Neoliberal governance and ‘responsibilization’ of agents: reassessing the mechanisms of responsibility-shift in neoliberal discursive environments
Neoliberal governance and ‘responsibilization’ of agents: reassessing the mechanisms of responsibility-shift in neoliberal discursive environments
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新自由主义治理和代理人的“责任化”：重新评估新自由主义话语环境中的责任转移机制
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发表时间：
2017
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通讯作者：
A. Guilfoyle
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作者：
Jarkko Pyysiäinen;D. Halpin;A. Guilfoyle
摘要“治理心态”方法在分析新自由主义治理如何通过“自由诉求”机制将责任转嫁给个体代理人方面产生了影响。这种富有成效的权力概念化产生了对(新)自由治理和当代西方资本主义运作的坚实研究。然而，这类研究在很大程度上忽略了“自由诉求”让参与者失望的情况下的一个补充机制，即“对个人控制的威胁”的动态。关注和阐述这一方面的研究，以及更广泛的“控制结构”，大多停留在(社会心理学)的学科边界内。在这篇文章中，我们的目标是将关于控制结构的社会心理学研究带入与政府理论的对话中，并展示新自由主义的“责任化”如何通过对个人控制的威胁、不安全感和恐惧治理来发挥作用。通过重点分析(新自由主义)治理主体的控制归因，我们提出了一种与实证研究相结合的利用和推进这些方法的方法。然后，我们从澳大利亚新自由主义农业政策的背景下，通过一个简短的实证说明，展示了新自由主义的“责任化”如何被视为依赖于农民在不确定的情况下努力保持个人控制，以及“呼吁自由”机制的运作。
ABSTRACT The ‘governmentality’ approach has been influential in analyzing how neoliberal governance transfers responsibility to individual agents through an ‘appeal of freedom’ mechanism. This productive conceptualization of power has generated a solid body of research on the workings of (neo)liberal governance and contemporary Western capitalism. However, such research has largely ignored a complementary mechanism characteristic of situations where ‘appeal of freedom’ lets actors down, that is, dynamics of ‘threat to personal control’. Studies focusing and elaborating on this aspect, and ‘control constructs’ more generally, have remained mostly within the disciplinary boundaries of (social) psychology. In this paper we aim to bring the social psychological research on control constructs into a dialogue with governmentality theorizing and to show how neoliberal ‘responsibilization’ can work through threats to personal control, insecurity and governance by fear. We propose one way of utilizing, and advancing, these approaches in tandem with empirical research, by focusing on the analysis of control attributions of the subjects of (neoliberal) governance. With a brief empirical illustration from the context of Australian neoliberal agricultural policies we then show how neoliberal ‘responsibilization’ can be viewed as relying on farmers’ striving to maintain personal control under uncertainty, in addition to the workings of the ‘appeal of freedom’ mechanism.