Power and Welfare

Nanna Mik-Meyer is Associate Professor in the Department of Organization and the Director of the Center for Health Management at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.Kaspar Villadsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

• 1. Introduction 2. Foucault: The Flexible Critique of Welfare 3. Goffman: Interaction and Identity Negotiations 4. Bourdieu: Field, Symbolic Violence and Domination 5. Luhmann: Welfare in Communicative Systems 6. Neo-Institutional Theory: Myths and Legitimacy 7. Risk Theory: Normality, Deviation and Neo-Liberalism 8. Transcending the Approaches

‘Theory is, or should be, the servant and facilitator of empirical inquiry, which cannot take place without it. In this book, Mik-Meyer and Villadsen offer a sustained and disciplined example of that approach to theory. Power and Welfare is clear and accessible ... and will still be read when many fashionable theory texts have vanished from view.’ – Richard Jenkins, Professor, Department of Sociological Studies, The University of Sheffield, England.‘This book is not only an examination of highly relevant and applicable theoretical approaches to power and welfare. It also shows the multiple forms and aspects of the play of power in the encounters between the citizen and the professional within the highly ambiguous context of contemporary liberalism. In both these respects, it is a leading example of what is emerging as a distinctive Copenhagen approach to public policy and governance.’ – Mitchell Dean, Professor, University of Newcastle, Australia, and Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.