview of the argument the first part of the paper summarizes the 2006 Air Security decision and the legislation it addressed. Public debates in Germany around the issue are then surveyed, with an emphasis on the contrast drawn by a number of commentators between utilitarian and 'Kantian' ethical positions. As a result of the apparently Kantian line it took, the Court conjured a specific but ambivalent space of 'benevolent abandonment'. The latter half of the paper explores the theoretical implications of the decision, arguing that understanding it as Kantian is too simple, and relating it to Michel Foucault's and Georgio Agamben's theorizations of the nexus of biopower and sovereignty. While the 2006 decision does not easily fit within Agamben's discussion of the 'sovereign ban' in Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998), it can be grasped by means of another strand of his reasoning, most fully developed in his discussion of "inoperativity" in The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford University Press, 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study moves in the space between two fields: science and technology studies (STS) and childhood studies; it thus belongs to the broader STS literature that investigates everyday practices outside the laboratory. The interpretation of ethnographic and bibliographic data on contemporary cardiovascular and obesity prevention in German kindergartens makes evident that when knowledge travels from biomedical laboratories to the preschool, then psychology comes into play! Bodies of knowledge such as behavioural or cognitive theories shape prevention and intervention practices, which could be seen as originally resulting from biomedical findings and trends. Accompanying this development is a change in the primary sciences that deal with childhood: these are no longer pedagogy or developmental and educational psychology (at least in their traditional forms), but ‘developmental science’. All this shapes contemporary childhood in quite normative ways. It thus remains an open question what non- or less normative institutional practices and bodies of knowledge could look like. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the concept of "biopower," a term created by French philosopher Michel Foucault concerning state regulation of the human body and populations. It focuses on eighteenth century Germany, examining the German idea and system of cameralism, which aimed to utilize resources and populations for the common good. The author particularly comments on the reform and regulation of midwifery in the Electorate of Bavaria and the work of physician and courtier Johann Anton von Wolter. German absolutism is also considered.