Who should do the talking? The proliferation of dialogue as governmental technology

Paradoxes of Welfare: Universality, Truth, and Power in Modern Welfare Provision

“…This paradox of truth has resulted in multifarious technologies that aim a facilitating the production of individual opinions on such matters from clients, patients or other services users. The paradox in this anti-authoritarian kind of truth production is that the professionals may always doubt whether the statements really come from the interior of an autonomous subject, or whether this speech is infected by external forces such as subculture, 'clientization', or addiction (Karlsen & Villadsen, 2008). The idea of social clients who are divided within themselves between, for instance, authentic willpower and dependency, stems from this paradox.…”

“…The study was done by the author and a fellow researcher (Karlsen & Villadsen, 2008). It takes its lead from the proliferation of dialogues as a popular governmental instrument, which has been witnessed across a range of welfare services-a development which followed the critique from the 1980s onwards of excessive expert guidance and welfare professionals who supposedly 'steal the problems' from their clients.…”

“…And so, there is a simultaneous empowerment and a disempowerment. The general strategy of deparadoxification is here a spatial differentiation of the psychic texture of the governed subject (Karlsen & Villadsen, 2008). An objectification of the subject with reference to the subject's self-control is hereby accomplished.…”

Public Policy and Foucaultian Critique: Towards a Happy Marriage?

“…It is outside the scope of this paper to interrogate exhaustively why concepts of power akin to post-structural thinking emerge in public policy programs at this particular juncture. In passing, however, we may mention that the 'anti-authoritarian' public policy initiatives of the 1990s and onwards, exemplified above, were merely the culmination of a long lasting critique of the welfare state's alleged rigidity and insensitivity to various citizens and groups (Karlsen & Villadsen, 2008). Second, from the early 1980s, the domain of those social theories that, more or less directly, inform social research and public policy underwent a re-orientation under the influence of postmodern theorizing, dissolving the base for true knowledge and the exercise of expert power.…”

“…Public policy researchers indebted to Foucault have undertaken fruitful work in this vein to open up the spaces for autonomy and critical practice for professionals and recipients alike within social policy (Parton, 1996;Cruikshank, 1999;Karlsen and Villadsen, 2008;Nadesan, 2008). Yet, as we noted at the outset, this position has lead to a perhaps unwarranted restriction of the kinds of power that could be analysed and the stances that could be taken with respect to the state.…”