Birgit Sauer

Geschlechterverhältnisse im Kontext politischer Transformation

Dieses Sonderheft der Politischen Vierteljahresschrift mochte aktuelle Entwicklungen von Politik, Okonomie, Gesellschaft und Kultur thematisieren: Sich entgrenzende Nationalstaatlichkeit, grenzuberschreitende kapitalistische Produktion und Konsumtion, „Entbettung“ kapitalistischer Finanzstrome (vgl. Altvater/Mahnkopf 1996: 122ff.), sich verandernde Formen und Institutionen sozialer Interaktion und Kommunikation sind grundlegende Veranderungen des Politischen, aber auch bedeutsame Modifikationen der Regulationsdynamik patriarchaler Geschlechterverhaltnisse.

Will gender equality ever fit in? Contested discursive spaces of university reform

Similar to other European countries, the introduction of non-academic, especially managerial, criteria in higher education has shaped and altered Austrian universities since over a decade. This paper presents the results of a frame analysis of Austrian higher education debates from 1993 until 2010. It outlines how reforms in higher education were prepared and enhanced by a new policy discourse, with a special focus on the way gender equality is framed in reform debates. Our article describes three core frames: ‘from local to global’, ‘from ivory tower to business’ and ‘from civil servant to excellence’. We cluster these three frames around imaginations of space that are embedded in the normative foundations of academia, and discuss how this links up with arguments for gender equality. We furthermore propose to analytically separate two conceptions of the university: the ‘entrepreneurial’ and the ‘managerial’ university.

Discourses on forced prostitution, trafficking in women, and football: a comparison of anti-trafficking campaigns during the World Cup 2006 and the European Championship 2008.

Compared with the massive campaigns against trafficking in women during the 2006 men’s football World Cup in Germany, the issue was not taken up very much in Austria, which hosted the European Championships in 2008. Except for some smaller initiatives, the public debates were not as strong as two years before. In Germany, not only were fears of an increased demand for sexual services due to the number of male football fans and ‘a flood’ of foreign prostitutes expressed, but so too was the concern that they would not come voluntarily. It was assumed that many of the women would be trafficked and forced into prostitution. Quite a number of women’s organizations in Germany thus campaigned against trafficking in women during the 2006 championship. This article compares the discourses in Germany and Austria and sheds light on the reasons for their similarities and differences. In particular, we explain the modest public debates and the lack of explicit mobilization against trafficking in women by Austrian feminist organizations. In doing so, the article sketches the most important strands in the argumentation of anti‐trafficking campaigns and their entanglement with other social fields, such as migration and gender relations. The focus of this article lies in the problematic mixing of concepts such as trafficking, forced prostitution, sex work and migration, and on the effects this might have.   ‘Expect emotions’ (Slogan of EURO 2008)

Die Magd der Industriegesellschaft

Die politische wie die politikwissenschaftliche Staatsdebatte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland verlief in konjunkturellen Zyklen. Die beiden Diskurse verhalten sich wie kommunizierende Rohren: War der sozialdemokratische Politiktyp der 70er Jahre durch eine Expansion des Staates und eine Steigerung staatlicher Regelung und Steuerung gepragt, so kennzeichnete den Mainstream der politikwissenschaftlichen Debatte dieser Zeit den Verzicht auf das Konzept „Staat“; an seine Stelle trat das Paradigma des „politischen Systems“ (Easton 1967), das gegenuber der geisteswissenschaftlichen und staatsrechtlichen Tradition der Disziplin deutliche Vorteile bot: Der Begriff des „politischen Systems“ trug zur Entmystifizierung „des“ Staates, des Hegelschen Phantasmas, bei. Die idealistische Imagination wurde mit dem Systembegriff gleichsam materialisiert und verwirklicht, hatte doch die institutionell-normativ orientierte Staatslehre nur wenig Spielraum fur empirische Analysen staatlicher Politiken gelassen. Ausgangspunkt der Analyse sollten nun nicht mehr die Form, sondern vielmehr die Funktionen des Staates, mithin seine Leistungsfahigkeit in vergleichender Perspektive sein. Auch Fragen der Teilhabe und Teilnahme am Staat liesen sich so politikkritisch anpeilen.

Politische und soziale Rituale in der DDR

Die folgenden Vorbemerkungen stellen ein Pladoyer fur Symbolforschung dar, wenngleich schon an dieser Stelle auf den heterogenen Stand der Forschung verwiesen werden mus. Dennoch erscheinen die unter dieser Forschungsrichtung versammelten Ansatze fur die Erklarung grundlegender politischer Phanomene zum Teil erklarungskraftiger als andere Ansatze. Insbesondere solche politischen Systeme, die sich selbst nicht uber Wahlen, sondern durch aquifunktionale Rituale legitimieren, sollten mit Hilfe der Ansatze der Symbolforschung untersucht werden.

Post-bureaucratic encounters: Affective labour in public employment services

This article explores the activation regime in three European countries – Austria, Germany, and Switzerland – and the related transformation of state bureaucracies into customer-oriented service providers. In the case of employment services affective labour tends to characterise the work process, in which public employees seek to guide, motivate, and control jobseekers. Our study focuses on organisational mechanisms, which govern the affect management of employment agents; we ask, how these actors are affectively subjectivated at the workplace and how they develop affective self-technologies to effectively govern jobseekers in counselling sessions. We conclude that state power and social policies increasingly revolve around subtle, affective means of governance, and we regard ‘affective entrepreneurialism’ as the dominant mode to govern public employees as well as citizens. The findings of the study are based on ethnographic fieldwork in three cities, where we conducted interviews, examined training materials, and observed and videotaped interactions at selected employment agencies.

Demokratie und Geschlecht

Die Transformation von Demokratien durch okonomische Globalisierung und politische Internationalisierung, die unter dem Stichwort „Postdemokratie“ diskutiert wird, ruckt auch die Geschlechterdefizite westlich-liberaler, reprasentativer Demokratien erneut in den Mittelpunkt. Politik- und Parteienverdrossenheit, die sich in geringerer Wahlbeteiligung sowie in sinkendem Vertrauen in politische Institutionen und Reprasentant/innen als Reaktion auf die zunehmende Informalisierung von Politik in nichtoffentlichen Verhandlungsrunden und auf das entpolitisierende Beschworen des Sachzwangs ausert, ist auch ein geschlechtsspezifisches Problem.

„Die hypnotische Macht der Herrschaft“ – Feministische Perspektiven

Das politische Ziel des Feminismus seit dem 19. Jahrhundert ist die Beseitigung von Unterdruckung, Ausbeutung und Ausgrenzung von Frauen aufgrund ihres Geschlechts, also ihre Befreiung bzw.

Governance as political theory: through the lens of gender. A response to B. Guy Peters

In the German-speaking areas of Europe, governance has, over the last two decades become a fashionable concept in political science. The concept is especially popular in the field of international politics and policy analysis. Kooiman (2002, p. 73) characterizes governance as a ‘growth industry’, partly due to the fact that the term opens the purses of research funders. In 2010, Gunnar Folke Schuppert, a German scholar of law and administrative studies, gave a talk titled ‘Everything governance – or what?’ pointing to the fact that the term governance runs the danger to become meaningless, because every political setting – even every situation in which coordination and communication are involved – is labeled as governance (Schuppert 2011). However, it is important to note that interest in the concept of governance may be explicitly, or even implicitly, legitimized by the failures of political science concepts over the last decades. For instance, Renate Mayntz takes the opportunity to criticize her own approach of an ‘actor-centered institutionalism’ in the light of the governance concept. First, she points out that policy studies have a strong focus on problem-solving and are characterized by a problem-solving bias. Second, she states that policy studies in the past have neglected questions of power and the self-interest of political actors – the Weberian aspect of policymaking (Mayntz 2001, p. 33ff.). Governance, Mayntz suggests, might overcome these pitfalls of political science. But after two decades of a ‘governance rush’, the concept is still proto-theoretical. It is either a normative concept (‘good governance’) or a descriptive term. Mainstream political scientists reject the normative notion of the concept; yet their own work is characterized by mere descriptions of new forms of governing for which they are unable to provide an explanation (Benz 2004, p. 19ff.). Therefore, one of the major questions exercising the political science community is whether governance can be an analytical concept, or even a theory. Hence, Peters’ attempt (in ‘Governance as political theory’, CPS 5.1, 2011) to ask what is the contribution of governance to political theory, and what constitutes the theoretical added value of the concept for political science, is timely. Peters starts his article by legitimizing the idea that political science needs a theory of governance. The behavioralism and rational choice approaches that are dominant in political science have, according to Peters, a bias towards the individual; and therefore, by neglecting institutions, they fail to explain the ‘real world’. Peters thus aims at strengthening and elaborating the concept of governance in the tradition of institutionalist

Staat und Geschlecht

Andrea Trumann Staat und Geschlecht Frauenquoten in Aufsichtsräten, garantierte Kitaplätze, Elternund Betreuungsgeld – »Gender Mainstreaming« Rezension zu: Gundula Ludwig, Birgit Sauer, Stefanie Wöhl (Hg.): Staat und Geschlecht. Grundlagen und aktuelle Herausforderungen feministischer Das Verhältnis von Staat und Geschlecht aus feministischer Perspektive Manja Wiesner Hausarbeit (Hauptseminar) Soziologie Familie, Frauen, Männer, Nicola Nagy. Der vergeschlechtlichte Staat. Zum Verhältnis von Freiheit, Geschlecht und Staat bei Jean-Jacques Rousseau. GENDER Heft 2 2017, S. 122–136. Geschlecht, Macht, Staat. Feministische staatstheoretische Interventionen. AutorInnen/HerausgeberInnen: Gundula Ludwig. Erscheinungsjahr: 2015. 14,90 €.