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The premise of the paper is that Foucault's concept of governmentality has important but unacknowledged implications for understanding strategy. Highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the governmentality approach, the paper seeks to suggest how governmentality can be used to conceptualise strategy. More generally, the paper seeks to contribute to the body of research on governmentality articulated by authors such as Peter Miller, Ted O'Leary and Nikolas Rose.

The paper reprises the argument that accounting is constitutive of social relations. It proceeds to discuss Peter Miller, Ted O'Leary and Nikolas Rose's seminal contributions to the conceptual development of governmentality. In outlining their work, the paper highlights the significance accorded to the emergence of standard costing and scientific management and its subsequent role in developing both the strategies and structures of managerial capitalism. The paper examines how this, in turn, was pivotal to the emergence of strategy as an important means through which organisations began to understand and conceive of themselves. The paper rehearses the standard criticisms made of governmentality within the accounting literature, before arguing that the concept emerges intact from the critique levelled against it. Proceeding to summarise Foucault's radical conception of power, the paper notes the elusiveness of Foucault's relationship with strategy. Elaborating on the nature of governmentality, the paper employs the concept to re‐examine the managerial revolution. The objective is to explore its implications for understanding strategy.

The paper builds on the innovative work published in accounting on governmentality to construct an account of the emergence of the managerial revolution. This yields important insights on strategy. In particular, the paper challenges Chandler, arguing that the birth of strategy is best seen as a post‐hoc rationalisation produced by the emergence of systematic management and standard costing. The paper explores how governmentality might be developed to study strategy. The overarching message of the paper is that there is a need to rethink strategy as a language and social practice. Strategy, therefore, must be understood as much as a cultural and political project than as an economic one.

The paper highlights how strategy can be regarded as a cultural and political phenomenon. This opens up the possibility of accounts of strategy that are firmly grounded within studies of organisations, politics and society. Dispensing with neo‐economic notions of strategy, the paper advocates writing Foucault into strategic management.

The combination of heightened emphasis on risk and its management in mental health, the precautionary principle, the idea of genetic susceptibility, advances in screening technology, and the promise of preventive pharmaceutical intervention is highly potent, especially in a world in which preventive prescription of psychiatric medication has become routine. Psychiatric professionals are given the obligation of governing, and being governed, in the name of risk, and in a political and public sphere suffused by the dread of insecurity. But there are risks in seeking to govern risk in a biological age. In this paper Nikolas Rose argues that the public, politicians and professionals alike might do better to refuse the demands of risk, and learn to live with uncertainty.

A lament of the educated during the past few decades has been over the incursion of work into private life. In the modern industrialized world, where consumer pleasures and entertainments abound, it is ironic that those best positioned to purchase them are often too engrossed in work to take the time to do so. The most skilled, privileged and well-remunerated in our society are consumed by work. In the nineteenth century, for the most educated and privileged to be so occupied would have meant social exclusion. Paid work (or sold-time) was a form of debasement; it brutalized the mind making the individual unfit for the enjoyment of social virtues (Mills, 1956, pp. 215–218; Sombart, 1915, p. 18). Now, 100 years later, the circumstances are neatly inverted. Work is a source of social status and privilege and those without work are devalued and excluded. Nikolas Rose (1990, pp. 160–161) describes the modern “world of work” as “a realm in which productivity is to be enhanced, quality assured and innovation fostered through the active engagement of the self-fulfilling impulses of the employee.” In other words, the individual’s desires for “autonomy” and “creativity” map neatly onto the organization’s search “for excellence and success.” It is an elective affinity as elegant as Protestantism with capitalism.

Depressive disorders are a focus of growing social and economic concern. While antidepressant medications are widely accepted, they are ineffective for nearly 40% of users, and cause numerous adverse drug reactions. The pharmacogenomics of depression attempts to better understand the role of genetic variation in antidepressant metabolism in the hope of improving drug efficacy and tolerability. However, the development and delivery of genome‐based antidepressants face many hurdles. In this paper we provide an overview of the potential impact of the pharmacogenomics of depression on public mental health care by focusing on the social and ethical issues at stake. These include questions about genetic testing, informed consent, drug access, and market fragmentation. We end the paper with a brief discussion of the wider context and how the pharmacogenomics of depression relates to broader trends in psychiatry and biomedicine.

The ways in which the brain, as mapped by bioscience, has become popularly understood as the locus and determinant of the self is a topic of increasing importance within medical sociology. Nikolas Rose has influentially chronicled the emergence of a “neurochemical self,” determined by brain chemistry and thus fluid, malleable, and open to improvement via increasingly fine-tuned psychopharmacology. This chapter argues for the contemporaneous emergence of a neurostructural self, intrinsic to the growing neurodiversity movement. Drawing on trends in contemporary neuroscience and biological psychiatry, this model of “brainhood” conceptualizes the brain-as-self as a material system: governed by physical laws, and thus both morally innocent and robustly predictable. Rather than being infinitely open to intervention and optimization, however, the neurostructural self is imagined as fixed and immutable, resistant to the medical intervention and presumption of infinite flexibility inherent within neurochemical selfhood. This chapter draws on a two-year ethnographic study of autism spectrum disorders in North America, investigating the ways in which circulating discourses about medicine, culture, and identity are shaping the emergence, development and use of autism spectrum diagnoses in contexts of daily practice. In this chapter, I explore why individuals with the autism spectrum disorder known as Asperger's syndrome are particularly effective examplars, consumers, and producers of this neurostructural selfhood.

Law attempts to govern life and death through the appropriation of images which give a fantasy of control over death. The functioning of the thanatopolitical state is underpinned by a perceived control over death and its representation. This means of controlling death is challenged when someone wishes to die in an untimely fashion. Death may be timely when the State engages in the officially sanctioned killing of the death penalty but not when the individual assumes such a power to decide. When an individual goes before the law to obtain a right to die, instead of confronting death, legal institutions evade the issue and instead talk about life, and its sacred and inviolable nature. Yet, in the same move, many exceptions to this sacred quality of life are carved out. One can see an example of this phenomenon in the area of Supreme Court decision making on physician-assisted suicide. In Washington v. Glucksberg the applicants had died by the time of the Supreme Court’s decision. Where did they go? Were they ever really there for the law? The Supreme Court decision attempts to recompose the notion of identic wholeness in the face of bodies associated with death and decay. It is, in other words, an attempt to arrest the process of death by composing a narrative which valorises life. The case becomes a narrative about the threat to life or, more precisely, a threat to a particular way of life. In other words, the state’s interest in preserving life becomes the interest in preserving the life of the state. The state must live on. The question then moves from being one of whether the individual applicant in a case concerning physician-assisted suicide should live or die, to one which asks should we the court live or die?

This article seeks to investigate the individualistic ideas, practices, and student identities that developed in correspondence education in the mid twentieth century. In doing so a number of questions about the individualistic pedagogy and identities in correspondence education are posed. How was individualism to be achieved? What pedagogic practices were used? Who could students learn from? What was the desired identity of the students? How were the student’s material circumstances understood? In attempting to answer these questions the article aims to increase understanding of the individual pedagogy and the construction of the ‘independent learner’ at work in correspondence education during its golden age.

The objective of this paper is to recognize the richness in exploring the inter‐linkages between accounting and popular culture. Such an investigation should reap returns in not only furthering an understanding of accounting, but also the ways and means in which notions of accountability and audit permeate our everyday lives. In addition, it attempts to capture the significant transformative influence of accounting, and calculative practices more generally, in the actual shaping of the contours of the cultural context. Finally, it briefly introduces the six papers in this AAAJ special issue.

The paper draws on literature from the fields of both accounting and cultural studies to set out a theoretically informed framework for the future examination of the myriad ways in which accounting is entwined with the popular.

The paper argues a case for the study of accounting within the domain of popular culture, proposes two theoretical lenses from which to examine the inter‐linkages between these two disciplines, and presents a diverse range of research possibilities for further scholarly inquiry in the field.

Traditionally regarded as trivial and unworthy of academic attention, research into the regular rituals that pervade the everyday is now a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry among social and cultural theorists. Accounting researchers, however, have remained relatively aloof from this general trend, preferring to seek solace in the sphere of the corporation rather than the coffee shop. This paper is novel in that it attempts to broaden the scope of accounting scholarship into the new domain of popular culture.