This article is concerned with price and pricing in the context of finance led neoliberal reform. It considers the sentiment often encountered in accounts of such reform that price instability is the outcome of the retreat of the state from the regulation of price and its externalization in the competitive play of the market. Drawing on the case of contemporary Finland, and especially a major round of government reform, we show how unstable prices are anchored in a set of coordinating mechanisms that form part of the infrastructure of a reorganizing state. We elaborate, then, a state infrastructure for the coordination of price instability and do so for the price and pricing of labour. This infrastructure is, however, not one that is coherent, centralized or integrated, but is dispersed and disintegrated and operates on multiple scales.

This article explores the role of affect in governmentality and develops the concept of the ‘affective milieu’ to better understand liberal forms of managerial control in market environments. Taking Foucault’s writings on consent, security and technologies of self as a vantage point, we suggest that the regimes of governmentality are both rational and affective milieus and propose that the Spinozan–Deleuzian affect theory provides an entry point for exploring how regimes of governmentality operate as affective milieus. The Spinozan–Deleuzian affect theory helps in understanding affective complexities and attempts to create affective alliances in governmentality. Elucidating this point, we explore how top executives at globally operating paper and metal companies entered a new affective milieu when going through market liberalisation. The affective milieu oscillates between the dangers and promises of the market. Using the notion of priming, we analyse how the top executives use the affective threats and promises of the opening markets and how they attempted to develop managerial techniques to incite and orient employees in the new milieu.

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This article examines Finnish politicians’ ambivalent attachments to social media – specifically Facebook and Twitter – in candidate-centred, personalised politics. The analysis draws on 20 semi-structured interviews with members of parliament (MPs) to investigate the tactics of adaptation and adjustment politicians develop in a work setting that precludes digital detox. To investigate the MPs’ contradictory feelings, the analysis builds on cultural and media theory to contextualise the porous border between the personal and the political that exists on social media. The analysis revolves around four interconnected themes: uneasiness of self-promotion, Facebook’s ordinariness, Twitter as a necessary evil, and tactics of patience MPs utilise when they encounter various forms of online harassment. The article suggests that in parliamentary research, social media should be considered an ambivalent social glue that holds things together rather than merely a platform for self-promotion.

This article explores the Hawthorne studies, an industrial research programme conducted at Western Electric Company from 1924 to 1933. The analysis focuses on the longest-running experiment, in which female workers in their twenties operated a relay assembly in a room specially designed for the experiment and were monitored by a group of engineers and industrial researchers. Based on the authoritarian setting, this research situates the experiment in the wider history of making workers through complex systems of value attributions, such as classifications and technologies of characterisation. However, examination of previous research and accounts of the Hawthorne studies suggests that the relay assembly test was also an ambivalent research setting characterised by negotiations and strategies which converged into the dynamics of knowing and being known. This article thus offers a new critical perspective on the experiment by regarding the operators as active players in an industrial labour process game rather than cooperative, adaptive laboratory subjects.