Thirdly, in the History of Sexuality and the work developed about biopolitics, Foucault seems to be willing to go beyond his image of critical thinker only dealing with social control and constraints placed upon individu- als. By contrast, the concept of governmen- tality becomes more centred upon individuals and the production of individuality, even if the collective dimension does not disapear. He stresses the ‘subjectivation’ process: i.e. how subjects invest and act in various situa- tions to make sense of their existence. He also progressively analyses how public authorities (with the health world in particu- lar), encourage subjects to be responsible for themselves, to think reflectively and to modify their behaviour – to self-regulate. This new form of governmentality (biopolitics) is seen as a postmodernist form of government at distance, where self disciplined subjects change their conducts in relation to assimilated norms and legitimate behaviours promoted by state organizations.
Those three related but slighly different conceptualizations open a large research agenda which bears some resemblance, for some limited issues to the question raised in terms of governance. In particular, the focus on the activities of the state, the understand- ing of power as a relation and the conception of politics, including various actors beyond the state, is quite important. Although a more precise analysis remains to be done, it is worth remembering that the UK-original ‘governmentality’ line of research developed in particular by Rose was informed by numer- ous exchanges with public policy scholars and in particular Hood. This strand of research on governmentality focuses on the second and third elements in particular and has led to interesting insights about biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality in the UK. Inspired by Foucault, Miller and Rose in London began in the second half of the 1980s to undertake a series of research on the question of governmentality. Following Fourquet classic analysis of French public accounting (1980) and the programme of the Sociology of Sciences particularly developed
by Callon and Latour (1981), their pro- gramme of research included in particular the analysis of what they call technologies to shape the conducts, social and economic activities in accounting or management. They used Callon and Latour’s idea of ‘govern- ment 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 instru- ments 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- able through the instruments to act upon conducts. This has progressively led these authors to consider the making of a neoliberal governmentality or ways of governing liberal advanced democracies based upon three ideas:
1 A new relation between expertise with knowl- edge accumulated in management tools and calculating techniques.
2 A new pluralization of ‘social technologies’ and the ‘deassembling’ of governmental activities.
3 A new spefication of the subject of government.
For the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to concentrate on one dimension informed by Foucault’s discussion of governmentality but also by the developments of the conceptuali- zation in terms of governance, i.e. policy instruments and instrumentation.
A POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF POLICY INSTRUMENTS1
The focus on policy instruments specifically directs attention to the mechanisms of rule and the relationship between government and the governed. At the macro level, research on instruments has afforded insights into the changing dynamics of state intervention