Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and maps
- Acronyms
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Being sensible
- three Governing behaviour change in risky environments
- four Obesity and strategies of rule
- five The incidentally sensible city
- six Events and the lucratively sensible city
- seven The sensible drinker and the persistence of pleasure
- eight Spatial governance and the night-time economy
- nine What life is this? Some concluding thoughts
- Bibliography
- Index
two - Being sensible
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and maps
- Acronyms
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Being sensible
- three Governing behaviour change in risky environments
- four Obesity and strategies of rule
- five The incidentally sensible city
- six Events and the lucratively sensible city
- seven The sensible drinker and the persistence of pleasure
- eight Spatial governance and the night-time economy
- nine What life is this? Some concluding thoughts
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Health is essential to individual, social and economic wellbeing. For this reason, it is central to political wellbeing or, put another way, political viability. Political success is increasingly being judged against public health parameters; the intensely divided reaction to the Obama administration's passing of the Health Bill or the emotive debate over ringfencing the NHS budget in the UK's 2010 general election are clear cases in point. As such, any examination of health goes straight to the heart of the rationalities, modes, tools and techniques of liberal governance that have been so ably explored by governmentality theorists in sociology, law, anthropology, accountancy and, most recently, geography, across a range of empirical contexts (see in particular Osborne 1997; Crampton and Elden 2007). This chapter therefore starts from the assertion that health is vital for what it tells us about the governance of individuals and society and, as a consequence, what the enterprises of governance reveal about those individuals and societies. In exploring how and why we are governed by and through health, we also uncover the ways in which space and place have become instrumental to these endeavours – a critical conceptual undertaking in the health geography perspective that underpins this book (Kearns 1993). Space and place are increasingly part of the weaponry called on to achieve the kind of sensible citizenry needed to undertake the inherently intricate task of ensuring the optimal functioning of the neoliberal project, while also managing the well-documented negative externalities. In order to explore these assertions, this chapter and that one that follows present and examine the book's core conceptual thesis and its central objectives. In so doing, they make a case for why an exploration of the overlooked realm of sensible behaviour offers a novel perspective from which to analyse health, its governance, the settings within which this takes place and the subjects who are made by these interlocked discourses and practices.
To this end, this book is grounded in three contentions:
1. Personal responsibility and informed choice are the discursive bedrocks of neoliberal health policy, but the relative influence of people's circumstances or ‘luck’ has received far too little attention. Given that, in order to be sensible, people need to be able to overcome the effects of their (bad) luck, the ascription of responsibility is both a ‘moral enterprise’ and a practical problem.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Governing Health and ConsumptionSensible Citizens, Behaviour and the City, pp. 17 - 34Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2011