It is well documented that the application of business models to the higher education sector has precipitated a managerialistic approach to organisational structures (Preston, 2001). Less well documented is the impact of this business ideal on the student‐teacher encounter. It is argued that this age‐old relation is now being configured (conceptually and organisationally) in terms peculiar to the business sector: as a customer‐product relation. It is the applicability and suitability of such a configuration that specifically concerns this contribution. The paper maintains that the move to describe the student‐teacher relation in these terms is indeed inappropriately reductive, but not straightforwardly so. The problem arises in that we remain unsure of the contemporary purpose of education. We lack any firm educational ideals that, in themselves, cannot be encompassed by the business paradigm. Indeed, the pedagogical critique of education (broadly, that education is only of use in as much as it is of use to society) extends further than has yet been intimated and prevents one securing any educational ideal that does not immediately succumb to critique. This pedagogical logic is unassailable in any linear way but, when pressed, precipitates an aporetic moment that prevents it from assuming any totalising hold over education. We draw on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to consider whether one might yet imagine an educational ‘quasi‐ideal’ that will enable practitioners and institutions to counter the effects of customerisation.

Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a relatively new, but increasingly important, contributor to both local and national decision-making processes. Adopting a multi-method approach, it incorporates qualitative and quantitative analyses to determine the various health impacts of policies and projects. HIA thus reflects recent developments in sociological theory, which have promoted qualitative techniques and challenged the dominance of quantitative methods. HIA embodies a particular renegotiation of the qualitative/quantitative opposition; each individual HIA represents an empirical instance of this renegotiation. As such, HIA can be conceptualized as a kind of 'political space', in which the opposition in question is structured by various social forces and plays out in concrete ways. Moreover, and notwithstanding the supposed methodological rapprochement, an analysis of a number of HIAs claims to expose a continuing, but perhaps unsurprising, privilege in favour of quantitative methods. In the first place, the paper contends that closer examination reveals this privileging to be unjustified, both empirically and theoretically, and alternative methodological and epistemological configurations are suggested accordingly. Specific gestures are made in this respect toward the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. In particular, the paper argues for a broad hermeneutic approach that both encompasses and situates the methodological tensions HIA stages. Second, attention is drawn to the fact that various and particular sociopolitical conditions maintain the characteristic architecture of the opposition. The political importance of HIA across a series of key issues is underscored in support of a more radical interpretation. For once situated within its wider cultural context, HIA ceases to resemble some straightforwardly neutral technology for health protection and delivery. If, instead, one reads it as an indicative micropolitical phenomenon, then one can begin to interrogate this simple policy tool in more complex ways. HIA both reveals, and is implicated in, a more fundamental and diffuse process that is presently resisting, undermining and regenerating traditional power distributions within the administration of health and beyond. The paper implicitly argues that HIA can only be properly understood within this context and, equally, allows one a certain analytical access to this context.

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Opening with a consideration of the methodological stakes, the paper examines, in a preparatory way, the phenomenon of the startle as a limit case for phenomenological analysis. Taking a bearing from a traditional Husserlian schema, the analysis quickly finds itself twisting and turning, contorting the received phenomenological method in order to remain with the phenomenon. Elements of Heidegger’s “fundamental analysis of Dasein” are also tried out, but similarly find themselves dislocated by the peculiar phenomenological content of the startle. Thus unsettling the basic structures of phenomenology and temporality, the paper concludes by setting the scene for an encounter with Levinas’ perturbing notion of the il y a.

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