Editorial
Ulrich Bröckling: Gendering the Enterprising Self: Subjectification Programs and Gender Differences in Guides to Success
How-to-books about personality coaching and slf-improvement design a comprehensive model of the neoliberal subject: the enterprising self. Significantly, manuals for successfullly marketing 'Me Inc.' often rely on feminist and leftist arguments. Drawing on Michel Foucault's work on modern governmentality and Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation the first part of the article traces the contours of this figure. The second part studies women's guides to success and outlines in which ways the female entrepreneur of her self differs from her male counterpart.
Keywords: governmentality; neoliberal subject; self-help literature; self-improvement.
Kim Su Rasmussen: Michel Foucault og racismens idéhistorie (in Danish)
Knowledge, power and subjectification are often considered to be the main themes in the writings of Michel Foucault. The reflections on racism, in comparison, play a less significant role in his work. Foucault's considerations about racism are nonetheless worth highlighting, as they are marked by a rare originality and a will to contest more traditional perspectives on the history of European racism. The article outlines Foucault's notion of racism and argues that one of its important features is the definition of racism as a specific historical function of power. This conception of racism as a function of power encompasses a suggestive but still unexplored analytical potential for a critical reflection on the history of European racism.
Keywords: biopolitics; Foucault; intellectual history; racism.
Patrik Aspers: Identitetsformation i sociala konfigurationer (in Swedish)
The purpose of this article is to present a theoretical framework for analyzing the formation of identities. Individual and collective actors' identities are formed over time as a result of positioning and evaluation in what is called social configurations. Social configurations are characterized by order and values that guide, and are used for evaluation of, actors' behavior. Order in social configurations emerges according to two inverted logics: Status and Standard. Order according to Status in a configuration is a function of the firmness of actors' order of identities, which correspond with a value. Standard means that actors' order of identities is a function of how well they perform against the standard (value) that is used for evaluation. In Status the identities are more entrenched than the value, and in Standard the principle of evaluation (the value) is more entrenched than the identities of the actors. The suggested approach can handle institutionalized as well as pre-institutional aspects of social life. A more general point is that configurations are used to study how social order emerges and how it is reconstructed. The empirical examples come from the global garment industry, which has been studied with ethnographic methods.
Keywords: actor; Erving Goffman; garment industry; Harrison White; identity; market; social configuration.
Hubert Buch-Hansen: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences: An Interview with Roy Bhaskar
Critical realism is gradually gaining ground in the social sciences. In this interview the founder of the critical realist philosophy of science, Roy Bhaskar, gives an account of the overall developments in his thought. Having briefly accounted for his background and reasons for becoming a philosopher and having explained how he took reflections on certain natural scientific practices as his starting point in the development of his philosophy, Bhaskar moves on to outline the main differences between the natural and the social sciences and to discuss his attempt to transcend the dualisms of the social sciences. The critical realist approach to the agency-structure dualism is contrasted with Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration, and Bhaskar explains what he sees as the main difference between critical realism and poststructuralist discourse theory. Towards the end of the interview, Bhaskar deals with the latest developments in his thought and he reflects on the state of crisis in today's world.
Keywords: agency and structure; alienation; critical naturalism; critical realism; dialectics; discourse theory; dualisms.
*** Special Section on Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ***
Niels Albertsen: From Calvin to Spinoza: The New Spirit of Capitalism
Max Weber employed the concept of a spirit of capitalism only in the context of the historical emergence of modern capitalism. Following Luc Boltanski and Čve Chiapello this article presents a transformed concept that applies also to established capitalisms. The concept includes justificatory orders of worth, the 'grammars' of which are articulated by political philosophy. According to Boltanski and Chiapello a New Spirit of Capitalism has emerged since the 1980s. The new spirit is founded on a 'project-oriented' order of worth, which, they argue, does not yet have a grammar. Extending their argument, Spinoza is proposed as the grammarian. This implies the paradox that Spinoza, the philosopher of immanence, is turned into a grammarian of a transcendent order of worth. However, this paradox exactly preserves a central ingredient of Weber's concept: transcendence.
Keywords: capitalism; Deleuze; ideology; immanence; justification; Negri; Spinoza; spirit of capitalism; transcendence; Weber; Zizek.
Carl-Göran Heidegren: Social Characterology: From the Protestant Ethic, via the Social Ethic, to the Hacker Ethic
Starting out from Max Weber's The Protestant Etic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the article traces some waystations in the reception history of Weber's text. This article focuses on a number of authors - David Riesman, William H. Whyte, Daniel Bell and Pekka Himanen - who have used The Protestant Ethic as a reference point in their own endeavours to capture the spirit of their time. Key themes in the article are ways of life, the formation of social character and characterological struggles. The aim of the article is to highlight The Protestant Ethic as a living classic in sociology.
Keywords: characterological struggle; Hacker ethic; Protestant ethic; social character; Social ethic; way of life.
Antje Gimmler: Contextualized Action: Remarks on The Protestant Ethic
Max Weber's study on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is still the subject of an ongoing debate about the conceptualization of modernity, the role of religion in social change and not at least the interdependencies between structure and agent. This paper addresses mainly the third topic. The Protestant Ethic introduces the institutionalization of capitalism as a multi-factorial set of interdependencies between agent and structure along with surprising side effects and unintended consequences. This institutionalization pattern could be understood more precisely with the help of Weber's basic sociological categories on action. On this background the standard interpretation of Weber's concept of modernity has to be questioned - a possible new critical approach that is already visible in the recent discussion on multiple modernities.
Keywords: Max Weber; multiple modernities; Protestant Ethic; structure-agency-linkage.