Abstract:

Over the past three decades fiscal sociology has increasingly gained traction among the scholars in the fields of public finance, sociology and politics as the market economies have plunged into recession periodically. With the 2008 global crisis, things have not turned worse only for economies but also for the broader social systems under the severe problems of the rising inequalities as a worrisome trend between and within countries. Fiscal sociology scholarship has seen as a promising research program for those who seek to understand complex and interrelated causes, effects and consecutive developments of the crisis. This paper makes a contribution to the critical fiscal sociological approaches developed. The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and governmentality literature after Foucault will be reviewed. The paper constructs a framework for broader sociological understanding of the current situation and crisis of public finance in theory and practice. Accordingly, public finance in the neoliberal context is described as a constructive governmental technology that carves out state policies and organization at the macro level and conducts the behaviors of individuals at the micro level of everyday life in a way to spread the market logic to the fiscal and non-economic/non-fiscal social domains.

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