Social Policy and Information Communication Technologies - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 219

work of French philosopher Michel Foucault in
the early 1980s, in the last ten years the govern-
mentality analytic has generated a massive body
of work that adopts the approach to provide new
insights across a wide range of domains.
Mitchell Dean, a leading governmentality
scholar, summarizes the conceptual approach as
follows:

those entities of which they dream and scheme.
(1990, p. 8)

While this perspective may give the impression
that “technologies of government” are subservient
to “political rationalities” by implementing the
latter, Miller and Rose acknowledge that there
is a 'complex interweaving of procedures for
representing and intervening' (1990, p. 7).
In the context of this chapter, the governmental-
ity approach helps to highlight the ways in which
ICTs are involved in processes of governing - or
what Foucault calls the “conduct of conduct” - and
can therefore be understood as an expression of
contemporary operations of power and rule. Of
course, the specific utilization of technologies
is extremely diverse. They can be mobilized by
totalitarian regimes to help coercively control
populations. Alternatively, more open liberal
democracies' use of ICTs often facilitate more
indirect forms of power, such as the use of mass
media to shape public opinion and govern through
experts (Miller and Rose, 2008, ch. 8).
Understanding government as involving
both expressions of political rationalities and
technologies of government provides a way in
which to engage with a discussion of ICTs and
social policy. Indeed, it should be noted that social
(and public) policy is itself both an expression
of political rationalities, but also a technology of
government (Henman, 2006b; Henman, 2009;
Walters, 2000).

[Governmentality] deals with how we think about
governing, with the different mentalities of govern-
ment. … It is a matter not of the representations
of individual mind or consciousness, but of the
bodies of knowledge, belief and opinion in which
we are immersed (Dean, 1999, p. 16).

To be sure, studies of governmentality are not
concerned with the way in which government is
thought as an idea, but how that “thought operates
within our organized ways of doing things, our
regimes of practices, and with its ambitions and
effects” (1999, pp. 17-18, emphasis in original).
Governmentality is therefore an analytics of gov-
ernment that examines the inter-relations between
the conceptualization and practice of government
- how each contributes to and forms the other.
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose make a similar
point, by arguing that governmentality involves
both “political rationalities” and “technologies of
government” (1990; 2008, pp. 26-52; Rose and
Miller, 1992). This characterization understands
governmentality as both linguistic and discursive,
on the one hand, and material, on the other. “Politi-
cal rationalities” are the discursive, constructive
and justificatory elements of government, whereas
“technologies of government” are the means with
which such discourses are translated into action,
or enacted. According to Miller and Rose:

the relationship between
icts and Social policy

There are four different ways in which ICTs relate
to social policy (and public policy more broadly).
First, there are a range of social polices about ICTs.
Some social policies respond to the social problems
that ICTs are perceived to bring, while others seek
to utilize ICTs as a specific strategy to address
social problems. A long-standing policy concern
arising from the use of ICTs - both by government

If political rationalities render reality into the
domain of thought “technologies of government”
seek to translate thought into the domain of re-
ality, and to establish “in the world of persons
and things” spaces and devices for acting upon