Housing and ethopolitics: constructing identities of active consumption and responsible community

Recent developments in social housing policy, including large-scale stock transfers, have been proclaimed as marking ‘the death of council housing’ in the UK. The decline of public housing and new techniques for the governance of social housing provision are symbolic of the transformation of welfarist social regimes in advanced liberal democracies. This paper explores recent social housing policy in the UK and suggests that policy developments reflect changes in technologies for governing the conduct of social housing tenants and practitioners. The ethopolitics (Rose 2001) of social housing are characterized by emerging identities of active, entrepreneurial consumption and the invocation of responsibilized community. The paper examines how ethopower is manifested through technologies of social housing governance and identifies conflicts inherent within this new politics of conduct.     

Building ‘Community’: New Strategies of Governance in Urban China

Abstract

Under the planned economy China's urban population was largely immobile and governed through the socialist workunit (danwei). Market reforms begun in the 1980s have culminated in the last decade with a dramatic decline of the state-sector and the emergence of a more mobile, heterogeneous and economically independent urban population. In rendering the old system obsolete, these trends have led the Chinese government to rethink its strategies for urban governance. At the turn of the millennium, a new campaign to ‘build communities’ was launched throughout the nation with the objective of establishing the residential ‘community’ as the new basic unit of urban governance. This paper explores the logic behind this policy innovation and analyzes the techniques adopted to operationalize ‘community governance’.     

Governing buyers of sex in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

This paper examines the developing body of Chinese prostitution law, and the nature of its implementation, with reference to mainstream media controversy surrounding the case of a male academic penalized as a buyer of commercial sexual services in late 2004. It argues that the protagonist's highly public ‘fall from grace’ may owe more to the Chinese media's new capacity to act as part of a disciplinary apparatus that extends beyond the purview of the Party-state – via its claim to promote freedom of information – than the presumed repressive ethos of the Chinese Communist Party.     

Identity theft and the care of the virtual self

Abstract

This paper analyses how major institutions are publicly responding to the crime of identity theft. It concentrates on how individuals are encouraged to responsibilize themselves against this potentiality, and what they should do in the event they are victimized. These two distinct discourses (prevention and victimization) aim to fashion a hyper-vigilant citizen whose daily routines, home environment, consumption patterns and sense of self are being brought into accord with wider power dynamics. These measures can be understood as encouraging a care of the virtual self – a wider social project characteristic of an informational age that encourages individuals to reduce the risks and maximize the potentialities related to their data double. In the context of identity theft, however, institutionally promoted methods for the care for the virtual self transcend what is reasonably practicable for most citizens and mask the role played by major institutions in fostering the preconditions for identity theft.     

Regionalism through social policy: collective action and health diplomacy in South America

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the place of social policy as a driver of region building in South America. The contention is that while much has been written about economic integration, institutions and security communities in regionalism, a discussion of the significance of other regional projects has lagged behind. Social policy, particularly in the Americas, has been neglected as a policy domain in the account of regionalism. Changes in the political economy of Latin America in the last decade suggest that we need to engage afresh with regional governance and social policy formation in the Americas. By looking at the institutions, resources and policy action in the area of health within the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) this paper reconnects regionalism and social policy and explores two interrelated, yet largely unexplored, issues: the linkages between regional integration and social development beyond the historical hub of trade and finance; and the capacity of UNASUR to enable new policies for collective action in support of social development goals in the region, and to act as a broker of rights-based demands in global health governance. In so doing, the paper contributes towards a more nuanced understanding of regionalism and regionalization as alternative forms of regional governance.     

Vietnam’s ‘socialization’ policy and the moral subject in a privatizing economy

Abstract

The Vietnamese term for socialization, xã h?i hóa, is grounded in its history of socialist construction, originally referring to the collectivization of property and resources. Since the country shifted to a market economy, yet remaining under the leadership of the Communist Party, the term has come to imply the individualization of responsibilities and the privatization of public goods. As a policy, however, it continues to evoke the idioms of ‘the whole society’ or ‘all the people’ as the basis of wellbeing and development. This paper examines the practices of socialization as part of broader shifts in welfare provision and local dynamics of exemplarity. I show that socialization concerns not only the mobilization of resources, but also the production of a moral subject that is self-optimized and yet sensitized to helping others, self-governed and yet governable by the party state. In a socialist country that is rapidly marketising, this moral subject plays into governing rationalities that blends new-prudentialist logics with socialist genealogies, privatization with a notion of society within which individual actions can be made morally meaningful. While the tension and contestation induced by people’s greater burdens are immanent, the continued reference to collective idioms appeals to people’s moral sensibilities, and thus makes socialization meaningful to some extent, even as they resent the turn away from broad-based structures of wellbeing.     

The post‐Stalinist present and the Australian past

Abstract

Since 1979, housing reforms in China have been seen as successive state efforts to improve urban governance. The idea is that the state has all along failed to deliver housing efficiently and equitably through the work units and that it is believed that only through the recommodification of housing could the housing problem be ultimately resolved. The housing monetarization policy (HMP) was thus launched in 1998 to replace the long-standing in-kind housing subsidy under the old welfare housing system. The policy aims at providing workers with cash subsidies as part of their wage package to enable them to buy or rent their homes from the market. The purpose of this paper is to explain the implications of the HMP through a neoliberal urbanization perspective. Through the case study of Guiyang, it is argued that while the HMP is successful in improving certain historical housing inequalities, it does not primarily aim at eradicating housing inequalities. HMP has in fact led to more rather than less horizontal inequities. In addition, it is argued here that a market housing system is leading towards increasing urban poverty, greater social polarization and spatial segregation. To improve governance, China needs to keep neoliberal urbanization in check and pay serious attention to its adverse consequences during economic transformation.     

Model for Management of Public Funds Transfers in SICONV

This article consolidates the efforts of the Information Systems Research Group for the construction of a reference model for the management of agreements celebrated based on the Brazilian federal government＇s voluntary funds transfers. It presents the Reference Model for covenants＇ processes, which is the product of the third phase of this research project. This model will be used as reference in the fourth phase of this project, when it will be applied to a sample of covenants. Experience gained in this step will allow the consolidation of the Reference Model. An important contribution of this work is to facilitate the understanding of proposals, so processes analyzed can be improved and redesigned. Processes information, from organization to details of each activity, can then be disseminated to all interested parties. Results here presented are not final. They will serve as input to the next stage of the project, which is the Assessment of the Reference Model by selected Stadual and municipal governments. Each entity will contribute with its own perspective to improving the idealized model.