Foucault's concept of ‘governmentality’ has over the past ten years increasingly been utilised by scholars working in a number of disciplines, including sociology, education, criminology and politics. Part of its appeal certainly lies in its focus on familiar and everyday processes, systems and interactions through which the state exercises power over the individual.

In Analysing Social Policy: A Governmental Approach, Marston and McDonald bring together a collection of essays from leading international researchers in order to show that governmental approaches to social policy can be useful tools in understanding the actions and structures of the state and the ways in which selves and populations are managed, directed, ordered and administered through schools, families, communities and workplaces. As such it is likely to be of interest not only to postgraduate students and scholars of social policy but also to postgraduate students working in the fields of education and economic regeneration. It provides an accessible series of case studies illustrating the application of a governmental approach, and acts as something of a methodological guide for postgraduate students planning their research. All of the contributions are empirically grounded, drawing on social policy problems and practices in many countries, ranging from North America to Europe to Australasia. The editors also sensibly control the readers expectations and pay due attention to the very real limitations of the approach.

The introduction sets out the origins of the analytics of governmentality, including the core contribution of Foucault's writings of the 1970s and 1980s as well as subsequent developments by other scholars. For those with a limited knowledge of this field, the summary and concepts are clearly outlined and extensively referenced and enlivened with examples pertinent to contemporary debates and social policy ‘problems’. Particular examples include notions of citizenship, the construction of ‘parent citizens’ or ‘consumer citizens’ in a mixed market economy of welfare provision, participatory approaches to policy making, partnership and ‘the problem of men’.

The book is structured around three themes. The first theme is governing space and place. As most of the contributors to the book owe much to the work of Dean, and the definition of government offered by Dean (Reference Dean1999: 11) − ‘Government is any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes’ − it is perhaps fitting that the first chapter of the book is an essay by Dean.

Dean's contribution focuses on understanding contemporary liberal government as a form of governing through freedom, and examines the tools of such a form of government, namely empowerment, networks and communities and the establishment of markets and quasi-markets for delivering public services. Dean points out that, at the same time as the growth of governing through freedom, there is ‘a contemporary proliferation of the techniques of arrest, incarceration, punishment, expulsion, disqualification and, more broadly, coercion’ (p. 39). The analytics of governmentality are well placed to explore this apparently dichotomous approach to the shaping of conduct. In Chapter 3, Larner tells the story of a policy research project focussing on local collaborative partnerships in New Zealand. In so doing she explores the role of the social policy academic as a governmental apparatus complicit in legitimising certain practices of partnership and also problematises the role of the academic researcher. Elm-Larsen in Chapter 4 focuses on those who live on the margin of society and the ‘ambiguities and contradictions in policies that intend to shape their conduct’ (p. 67), and the way in which spaces for marginal people, such as drop-in centres, can be understood through the analytics of governmentality. Elm-Larson highlights the shortcomings in the governmental approach, not least the tendency to eschew normative standpoints or the lack of a ‘yardstick for judging how or when marginal people achieve a better life through policy intervention’ (p. 82).

The second theme is governing others and governing selves. In this section Clarke examines the construction of ‘Citizen-Consumer’ in New Labour's reform of public services; Korteweg examines the politics of subject formation in the context of welfare-to-work programmes for women in the United States and the Netherlands and provides useful insights into the methods used in governmental approaches for analysing social policy, especially with regard to analysing discourses and practices; Pease analyses the ‘problem of men and boys’, namely their health and their behaviour as well as the academic performance of boys, and shows how the notion of governmentality is useful in understanding the construction of men and boys as gendered subjects; and, finally, in this section Kessl looks at the restructuring of child and youth welfare in Germany in the twenty-first century and highlights the prioritisation of self-conduct over state responsibility.

The final section looks at governing through new technologies. Walters looks at the polymorphic nature of policy change, linking it to Foucault's concept of ‘genealogy’ and to Labour's rejection of linear temporality and illustrates his argument with an interesting case study focusing on compulsory identity cards as an approach to deal with the ‘problems’ of immigration, welfare abuse and national security. Smith uses a governmental approach to examine the construction of mothering, in relation to reproductive technologies, by Australian parliamentary and media debate, thereby showing how governmentality provides a useful set of tools to analyse the discourses of public policy debate and the ways in which such debates validate or demonise personal identities. In the final chapter, Henman looks at the tools and techniques used by governments to translate discourse into action, in particular focusing on advanced network information and communication technologies as a means of ordering information in such a way as to reinforce policy aims and to provide the appearance of personalised programs of support.