Social engineering and cultural policy – theoretical and empirical reflexions from Swedish cultural policy in a historical perspective

This article explores the influence of social engineering in various forms within Swedish cultural policy, seen in a historical perspective. In social engineering cultural policy measures, reforms and projects are justified by scientifically based research rather than party based ideological arguments. Karl Popper’s classification of the utopian and the step-by-step engineering make up the starting point, redefined as paternalistic engineering, welfare state engineering and utilitarian engineering in order to apply these ideas to cultural policy. Social engineering was predominant in Swedish cultural policy mainly during the post war period. In the 1950s as well as in the 1970s this engineering takes on a paternalistic character, in the struggle against injurious culture, such as video violence. Current practice of paternalistic engineering is directed at revealing and identifying invisibles structures in the field of cultural heritage. The welfare state engineering had its highlights in the planning era of the 1960s and the 1970s, and today culture as a beneficial factor for both citizens and society is labelled utilitarian engineering.     

From Confinement to Attachment: Michel Foucault on the Rise of the School

This article develops a Foucauldian account of the rise of the modern school, on the basis of a thorough examination of all references to education in Foucault's work. It analyses the seventeenth-century origins of mass schooling and traces its development up to the nineteenth century. It identifies several overlapping stages in this multifaceted and largely contingent development, particularly a fundamental shift from a negative to a positive conception of the school. This Foucauldian understanding of the rise of schooling as a disciplinary technology suggests that an initial focus on the exclusion or confinement of disorderly groups was gradually superseded by a focus on the inclusion or “attachment” of diverse individuals and on the development of their potential. It concludes by cautioning against over-simplistic applications of Foucault's work to the field of education.     

Implementing Spatial Data Analysis Software Tools in R

This article reports on work in progress on the implementation of functions for spatial statistical analysis, in particular of lattice/area data in the R language environment. The underlying spatial weights matrix classes, as well as methods for deriving them from data from commonly used geographical information systems are presented, handled using other contributed R packages. Since the initial release of some functions in 2001, and the release of the spdep package in 2002, experience has been gained in the use of various functions. The topics covered are the ingestion of positional data, exploratory data analysis of positional, attribute, and neighborhood data, and hypothesis testing of autocorrelation for univariate data. It also provides information about community building in using R for analyzing spatial data.