infonet-economy

Post-Foucauldian governmentality studies (PFGS) assert that Foucault-inspired work on governmentality privileges the discursive level of governmental techniques - such as social policies - whilst ignoring the empirical reality of governing. To retain its explanatory value, so the argument goes, governmentality studies need to be complemented with empirical studies of the actual practices of those being governed. This article challenges PFGS on the basis of how it tends to interpret people's deviance from the stated objectives of discursive governmentality as an indication that governing forms a perpetually failing operation. Turning this logic on its head, we purport that although governmental techniques often fail to produce their designated aims, this apparent failure eventually forms a constitutive, if disavowed, element of governing. To substantiate this claim, we offer a rereading of research dealing with how social enterprise policies are dealt with by practitioners in the UK third sector. Pinpointing how practitioners deviated from the normative demands of existing social enterprise policies, it gets discussed that they inadvertently acted in accordance with the broader governmental objective of using the third sector to ameliorate social problems. Based on these insights, it gets suggested that the intertwined relationship between deviance and government's ignorance thereof forms the linchpin of the ‘art of governing', since only if individuals are unofficially allowed to deviate from what social policies explicitly demand does it become possible to harness the creative potential immanent to those being governed.