The government of life: managing populations, health and scarcity

Faster, harder, longer, stronger – management at the threshold between work and private life: The case of work place health promotion

“…WHP programmes) by their employers. Furthermore, while bio-political regulations remained until the late 1970s closely connected to the liberal ambition of protecting individuals and civil society from the social injustices and health issues associated with the functioning of the market economy, they have since then, not the least through their marketization, become tied to the neoliberal ambition of remedying social injustices and health issues by helping individuals govern themselves in accordance an economic rationality (Villadsen and Wahlberg 2015).…”

“…It is in the wake of this critique, means Foucault (2007) that partly new 'bio-political' forms of regulation emerge. These combine developments in the life sciences -medicine, psychology, eugenics and demography -with liberal economic values (see Dean 2015;Lakoff 2015;Rose 2007;Villadsen and Wahlberg 2015).…”

“…In the analysis of WHP the paper draws on Foucault's later works on neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control (2003,2007,2009), on their further development by for instance Dean (1999), Gershon (2011), Gordon (1991, Lemke (2001), McNay (2009), O'Malley (2000 and Rose (1999) and on their more specific usage in studies of government and health (Dean 2015;Lakoff 2015;Rose 2007;Villadsen and Wahlberg 2015). Through this literature the paper develops the argument that WHP operates as an unobtrusive form of control, but in ways that break with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of identity regulation.…”

The biopolitics of Māori biomass: towards a new epistemology for Māori health in Aotearoa/New Zealand

“…Importantly, from a biopolitical perspective, the intention is not to 'test' whether these techniques are accurately portraying 'reality', but to ask how they are linked to the way the problem of population is understood and to consider the consequences of that understanding (e.g. Lakoff 2015; Villadsen and Wahlberg 2015;Wahlberg and Rose 2015). When problematic sub-populations emerge through particular biopolitical techniques, we need to ask what these consequences might be for how people in those sub-populations will be subjectified and disciplined.…”

The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society

“…Social scientists on the other hand study people; their forms of organisation, their practices, behaviours, selfunderstandings and more, predominantly with the help of databases, collected documents, surveys, interviews, participant observation and more. Biology and society intersect in numerous spheres (see Villadsen & Wahlberg 2015), albeit health and medicine is perhaps one of the most salient and it is within this sphere that I will show how knowledge of (biological) life and knowledge of living -generated in and through different methodologies -have come to co-circulate and inform practice in ways that increasingly enfeeble the kinds of epistemological hierarchisations that are embedded in the notions of 'biological reductionism', 'biomedical hegemony' or Cochrane-style hierarchy of evidence models (which place qualitative research on their lowest rungs).…”