[Foucault's concept of gouvernmentality: an instrument to analyse nursing science]

The following article will present the concept of gouvernmentality by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). I will point out in which way his idea could be applied to nursing science. The notion gouvernmentality goes back to the late works of Michel Foucault. The idea of gouvernmentality continues, broadens and shifts the stress of his influential work on the analysis of power. The strategic concept of power is not sufficient to investigate from a consistent analytical perspective into the complex problems of the state and subjectivity. Only Foucault's findings of the notion and the concept of gouvernmentality has come up to an adequate analytical method. Relations of power are investigated from the point of view and hereby social technologies and self-technologies can be analysed in relation to each other The analysis of neo-liberal gouvernmentality finally succeeds by using this broadening of perspective. A new definition of state and economy can be revealed: the market turns into a regulating principle and economics grasps all kinds of human actions and proceedings. Apart from a few exceptions the hitherto Foucault-reception in nursing science does not follow the late works of Foucault and limits its research possibilities. In this article I will analyse examples of the quality discourse and the problems of an interpretation of needs. It will be shown how both areas might shape patients as well as nurses in the sense of neo-liberal subject formation and how finally the act and art of nursing will be transformed into an act of economics.