Faulty ‘tools’? Why social work scholarship needs to take a more critical approach to Michel Foucault

Abstract

Summary

Having outlined Foucault’s articulation of power and governmentality, the article critically explores attempts to translate the philosopher’s theorisation into social work.

Findings

After briefly referring to Jacques Donzelot’s work and that of other writers, it is argued that Foucault’s conceptual ‘tools’ are problematic for those seeking to promote critical approaches within the field of social work. Those influenced by Foucault’s complex contributions may amplify a defective understanding of power which unduly emphasises ‘soft’ power and neglects the continuing significance of hierarchical and coercive power. This is reflected in Foucault’s analysis of the state and, at a micro level, his remarks on sexualised interactions involving adults and children. Efforts to ‘apply’ Foucauldian reasoning within social work may also risk promoting politically passive forms of theory and practice.

Applications

Contributing to the discipline’s literature on Foucault, the article maintains the social work scholarship has much to gain by engaging with work, but this engagement might aspire to become more critical.

Keywords

Social work critical social theory Foucault power governmentality

Introduction

In the mid-1970s, Foucault professed his desire to ‘talk about subjects that can serve a maximum number of people’ providing ‘them with tools which they can use later on in any way they please in their own fields, whether they are psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, teachers, or whatever’ (Foucault in Defert, 2013, p. 58). Unsurprisingly, within the discipline of social work, many writers have applied Foucauldian theorisation to try and grasp the meaning and intent of the profession and the social world in which it operates (see, e.g. Chambon, Irving, & Epstein, 1999; Garrity, 2010; Gilbert & Powell, 2010; Powell, 2013; Winter & Cree, 2016).

This contribution questions Foucault’s conceptualisations particularly associated with two, not easily separable, concepts: the relations of power and governmentality. First, attention is devoted to his articulation of the concepts in, for example, courses he gave at the Collège de France in the 1970s. Arguably, there has not been sufficient attention paid to these lectures within the social work literature. The second part of the article, initially focussing on the contribution of Jacques Donzelot, briefly dwells on attempts to fruitfully apply Foucault’s theorisation to social work. The third part – the Discussion – suggests that, for a social work readership, there are fundamental problems with Foucauldian approaches. Here, the focus is on two dimensions. First, it is maintained that the theorisation of power – with its tendency to emphasis ‘soft’ power – fails to appreciate the continuing significance of hierarchical and coercive power. This is reflected, at a macro-level, in Foucault’s defective analysis of the power of the state and, at a micro level, in his jarring analysis of sexualised interactions involving adults and children. Second, it is argued that some attempts to ‘apply’ Foucauldian reasoning within social work risk promoting politically passive forms of theory and practice which can only bolster the status quo. This is especially the case with contributions situated within the field of Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ studies.

Foucault, power and governmentality

Power

According to Foucault (1990), power [pouvoir] tends to be omnipresent, fluid, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted and ineradicable. It is ‘produced from one moment to the next … Power is everywhere’ (p. 93). As Elden (2017) explains, power is

not a top-down model of domination, concentrated on a single source and exercised over those who do not have it; it is not focused in spectacular bursts or displays. Rather it operates through … a micro-physics of small actions and continual operations. Power operates within society, from within a network of relations. (p. 30)

In the 1970s, Foucault (1991) charted how disciplinary power could be distinguished from sovereign power. However, rather than perceiving new penal procedures as more ‘rational and humane’, Foucault sees them as having put in place different kinds of ‘rationalities and logics for understanding … The old feudal power was being replaced by a new form of “micro-physical” power’ (Danaher, Schirato, & Webb, 2000, p. 50). Here, the aspiration is to produce docile dispositions compliant not only within the confined space of the prison, but also within other sites such as military barracks, schools, hospitals and factories. Such organisational forms, as well as seeking to instil appropriate mind-sets, managed and monitored the movement of bodies in regulatory ways (Garrett, 2010). Institutional timetables dictated when events and processes should occur (and not occur), how much distance there should be between desks in a school or beds in a workhouse or hospital ward. The aim is to routinise patterns of movement and to situate bodies in certain places at specific moments in the day. Over time, this would become normalised and individuals located within these various institutional settings would require little external direction. Important here was the role of science, expertise and – seemingly objective – knowledge in providing an authoritative rationale for such processes and associated classificatory systems and order-making (Rose, 1989). Foucault’s concern, therefore, is to ‘examine how power relations of inequality and oppression are created and maintained in … subtle and diffuse ways through ostensibly humane’ social practices (McNay, 1994, p. 2). Even when individuals think they are at their `most free, they are in fact in the grip of an insidious power which operates not through direct forms of repression but through less visible strategies of “normalisation”’ (McNay, 1994, p. 5).

Subsequently revising his earlier theorisation, Foucault arrives at the understanding that modernity’s ‘signal trait’ is, in fact, biopower and not disciplinary power (Behrent, 2016, p. 40). He associates biopower with the appearance of an ‘absolutely new political personage’, ‘the population’ in the 18th century (Foucault, 2009, p. 67). Biopolitics and biopower are illustrated by the emergence of the ‘technologies, knowledge, discourses, politics and practices used to bring about the production and management of a state’s human resources’ (Danaher et al., 2000, p. ix). Nevertheless, he remains intent on challenging the view that power only flows uni-directionally. In 1977, criticising ‘revolutionary’ thinking for having a ‘tendency’ ‘not to see power in any other form than the state apparatus’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 119), his theorisation ran counter to the arguments of many contemporary leftists, including those within the social work academy, who perceived power as being firmly in the hands of the ruling class and capitalist state (see, e.g. Corrigan and Leonard, 1978). Foucault begins, therefore, to articulate a theorisation of power starkly at odds with a Marxist understanding in which power is viewed as primarily determined by one’s relation to the means of production and distribution (Garrett, 2018a). He directly challenges this conceptualisation, dismissing the idea that power is ‘something in a society that some possess and others do not’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 227). In contrast, he argues that no binary exists, since there is no ‘all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations … no duality extending from top down … to the very depths of the social body’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 94).

Conceding that the Marxist ‘formula’ of power has ‘political value’, he nonetheless views it as inadequate for ‘historical analysis’ because power is not simply ‘possessed’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 227). For him, this perception is too crude as it fails to adequately recognise how power is truly exercised over the ‘whole structure of the social field, according to a whole system of relays, connections, points of support, of things as tenuous as the family, sexual relationships, housing and so on’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 228). Power is not something ‘acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 94).

According to this reasoning, power is ‘not an institution, and not a structure’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 93). It cannot be appropriated, wholly taken and utilised by one side (Foucault, 2015, p. 228). Rather, at every moment it is in play ‘in little singular struggles, with local reversals, regional defeats and victories, provisional revenges’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 228, emphases added). Implicitly, criticising what he views as a sloganising and erroneous conceptualisation, Foucault (2015) maintains that the ‘power relationship does not conform to the monotonous and definitive schema of oppression’ (p. 228).

Dangers exist, implies Foucault, in inflating the capacity of a seemingly ruling group to deploy power so as to entirely steer the course of events. Neither the ‘caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in society (and makes it function)’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 95, original emphasis). To comprehend power, therefore, it is vital to analyse the ‘most diverse and specific manifestations rather than focussing on its most centralized forms’ (McNay, 1994, p. 3). However, the problem here is that we still tend to be in thrall to anachronistic, hierarchical ideas about power better suited to different historical epochs, with ‘representations of power’ still under the ‘spell of the monarchy’ (Foucault, 1990, pp. 88–89). As Foucault (1990) famously asserts, in ‘political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king’ (pp. 88–89). However, conceiving of power ‘without the king’ is deemed to be crucial (Foucault, 1990, p. 91). Power must not be ‘sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 93). We must ‘construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as the model and code’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 90). This is the aspect of power relations Foucault ‘calls a microphysics rather than a macrophysics of power’ (McNay, 1994, p. 3, original emphasis).

Foucault (1991) asserts that there is a need to ‘cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces’ (p. 194). There is a pervasive ‘tendency not to recognize the latter except in the negative and emaciated form of prohibition’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 86). Foucault endeavours, therefore, to reformulate the ‘negative conception of power as repression to account for the conflictual, unstable and empowering elements inherent in any set of social relations’ (McNay, 1994, p. 3). Power is ‘not evil’, but is associated with ‘strategic games’ (Foucault, 1988b, p. 18).

Governmentality

Attempting to identify shifts taking place from the 16th century onwards, Foucault (2009) reluctantly settles for the term ‘governmentality’ which he deems to be an ‘ugly’ word (p. 115). Given the political and economic turbulence of the late 1970s, his ruminations may seem unduly abstract and disconnected from the world of social work in the second decade of the 21st century. However, those who attended his Collège de France lectures ‘always took away from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events’ (Ewald and Fontana, 2009, p. xv). On occasions, Foucault (2009) renders this connection explicit; for example, in his assertion that we now ‘live in the era of governmentality’ (p. 109).

Many people ‘govern – the father of a family, the superior in a convent, the teacher, the master in relation to the child or disciple – so there are many governments’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 93). However, across all these spheres, government has much the same purpose: ‘it arranges things’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 98). Government is defined as a right way of arranging things in order to lead them. This is not a matter of crudely imposing laws, but of managing affairs in a more subtle and tactical fashion to ensure that matters are appropriately ordered and disposed. Governing is, therefore, different from ‘reigning or ruling’ and not the same as ‘commanding’ or ‘laying down the law’ (Foucault, 2009, pp. 115–116).

Foucault’s intention is to chart how the ‘lineaments of this new understanding of governmental reason slowly cohere in thought and practice from the sixteenth century onwards, reaching its fullest expression in the neoliberal regimes of the late 20th century onwards’ (McNay, 2009, p. 57). In his analysis of the evolving ‘art of government’, Foucault (2008) wants to ascertain the ‘way of governing expands, how it contracts, how it is extended to a particular domain and how it invents, forms, and develops new practices’ (p. 2, 6). Such shifts, apparent in a series of treatises, reflect a new interest in how populations were imagined, discussed and acted upon. Maintaining his focus on Europe, he identifies a growing preoccupation, within intellectual discourses, with how populations should be governed, by whom, to what extent and by which methods. Relating this notion to our period of neoliberal globalism, this policy concern is highlighted in terms of the ‘selective logic’ currently distinguishing between ‘desired’ and ‘undesired’ migrants with a new emphasis being placed on ‘migrants’ presumed ‘utility’ [or otherwise] to the nation and its welfare (Keskinen, Norocel, & Jørgensen, 2016, p. 324).

These emerging arts of government, partly based on the model of the family, soon begin to be applied to the ‘problematic of population’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 105). Thus, the family changes from ‘being a model to being an instrument … a privileged instrument for the government of the population’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 105). However, Foucault (2009) is also keen to identify how older ways of governing continue to influence newer methods: for example, the continuing significance, for pastoral power, of the figure of the shepherd who was in charge of the salvation of his flock and keeps watch and remains vigilant with ‘regard to possible misfortune’ (p. 127). According to Foucault, a crisis within the Christian pastorate, prompted by an inability to continue to regulate conduct, is one of the factors contributing to the proliferation of alternative governmentality discourses. The pastorate does not disappear in the 16th century, but newer forms of ‘conducting’ and ‘directing’ become more prominent (Foucault, 2009, p. 231).

The whole notion of conduct and how ‘one conducts oneself’ and ‘lets oneself be conducted’ becomes a significant issue in the late Middle-Ages (Foucault, 2009, p. 193). Here focal questions include: ‘By whom do we consent to be directed … Toward what do we want to be led?’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 197). In his historical survey, Foucault examines the insurrections in conduct occurring towards the end of 15th century and at the beginning of 16th. He highlights the importance of the English Revolution (1642–1660) which includes the Civil War, the execution of King Charles I and the instigation of the Cromwellian Commonwealth (1649–1660). Here, ‘different forms of religious community and religious organization are one of the major axes and one of the great stakes in all the struggles’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 228). Leaping forward, he also suggests that the Bolchevik Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 includes ‘a whole aspect of insurrections of conduct, [of which] the Soviets … were one, but only one, expression’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 228). Arguably, this is a comment that highlights the inadequacy of a conceptual framing aiming to house a disparate assortment of rebellions and revolutions under the expansive rubric of ‘insurrections of conduct’.

Having briefly surveyed – in his own words – some of Foucault's ideas in relation to power and governmentality, we will turn to examine how social work has engaged with this theorisation.

Social work, power and governmentality

Jacques Donzelot may have been one of the first – certainly the most influential – writers attempting to directly connect Foucault’s ideas about relations of power and governmentality to social work. In his Policing of Families, initially published in France in 1977 (Donzelot, 1979), the French sociologist explores how the family functioned prior to the Revolution of 1789 when it constituted the ‘smallest political organization possible’. Here, the male ‘head of the family’ was able to exercise wide discretionary power (Donzelot, 1979, p. 48). According to Donzelot (1979, p. 51), the storming of the Bastille was performed by those whom the ‘socio-familial apparatus could not keep in check’. On a more abstract level, the Revolution ‘constituted the symbolic destruction par excellence of family arbitrariness and its collusion with royal sovereignty’ (Donzelot, 1979, p. 51). Following the turmoil of the Revolution, and the ensuing period of political reaction, a key challenge was to ‘reorganize the labouring classes in a disciplinary way when the ancient ties of fellowship and vassalage no longer attached them to the social order’ (Donzelot, 1979, p. 54).

Clearly, this question relates to Foucault’s concerns about power and ‘government’ and what is regarded as the appropriate degree of distance between the state and individual families. Donzelot (1979, p. 55) foregrounds the role of philanthropy and philanthropic intervention which is

not to be understood as a naively apolitical term signifying a private intervention in the sphere of so-called social problems, but must be considered as a deliberate depoliticizing strategy for establishing public services and facilities at a sensitive point midway between private initiative and the state.

Influenced by Foucault’s conceptual perspective explored in his mid-1970’s lectures on the ‘Abnormal’ (Foucault, 2016) and Discipline and punish (Foucault, 1991), Donzelot argues that dispensing advice was central to philanthropic endeavours. Material aid might be provided, but only after careful examination of the circumstances of the specific family in question. This approach involved, therefore, ‘continuous surveillance’ and ‘full penetration into the details of family life’ (Donzelot, 1979, p. 69).

From the late 1880s until the period shortly before the First World War (1914–1918), several pieces of legislation lead to the ‘gradual transfer of sovereignty from the “morally deficient” family to the body of philanthropists, notables, magistrates, and children’s doctors’ (Donzelot, 1979, p. 83). This process involved the erosion of ‘family autonomy’ and new forms of tutelage (Donzelot, 1979, p. 89). The construction of a ‘whole series of bridges and connections between Public Assistance, juvenile law, medicine and psychiatry’ also took place (Donzelot, 1979, p. 89). Here, the theme of ‘prevention’ fulfils a role in uniting these often disparate fields and disciplines. Redolent of Foucault’s ideas on governmentality, Donzelot (1979, p. 92) argues that what was occurring was a ‘transition from a government of families to a government through the family’ with the family increasingly becoming a ‘relay’ for a range of ‘social imperatives’. The analysis situates social work prominently within these historical and social shifts occurring in France. Indeed, although formerly a rather marginal figure, even by the beginning of the 20th century, the social worker gradually usurps the ‘teacher in the mission of civilising the social body’ (Donzelot, 1979, p. 96).

Donzelot largely concentrated on France and his analysis met with a good deal of criticism on publication. Bourdieu felt Policing the Family revealed the contempt the author had for social workers (Pestana, 2012, p. 137). For others, the book appeared to argue that liberty was simply the ‘absence of misery’ with Donzelot ‘idealising misery and violence’ as an illustration of ‘some kind of popular autonomy’ (Pestana, 2012, p. 137). He also ignored that there exist ‘forms of intervention in the lives of subjects that enhance and do not diminish their freedom’ and ‘capabilities’ (Pestana, 2012, pp. 137–138).

Feminist authors deservedly criticised facets of Donzelot’s Foucauldian analysis. In 1982, Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh (2015, p. 99) took aim at the book’s presentation and the ‘superior tone of the text’ with its ‘self-conscious literary pretentions’, ‘Olympian detachment’ and ‘pseudo-scientificity’. Rejecting the Marxist analysis that the family is functionally necessary for capitalism, Donzelot honed in on the ‘alliance’ constructed between moral philanthropy, feminists and women more generally. Indeed, Donzelot (1979) argued that the ‘woman, the housewife and attentive mother’ colluded with the state and philanthropists to ‘stamp out the spirit of independence in the working man’ (p. 36). As Barrett and McIntosh (2015) concluded:

Underlying The Policing of Families is a very familiar theme. The authoritarian patriarchal family is mourned, and women are blamed for the passing of this organic social order. The text is incipiently anti-feminist, and even at times explicitly conjures up … the reader’s sympathy for the ‘poor family’ and the henpecked husband. (p. 104)

Published in France over 30 years after the end of the Second World War, the book’s title implicitly referenced the Régime de Vichy and equates social workers, surveilling and intervening in the family, with the role of the collaborationist police and gestapo. However, Donzelot influenced many UK-based social work educators (see, e.g. Parton, 1991).

In North America, where Foucauldian scholarship is vast, Chambon et al. (1999) later produced a thoughtful and influential edited collection. Chambon recognised that a Foucauldian approach collides – or at best exists in tension with – focal and embedded tenets of social work related personhood and self-determination (Biestek, 1975). Indeed, part of Foucault’s intellectual project is concerned with ‘uncovering the making of the contemporary “self” and the mechanisms that constitute this self’. In short, the self ‘cannot be understood outside of history’ (Chambon, 1999, p. 52). Nonetheless, Foucault’s attempts to ‘dislodge monolithic ways of defining the self and to locate clients and workers within cultural and institutional arrangements and within systems of power’ might still be helpful in eroding the solidity of prescriptive ideas about normality and appropriate forms of personhood (Chambon, 1999, p. 59). Foucault’s historicising of the self – his seeking to situate it within specific historical contexts and contemporaneous dominant discourses – might, for example, beneficially aid practitioners in better comprehending and contesting contemporary dividing practices and what are currently viewed as unhealthy or, more ambiguously, disreputable dispositions and forms of conduct.

In short, runs the argument, Foucault’s ‘toolbox’ contributes something that may be particularly helpful for the profession (Manias and Street, 2000). What is more, the aspiration to magnify micropractices and ‘otherwise dull details’ is ‘highly compatible with social work’ (Chambon, 1999, p. 61; see also Garrett, 2018b). Unquestionably, this type of focus on the quotidian and the ordinarily unexamined is vital in aiding critical social work inquiry. It entails a sustained and detailed exploration of the often ‘very fine, if not insidious, mechanisms of control and norm setting’ present within ‘contemporary norms of professional social work training’ (Chambon, 1999, p. 61). Similarly, dwelling on naming practices and the terms and phrases applied to, for example, particular individuals, groups, occurrences and practices merit scrutiny and analysis as part of an overarching, critical and quizzical approach.

However, in what follows, it will be suggested that there are problems with Foucauldian approaches. Two dimensions are dwelt on: the tendency to overemphasise ‘soft’ power and to insufficiently recognise the potency of hierarchical and coercive power; the risk that Foucauldian perspectives provide a basis for politically passive thinking and practice within social work.

Discussion: Problematising Foucauldian social work

Over-emphasising ‘soft’ power and neglecting hierarchical and coercive power

At the macro-level, the changes Foucault maps relating to the new arts of government, emerging in the sixteenth century, conjures a picture which is far too consensual in that he disproportionately emphasises the more gentle, manipulative ways of managing people. In this sense, he is overly attuned to emerging forms of ‘administration’ and the gradual appearance of a governing ‘ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 108). Hence, he fails to take into account the fact that the institutions intent on instilling docile dispositions were also apt to be violent and resorted to brutal methods of discipline and degradation (Garrett, 2009). For example, Smith (2011, p. 11) wryly observes that Foucault fails to acknowledge the ambiguity of the figure of the shepherd. The pastoral care they devote to their flock, discussed in detail by Foucault, is not for ‘love of them nor to provide for their well-being … It is to enhance their value’ prior to sale and slaughter.

Foucault’s attention is, therefore, disproportionately devoted to the more subtle mechanisms crafted to achieve order and an appropriate arrangement of things. This aspect of Foucault' work is recognised by Dean (2002, p. 38), a prominent governmentality theorist, who acknowledges that, despite the concentration on ‘mentalities and devices’, there should not be an analytical neglect of the more ‘coercive, binding or obligatory dimensions of liberal governmental programmes and practices’. This understanding has contemporary resonance in the sphere of social work with children and families where ‘empowerment’ talk can quickly evaporate and the law can be deployed to coercively remove a child if the parents are deemed irrevocably recalcitrant and unwilling to ‘co-operate’ with the relevant service providers (Broadhurst et al., 2015). Relatedly, some writers have explored how social work ideas about ‘empowerment’ can become sullied in the context of case recording practices in which ‘one class of people is captured in writing by members of another social class’ (Margolin, 1997, p. 150). Relatedly, social work scholars from the Global South have also questioned how the power relations dictated by international bodies, such as the World Bank, are characterised by individuated neoliberal ‘empowerment’ discourses while implicitly denying the wider, more punitively coercive, social and economic structure. As Vandana Chaudhry (2018) maintains, such discourses and practices rely on particular ‘ideals of individual freedom, thus shifting attention away from both structural inequality and political practices of collective political struggle’ (original emphases) (p. 4).

Having abandoned his interrogation of the exploitative nature of capitalism by the early 1970s, Foucault lacks theoretical interest in the fact that workers must sell their labour power in order to survive (Garrett, 2009). Capitalism is inherently coercive and this has been especially evidenced throughout the period of neoliberal ‘austerity’ and it has prompted an increase in suicides among those deprived of social security benefits (Mills, 2018). Debt also continues to play an important role and it has had an enormously deleterious impact on many users of social work services and practitioners. The financialisation of the economy has furnished the ‘prerequisites for the dramatic growth of household debt’ and this has copper fastened the ‘connection between debt and discipline’ (Mahmud, 2012, pp. 474–475). Although under-theorised in Foucauldian analyses, contemporary levels of indebtedness are likely to materially shape individual and collective dispositions and behaviours. For example, in the UK, young people now graduate from university with an average debt of more than £50,000. It is not unlikely, therefore, that this burden may help to foster particularly compliant attitudes within the workplace. Burdensome debt is, in fact, likely to be a more effective way of structuring conduct than the rarefied strategies and tactics so preoccupying many contemporary Foucauldian theorists.

Related to Foucault’s theoretical diminution of the power of the capitalist state, his body of work seems unable to account for the subsequent growth, as witnessed by many social workers located within the criminal justice system, of mass incarceration (Garrett, 2016; Sheehan, 2011). Here, it is vital to ‘construe the prison as a core political institution’ and not, as understood within the Foucauldian paradigm, as a waning and declining site of discipline and state power (Wacquant, 2009, p. xviii). Since about the year 2000 the world prison population total has grown by almost 20%, which is slightly above the estimated 18% increase in the world’s general population over the same period. The female prison population total has increased by 50% since about 2000, while the equivalent figure for the male prison population is 18% (Walmsley, 2017, p. 3). The recorded total of prisoners is 10.35 million, but it may be in ‘excess of 11 million’ (Walmsley, 2017, p. 3). The US, for example, has more than 2.2 million prisoners; 698 prisoners per 100,000 of the national population (Walmsley, 2017, p. 3). The bloated size of the US prison population comfortably outstrips the national population of a number of European States including Estonia (1.31 million), Latvia (1.99 million), Kosovo (1.81 million), Macedonia (2.07 million) and Slovenia (2.06 million) (extrapolated from Walmsley, 2017). Giving this development a neoliberal inflection, the US criminal justice system – especially – seems to be increasingly furnishing market opportunities with all 50 states defraying ‘prison costs by charging prisoners some form of pay-to-stay fees’ (Page and Soss, 2018, pp. 144–145).

As we have seen, Foucault is intent on contesting the idea that – what we might refer to as – real power is entirely located within the apparatus of the capitalist state (Althusser, 1971). For him, the state apparatus merely constitutes a ‘concentrated form, of even a support structure, of a system of power that goes much further and deeper’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 229). It follows, therefore, that political strategies have to be tapered accordingly since ‘neither control nor destruction’ of the state apparatus would ‘suffice to transform or get rid of a certain type of power’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 229). For some, Foucauldian theory does provide analytical room for thinking about strategies of resistance and social transformation because power relations, while fluid and ubiquitous, are also mutable. Yet, as Badiou (2005, p. 4) asserts, despite Foucault’s claim that power produces resistance he appears unable to account for the source of such resistance or the mechanism responsible for this ‘strategic codification of these points of resistance’. If the ‘subject – right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts – is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance?’ (Badiou, 2005, p. 4).

At the micro-level, the theoretical dilution of coercive and hierarchical power becomes central in Foucault’s remarks on adults having sex with children and in his comments relating to sexual assault. Perhaps partly because, in many quarters, Foucault is still ‘imagined as an unadorned radical’ (Dean, 2018, p. 26), these contributions are invariably occluded when social work educators have recourse to him. However, this lacuna is immensely important because practitioners are frequently enmeshed in assessments related to the harm and protection of children. Foucault’s views are also significant in illuminating core problems with his theoretical engagement with issues pertaining to power.

In a 1978 exchange with two gay activists, on the topic of morality and the law, Foucault defines as ‘extremely questionable’, the ‘psychological knowledge’ underpinning the legal prohibition of adults having sexual relationships with children (Foucault in Foucault et al., 1988, p. 277). Even more vehemently, he adds that to ‘suppose that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and is incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are quite intolerable, quite unacceptable’ (Foucault in Foucault et al., 1988, p. 284). As to the thorny issue of consent, Foucault considers ‘an age barrier laid down by law … not [to] have much sense’ since, in his opinion, a ‘child may be trusted to say whether or not he was subjected to violence’ (Foucault in Foucault et al., 1988, p. 284).

Such comments may not be untypical at this time given that the notion that adults – mostly meaning men – should be permitted to engage in ‘consensual’ sex with children was viewed, by some, as forming a legitimate part of an encompassing project seeking greater social and sexual liberation (Freedland, 2014). Foucault’s distrust of the state and its experts entirely fits within this libertarian discourse. Furthermore, his perspective here is entirely in line with his ‘wider insistence on historicising and relativising’ (Philo, 2011, p. 124, original emphases). From ‘such a vantage-point’, he could hardly not be wary about ‘simplistic socio-legal depictions of paedophilia’ and strident adult/child binaries (Philo, 2011, p. 124). In this sense, it reflects Foucault’s’ theoretical consistency and ‘unnerving intellectual honesty’ (Philo, 2011, p. 125). That said, such a stance can, of course, also be perceived as naïve and jarring in the context of child protection social work. Here, ensuring the welfare of the child is paramount frequently entails recourse to binaries and the reinforcement of adult-centric perceptions.

Equally troubling is Foucault’s (2016) recounting of the case of Charles Jouy, an agricultural labourer he describes as the ‘village idiot’ who assaulted a ‘little girl’ called Sophie Adam in the late 1860s (p. 292). Foucault (2016) explains that Jouy

dragged young Sophie Adam (unless it was Sophie Adam who dragged Charles Jouy) into the ditch alongside the road to Nancy. There, something happened: almost rape perhaps. Anyhow, Jouy very decently gives five sous to the little girl who immediately runs to the fair to buy some roasted almonds. (p. 292)

Charles Jouy, it appears, was later confined in an asylum, while Sophie Adam was sent to a House of Correction; Foucault considers these official responses as examples of how psychiatry and forms of assessment were beginning to function during this period. Previously, members of the community existed in a ‘social landscape’ where such incidents were not uncommon and the matter was unlikely to have been taken further. There existed a ‘peripheral, floating sexuality’ which brought ‘children and marginal adults together’ and it did not generate this type of concern (Foucault, 2016, p. 296). Ordinarily, the Adam assault would appear ‘perfectly commonplace and anodyne’ (Foucault, 2016, p. 296). However, Foucault (2016) tells his audience, the incident provides evidence of a turning towards ‘higher authorities of technical, medical and judicial control’ with psychiatrists claiming ‘Jouy’s conduct for their competence’ (pp. 296–297). This is, of course, a typical reading by Foucault, but even Stuart Elden (2016, p. 24), a leading Foucauldian scholar, criticises such inappropriate and ‘weak attempts at humour’. More fundamentally, Foucault’s playfully trivialising tone and ill-judged levity downplay the seriousness of the sexual assault on a child.

Moral judgement aside and looking through a more ‘theoretical’ lens, Foucault’s dubious perspective disregards how power dynamics operate in relation to an individual or a group’s structural location (determined by class, but also gender, generation/age, ‘race’/ethnicity) and how this impacts on and shapes individual encounters and interactions. For example, adults are likely to have more material power (associated with economic standing, physical size and strength) and more symbolic power than children even within, what Foucault dubs, regimes of ‘floating sexuality’.

Providing the basis for politically passive thinking and practice within social work

Despite often being imbued with an anti-communist and cold war sensibility, Foucault’s overtly political interventions pointed to his willingness to become an activist and to express solidarity with oppressed groups. Here, his actions were underpinned by an intellectual interest in parrhesia (Foucault, 2015): derived from Greek antiquity, this is founded on the idea of ‘fearless speech’ and the need to speak the truth to power (Christie and Sidhu, 2006). Writing in 1984, he claims that ‘we are all members of the community of the governed’ and so we are ‘obliged to show mutual solidarity’ with those subjected to maltreatment by states. Hence, there has to be a preparedness to ‘stand up and speak to those who hold power’ (Foucault, 2002, p. 475). Such remarks are somewhat similar to the formulation of the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) which asserts that there is a requirement to work in ‘solidarity’ with those subject to ‘social conditions that contribute to social exclusion, stigmatisation or subjugation’ (IFSW, 2012).

However, this arguable affinity between Foucault’s ethic of ‘solidarity’ and the stance of the IFSW is mostly absent in the coolly detached literature on governmentality (Dean, 1994, 1999, 2002; Rose, 1985, 1989, 1998). Indeed, the tonality of governmentality studies contributions, within and beyond social work, can be problematic as these frequently imply that the authors working within this theoretical framework possess a capacity, not accorded to the rest of us, to escape the processes they describe. Feigning a, seemingly, dispassionate, objective and panoramic perspective, they resemble ‘foreign correspondents’ unwilling to intervene in the events on which they are reporting (Fitzpatrick, 2002, p. 14). On account of this orientation, the ‘dispossessed’ are likely to look on this stance as little more than ‘affluent self-indulgence’ (Fitzpatrick, 2002, p. 14). For example, the author of one social work article exploring the evolution of services for children and families claims that her theoretical perspective derived ‘broadly from the work of Michel Foucault … does not attempt to deduce developments to be “good” or “bad” but rather attempts to capture the nuances, essence, tendency and potential of the particular moments’ explored (McGregor, 2014, pp. 772–773). Somewhat similar to the ‘foreign correspondent’ attitude identified by Fitzpatrick, the author does not aspire to form a view or to calibrate a judgement. Nor is the aspiration to determine which societal force might be prompting events to unfold in a particular way. Rather, everything is perceived as contingent and arbitrary. Consequently, exhortations directed at practitioners to promote ‘social justice’, foundational to social work as an ethical enterprise, are effectively nullified if the aim is not, as we have seen, to assess the evolution of the profession in terms of whether what is occurring is progressive (‘good’) or retrogressive (‘bad’). There is, seemingly, no normative ground or political space available from which to evaluate. Following this logic, it is impossible to assess whether, say, cuts to social services for disabled children and their families are justified. However, by not condemning and campaigning against such cuts to services, social work drifts into a politics of abdication and merely functions to help consolidate the way things are presently arranged by neoliberal elites. Moreover, what might be termed, the governmentality bystander position is, in itself, a product and a reflection of thinly veiled social privilege.

However, social workers have a ‘responsibility to promote social justice, in relation to society generally, and in relation to the people with whom they work’ (IFSW, 2012, emphasis added). This ethical imperative compels practitioners and educators to challenge ‘unjust policies and practices’ (IFSW, 2012). The IFSW asserts, in fact, that there is ‘duty’ for social worker to ‘bring to the attention of their employers, policy makers, politicians and the general public situations where resources are inadequate or where distribution of resources, policies and practices are oppressive, unfair or harmful’. Without the ‘emphasis on social justice, there is little if any need for social work or social workers. The skills and knowledge base of the profession are not unique’ (Bisman, 2004, p. 15). This perception has been echoed by other social work educators who recognise that championing social justice is a ‘principle that constitutes the profession’s organizing value and moral responsibility’ (Olson, Reid, Threadgill-Goldson, Riffe, & Ryan, 2013, p. 24). Running counter to much of contemporary Foucauldian reasoning, this social justice imperative demands, therefore, partisan identification with the dominated and exploited and those labour and social movements struggling to change the world. In short, there is an ethical obligation to differentiate, in policy terms, between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.

Conclusion

Contentiously, Duschinsky and Rocha (2012) claim that no ‘one since Marx has made a more profound change to the way in which we think about society, power and politics than Foucault’ (p. 14). His ‘political significance’ lies in the attention he gave to ‘areas often considered politically as well as socially marginal – madness, imprisonment, the medical clinic, the origins of our ideas of and on sexuality’ (Reader in Elden, 2017, p. 188). Clearly, this short article has only excavated just a few of the sites Foucault chose to explore (see also Garrett, 2019b). A panoply of other themes could have been unearthed and been the focus for discussion: for example, his fascinating, but politically ambiguous, interrogation of the origins of neoliberalism (Foucault, 2008; Garrett, 2019a). Here, the main interest has been on his theorisation of the relations of power and, relatedly, governmentality. In this context, it has been argued that there are serious problems associated with Foucault’s conceptualisations and with some of the endeavours made to apply his ideas to social work.

This article has maintained there is a need to engage with and challenge some of Foucault’s focal ideas which have percolated into the profession’s academic literature and, more broadly, into social work education. Despite his lacking a convincing theory of social change and of a normative base from which to evaluate it, this does not mean that Foucauldian thinking should be entirely abandoned within the discipline. Rather, the social work academy might aspire to be more critical in responding to and applying Foucault’s compelling contributions. Indeed, despite the potency of the Foucault ‘brand’ and the sheer symbolic weight of his intellectual standing, this task is vital.

Footnotes

Ethics

No ethics board considerations were necessary for this analysis.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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