Institutional Transformations

can be designed in order to achieve specific human ends goes back, at least, to Plato’s presentation of the appropriate form of the just citystate in the Republic. Since then, scholars from numerous traditions and disciplines have analysed how laws and norms function to distribute social, cultural, and natural resources, and to organize relationships within the field of their operation, thereby both constraining and enabling human action. Transform an institution by changing laws, or challenging dominant norms, and it is likely that the scope for social action and the shape of social relations will also shift. Building on this tradition, the papers in this special issue explore how particular legal, political, and normative interventions into existing institutions might serve to promote a more just society. In considering the transformative potential of institutional interventions, however, it is important to be modest about the capacity of any institution, or any institutional design, to predictably control human behaviour. As Michel Foucault argued, institutional power has been misunderstood, in part because power is not something that can be held, or possessed; it only exists through being exercised (see, for example, Discipline and Punish; History of Sexuality). On this view, social and political power is not so much an external imposition on preformed human subjects as it is an expression of the subjectivities that are formed in and through various institutional contexts, for example, schools, hospitals, prisons, and asylums; and through the everyday disciplinary practices around sexuality, the family, and medicine. The approaches taken by the authors in this special issue are generally in agreement with the conception of power as productive of subjectivity. At the same time, they seek to build on this approach by attending to the affective dimension of the productivity of power and the specific ways in which the embodiment (the sex, race, ethnicity, class, and so on) of social actors is experienced, imagined, and lived in institutional settings. Those who aim at institutional transformation, the authors suggest, must attend to the specificity of the lived experience of social actors. This explicit focus represents an important development in scholarship because, even when scholars of institutional transformation have paid attention to