They used Callon and Latour’s idea of ‘government at a distance’ to focus on the material side of governmentality, i.e. the instruments making interventions possible. In a recent introduction to their work, they make the fol- lowing comment: ‘We took the idea of instruments broadly, to include not only actual instruments tools, scales, measuring devices and so forth but also the ways of thinking, intellectual techniques, ways of analyzing oneself, and so forth, to which they were bound’ (Miller and Rose, 2008: 11). Rationalities could only become operation through the instruments to act upon conducts.