Public Policy and Foucaultian Critique: Towards a Happy Marriage?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article suggests that certain intertwinements can be discerned between contemporary public policies and post-structural thinking, emblematically represented by Foucault and scholars drawing upon his work. The article demonstrates that the post-structural perspective on power, while recognising its strengths and efficacy, confines observers to a particular form of analytical critique, which sets specific limits for what can be observed and debated. The position of Nikolas Rose is discussed with a specific attention to his diagnosis of the adoption of ‘community’ as a governmental category and his understanding of the relationship between power and critique. A significant challenge for this form of critique is the recent embracing of concepts of ‘diversity’ and ‘pluralism’, both in welfare reforms and service arrangements. Another difficulty is posed by how to engage with the material conditions of critical practice which implies analytical critique and resistance through creative self-formation. The article suggests some dislocations of the generalized Foucaultian position on public policy that seem increasingly necessary in the present situation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.040 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.116 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".