The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters: The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology, by Nanna Mik-Meyer, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2017, 158 pp., £70.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781526110282

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Notes

1. It could (and perhaps should) be argued that this also inflicts a type of violence on Foucault’s work by slicing it into distinct phases. I think it best to allow Foucault to speak for himself on this issue. In his final course at the Collège de France in 1984, Foucault presents his research as ‘the analysis of complex relations between three distinct elements none of which can be reduced to or absorbed by the others, but whose relations are constitutive of each other. These three elements are: forms of knowledge (savoirs), studied in terms of specific modes of veridiction; relations of power, not studied as an emanation of a substantial and invasive power, but in the procedures by which people’s conduct is governed; and finally the modes of formation of the subject through practices of the self…[through] this triple theoretical shift… we can study the relations between truth, power, and the subject without ever reducing each of them to the others’ (Foucault 2011, p. 9).