Managing Politics? Ethics Regulation and Conflicting Conceptions of 'Good Conduct'

摘要

Our findings provide a vivid illustration of the diversity of effects that ethics regulation can exert when applied to politicians and the merits of using Foucauldian ideas to interpret them. The ethical framework for local government in England brought together an array of technologies of government and the self to encourage the alignment of behavior with particular norms. While there is evidence that ethics regulation served to promote and reinforce good governance in some councils, our analysis also shows the considerable scope for resistance, both to the political identity of a councillor embodied in the code and through the use of ethics regulation practices to achieve political goals. Three sets of findings follow from these patterns of resistance.