The Politics of Self-Governance

The Politics of Self-Governance

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The Politics of Self-Governance

Edited by Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou Roskilde University, Denmark

© Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 Wey Court East Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The politics of self-governance.   1. Political planning--Citizen participation. 2. Local   government--Citizen participation. 3. Democracy. 4. Public  private sector cooperation.   I. Sørensen, Eva, 1957- II. Triantafillou, Peter.   320.8-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sørensen, Eva.   The politics of self-governance / by Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou.    p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-7546-7164-0 -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9281-2 (ebook) 1. Political planning--Citizen participation. 2. Local government--Citizen participation. 3. Democracy. 4. Public-private sector cooperation. I. Triantafillou, Peter, 1957- II. Title.   JF1525.P6T75 2009   320.8--dc22 2009010405 ISBN 978-0-7546-7164-0 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-7546-9281-2 (ebk.V)

Contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors   1

The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction   Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou

vii ix 1

Part 1 Scientific Reflections on Governance 2

A Macro Level Perspective on Governance of the Self and Others   25 Anders Esmark and Peter Triantafillou

3

The Politics of Self-Governance in Meso Level Theories   Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing

43

4

Self-Governance in Micro Level Theory   Lina Eriksson

61

Part 2 Governance in Action 5 6 7

The Institutional Design of Self-Governance: Insights from Public-Private Partnerships   Keith Baker, Jonathan B. Justice and Chris Skelcher

77

Citizen and City: Institutional Reform and Self-Governance in Los Angeles   Juliet Musso and Christopher Weare

95



Paradoxes of the Self: Self-Owning Universities in a Society of Control   Jakob Williams Ørberg and Susan Wright

8

Self-Governance and the Disappearance of the Human Body   Herbert Gottweis

9

Public Administration in Teams: Self-Governing Civil Servants   151 Birgitte Poulsen

117 137

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vi

10

Governing the Responsible Prisoner: A Comparative Analysis   Mary Bosworth

11

Self-Governance through the Committees in the Open Method of Co-ordination: The Cases of Employment and Social Inclusion  187 Caroline de la Porte, David Natali and Philippe Pochet



169

12 Conclusion   ����������������������������������� Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou

211

Index  

221

List of Figures and Tables Figures 5.1

The structure of the strategic service delivery PPP  

9.1

Characteristics in control society and its associated subjectivity   The Ministry of Industry before 1994   The Ministry of Business Affairs after 1997  

9.2 9.3

11.1 EU governance structure for economic, employment and social policies  

88 154 156 157 196

Tables 5.1

Summary analysis of the two case studies  

6.1 6.2 6.3

Narratives of urban governance and democratic reform   Status of empowerment provisions   Urban governance frames and neighborhood reform in Los Angeles  

9.1

The subjectivity of the civil servant in disciplinary and control society  

83 99 109 111 162

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Notes on Contributors Anders Esmark is Associate Professor at the Department of Society and Globalization at Roskilde University. He is currently engaged in research on the implications of network governance and the emergence of network society, the relation between media and politics and public sphere transformation. Recent publications include contributions to Public Administration and Administrative Theory and Praxis, and the book New Publics with/out Democracy (2007), Copenhagen: Nordicom (edited with Henrik Bang). Birgitte Poulsen, PhD, is Associate Professor in Public Administration at the Institute of Society and Globalization at Roskilde University. She has published several articles on public sector reforms, public management and organization with a particular focus on the development and change of roles and identities in public administrations. Caroline de la Porte is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense). She specializes in different modes of governance in the EU and new EU integration theories, particularly in the social policy and employment fields. As well as the Europeanization of social policy, she is also interested in EU Member States. A recent publication on this topic is ‘Good Governance via the OMC: The Cases of Employment and Social Inclusion’ (2007), in European Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 <www.ejls.eu>. Chris Skelcher is Professor of Public Governance at the Institute of Local Government Studies, and Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer at the College of Social Sciences, University of Birmingham. His research examines the new forms of relationship between state, citizen and business, and especially the implications for transparency, accountability and democratic policy making. He is currently researching how the city governments of Birmingham, Copenhagen and Rotterdam have responded to the pressures of migration and neighborhood decline. His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals, and his most recent books are Working across Boundaries: Collaboration in Public Services (2002), Basingstoke: Palgrave (with Helen Sullivan) and Managing to Improve Public Services (2008), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (with colleagues). Christopher Weare, PhD, is Deputy Director of the Civic Engagement Initiative and Research Associate Professor within the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. Dr Weare employs social network analysis to examine how voluntary



The Politics of Self-Governance

associations join communities together and connect them to organs of governance. He also studies the development and impacts of e-government. Before joining SPPD, he was a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Dr Weare holds a PhD in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley. David Natali is lecturer at the University of Bologna-Forli (Italy), his domain of expertise is comparative analysis of welfare reforms, and the study of European integration in social policy domains. His most recent publications are Pensions in Europe, European Pensions (2008), Brussels: PIE Peter Lang; ‘The New Politics of Pension Reforms in Continental Europe’ (with M. Rhodes), in Arza, C. and Kohli, M. (eds), The Political Economy of Pensions: Politics, Policy Models and Outcomes in Europe (2007), London: Routledge, 25-46. Eva Sørensen is Professor in Public Administration and Democracy at the Institute of Society and Globalization at Roskilde University. She is currently vice-director of Centre for Democratic Network Governance and director of a large research project on user driven innovation in the public sector. She has written several books and articles about new forms of governance and their implications for public sector effectiveness and democracy. Recent books are Theories of Democratic Network Governance (2007), Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan (edited with J. Torfing) and Public Administration in Transition (2007), Copenhagen: DJØF-Publishers (with G. Gjelstrup). Herbert Gottweis, has been Professor at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Vienna since 1998. He also directs the Life Science Governance Research Platform at the University of Vienna. Gottweis was the coordinator of the PAGANINI (‘Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation’) project (2004-2007) funded as a STREP under the 6th EU Framework program. Under the 7th EU Framework program Gottweis is partner in REMDIE (Regenerative Medicine in Europe: Emerging Needs and Challenges in a Global Context) and in BBMRI (Biobank and Biomolecular Ressources Initiative). Among his recent publications are The Global Politics of Stem Cell Research: Regenerative Medicine in Transformation (2009), London: Palgrave (with B. Salter and C. Waldby); ‘Personal Genomics (PG) Services and the Post-Genomic Condition’ (2008), Nature, 454, Nov 6, 34-35 (with B. Prainsack, J. Reardon, J. Lunshof, R. Hindmarsh and U. Naue); and Biobanks: Comparative Governance (2008), London: Routledge (edited with A. Petersen). Jacob Torfing is a Professor in Politics and Institutions. He is a political scientist and his research interests include discourse theory, employment policy, democratic participation and governance networks. He has published widely on discourse theory and democratic network governance. His books include Theories of Democratic Network Governance (2007), co-edited with E. Sørensen; Discourse Theory in European Politics (2005), co-edited with D. Howarth; New Theories of

Notes on Contributors

xi

Discourse (1999); and Politics, Regulation and the Modern Welfare State (1995). He is Director of Centre for Democratic Network Governance and a former member of the Danish Social Science Research Council. Jakob Williams Ørberg has an MA in Anthropology from University of Copenhagen. Until the summer of 2008 he was a research assistant at the Danish School of Education at the University of Aarhus where he participated in a Research-Council funded project on the reform of Danish universities. His research interest is with the relationship between practice and planning and the performative aspects of power. Jonathan B. Justice is an Assistant Professor in the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Delaware. His current academic activities are concerned with public budgeting and finance, fiscal transparency, publicsector accountability and decision making, non- and quasi-governmental public administration, and local economic development. Juliet Musso, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Public Policy at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. Dr Musso researches political institutions and urban policy, with particular attention to institutional reform and community governance. She has written on the political economy of municipal incorporation and currently is researching the policy and political implications of neighborhood governance reform. Other research topics include local government use of advanced telecommunications technologies, fiscal federalism and budgetary policy. Keith Baker is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Southampton. Keith recently completed his PhD which examined the role of boundary-spanning individuals in strategic service delivery partnerships in a UK local authority. Keith’s research interests include governance and accountability, the policy process, public sector contracting and energy and environmental policy. He is currently working on a project which is investigating the governance and regulatory structures of the nuclear industry. Lina Eriksson is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. She received her doctorate degree in political science from Goteborg University in 2005. Her work since then has included a co-authored book on a new conceptualization and measurement of autonomy and a single-authored book (to be published in 2009 with Palgrave Macmillan) on the role of rational choice theory in political science. Mary Bosworth is Reader in Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on issues to do with punishment, incarceration and immigration detention with a particular focus on how matters of

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race, gender and citizenship shape the experience and nature of confinement. Her books include Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons (1999), Farnham: Ashgate Publishing; The US Federal Prison System (2002), London: Sage; and Explaining U.S. Imprisonment (2009), London: Sage. Peter Triantafillou is Associate Professor in Political Analysis of Public Administration at the Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University. He is member of the Center for Democratic Network Governance and is currently engaged in a research project on employment policies in Denmark and Australia. He has written several journal articles and book sections about the exercise of power and freedom implied by New Public Management and the governing of employment, labour and health in Denmark, the EU, and Malaysia. A recent publication is ‘Benchmarking in the Public Sector: A Critical Conceptual Framework’ (2007), Public Administration, vol. 85, no. 3, 829-846. Philippe Pochet is General Director of the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI). He has published widely on issues of social policy in the EU. He is Digest Editor (1995 to date) of the quarterly Journal of European Social Policy, University of Bath (London: Sage) and General Editor of the ‘Work and Society’ series (1999 to date) (Brussels: European Interuniversity Press/Peter Lang). His most recent publications include Social Developments in the European Union – 2007 (2008, edited with C. Degryse), European Trade Union Institute for Research, Education and Health and Safety (ETUI-REHS) and Observatoire social européen, Brussels and ‘Influence of European Integration on National Social Policy Reforms in Bismarckian Countries’ (2008, with B. Palier), in Palier, B. (ed.), A Long Goodbye to Bismarck? The Politics of Welfare Reforms in Continental Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at the School of Education, Århus University. She is currently leader of a research programme on Education, Policy and Organisation in the Knowledge Economy (EPOKE), and is just completing a Research-Council funded project on the reform of Danish universities. She has also written on university reform and the development of neo-liberal governance in Britain, which she has studied as an anthropologist concerned with ethnographies of large scale processes of political transformation. Her main book (with Cris Shore) is Anthropology of Policy (1997, Routledge) and she is founding co-editor of the Journal Learning and Teaching: International Higher Education in the Social Sciences (LATISS).

Chapter 1

The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou

1. Towards a new governance imagery Over the last 30 years we have witnessed a slow but steady emergence of a new governance imagery that embodies a novel understanding of what it entails to govern in an efficient, effective and democratic manner. From being perceived as an act that is carried out by a publicly elected sovereign ruler over a population consisting of individual and collective subjects through different forms of rules and regulations, governance is increasingly being regarded as a complex process of co-governance involving a plurality of relevant and affected public authorities and private stakeholders in carrying out various governance tasks through different forms of self-governance. This new imagery is embedded in a variety of, often contradictory, governing activities carried out under such headings as participatory planning, active social policies, network governance and new public management. While these diverse activities cannot in any way be reduced to one and the same phenomenon, they all, in one way or another, hold the promise of being more effective, efficient and/or democratic by latching on to the self-governing capacities of individuals and collectives. In that sense, they all inscribe themselves in a governance imagery that we denote the politics of self-governance. One of the most striking features of this new governance imagery is that it redefines society from being an object of governance that represents a burden to the governors, to being a potential resource that needs to be activated in the pursuit of efficient, effective and democratic public governance. Hence, affected and involved citizens, firms, voluntary organizations and interest organizations are increasingly being regarded as knowledgeable, competent, resourceful and responsible contributors to solving governance tasks. If the once celebrated institutionalized divide between state, market and civil society – between the public and the private sector – ever did exist, its clarity and relevance is increasingly contested. According to the emerging governance imagery, market and civil society are not spheres of freedom beyond the reach of public rule, but rather important contributors to the production of public governance due to their alleged ability to produce public value through self-governance. The state, on its side, is regarded not as an institutional condensation of hierarchical rule but as a



The Politics of Self-Governance

relay for the articulation and management of institutional settings engendering the self-governing capacities of public and private agencies. Before proceeding, some conceptual clarification may be appropriate. By the notion of ‘self’ – used in the context of self-governance – we are allowing for a variety of individual and collective selves of which some are public and some are private. Hence, we refer to a diverse body of agents ranging from public administrators, politicians, citizens and private entrepreneurs to public institutions, private companies and NGOs. The term ‘self’, indicates that these agents share a certain capacity to act not due to some innate quality, but due to the social and political processes in which the self is embedded. We use the term self-governance indifferently from the term autonomy which literally translates as self-legislation from the Greek. Of course, this is a deceptively simple definition which immediately raises several questions of which the perhaps most important one is: Does selfgovernance entail a form of governing (by the self) taking place in isolation from other social and political forces? The short answer is no, because such a definition would exclude analytical attention to all the political forces impinging on selfgovernance. While we do not regard self-governance as something taking place in a social or political vacuum, we do restrict our understanding to the situations in which the governing of the self is not wholly determined by forces external to the self. This would in our view make it meaningless to talk of self-governance. Consequently, our notion of self-governance comprises that vast array of situations in which the self is allowed and possibly even urged to govern itself by external, non-deterministic forces. Our motivation for picking such an admittedly broad definition is that it allows us to explore the diversity of the many ideas, arguments, programs and interventions seeking to utilize and augment self-governance. The questioning of the borderline between the public and the private sector – between what was traditionally seen as the realm of coercion and the realm of freedom – has not only transformed the private sector into a potential co-governor, but has also paved the way for the introduction of different market-like and civil society-like forms of self-governance into the public sector. Hence, the staging and managing of competitive games and norm based collaboration between more or less self-governing public and private actors have become a central tool kit in efforts to advance public governance. These new forms of regulated self-governance seek to push bureaucratic forms of governance aside in order to give way to incentiveor motivation-based forms of governance that enhance the eagerness of public institutions, public employees and individual and organized users of public services to contribute actively to defining central governance problems, qualifying policy objectives, implementing policy initiatives and evaluating governance performance. In brief, the new governance imagery is characterized by a form of governing that works by nurturing and shaping the problem solving and selfsteering capacities of both public and private, and both individual and collective selves. But what is really new about the emerging governance imagery and the reforms that are informed by it? Certainly there is nothing new about political steering

The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction



being dependent on the self-governing capacities of citizens, groups, firms and organizations. The type of (social) liberal governing emerging after the bourgeois, democratic revolutions in Western Europe and other parts of the world from the end of the eighteenth century clearly depended upon the making of citizensubjects who were able to freely conduct themselves according to existing codes of morality and civility. This amounted to a form of classical liberal governing that as a constituting feature depended on the ability of free subjects to govern themselves properly and on the ability of the state apparatus and other governing actors to instill in these subjects the discipline of freedom (Foucault 1979; Hayek 1979, 163). In particular, this classical form of liberal government depended on the making of a more or less autonomous private sphere (civil society) distinct from the public sphere in general and the state in particular (Habermas 1989). Today we are seeing a new form of governing that tries to unfold the self-governing capacities of individual and collective actors by going across if not by outright ignoring the public-private boundaries that were so dear to classical liberal government – a fact lamented by a number of concerned democratic scholars (Habermas 1987). Today the role of governing authorities (be they private or public) seems to be less about producing disciplined and docile bodies and more about creating entrepreneurial individual and collective actors that are constantly improving themselves in terms of health, wealth and social skills (Deleuze 1995). In a certain sense, the new governance imagery espouses a far more interventionist mode of governing than classical liberalism ever imagined. The ambition of the new governance imagery is not only that of correcting and disciplining, but above all also that of augmenting and improving. This entails that the types of selves addressed by the new politics have expanded. Today, the selves who are targeted by governance interventions are not only the criminals, the ill and the deviant, but also communities, business councils, policy networks and public agencies whose self-governing powers are invoked in order to make them more effective, efficient or democratic. More importantly, the interventions aim to construct capable individual and collective selves through initiatives that augment their self-esteem, life-long learning abilities, entrepreneurial capacities and flexibility and sense of responsibility. Correspondingly, we witness the emergence of a wide range of devices, procedures, techniques and programs that seek to gauge the capacities of societal actors to develop and improve themselves. In effect, these devices are creating new visibilities and measures of human and organizational capacities such as contracting out, public-private partnerships, performance measurement, bench marking and human resource management. The working hypothesis of this book is that the changes sketched above amount to a significant change in the way in which the possibilities and tasks of public governance are being understood. More precisely, we believe that we are witnessing the emergence of a new hegemonic governance imagery characterized by high hopes of potential benefits of self-governance for the enhancement of efficient, effective and democratic governance. By the term ‘imagery’ we are referring neither to a political ideology manipulating objective interests or covering



The Politics of Self-Governance

up the true state of affairs, nor to some kind of abstract collective unconscious structuring of human conduct from the outside. Instead we use the term governance imagery to refer to those manifold and often contradictory lines of questioning and ways of thinking about public governance that are always already inscribed in concrete activities be that academic labour such as the production of theories or political-administrative interventions such as public sector reforms, or both. Thus, in line with Wittgenstein’s understanding of rules in language games (Wittgenstein 1997), we regard the governance imagery not as something that stands above or apart from social practice but as part and parcel of it. By hegemony we refer to a dominant way of thinking about the nature, potentials and tasks of public governance, not to an all-embracing (totalizing) political ideology. This hegemony has materialized itself in two ways over the last three decades, namely in public sector reforms and in the academic theorizing on public governance. Public sector reforms in advanced liberal democracies all over the world and in a wide variety of policy areas have been preoccupied with institutionalizing forms of governance that exploit the potential self-governing capacity of the involved and affected stakeholders in ways that is meant to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and democratic quality of public governance. With regard to the latter, social scientific theories, notably political science, public administration research and sociology, have increasingly occupied themselves with reflections and speculation concerning why and how individual and collective forms of self-governance have become a core ingredient in contemporary governance and what the possible impact of different forms of self-governance is likely to be. If we accept that governance has changed in the direction sketched above, what could be the reasons? It would of course be a blatant display of hubris to suggest that any single force is lying behind these changes. More importantly, as the chapters of this book show, the intellectual vocabularies and political reforms informed by the governance imagery are highly diverse and often contradictory phenomena that are the result of highly differential forces. If we should dare propose some general forces contributing to the emergence of the governance imagery, it would be ‘the usual suspects’. First of all, the rapid economic growth in most post-WWII Western states had created high ambitions among policy makes and similarly high expectations among citizens of the public provision of health services, education and social security. Thus, when the same states were hit by severe economic recession and fiscal deficits in the 1970s and 1980s, policymakers and administrators were under severe pressure to find new ways of reducing public expenditures. Secondly, the emergence of new computer-based systems of taxation, accounting, auditing, performance measurement, etc. held the promise of delivering public services in a more goal- and cost-effective manner. Thirdly, we see a rather queer merging of ‘Leftist’ ideals of emancipation, self-determination and self-realization found in the new social movements with ‘Rightist’ ideals propagating the withdrawal of the state and other public service providers to an absolute minimum number of core functions in favor of a reinvigoration of the ability and responsibility of individuals, families and communities to take care of

The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction



themselves. Despite continued differences and conflicts over the ways in which self-governance should be put into concrete practice, we seem to see the emergence of a broad consensus in support of self-governance as both an end in itself and as a means to provide more effective public governance. If it is correct that the new governance imagery has materialized more or less simultaneously in concrete public governance reforms and in academic studies of public governance, we are faced with the question of whether the theoretical diagnoses are spurred by the public governance reforms or, the other way around, whether the emergence of new theories and perceptions of governance is one of the driving forces behind the reform initiatives. In line with our Wittgenstein inspired approach to social practice, we adopt the both-and position: The governance imagery is fed by problems, plans and reforms in public governance as well as by academic thinking about these changes. This may seem a rather facile approach. Yet we believe it is a fruitful one in that it allows us to avoid reducing one set of practices (such as academic work) to the unidirectional, causal effects of another (such as governance reforms). It allows us take theoretical labour seriously in the sense that we regard it not merely as a more or less accurate representation of something else, but something that actually has a certain influence on its object of study, namely public governance reforms. 2. A politics of self-governance In our attempt to show how a new self-governance imagery has obtained a hegemonic position, we focus on how theoretical insights and public governance reform initiatives mutually influence each other in a complex process. We try to account for some of the ways in which this complex process has accelerated and consolidated the self-governance imagery to an extent that makes it possible to speak of the present times as dominated by a politics of self-governance. We understand ‘politics’ rather broadly as the governing strategies and interventions (that are produced and have effect within and beyond the state apparatus), the manifold problematizations, theories and moral values informing these strategies and interventions, and the conflicts unfolding around them. This use of the term politics is of course quite different from its more narrow usage as a term for describing different ideologically or interest based political strategies i.e. liberalism, conservatism and socialism, which battle for political power within the political institutions of representative democracy. We have chosen this rather broad definition of politics to be able to capture some of the many ways in which the reflections, ambitions and struggles over self-governance transcend traditional ideological-political boundaries. Methodologically speaking, it allows us to map some of the manifold ways in which the governance imagery is nurtured by and nurtures intellectual labour (theories, scholarly studies and debates) and governing interventions (administrative procedures, laws, political reforms and programs). As such the broad definition opens up the possibility for mapping the ways in which



The Politics of Self-Governance

the governance imagery informs the identification of problems of governing, and how governing can and should be carried out. In order to unravel the hegemonic status of the politics of self-governance, we are proposing a comprehensive mapping of how it has materialized itself as governance narratives within social scientific theorizing and public sector reform programmes in advanced liberal democracies. What narratives do recent dominant social scientific theories and public sector reform programmes in advanced liberal democracies construct and refer to in their considerations on how public governance is, possibly could, and should be carried out? What answers do they give to questions such as: What is governance? How is it exercised? Who are the governors and who are governed? What is to be publicly governed and what is not? What is the purpose of public governance? Apart from the general conceptual definitions made above that allow us to clear a rather broad analytical space we do not propose any common methodological framework. While each chapter includes a strictly descriptive element and thus adds to the mapping of the politics of selfgovernance, they use quite diverse methods for producing these maps. Many use policy-documents, others use interviews and observation. Our ambition here has been to ensure that the chapters address the same research questions, not that they do so by the same technical means of inquiry. We seek then to map, rather than providing our own understanding of selfgovernance, the various theoretical and empirical understandings of selfgovernance in different advanced liberal democracies. Each chapter seeks to shed light on the following questions: a) How has the politics of self-governance put its mark on different areas of public governance? b) What are the driving forces behind the enhanced role of self-governance in the production of public governance? c) What are the effects of the attempts to enhance the role of selfgovernance? d) If any, what sort of normative assumptions are the theories making and what sort of policy advice would these assumptions imply? The point of this account is to identify an eventual homology between the recommendations found in political science theories and the actual policy initiatives analysed in the case studies. In what follows, we present a broad, tentative mapping of how the politics of self-governance has materialized itself in social scientific theorizing. We then provide an overview of the ways in which the governance imagery has informed public sector reform programmes and governance practices. 3. Social scientific theories The possibility and ability of citizens, groups and organizations to govern themselves is a longstanding concern of academic inquiry within the social sciences. Yet, the framing of this concern into an imagery whereby the state’s governing capacities is seen as directly related to its ability to draw upon and facilitate the self-governing capacities of society is more recent. In the following, we aim to provide a broad overview of recent (last two decades or so) social

The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction



scientific theories that contribute to the making and consolidation of the politics of self-governance. Later on, in Part 1 of this book, we select a number of dominant (often quoted) theories in order to make a more in-depth analysis of how they conceptualize the new governance imagery and what narratives they produce about the emergence, nature and impact of the politics of self-governance. At this point we are primarily trying to provide a rough sketch of how the politics of selfgovernance is present in contemporary social scientific theorizing. Consequently, we are clearly not doing justice to those parts of the social sciences which explicitly or implicitly challenge the politics of self-governance (e.g. Marinetto 2003). It should therefore be stressed that the purpose of this overview is not to prove that the self-governance imagery is a totalizing ideology that has completely colonized our social scientific thought space. By the same token, the battle for hegemony is by no means over. On the one hand, our ambition is more modest in that we seek to show how the self-governance imagery in different ways and to varying degrees is articulated through a broad range of recent social scientific theories rather than seeking to provide an exhaustive mapping of all social scientific theories dealing with governance. On the other hand, we hope that by providing such an account of this new imagery we may contribute to the continued debate over whether this is really the only playing field, the only imagery through which we should view, debate and exercise public governance. This book’s analysis of academic labour is structured according to the scientific disciplines of political science, public administration and sociology. We have selected these disciplines because we find that they are the disciplines relating most directly to the question of what public governance is and how it is and should be performed. The emergence of the politics of self-governance within political science and public administration research has been closely linked to the overload hypothesis, i.e. the assumption that our societies are to an increasing extent wrought by governance overload and is therefore in need of a politics of self-governance that reduces the demands directed towards the political system and enhances the amount of resources that can be put into meeting these demands (Rhodes 1997; Pierre and Peters 2000; Rhodes 2000; Flinders 2004). The same line of argument has been central within the public administration debate. Already in the early 1970s, public choice theory (Ostrom and Ostrom 1971; Buchanan and Tollison 1972) and transaction costs analysis (Williamson 1975) started playing a fundamental role in the academic debate and understanding of public sector maladies and possible solutions to them. Scholars from both disciplines argued that the government was unable to undertake all the tasks thrust upon it by society (Crozier et al. 1975; King 1975). The sustained fiscal crises and high levels of   Psychology and Business Administration are also relevant but because of limitation of space and intellectual capacity we have not included the fields of, for example, human resource management, coaching, team-building, corporate governance (Sundaramurthy and Lewis 2003), corporate social responsibility, and business ethics (Daily et al. 2003).



The Politics of Self-Governance

unemployment combined with steadily increasing popular demands for welfare services and social security seen in many if not all OECD countries during the 1980s further nurtured the notion that the role of the state and its way of governing had to be reconsidered (Birch 1982). After a series of more or less substantial reforms of the public sector in the advanced liberal democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, which needless to say have varied significantly in scope and depth across different countries, key political scientists and public administration researchers started talking about a hollowing out of the state, if not as a completed fact, then as the distinct feature of an ongoing transformation process of most OECD countries (Rhodes 1994; Milward and Provan 2000). Others have pointed to the increased complexity of our societies as the principal cause of new forms of governing. They argue that rather than being weakened, the state is required to play a new role. The state is being challenged because it has to impose order in an increasingly complex society in which the state’s governing capacities depend on its ability to trigger and give direction to governance initiatives performed by a wide range of public and private actors (Kooiman 2000; Mayntz, 2003; Pierre and Peters 2005). Some scholars have argued that the pressure of globalization on the state, including the increasing cross boarder flows of capital and goods, has narrowed down or at least significantly altered nation-states’ room for manoeuvre (especially members of the European Monetary Union) in their choice of fiscal (Hodson and Maher 2004), monetary (Hinnfors and Pierre 1998), industrial development (Weiss 2005) and social welfare (Pierson 2001) policy designs. Yet others have argued that the scale of globalization and not least its allegedly erosive effects on the capacity of state regulation tend to be exaggerated (Hirst 1997). In fact, some have even argued that globalization discourses have served to augment the scope and severity of state intervention (Jessop 2001; Dean and Henman 2004). Notwithstanding these opposing viewpoints, it seems fair to argue that within the disciplines of political science and public administration a broadly shared understanding has emerged of an actual transformation of the conditions for state governance that essentially requires – regardless of possible political preferences for the opposite – a radical change in what the state can govern and how it is able to do so. Accordingly, many scholars are taking this diagnosis as the basis for recommendations on how the state should transform its mode of governing by allowing other actors to play a much more active role in the formulation and implementation of public policies (Kickert et al. 1997). In sum, in both political science and public administration theories, we find a widespread concern about the ability of the state to govern effectively, efficiently and democratically. In particular, many point to the need of reforms whereby the central state not only allows, but actually facilitates the involvement of a whole range of other public and private actors in the exercise of public governance. Although sociology from its very first inception has taken society, rather than the state, as its key object of study, the discipline nevertheless has dealt quite intensively with the role of the state and its mode of governing. At least three strands

The Politics of Self-Governance: An Introduction



of theory within sociology dealing with this issue may be identified. First, we find a group of sociologists who analyse the recent changes in political governance in terms of welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990). One argument made by these researchers is that the more or less distinct welfare regimes, such as the liberal, conservative and social democratic ones, will gradually move in a neo-liberal direction and possibly converge towards a model of welfare pluralism (Gould 1993). While far from everybody agrees with this prediction about convergence (Clasen and Clegg 2006), we find the assertion that Western liberal democracies are moving towards new forms of public welfare delivery because the state, as a result of ideological and financial pressures, is forced to give up its protective role as the universal provider of social welfare. Ulrich Beck, for example, has argued that the likely consequence of globalization is ‘Brazilianization’ or a political economy of insecurity characterized by the growth of informal and temporary jobs and the weakening of the ‘Fordist’ industrial relations compromise ensuring labourers a certain level of purchasing power (Beck 2000). In order to counteract this tendency, Beck suggests we create a society of active citizens whose loyalties and aspirations should not be limited by the stifled governing capacities of the nation-state, but organized both locally and across existing political boundaries (ibid. 5). Others are even more direct in their views about the need for the state to shift into a more enabling/activating role that engenders the participation and empowerment of local authorities, businesses, NGOs and citizens (Shin 2000; Taylor 2000). A second strand of sociology has been preoccupied with the role of new social movements or NGOs in late modernity (Touraine 1981). In this literature we find a major normative concern around the liberating and democratic potentials of social movements. Although some researchers are more optimistic than others, it does seem fair to say that the presence of the following dilemma is widely shared: While excessive and instrumental state intervention is debilitating for the functioning of a life world characterized by communicative rationality that informs the activities of social movements, this life world is at the same time dependent on the existence of a state capable of enforcing civil and political rights and providing financial support for social movement activities (Habermas 1994). The many ways in which this uneasy and dilemma filled relationship between the state and the life world is played out, for example when the state draws on social movements in the delivery of public services, has been a central research area for a large group of sociologists throughout the 1990s (Marwell 2004). Third, we find a quite widespread understanding of contemporary societies as characterized by increasing complexity which generates particular challenges to social integration and state governance. Anthony Giddens, for example, argues that in late or high modernity both institutions and individuals are becoming more reflexive (Giddens 1991). We are probably not overstretching the fact when we claim that there is a link between Giddens’ diagnosis of our societies being characterized by a so-called life politics in which governing is based on freedom of choice and productive powers (Giddens 1991, 214ff) and his affirmative Third Way

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politics seeking to enhance the quality of societal governance by facilitating the resources of responsible, entrepreneurial individuals, families and communities. While we find a quite diverse range of public governance diagnoses and cures in social scientific theories, we do believe it is possible to discern a certain common denominator. Despite the variations, these works tend to see the state today and its capacity to govern and deliver welfare services as being under intense pressure from local citizens, globalization, neo-liberal ideologies, fiscal constraints, or other economic forces. The cures vary too. While some abstain from providing suggestions about what to do, the ones who do so seem to point to the importance of providing room for initiatives and actors that transcend the nation-state. This is not so much a politics of non-interference or a wholesale privatization of the production of public value, though it would probably not be difficult to find academics arguing for that. What we find in the above writings is rather suggestions for a form of public governance where the state not only gives room, but also actively facilitates new forms of political participation and active citizenship. With this we will now turn to the reform programmes and governance practises that have been unfolding over the last decades in different policy areas in different advanced liberal democracies. 4. Public governance reforms In this section, we provide a brief overview of how the politics of self-governance has found its way into a range of different policy areas. Later on, in Part 2 of the book, we offer a series of in depth studies of a number of concrete reform initiatives within a variety of policy areas, levels and countries. As was the case with our account of the theories on governance, we do not intend to prove that the new self-governance imagery has completely taken over. We simply seek to demonstrate how self-governance is used today as a central means to provide public governance in a wide variety of areas and contexts. Many of the recent public sector reforms that have seen the light of day in the last decades have aimed at introducing various forms of self-governance. One group of reforms has been directed towards the shaping and framing of empowered individuals capable of governing themselves in ways that fit well into the overall structuring of society. Among these empowerment reforms some have targeted the formation of critical customers capable of making rational choices, while others have aimed to develop responsible citizens willing to contribute to carrying out individually related governance tasks (Bang 2003; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). Another group of reforms have aimed to shape and frame collective forms of selfgovernance (Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999; CEC 2001). Public institutions have been granted increased autonomy; the formation of different forms of networks and partnerships between public and private actors have been encouraged and legalized, different funding schemes have triggered a growth in the active and systematic involvement of private firms and voluntary organizations in solving

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public governance tasks, and a whole range of boards, councils, committees and forums consisting of various stakeholders have been formed in order to involve different stakeholders and their interest organizations directly in the governing of different areas of public governance. The new forms of self-governance grant individual citizens and collective actors a whole series of new exit- and voice-based channels of influence, while simultaneously providing public authorities with a series of new ways of controlling self-governing actors and holding them accountable based on a contract – and/ or negotiated distribution of responsibilities and an incentive based framing of individual choices. While we should remain sceptical of the actual effects of the many attempts to promote self-governance, the new forms of governance have found their ways into all levels in the increasingly multi-levelled political systems in advanced liberal democracies. Obviously the forms vary considerably with levels. Thus, the efforts to increase the involvement of individual citizens in different collective forms of governance seem to be most marked at local levels of governance, whereas the involvement of more organized and resourceful stakeholder groups have been the main target at higher levels of governance. A clear indication of the fact that the self-governance imagery has not only gained ground on local levels of governance is found in the EU’s Governance White Paper published in 2000 that marks an increased strategic interest in involving stakeholders directly in policy making an policy implementation, and stresses the important role of committees in EU policy making as well as the widespread use of the Open Method of Coordination in policy areas with weak legal regulation. These policy suggestions are directly oriented towards enhancing the self-governing capacity of the nation-states and relevant stakeholder groups (Marks 1993; Bache and Flinders 2004; Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2005). In the following we give a few examples of how these new forms of self-governance are gaining ground within different policy areas. Within the area of public service delivery we are currently witnessing an explosion in the deliberate strategic effort to enhance self-governance either though the empowerment of individual citizens or through the formation of responsible, local communities of stakeholders. While the former initiatives target the development of the rational capable and critical costumer on a public market the latter seeks to establish all sorts of boards, committees and networks which bring together relevant stakeholders such as users and producers of the services, interest organizations, relevant professionals and experts and public administrators and politicians. This development is among other things taking place in the area of primary school governance where pupils, parents, teachers and the school manager at the individual school are encouraged to collaborate in an effort to govern the school in the best way possible (Hansen 2005). While many have questioned just how effective and how representative these networks are (Ranson et al. 2005), there are clear signs that a whole range of new usually local actors are engaged – whether spurred on by public authorities or not – in the attempt to modify and hopefully improve schools and education policies (Bache 2003). As shown later

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on in this book and in a number of other studies, it is possible to identify the same development in the governing of higher education institutions (Kickert 1995; King 2007). Another public service area is health that may well be the one in which the most spectacular and widespread hierarchical and even authoritarian forms of state intervention have traditionally taken place in our societies. Even if the ability of citizens and communities to take care of their own health has always played a certain role in the health sector, the self-governing capacities of individuals have come to play a still more proliferate role over the last few decades (Rose 2006). This is, amongst others, in the area of chronically ill where patients are to an increasing extent redefined as potential coordinators of their own treatment process, and sent on training courses which empower them to take on this task. This move towards self-governance is furthermore found in what could be denoted as a lifestyle oriented health policy which currently is gaining ground. This proactive policy focuses on how the self-governing capacities of individuals can help to reduce health problems before they appear. Moreover, this lifestyle politics emphasise the importance of workplaces, communities, urban neighborhoods and local authorities for the prevention of health problems and seek to get all these actors to work in tandem in publicly funded projects on the promotion of lifestyle changes and thereby combat obesity, cardiovascular diseases and various forms of cancer (Weiner and Alexander 1998; Callaghan and Wistow 2006). Traditionally, the regulation of the labour market and employment has in many European countries been a matter for non-state actors, namely representatives of the employers and the employees. While laws and state regulations have played a crucial role in most Southern European countries, voluntary (collective) agreements formed between organized employers and employees have been the rule of the game in many Central and Northern European countries. These corporatist policy-making networks, in which non-state actors have played a very influential role, have in the last few decades lost their solidity in many countries. Collective bargaining has been decentralized, labour unions have lost members and many central states have been anxious to play a more interventionist role in order to ensure international competitiveness. Yet, the trend towards more direct state intervention in labour market policies does not mean that the ideal of self-governance has been dropped. First of all, labour market policies, which are now increasingly termed employment policies, now depend on the figure of the active jobseeker who are urged and at times even forced to seek jobs (Dean 1995). Second, employment policies are in many, though not all, cases taking a new more inclusive and flexible form in order to ensure policy implementation. Thus, many Northern European countries have developed effective, albeit less stable, policymaking networks made up not only by the classic corporatist actors, but also by local authorities, local business councils and community groups (Torfing 2007). Within environmental politics, the role of NGOs concerned with conserving nature, promoting environmentally friendly technologies and re-shaping wider societal structures according to ecological principles have been absolutely

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fundamental in putting environmental issues on the political agenda since the 1960s. While some of these movements ascribe to spectacular events (Greenpeace) and public campaigns, other engage in governance networks with policy-makers, administrators and private businesses (Doyle and Doherty 2006). Recently, the latter strategy has been analysed by various academics in terms of environmental governance by which environmental issues are seen to be handled by actors driven by an enlightened self-interest (Bulkeley 2005; Lesmos 2006). More or less self-governing networks and partnerships between public and private actors have in various ways played an important role in urban planning and governance in many European countries for a long period. Perhaps the Netherlands is the country where the willingness of policy-makers to experiment with different forms of urban governance has been greatest (Hajer and Zonneveld 2000; Priemus 2007). We find similar attempts of promoting self-governance within urban planning and policy-making in other countries both inside and outside Europe as well (Pierre 1998; Keil 2006). Networks of public and private actors that operate at a certain distance from central state authorities have also had a long-standing role in regional development policies in most liberal democracies. In Europe these networks have slowly but steadily gained an increasingly important role after the launching of the European Regional Development Fund (Structural Funds) in 1975 (Ansell 2000). But also independently of these funds, several countries inside (Bennett et al. 2004) and outside (Everingham et al. 2006) Europe have experienced an increased political importance being attributed to the regional policy-making and policy implementing capacities of networks of public and private actors. It is beyond the scope of this book to map the materialization of the governance imagery in other geopolitical settings Yet it should be pointed out that the politics of self-governance under such headings as good governance and people-centered development seems increasingly to inform political efforts to stimulate industrial and economic development (Wade 1990; Weiss 2003), the design of effective development interventions (Leftwich 1994), and the attempts to empower citizens and local communities (Triantafillou and Nielsen 2001) in the so-called developing countries. A final policy area that has been heavily influenced by the politics of selfgovernance is process management. The last 15 years we have witnessed something little short of an explosion in new management techniques that focus on how to trigger the engagement, responsibility and capacities of individual employees or groups of employees (Pinnington and Edwards 2000; Radnor et al. 2006). Examples of these new forms of management that seek to enhance the willingness and capacity of employees to governing themselves goes under slogans such as human resource management, lean management and new public management. While some of these management strategies focus on financial ownership i.e. stock options and other forms of incentive management, others point to the importance of enhancing the symbolic ownership and belonging of the employees. However, both strategies seek to enhance the self-governing capacity of the employees

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through the blurring of the distinction between the employee’s economy/identity and that of the work place. This blurring has made it possible to reduce the level of hierarchical control and allow for more autonomous forms of work i.e. in selfgoverning teams and individually at work station at home. The above description of some of the empirical developments in different policy areas gives an initial indication of how the politics of self-governance has put its mark on different policy areas of public governance in advanced liberal democracies. 5. The design of the book As stated above, the aim of this book is to give a comprehensive and detailed mapping of how the politics of self-governance materializes itself theoretically and empirically. This mapping exercise will enquire into how social scientific theories and empirical reform programmes and governance praxis conceptualize the emergence, causes and consequences of the politics of self-governance. More precisely, each chapter is trying to shed light on the four questions listed in section 2 above. The first step in the mapping exercise consists in showing how a number of selected social scientific theories articulate the politics of self-governance and how they answer or at least relate to these three questions. The theoretical mapping in Part 1 aims to show that even if far from every recent, dominant social scientific work discussing political governance endorses the governance imagery, the latter nonetheless defines an intellectual terrain that the theoretical literature has to relate to even if the purpose is to analyse or criticize the epistemological and moral characteristics of that terrain. This part of the book is divided into three chapters on macro, meso and micro theories, respectively. Although this way of dividing social scientific theories is used relatively often, it tends to be used in different ways. Some refer to different hierarchically defined institutional levels in a given political system (Kapiriri et al. 2007), some point to different levels of abstraction (Wiley 1988), and others again argue that it does not make sense to use this distinction between levels since they are all basically reflections of one constitutive micro level (Collins 1981). In this book we use the macro/meso/micro terms to denote different objects of investigation. Hence, by macro theories we refer to theories analysing large scale societal developments and governing practices operating at the level of the state. By meso theories we mean theories that focus on the institutionalization of relations between actors, and by micro theories we think of theories that have individuals and the factors that influence their actions as the main object of investigation. The empirical mapping in Part 2 of the book takes the form of eight case studies of how the politics of self-governance is unfolding in a specific policy field in a given national or trans-national context. The purpose of these case studies is to show that the politics of self-governance has wide ranging significance for and

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impact on the way in which public governance is performed in advanced liberal democracies, and that this impact is not narrowly linked either to certain policy areas or to specific political ideologies or regimes. The eight case studies first describe and analyse the specific reflections, techniques and conflicts involved in the attempts to produce public purpose through self-governance. Then, they address the causes or driving forces that are regarded as important for the emergence of the politics of self-governance in the analysed case. Finally, the chapters seek to unravel or predict the effects of the politics of self-governance in the particular case. In terms of policy areas, the case studies include education, public health, employment and crime prevention, community development, public management and business policy. These policy areas have been selected in order to show that the politics of self-governance sets its marks on many if not all areas of public governance ranging from service delivery over process regulation to authoritative rule. While the book has no strict comparative pretensions, we have strived for a certain regime diversity by selecting cases from both predominantly neo-liberal regimes (United States, Australia and Great Britain) and more Social Democratic ones (Austria and Denmark). The fact that the politics of self-governance is prevailing in countries with different political regimes helps to illustrate that this governance imagery is much more than a political whim. Two of the cases (accounting and employment) have been selected in order to demonstrate that the politics of self-governance also manifests itself at trans-national levels of governance. 6. On the chapters In Chapter 2, ‘A Macro Level Perspective on Governance of the Self and Others’, Anders Esmark and Peter Triantafillou examine macro oriented theoretical understandings of the politics of self-governance, namely systems theory and governmentality studies. After arguing that both Niklas Luhmann’s and Foucault’s analyses are best understood as histories of the emergence of modern forms of societies and governing, the chapter accounts for the ways in which Luhmann and Foucault address the issue of self-governance and the governing of others. A key point is that both authors view the societal and governmental changes taking place around the end of the eighteenth century as marking the birth of modern society, but disagree on more recent developments. Whereas Luhmann basically views today’s society as a continuation of the systems crystallized two centuries ago, Foucault and his followers claim that a distinct form of advanced liberal government has emerged over last three decades or so. Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing map, in Chapter 3, ‘The Politics of SelfGovernance in Meso Level Theories’, the ways in which the governance imagery is articulated in governance network theory, regulation theory and post-liberal democratic theory. These theories are all, albeit in different ways, concerned with

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the normative question of how self-governing societal actors such as voluntary organizations, private firms and public institutions can contribute to the efficient, effective and/or democratic governance of society. The authors argue that while the three meso level theories in important ways supplement each other, their rather different theoretical assumptions make the design of a more comprehensive meso level theory about the emergence, functioning an impact of self-governance a difficult task. In Chapter 4, ‘Self-Governance in Micro Level Theory’, Lina Eriksson accounts for the role of self-governance present in different micro level theories of governance, notably public choice theory and the literature on the management of common pool resources. She argues that the predominance of rational choice inspired approaches to governance questions has often, though far from always, resulted in policy advice favoring small government and enhanced competition. She interestingly notes that despite important variations in the theoretical assumptions about what drives individual actions, most micro level theories point to the importance of developing and maintaining proper collective institutions for the governing of public issues. In Part 2 of the book, ‘Governance in Action’, we present a number case studies mapping and analysing some of the many ways in which self-governance is put into action in the production of public purpose. Over the last decades, public-private partnerships have mushroomed particularly, but not exclusively, in the Anglo Saxon countries as an allegedly more responsive and effective way of handling a wide range of political issues. In Chapter 5, ‘The Institutional Design of Self-Governance: Insights from Public-Private Partnerships’, Keith Baker, Jonathan B. Justice and Chris Skelcher analyse two quite different British cases (social service delivery and public order maintenance) of designing public-private partnerships. They show that both the level of contestation and the exercise of public authority differ importantly in such partnerships, something that may partly be attributed to pre-existing norms and ways of governing within the given policy area. Juliet Musso and Christopher Weare, in Chapter 6, ‘Citizen and City: Institutional Reform and Self-Governance in Los Angeles’, analyse the citywide system of neighborhood councils established in 1999 with the stated goals of increasing citizen participation in policy formulation and implementation. They show that while some neighborhood councils have demonstrated some important accomplishment in such areas as land use policy and service delivery, other councils have suffered from personal conflicts and lack of strategic direction. Moreover, all councils have had to face a problematic relationship with the City Government, which have tended to be reluctant to support and incorporate the councils’ interests and resources. Under the heading of ‘the knowledge society’ institutions of higher education have been subjected to numerous new initiatives seeking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their teaching and research. In Chapter 7, ‘Paradoxes of the Self: Self-Owning Universities in a Society of Control’, Jakob Ørberg and Susan

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Wright examine the recent Danish university reforms in an attempt to explore just what kind of self is being promoted through the many new governing mechanisms. They conclude that the reforms are ridden with a paradox in that centrally and topdown driven changes are assuming that universities act as coherent organizational selves on the one hand, but are actually creating fragmented organizational subjects trying to respond to constantly shifting and increasing performance demands by the Ministry on the other. In this process, bottom-up initiatives and values that do not immediately conform to the externally given performance indicators are at risk of being excluded. In the last decade or so, biobanks have become a rapidly growing element in the mapping and possible curing of genetically related diseases. In Chapter 8, ‘Self-Governance and the Disappearance of the Human Body’, Herbert Gottweis examines biobanks and the tensions they generate between the construction of the autonomous, self-governed individual and patient in medical-ethical and public discourse, and what seems to be the dissolution of the human body in contemporary biomedical practice. He argues that biobanks challenge the notion of the self-determining citizen by constituting a new way of governing bodies through highly complex social/scientific assemblages consisting of a multiplicity of heterogeneous objects. The rise of communitarian problematizations of bodily health is one sign of this trend. The performances of public organizations are increasingly seen to depend upon the human factor, i.e. the competencies of the employees. Such competencies include innovation capacity, personal engagement, flexibility, customer orientation and social/cooperative skills. In Chapter 9, ‘Public Administration in Teams – SelfGoverning Civil Servants’, Birgitte Poulsen examines the ambitions, conflicts and problems encountered in the attempt to promote self-governing teams and project management in the Danish central state administration. A key conclusion is that while the paradigm of self-governance and creativity has enabled new forms of freedom among the civil servants, it is not unproblematic because it tends to devaluate experience, educational skills and continuity. In Chapter 10, ‘Governing the Responsible Prisoner: A Comparative Analysis’, Mary Bosworth compares official management practices and rhetoric from the British and the US federal prison system. Using concrete examples from the admission manuals, she shows how ideas and notions of the new public management literature have informed the attempts to encourage prisoners to govern themselves. In this endeavor, the handbooks present inmates as just another ‘client group’ and the prisons as just another public service institution. She explains that this managerial vocabulary veils the near-limitless sovereign power underpinning penal practice while simultaneously placing all the responsibility on the prisoners for their self-improvement and good order. Under the reference of ‘globalization’ the employment and social policies of European societies are currently undergoing a more or less dramatic transformation. While these issues remain largely within the jurisdiction of member states, the European Union and its many committees are actively engaged in forging

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strategies inciting member states to take action through a host of soft governing mechanisms, such as the Open Method of Coordination. In Chapter 11, ‘SelfGovernance through the Committees in the Open Method of Coordination: The Cases of Employment and Social Inclusion’, Caroline de la Porte, David Natali and Philippe Pochet examine how and to what extent the OMC Committees function as self-governing bodies in the formulation of employment and social inclusion policies. They show that socialization processes within the Committees importantly contribute to the making of self-governing capacities in the sense of developing common problem perceptions, devise strategies and even take up new issues in ways that partly reflect but in no way are reducible to the interests of their respective member states. Based on the insights generated by these chapters, we try to sketch the contours of the contemporary governance imagery in the concluding chapter. We do so by pinning down the chapters’ contribution to shedding light on the major features of the politics of self-governance, the forces behind it, and its effects. References Ansell, C. 2000, ‘The networked polity: Regional development in Western Europe’, Governance, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 279-291. Bache, I. 2003, ‘Governing through governance: Education policy control under new Labour’, Political Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 300-314. Bache, I. and Flinders, M. (eds), 2004, Multi-Level Governance, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bang, H. 2003, ‘A new ruler meeting a new citizen: Culture governance and everyday making’ in Governance as social and political communication, H. Bang (ed.), Manchester University Press, Manchester. Beck, U. 2000, The Brave New World of Work, Polity, Cambridge. Bennett, R.J., Fuller, C. and Ramsden, M. 2004, ‘Local government and local economic development in Britain: An evaluation of developments under labour’, Progress in Planning, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 209-274. Birch, A.H. 1982, ‘Overload, Ungovernability and Delegitimation: The Theories and the British Case’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 14, pp. 135-160. Buchanan, J.M. and Tollison, R.D. 1972, Theory of Public Choice: Political Application of Economics, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Bulkeley, H. 2005, ‘Reconfiguring environmental governance: Towards a politics of scales and networks’, Political Geography, vol. 24, no. 8, pp. 875-902. Callaghan, G. and Wistow, G. 2006, ‘Governance and public involvement in the British National Health Service: Understanding difficulties and developments’, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 63, no. 9, pp. 2289-2300. CEC 2001, European Governance, A White Paper, COM (2001) 428 final, CEC, Brussels.

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Part 1 Scientific Reflections on Governance

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Chapter 2

A Macro Level Perspective on Governance of the Self and Others Anders Esmark and Peter Triantafillou

1. Narrowing down the field: Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann This chapter proceeds on the assumption that macro level theories and analyses are important to the debate about the transformation of governance, not least with respect to the rise of the politics of self-governance. Its merits notwithstanding, the debate on the transformation of governance has, to some extent, focused mainly on the meso level. The inclusion of macro level as well as micro level observations thus emerges as one of the key challenges to current and future governance research (Bang 2003; Bevir 2003). As noted in the introduction, there is a large body of scholarly (social science) literature on large-scale social trends and developments which has important things to say about the politics of self-governance. Although we recognize the relevance of this literature, we have chosen to limit our discussion in this chapter to the contributions of Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann. We have chosen Foucault and Luhmann because they both deal with power, steering and not least self-steering directly. Whereas other macro sociological contributions might highlight certain important changes in the broad societal conditions of current governance discourses and techniques, such as the development of new communication technologies (network society), increasing uncertainty, interconnectedness and complexity (risk society) or the transformation of dominant modes of production (knowledge society), both Foucault and Luhmann place issues of power and steering at the centre of their approach. It may be objected that whereas Luhmann’s work clearly fits the label of macro level observation or macro sociology fairly easily, Foucault is better known as an analyst of the microphysics of power. In fact, he even claimed that his interest was neither in the state (Gordon 1991, 4) nor in society (Foucault 1991a, 85). None the less, we find that Foucault’s writings in the context of macro level observation are highly relevant not only because he was concerned with the broader, strategic linking of microphysical practices, but also with the role of state power in governing populations and the question of overarching power formations. A less recognized communality between the two authors is that they were both historians. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the contribution of Foucault’s and Luhmann’s writings to our understanding of the emergence, character and efficacy of the politics of self-governance. We try to meet this aim firstly by accounting

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for the key concepts, analytical strategies and diagnoses of governing in modern societies launched by the two authors. In particular, we focus on their understanding of the recent changes in governing in Western societies. Secondly, we try to point to some of the ways in which the writings of the two authors have contributed to the production of the current governance imagery. While the two authors themselves had no intention of providing any normative grounding for governing interventions, we indicate at the end of this chapter that their diagnoses have been taken – in often rather curious ways – by other researchers as an ontological and even moral grounding of policy designs contributing to the politics of selfgovernance. We start the chapter by focusing on the historical analyses and diagnoses made by the two authors. We do so, because both authors treat the transformation of governance and the potential rise of self-governance in a historical perspective. We then continue and explore their understandings of self-governance. This is followed by an account of their conception of the governing of others. We finish the chapter by first accounting for Foucault and Luhmann’s take on the causes and effects of the politics of self-governance, and second discussing the normative assumptions and implications made by the authors themselves and by subsequent researchers. 2. Histories of the politics of self-governance Foucault’s writings are usually divided – by himself and others – into three themes: knowledge, power and ethics. What connects these three themes is not only that Foucault analyses them as historically concrete and variable practices, but also that he focuses on the ways in which they contribute to the constitution of subjects. Foucault’s writings are difficult if not downright impossible to categorize within a particular discipline. While his training as a psychologist and a philosopher clearly shows in his analytical approach to madness and sexuality, he has exercised a huge influence on sociology and to some extent political science. Two main sources of inspiration stand out in his attempt to undertake ‘histories of the present’ (Foucault 1977a, 31), namely the French historians of scientific epistemology, such as Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of Western morality and science (Foucault 1977b). It is above all from these two influences that Foucault develops his archaeological analyses of knowledge and his genealogical analyses of power and ethics. Luhmann’s writings are both voluminous and diverse, not least with respect to the melange of sources utilized, which include general systems theory, phenomenology, notational logic, communications theory, linguistics organization theory etc. However, two characteristics are fundamental to Luhmann’s approach. On the one hand, his concerns were sociological: his basic motivation was the quintessential macro sociological quest for insight into the fundamental structures and dynamics of society (Luhmann 2005). On the other hand, Luhmann also

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adopted a historical approach. His aim was not simply to offer a theory of society, but rather to provide a historical analysis of the form of society particular to modernity as well as its predecessors (Luhmann 2005, 181). As Luhmann stated, he tended to ‘think primarily in historical terms’ (1991). Recently, the somewhat neglected historical dimension of Luhmann’s work has been made the subject of more careful scrutiny (Buskotte 2006). If Foucault attempted to provoke contemporary thinking by unravelling hitherto neglected strategic assemblages or networks of power-knowledge relations, and not least the historical transformations of such assemblages or dispotifs (Foucault 1980, 194), Luhmann’s historical analysis was guided rather by the arch-sociological issue of the ‘form of differentiation’ constituting society. Consequently, the overall historical narrative proposed by Luhmann consists of a number of societies defined by their constitutive forms of differentiation: segmentation, centre-periphery differentiation, stratification and functional differentiation (1997, 595). Although the point of observation underlying this historical narrative is different from that of Foucault and governmentality studies, they do display a certain affinity in the sense that what is at stake in both cases is essentially a preoccupation with the historical epoch of modernity; its beginning, consolidation and to some extent also its limits and potential disruption. Briefly put, Luhmann shares with the Foucault the tendency to disregard the schematics of pre-modernity, modernity, post-modernity and its established ‘transitory events’ (revolutions, capitalist production etc.), while on the other hand presenting what none the less amounts to a history of modernity, albeit an alternative one. For Luhmann, this history is basically about the emergence, consolidation and modification of a number of so-called function systems, most importantly the economy, politics, law, family, religion, art, science, education and health (Luhmann 1997, 743). Since the decisive turning point in the latter part of the 18th century, these systems of communication have become increasingly inclusive and exclusive. With respect to inclusiveness, each function system has become increasingly open to anyone, anytime and anywhere. Stated differently, each function system has become a global system of communication. In this sense, Luhmann’s history of modernity implies a radical claim about globalization. At the same time, function systems are completely exclusive in the sense that they are operatively closed around their particular functions, excluding all other function systems (Luhmann 1997, 708). The array of mutually exclusive function systems adds up to the present communicative reality of a functionally differentiated world society. Luhmann initially declares that the onset of functional differentiation is ‘hard to date’, being subject to historical traces reaching back well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but none the less he also states that stratification decisively gave way to functional differentiation during the latter third of the eighteenth century (1997, 734). Similarly, Foucault’s key proposition about the emergence of ‘disciplinary societies’ is dated at the end of the eighteenth century, although historical traces reaching back several centuries can also be found.

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Foucault’s core analytical theme is the careful mapping of the discourses, instruments and practices related to this new form of power and its relations to the other points in a recast triangle of sovereignty, discipline and government. Whereas Luhmann regards power as completely enveloped by differentiation (power is always completely differentiated), Foucault regards differentiation as internal to power. In fact, strategies and practices of power are the source both of differentiation and connections between that which is differentiated. Thus, Foucault accounts for the differentiation between state and civil society in modernity as a particular liberal form of governing a territory and its population (Foucault 1989, 113-115; see also Gordon 1991, 14-27). The ingenious stroke of liberalism was to resort to a form of governing that depends not on the omnipotence of the state, but on the self-governing capacities of individuals, organizations and groups in the so-called civil society. Now, liberalism never believed that the self-governing capacity of civil society would emerge out of nothing. Thus, Foucault’s analysis of the disciplining of prison inmates, soldiers, workers, students and the sick should be seen not as the state’s encroachment on a primordial civil society, but as part and parcel of liberalism’s ambition to carve out a distinct sphere able to govern itself properly. The fact that Foucault’s approach provides an important input into the governance debate is now less than controversial (see for example Torfing and Sørensen 2006). We would highlight the historical dimension to this input: Foucault and governmentality studies provide a very strong argument about the historical transformation of power and, by implication, of governance. In particular, the potential transition from the disciplinary societies to ‘advanced liberalism’ or ‘control society’ could be considered a comprehensive analysis of the transition from ‘government to governance’ in governance studies (cf. Chapter 3, this volume), although such an analysis differs decidedly from the conventional interpretation of this shift in governance research with respect to issues such as the role of state, sovereignty, the concept of government and indeed the notion of selfgovernance. Luhmann’s work has also found its way into the governance debate, though his thoughts have not been considered in terms of power or of concrete historical events, rather they have been more often used in rather sweeping statements about the increasing complexity and fragmentation of current society (Koimann 2000; Kickert 1997; Mayntz 2000, 2003). We would hold, however, that such a utilization of Luhmann’s work is largely misleading. Indeed, we consider Luhmann no less a historian of power than Foucault. Yet, as we will see in the following two sections, Luhmann’s emphasis on the differentiation of power results in an analysis of self-governance and governance that differs importantly from Foucault’s. 3. The self-governance of subjects and systems Foucault and most of his followers talked about the governing of the self in two distinct senses, namely the governing of the self by the self and the governing of

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the self by others (than the self) (Foucault 1997, 87, 90). In this section we deal with the former, the latter is dealt with in the next section. While Foucault had already argued in Discipline and Punish that power can only be exercised over free subjects, it is only in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality that he proposes a distinct analytic of ethics, which is the term he uses to denote the concrete practices constituting freedom (Foucault 1985, 1986). Ethics is the self’s labour or action upon itself and thereby denotes the practices by which the self forms itself as a subject. Briefly put then, Foucault and governmentality studies in a wider sense, conceive self-governance as practices of freedom exercised by selves in constituting themselves as subjects. Luhmann, however, approaches the issue somewhat differently. Thus at this point we are concerned with the question of the ‘self’: What constitutes a self capable of governing itself? For Foucault, a ‘self’ more or less invariably refers to an individual person. Thus, in his analysis of ethical practices in the History of Sexuality, Foucault focuses on individual persons, notably male citizens of the Greek city state or the Roman Empire. Similarly, the ‘self’ targeted by the disciplinary techniques unravelled in Discipline and Punishment refers to individual persons and bodies capable of disciplining themselves. Foucault’s studies did not engage other ‘selves’ than individual persons. Despite this there is no reason why his analytical framework could not be extended to collective selves. Thus it would be possible to apply the framework in an attempt to analyse the ways in which, for example, ethnic groups, workplaces, organizations and even states consider and govern themselves as subjects. Yet this is clearly an area within governmentality analysis that is in need of further conceptual clarification. By contrast, systems theory suggests a somewhat more general approach to the question of the self involved in self-governance. Luhmann’s basic proposition is that any operative entity constitutes a self. The notion of operation simply refers to the act of ‘making a difference that makes a difference’. As is fairly well known, Luhmann called such operative entities systems, which are constituted by a distinction between system and context (‘umwelt’), although they could of course have been called something else. In his principal work on general systems theory, Luhmann distinguished between machines, physical systems, psychic systems and social systems (1984). This map of systems basically reflects the conventional cybernetic proposition that entities in these disparate domains are all operative in the same sense of being able to make a difference, i.e. making a distinction and acting according to it. As such, Luhmann proceeds from a cybernetic proposition in which the self is thoroughly dislodged from humanism; from its conventional ties to the human being, the individual subject and the extension of the subject to include organizations through the legal doctrine of accountable subjects or the notion of collective action. Instead, self and system, of whatever kind, are treated as equal terms. Although Luhmann did display a basic cybernetic orientation in his mapping of different systems, he made no serious attempts to include machines or physical systems in his work. Nor did he share the conventional cybernetic tendency to

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conceptualize physical systems as blue-prints for social systems, mimicking the vocabulary of physics and ‘thermodynamic laws’. Rather, he invested the bulk of his analytical effort in the particular case of social systems, which, apart from the already mentioned function systems, include organizations and interaction systems. The emergence of new types of social systems is an empirical question, and Luhmann did consider new social movements a potential innovation in this respect (1997, 847). Yet the distinction between function systems, organizations and interaction systems was never substantially revised. The relation between social systems and psychic systems was also a vital theme for Luhmann. The notion of psychic systems, or ‘thinking systems’, was Luhmann’s preferred alternative to the conventional concepts of subject and individual, implying that the body should be conceived as a physical system in its own right, or maybe even a number of systems since cells might also be considered systems, For Luhmann self-governance is not about ethics but instead an ontological prerogative of any system. Luhmann’s basic proposition is that any operative entity (system) is completely self-determined. Regardless of the nature of operation (acting, observing, thinking, communicating, changing etc.), the prerogative of complete self-determination is implied. Drawing on different sources, Luhmann proposed a number of approaches to and concepts of the notion of complete self-determination, notably autopoiesis (literally meaning self-creation) but also self-reference and self-organization. Although the concept of self-governance or self-steering is dealt with less explicitly by Luhmann, it is clearly to be included among the derivatives of complete self-determination. Any system is, in the final instance, self-governing or self-steering. Systems theory regards cases where this self-governing capacity is thwarted or subdued, which of course can happen, as a termination of the system. Both Foucault’s and Luhmann’s writings can be seen as anti-humanist in the sense that both reject taking the consciousness or the behavior of human beings as the ultimate explanation of social phenomena. Nevertheless, Foucault’s analysis of self-governance in Ancient Greece and Rome clearly focuses on the reflections and actions of individual persons. So does his proposed four-fold analytical framework of ethics, namely the ethical substance, the mode of subjectification, the ethical work, and the telos and the end of the self’s actions on itself (Foucault 1985, 26-27). Yet in both his concrete analysis of ethics and in the suggested analytical framework, it is clear that Foucault did not suddenly turn into a methodological individualist at the end of his authorship. Ethical practices, Foucault claims, are directly related to schemes of power in general (see below) and socially endorsed codes of conduct, what Foucault terms morality, in particular. Moreover, as already mentioned, we see no reason why Foucault’s analysis of ethics could not be extended to include other selves than individual persons. What Luhmann suggests in this respect, might be considered a more comprehensive theory of the self involved in self-governance, which in a certain sense takes Foucault’s anti-humanism one step further, and opens up the possibility for analysing selfgovernance in terms of groups, organizations, and even nation-states. Accordingly,

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self-governance cannot be understood by focusing solely on individual agents, but has to include the ways in which the actions of others impinge on the selfgoverning actions of these agents. 4. Linking self-governance and governance For Foucault, freedom involves, first, the contention that freedom cannot be determined in advance because it is made up by the very practices freely chosen and exercised by the self. Second, being a free subject on the one hand always already entails a relation to others. The self’s subjection to itself never takes place in a social vacuum but always in relation to existing codes or rules of conduct and thereby to the expectations and scheming of others. Thirdly, while the self’s ethical practices are not taking place outside power, they do depend upon a certain element of liberty, i.e. a certain room for the self to reflect, choose and work upon itself (Foucault 1994a, 2-3). In other words, while freedom is exercised in a field of power relations, these relations have to be mobile and perhaps even reversible. If they sediment into a condition or state of total domination, which for Foucault would be something altogether different from power, then resistance may perhaps be possible, but it would make no sense to talk about freedom in the sense outlined above. Thus freedom or self-governance, which for Foucault amount to the same thing, is neither an ideal condition beyond power nor an illusory ritual of selfimposed domination, but an activity where the self informed by shifting social codes of conduct (i.e. codes formed and reproduced by the self and by others) turns itself into a subject. Now, if freedom or self-governance always takes place in a social and powerladen context, how may we account for the link between the practices of selfgovernance and governance, or to put it in Foucauldian terms government and ethics? The most basic answer to this question is to be found in Foucault’s concept of government. It is through the practice of government that a concrete link or contact point is established between the governing of others and the governing of the self by the self. Government is thus defined as the conduct of conduct or the action upon the actions of others (Foucault 1982, 221). By definition these others have a space for acting – upon themselves or upon others. The relationship established by government is neither one of coercion or violence, nor one of voluntarism. In other words, while the self subjected to government is not forced to undertake externally determined actions, it cannot simply dismiss at will the attempts to act on its conduct. The self has in one way or another to relate the attempts of governing its conduct by for example complying, resisting, preempting, or actively participating in and seeking influence on these attempts. We find a similar line of reasoning in the work of Luhmann when he reflects on the possibility of steering from the outside under the conditions of autonomy Steering of the self (any given system) by others (other systems) is not regarded by Luhmann to be in conflict with the notion of self-determination. The concept of

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autopoiesis and complete self-determination obviously suggests the impossibility of determining the operations of a system from the outside, but Luhmann also maintains that systems do not operate in splendid isolation, simply ignoring other and acting in complete introverted, blindness. Systems constantly can and do attempt to steer each other, but this can only take place as steering of self-steering. Thus, much in the same way as Foucault sees power and freedom as mutually constitutive; Luhmann sees the self-steering of systems as preconditions systems theory regards for steering from the outside by other systems. If steering from the outside seriously seeks to end self-determination and self-steering, it can only do so in the form of complete destruction, i.e. coercion or violence. Thus, the link between steering of the self by the self and steering of the self by others is conceived in much the same fashion by the two authors, albeit in very different terminologies. In the terminology of systems theory, the Foucauldian notion of ‘conduct of conduct’ amounts to the proposition that any attempt at steering from the outside or steering of the self by others is always a case of ‘second order steering’ or ‘steering of self-steering’. Given that self-steering is the ontological prerogative of any emergent system, steering from the outside can only take place as the framing, guiding, affecting etc. of self-steering. Thus, Foucault and Luhmann remain in agreement that steering in its conventional sense, i.e. steering between disparate entities (A and B), is something that takes place under the condition of self-steering. Based on this congruency they can even be said to pose similar questions of relevance to governance research: what are the forms of power involved in the governance of the self by others, and to what extent do they allow for/presuppose self-steering? Their answers to these questions are, however, not quite identical. 5. The governance of others/Politics of self-governance Foucault addresses the questions of governing other selves by pointing to the historical constitution of the triangle of discipline, sovereignty and biopolitics. Discipline, or disciplinary power and disciplinary techniques, according to Foucault, was found in the European monasteries from the late medieval period, gradually emerging out of the period of arcane or feudal sovereignty (Foucault 1977a). Together with new weapon technologies, disciplinary techniques would be taken up by the army in the Netherlands and other European countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Foucault 1994b, Dits et écrits. III, 375, Dits et écrits. IV, 191). Subsequently a host of disciplinary techniques appeared to serve a variety of purposes, but above all to provide docility and productivity, in workshops, educational institutions, hospitals and prisons during the eighteenth century. Disciplinary technologies, Foucault argues, were a vital condition for the creation of a productive workforce in the industrializing countries: by enabling the accumulation of men, discipline complemented the technologies for accumulating capital and thereby the development of our industrialized societies (Foucault

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1977a, 220-221). The disciplinary apparatus was linked to the ideal of a potentially omnipresent gaze (panopticon). As narrated by numerous democratic and political scholars, sovereignty was not simply replaced by discipline. Rather, sovereignty went through a process of democratization in a number of Western European countries and the Americas during the nineteenth century through constitutions, laws and individual rights with the aim of instating the people as the new sovereign. The self-determination and self-governance of the people would now be the principle objective and instrument of sovereignty. Foucault does not deny this popular rendition of the history of sovereignty, but adds that the democratization of sovereignty was linked directly to ambitions of governing the wealth and wellbeing of populations of states in a much more comprehensive and efficient manner. Democracy then not only entailed the sovereignty of the people, but also the unprecedented quest to govern the people. Thus the democratization of sovereignty was directly linked both to discipline and above all to biopolitics, which is Foucault’s term for the regulatory interventions targeting the population as a biological entity. Needless to say, the European territorial states had shown an interest in maintaining a large and productive population that could serve in the defence (or even expansion) of territorial boundaries and as an object of taxation well before the advent of democracy. However, at the eve of the first (modern) democratic revolutions in France and the US, the protection and augmentation of the viability, vigor and health of the population becomes a goal in its own right for state action. A new biopower thus emerges merging disciplinary, individualizing techniques and biopolitical regulations targeting populations. In addition to the state, this period sees the emergence of a whole range of private organizations and social movements (hygienists, philanthropists, labour unions, insurance associations) involved in the promotion of the wellbeing of populations. It is the proliferation of disciplinary techniques, biopolitical interventions, sovereign power and a multiplicity of state and non-state organizations concerned with the productivity, health and wellbeing of individuals and groups in the European states over the nineteenth century that Foucault calls the ‘governmentalization of the state’ (Foucault 1991, 103). What is at stake in the on-going transformation of governance, the rise of self-governance and the transition from government to governance, however, is no longer the governmentalization of the state, but rather the governmentalization of government (Dean 1999, 193). If classical liberal governing was informed by an immanent critique, albeit by no means a rejection, of state intervention, government in our society seems above all to hinge on the freedom of the governed (Rose 1999). For advanced liberal government or ‘governmentalized government’ the key problem is neither the danger of excessive state intervention, nor the dangers of social anomie and disintegration. Rather the key problem is: How to nurture the self-steering capacities of individuals, groups and organizations? The US, UK, Australia and New Zealand are leading examples of the spread of a wide range of technologies of agency (such as contracting out and value

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based management) and technologies of performance (such as evaluation and benchmarking) seeking to penetrate domains of expertise and bureaucracy with a view to rendering their activities more transparent, customer oriented and efficient (Dean 1999, 167-169; Triantafillou 2007). While such attempts may take overtly centralized and directive forms, the point is not to enhance state control, but rather to unleash the productive and creative potentials of public service providers. It is through incentives, learning and facilitation that the self-governing capacities of local public authorities are to adopt ‘best practice’. If any, the provocative point of Foucauldian inspired studies of such attempts by public authorities of promoting self-governance is not that the latter are inherently affected and formed in the process, but that even the allegedly ‘self-grown’ measures (pure from the touch of legal authority) seeking to find their own solution to the handling of public issues may be informed by exactly the same governing rationality. If individuals, groups and organizations by themselves (i.e. without being coerced) start regarding themselves as in need of empowerment in order to be able to deal adequately with public issues, this only goes to show that the power ingrained in advanced liberalism is by no way limited to our parliaments, ministries, municipalities, police forces or our courts. Luhmann’s alternative analysis of dominant forms of power could be presented in the following brief fashion: functional differentiation should be regarded as a historical process through which the dominant modern traditions of governance are constituted. Thus understood, the prevailing traditions of governance in contemporary societies are constituted by the governance mediums and programmes of the previously mentioned function systems including not only the political system and the legal system, but also the economy, science, family, religion, education, health, art etc. Each function system is constituted by a specific symbolically generalized medium such as money in the case of the economy, truth in the case of science etc. These governance mediums are in turn, supplied by more specific semantics and programs (texts, discourses etc. as well as something more akin to sociological procedures, norms, roles etc.), which attach themselves to the mediums in question. The ‘governance function’ of symbolically generalized mediums is performed by a combination of the fixation of codes entailed in the mediums and the variability of the programs and semantics that attach themselves to the code (Luhmann 1997, 363; see also Willke 1997, 1998). There are no ‘primary’ or ‘constitutive’ function systems in the functionally differentiated world society, nor any meta principles of social order assigning preferences to one function system at the cost of others: the relation of function systems to each other is one of mutual exclusion and functional equivalence. It is vital therefore, not to confuse steering or power with the political system (let alone the state, which refers to a certain type of organization within the political system). The political system is simply one function system among others, caught in the same type of inter-systemic relations as any other system. The ‘politics of self-governance’, thus understood, may be interpreted as programmes pursuing

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the governance of self-governance within the political system, but it is certainly identical with the practice of governance of self-governance as such. What emerges out of Luhmann’s macro analysis is a catalogue of dominant forms of power, or traditions of governance, which is clearly different from Foucault’s analysis. One might find some affinity between their analyses of sovereignty, but Luhmann’s notion of function systems as prevalent forms of power produces an analysis altogether different from Foucault’s. Rather than a triangle of sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics, we are presented with an array of function systems that can all be analysed as prevalent power formations or traditions of governance. Function systems are of course, selves in their own right: being systems they retain the prerogative of complete self-determination and selfgovernance. Thus, the relation between other systems and function systems is not simply a relation of the subject to the tradition or a structural imperative or a social code, but a relation between autopoietic systems. Because of the temporal and spatial extension of function systems, however, they represent what Luhmann refers to as the society-internal context of other social systems and psychic systems (‘Gesellshaftinterne umwelt’). Thus, the steering of the self and others by organizations, interaction systems and psychic systems largely takes place within function systems. Obviously, any system can ignore function systems, attempt to ‘move beyond’ them or attempt directly to steer and change a function system. But Luhmann’s claim is that for the majority of social and psychic systems, a rather straightforward utilization of the mediums and programmes of function systems is the order of the day. Both Foucault and Luhmann present a macro level analysis of the forms of power involved in the conduct of conduct, or the steering of self-steering. For Foucault and the bulk of governmentality studies, the triangle of discipline, sovereignty and biopolitics is the key object of analysis. By contrast, Luhmann’s analysis draws our attention to the governance mediums and programmes of the different function systems. Power, in other words, is not simply located in political sovereignty, law or money, but also in truth, love, faith etc. In both cases, we are presented with an analysis in which prevalent modes of power and steering are not simply located in the state, but rather at the level of society. Foucault’s analysis, however, suggests more or less unbounded networks of power that permeate society as a whole, whereas Luhmann suggests a radical differentiation of power and steering itself. For Luhmann, power and steering are more or less fully contained within the differentiation between specific function systems, whereas the core of Foucault’s analysis revolves around the spread of particular forms of power (discipline or the triangle of discipline, sovereignty and biopolitics) across a wide range of otherwise disparate institutional settings. Luhmann would not reject that such cross-systemic relations are possible at the level of organizations and interaction systems, just as one might find numerous scripts, standards and mechanisms that tend to float or move between function systems. In general, Luhmann dealt with such instances of cross-systemic relations under the headings of co-evolution, interpenetration, structural and operative couplings and one might reasonably add the forms of

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power particular to such instances to a systems theoretical governance agenda. Indeed, discipline, biopolitics and the mechanisms of advanced liberalism or ‘control’ might be conceived as such forms of power and steering working across the lines of functional differentiation. Luhmann, however, would remain adamant that functional differentiation remains primary in current society: society has not been de-differentiated by functionally indifferent networks of power or communication. For the same reason, Luhmann vehemently resisted the idea that modernity, i.e. the functionally differentiated world society, had somehow come to an end. For Luhmann, there is no historical rupture to be found at the level of primary societal differentiation between the onset of functional differentiation and the present day. Thus, whereas Foucault and others find a historical break in the aftermath of World War II, which can be interpreted as the governmentalization of government, no such transition can be found in Luhmann’s analysis. Whether functional differentiation has in fact been weakened remains an empirical question, and Luhmann might simply be wrong. Thus, one possible analysis would be that governmentalization of government, the rise of self-governance and advanced liberal government involves the dedifferentiation of society, which also seems to be the claim of some proponents of the governmentality perspective (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004). However, an alternative proposition would be that a historical transition has taken place, not at the level of function systems themselves, but rather in the way organizations, interaction systems and psychic systems relate to function systems. Traditionally, other systems have adopted a certain primary function (funktionsprimat), remaining thoroughly rooted in one particular function system. However, organizations are becoming increasingly mobile, shifting and moving between function systems. A key dynamic in the transition from government to governance, thus understood, would be the ‘unhooking’ of function systems in the sense that public and private organizations alike utilize new governance mediums and programmes. Thus, state organizations and public authorities are becoming less dependent on the programmes of the political system and the legal system, while increasingly utilizing mediums and programmes from other function systems such as the economy, science and family (Esmark 2008). Thus, a systems theoretical approach emphasizes the increased mobility of organizations, interaction systems and other systems across the lines of differentiation still maintained by function systems as a key variable in the current development of governance. Such an analysis, however, does not put the rise of self-governance at the heart of the on-going transformation of governance. It does not focus on the extent to which current governance is defined by an increasing interest in strategically nurturing or increasing freedom for its own ends. Whereas the increase in freedom, without diminishing the capacity for steering, is in a certain sense the key empirical variable in the governmentality perspective, the utilization of new governance mediums and programmes by public and private organizations implied by the notion of ‘increased mobility’ would be the key systems theoretical variable. The two variables are not mutually exclusive,

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however. Indeed, they seem to go fairly well in hand. Thus, the introduction of HRM-techniques, seminars and the self-development of the modern employee can be described as strategically nursing and increasing the freedom of the employee as well as the coding of modern management in the medium of love and the appropriation of the programmes and discourses of the family. The introduction of bench-marking, evidence-based policy, naming and shaming so central to current public governance can be described as normalizing power beyond discipline, as well as copying and emulation of scientific mediums and routines by public authorities etc. 6. The causes, effects and normative implications of the politics of self-governance But what then are the causes of the emergence of advanced liberalism? Due to their deliberate strategy of avoiding explanatory why-questions in favor of descriptive what, how and when-questions, Foucault and his followers have little if anything to say about the causes of the emergence of advanced liberalism or any other form of government for that matter. Instead, these studies prefer focusing on the intelligibility of the historical variable assemblages of sets of dispersed forms of knowledge and practices. Thus, the notion of dispositif, which was borrowed from Louis Althusser, was used by Foucault to denote the strategic relations between different elements such as discourses, scientific statements, regulatory decisions, laws administrative procedures, architectural design and various institutions (Foucault 1980, 194). Such a dispositif could be globalization, crime prevention, or the war on terrorism. To the extent that it makes sense, for example, talking about globalization as a dispositif, the challenge would be to examine how discourses and scientific statements about globalization and the challenges ‘it’ puts on economic competitiveness and state governance are linked to concrete policies (such as employment, education and social welfare), administrative procedures (such as New Public Management), laws (such as property rights and immigration) and various new institutions (such as think tanks and academic institutions giving expert advice on globalization). In sum, instead of looking for causality behind a given phenomenon, Foucault and his followers try to account for its intelligibility and the power effects it produces. Although Luhmann never offered any strict reasons or exhaustive explanations as to why functional differentiation (or any other previous form of differentiation) emerged as the primary form of differentiation in society, he was less shy than Foucault about attributing a certain level of weak causality to historical development. At the theoretical level, he basically proposed a functionalist mode of explanation based on the distinction between problem and solution as a schema of observation. Systems of certain durability, he argued, can reasonably be assumed to present a viable solution to some sort of problem. For example, the success of modern organizations is seen in large part to derive from their ability to overcome

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the limitations place upon communication by the criterion of ‘personal presence’ in interaction systems. In the case of function systems, this problem is essentially the threefold problem of communication: contact, understanding and success. If one asks why function systems are so durable and pervasive, the answer would be that they present viable solutions to the problem of communication, i.e. makes the otherwise unlikely event of communication more likely (Luhmann 1984). Obviously function systems are still contingent: they are not theoretically necessary (as in the work of Parsons), nor do they offer any guarantee that communication can in fact take place. Moreover, the constitution of function systems as global systems of communication clearly also depends on certain innovation in mediums of diffusion, or technological media in the conventional meaning of the term. Briefly put then, Luhmann opted neither for strict functional necessity and strong causality, nor for pure contingency, but for a strategy of observation based on the maintenance of the distinction between problem and solution as viable and productive mode of observation providing some level of explanation for the emergence and stability of certain systems. What, if any, are the normative implications of Foucault’s and Luhmann’s studies for the politics of self-governance? Neither scholar had any ambition whatsoever of formulating a normative framework for recommendations or political actions. In fact, Foucault went at great pains to try and avoid endorsing a particular normative standpoint. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify certain implicit values in the writings of both authors. More importantly, several normative deductions have been made by subsequent analysts based on often rather dubious readings of Foucault’s analyses of modern subjectivity and Luhmann’s analyses of modern steering. Despite several accusations of nihilism, Foucault’s writings – like those of his great source of inspiration Nietzsche – are anything but nihilist. His analyses of the working of modern power and subjectivity reveal an intense concern with political struggles over the ways in which we govern others and ourselves in our societies. While these studies are not based on an explicit normative framework, they are explicitly intended as tools serving to destabilize power relations, induce a certain level of mobility in these, and thereby make room for ethical or self-governing practices that constitute our freedom (Foucault 1977b). The proliferation of social movements, who often explicitly refer to Foucault and other so-called constructivist thinkers in their arguments for reforms of the penal system, gender relations, ethnic relations etc., does seem to testify to a certain influence of this type of thought (e.g. Butler et al. 2000). More recently, Foucault’s philosophical ethos of trying to think and act differently and his scant remarks on exercising ethics in terms of an art, as a form of self-improvement, have been taken by certain management theorists as a moral foundation for a selfimproving subjectivity (Hjorth 2005). Thus, it would not be surprising to see some of our petty engineers of the human soul trying to promote entrepreneurship in the private and public sectors in the name of a ‘Foucauldian’ ethos. Much has often been made of the fact that Luhmann studied with Parsons. But, although Luhmann clearly acknowledged his inspiration from Parsons, one

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important difference (out of several) is that functional differentiation was not intended as a normative theory by Luhmann, but rather as an empirical theory or simply as an empirical claim. Whereas function systems are clearly necessary in a normative sense for Parsons – being solutions to the conundrum of social order – Luhmann never attributed any necessity to function systems, empirical or normative. One the other hand, there are numerous remarks about the potentials and problems of functional differentiation scattered throughout Luhmann’s work. Luhmann makes these judgements almost en passant, never venturing to disclose a normative position from which they are made. In general, however, we could say that he remained thoroughly ambivalent with respect to the efficiency as well as the democratic value of functional differentiation. On the one hand, functional differentiation can of course be regarded as a historical accomplishment integral to much normative and democratic theory. At least, breaches in the boundaries established by functional differentiation are at the heart of many classic democratic concerns. For example: lack of distinction between politics and family is at the heart of nepotism as well as fascism (the leader as the ‘Father’, the people as his ‘children’), co-optation of the system of law by other systems such as the political system (might is right), religion (divine law) and science (moral or natural law) is completely incompatible with the formula of the Recthtsstaat. On the other hand, many democratic problems, as well as problems of efficiency in current society derive from the communicative closure of function systems, i.e. exclusion, blindness to social and environmental concerns, lack of innovation and changes etc. If systems theory offers a definite normative position then, it is only one that suggests a healthy dose of suspicion when either the potentials or the problems of functional differentiation is overstated in a rather one-sided way, i.e. when functional differentiation is considered an imperative simply to be accommodated or as the source of fragmentation, disintegration and colonization of civil society and the life-world. References Butler, J.P., Laclau, E. and Zizek, S. 2000, Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left, Verso, London. Dean, M. 1999, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage, London. Deleuze, G. 1995 [1990], ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations, G. Deleuze, University of Columbia Press, New York, pp. 177-182. Foucault, M. 1977a, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Allen Lane, London. Foucault, M. 1977b, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, countermemory, practice, D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp. 139-164.

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Foucault, M. 1979, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, Allen Lane, London. Foucault, M. 1980, ‘The confession of the flesh’, in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, C. Gordon (ed.), Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, pp. 194-228. Foucault, M. 1982, ‘Afterword: The subject and power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, pp. 208-226. Foucault, M. 1985, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, Pantheon, New York. Foucault, M. 1986, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self, Pantheon, New York. Foucault, M. 1991, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, pp. 87-104. Foucault, M. 1994a, ‘The ethic of care of the self as a practice of freedom’, in The final Foucault, J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds), The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, pp. 1-20. Foucault, M. 1994b, Dits et écrits. I-IV. Paris. Foucault, M. 1997, ‘Subjectivity and Truth’, in Michel Foucault. Ethics. The Essential Works, Vol. 1, P. Rabinow (ed.), Penguin Books, London, pp. 87-92. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2004, Multitude – War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin Press, New York. Hjorth, D. 2005, ‘Organizational entrepreneurship – With de Certeau on creating heterotopias (or spaces for play)’, Journal of Management Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 386-398. Kickert, J.M.W., Klijn, E. and Koppenjan, J.F.M. (eds), 1997, Managing Complex Networks – Strategies for the public sector, Sage, London. Kooiman, J. 2000, ‘Societal Governance: Level, Modes and Orders of SocialPolitical Interaction’, in Debating Governance, J. Pierre (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 138-164. Luhmann, N. 1995 [1984], Social Systems, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Luhmann, N. 1997, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Luhmann, N. 2005, Einführung in die Theorie der Gesellschaft, Carl-Auer, Heidelberg. Mayntz, R. 1993, ‘Governance Failure and the Problem of Governability’, in Modern Governance, J. Koimann (ed.), Sage, London, pp. 9-20. Mayntz, R. 2003, ‘New Challenges to Governance Theory’, in Governance as social and political communication, H.P. Bang (ed.), Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 27-41. Rose, N. 2007, The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

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Triantafillou, P. 2007, ‘Benchmarking in the public sector: A critical conceptual framework’, Public Administration, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 829-846. Willke, H. 1997, Supervision des Staates, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Willke, H. 1998, Systemtheorie III – Steuerungstheorie, Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart.

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Chapter 3

The Politics of Self-Governance in Meso Level Theories Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing

1. Introduction As noted in the introduction, the politics of self-governance has had an impact in all corners and on all levels of social science theorizing. The impact encompasses meso level theories, i.e. theories that focus on the emergence, causes and consequences of different ways of institutionalizing interaction between actors. The interest within the social sciences in the role that institutions play in structuring action has always been considerable and was only temporarily interrupted by the behavioral and Marxist scientific revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. However, from the 1980s and onwards we have witnessed a resurrection of the research interest in the questions of how and why institutions emerge, how they function and what impact they have. This new theoretical interest, which has been labelled neoinstitutionalism, differs from old institutionalism in that its focus of attention is not only directed towards the role and functioning of formal institutional features, but also other institutional features such as resource distribution and culture. This renewed interest in the role of institutions has not least been notable in the research that addresses issues related to the question of how to govern society. The current amount of research that deals with the role of institutions in the governance of society is vast and a comprehensive description of this broad field of meso level theorizing is not possible in one chapter. Here we restrict ourselves to presenting three bodies of theory from different parts of the social sciences that each, in one way or another, concurs with the new governance imagery and its inscription of the politics of self-governance into social science theorizing. The two bodies of theory are governance network theory, regulation theory and postliberal democratic theory. We begin by examining the way in which governance network theory conceptualizes, describes, explains and evaluates the politics of self-governance. 2. Governance network theory and the politics of self-governance From the early 1990s and onwards a diverse body of theories has been developed and brought together under the label ‘governance theory’. These theories have

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mainly grown out of two disciplines: Public administration theory and political science (Klijn 1997, 14-16; Sørensen and Torfing 2007, 3). Within public administration theory, the move towards governance theory from the late 1970s and onwards was spurred by two things: 1) a growing scepticism among practitioners and researchers towards bureaucratic forms of governance, and 2) an augmenting recognition of the heterogeneous and decentered nature of the state. The critique of bureaucratic governance was among other things fuelled by the ‘governability crisis’ of the 1970s that was seen as an expression of a series of deep rooted problems related to governing by rule and command i.e. bounded rationality in decision making and implementation problems. The heterogeneous and decentered nature of the state was seen as a consequence first of the increasing compartmentalization of the state apparatus, and second of the reform initiatives of the 1980s that led to a division of the state apparatus into a decentered plurality of relatively autonomous public institutions and levels and an augmented blurring of the institutional boundaries between the public and the private sector i.e. state, market and civil society (Lipsky 1980; Hanf and Toonen 1985; Hjern and Hull 1984, Kaufmann et al. 1986; Harmon and Mayer 1986). Faced with this challenge, the main objective of many public administration researchers has become that of analysing and discussing how public administration and governance can be exercised in a decentered, heterogeneous and fragmented institutional context. More specifically, public administration researchers begin to ask: how is it possible to govern – or manage – society through the institutionalization of different forms of horizontal coordination between relatively autonomous public and private actors? (Peters 1998). While public administration theorists, for obvious reasons, have mainly approached the study of the new forms of governance from a state-centric perspective that focuses on the emergence, role and impact of horizontal forms of governance within and at the margins of the state apparatus, political scientists have approached the study of the new forms of governance from a more societycentric perspective. A core objective for political science and most notably for the state theorists has been to study the interplay between state and society in order to increase our knowledge of to what extent and how it is possible for the state to govern society vis-à-vis strong private actors such as interest organizations and large businesses (Jordan and Schubert 1992; Kenis and Schneider 1991). This long lasting theoretical debate was initiated in the late 1950 and early 1960s by the American pluralists who pointed to the considerable but controllable impact of interest organizations on public policy making. In the 1960s and 1970s, the pluralist position was challenged, first by the corporatists who pointed to the increasing compartmentalization of the state and the establishment of still closer ties between specific parts of the state apparatus and the dominating interest organizations and later by the neo-corporatists who argued that the state was loosing its sovereign position vis-à-vis strong private actors, and was to be seen as one powerful actor among many. The final step in the theoretical marathon of the state theorists was the emergence of policy network theory in the late 1980 and

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early 1990s. These theories point to how the interplay between state and private actors varies and tends to be institutionalized in different network like forms of negotiated cooperation ranging from loose, open and short lived issue networks to tight, exclusive and stable policy communities (Marsh and Rhodes 1992). In this theoretical development, the image of the state as sovereign is slowly but steadily melting away, and the need for the state to exercise its power in more subtle ways is articulated more and more explicitly, just as the question of how to harvest the potential governance capacity possessed by a broad variety of societal actors gains prominence (Marin and Mayntz 1991; Kooiman 1993). State theorists increasingly ask: To what extent and how can the state enhance its ability to govern society through the facilitation of cooperation among self-governing stakeholders? In the early 1990s, public administration theory and state theory combined in a shared effort to develop a theory of the emergence, role and impact of selfgoverning networks within and beyond the state in processes of public governance (Mayntz 1993; Scharpf 1994; Kooiman 1993; Rhodes 1997a; Kickert, Klijn and Koppenjan 1997; Jessop 1998). The term governance network theory points to this extensive new literature that seeks to conceptualise, study and analyse networks as a particular form of governance. As such, these theories are interested in one particular form of networks, namely governance networks, which they more or less unanimously define as a relatively stable self-governing group of interdependent but operationally autonomous actors who work together in order to reach negotiated goals that contribute to what is at a given point in time defined as public purpose (Torfing 2005). Governance network theorists contend that networks have always played a role in the provision of public governance. So the new feature is not networking, but the fact that networks have to an increasing extent become institutionalized as a particular form of governance – a tool kit – which can legitimately be used in the pursuit of public governance. In this process other forms of governance i.e. hierarchy and market have become modified (Rhodes 1997; Jessop 1998, 2003). Hierarchical rule following has been modified by the establishment of horizontal forms of intra-organizational coordination, while the competitive logic of market regulation has been modified by the institutionalization of various forms of inter-organizational cooperation. As such, governance theorists do not claim that hierarchical and market based forms of governance are out, but point to the fact that networks have appeared on the scene as a new strategic means of governance, and that networks and the traditional forms of governance do not live separate lives, but tend to become mixed in complex ways that modify and transform them all (Scharpf 1994, 41). Although the term governance theory covers a broad range of theoretical approaches inspired by different neo-institutionalisms (Sørensen and Torfing 2007, Chapter 2), these theories tend to provide the same storyline regarding the emergence of the politics of self-governance in what appears to be the age of network governance (Rhodes 2000). According to this storyline, new technological achievements, new and more individualized political identities, and a permanent growth driven reorganization of the capitalist economy have

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made society increasingly complex, dynamic and diversified and in the attempt to cope with this situation and the growing demands for effective and flexible public governance it entails, the public sector has had to reorganize itself in a way that makes it more complex, dynamic and diversified (Kooiman 1993, 4; Mayntz 1993; Jessop 1998). A side effect of this reorganization process is an intensified fragmentation and decentering of the institutional set up of the public sector and a further blurring of the borderline between state and society through the enrolment of private actors in the provision of public governance. In this new context, the crucial role of governance networks is seen as, first, to provide horizontal forms of cross institutional coordination and collaboration between the many fragmented and decentered public actors and, second, to establish close links between public and private actors that enhance the commitment of the private actors to contribute to the governing of society. Governance network theorists are first and foremost occupied with debating the manifest as well as the potential impact of governance networks on the provision of effective governance. The potential impact that governance networks might have on the effectiveness of public governance includes: 1) Increasing the quality of political goals due to knowledge sharing; 2) Improving coordination through the creation of a shared perception of what the political goals entail and why they are important; 3) Raising the level of ownership of policy among the involved and affected, thus reducing resistance and paving the way for the smooth implementation of policy goals; 4) Bridging of difference that enhances the production of innovative outcomes; 5) Introducing context sensitive governance processes through the provision of a tailor made institutional set up (Sørensen and Torfing 2008). In sum, governance network theorists have relatively high hopes regarding the ability of governance networks to enhance the effectiveness of the policy process as well as of policy outcomes. Until recently, governance network theory has had comparatively less to say about the democratic impact of network governance. Most theorists have restricted themselves to claiming that governance networks might trigger problems with regard to ensuring democratic accountability, transparency, representation and participation (Ripley and Franklin 1987; Marin and Mayntz 1991; Rosenau 1995; Peters and Pierre 2000). However, others like Kooiman (1993), Rhodes (1997b) and Jessop (2000) argue that the seemingly incompatible relationship between representative democracy and network governance could be removed through a much needed reinterpretation and reorganization of democracy in a way that allows for the development of democratic institutions that combine functionally and territorially organized forms of democratic participation and representation. This approach has recently been taken up by a new generation of governance theorists who argue that governance networks might in fact, under certain conditions, help to strengthen representative democracy and reduce the current political disenchantment in advanced liberal democracies (Klijn and Skelcher 2007; Sørensen and Torfing 2003, 2005; Stoker 2006; Benz and Papadopoulos et al. 2006).

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From the very beginning, governance network theorists have been occupied with the question of whether and how it is possible to govern self-governing networks. Seen from a state-centric point of view, the answer to this question is crucial because it has to do with whether or not it is possible to produce coordinated public governance in a decentered political structure. Seen from a society-centered perspective, it is necessary to find answers to this question because they might illuminate the nature of the balance of power between central political authorities and self-governing actors. In other words, they want to know whether we are witnessing centralization or decentralization of the political power in society. Governance theorists have given the specific task of governing society through the governance of self-governance many names (Kickert, Klijn and Koopenjan 1997; Rhodes 1997a; Jessop 1998). However, in recent years the term metagovernance seems to have been accepted as the term for this specific form of governance (Jessop 2002; Kooiman 2003; Sørensen and Torfing 2007). The term metagovernance covers a broad variety of approaches to the governance of self-governance. Some theorists are specifically interested in macro level forms of metagovernance that are carried out either through the making of choices between different forms of governance i.e. hierarchy, market and networks (Jessop 2002) or through a third order formation of specific belief systems (Kooiman 2003). Other governance theorists have directed their attention towards a more detailed meso level analysis of governance techniques that aim to govern self-governance, and towards the development of a typology of different tool kits for exercising metagovernance ranging from various hands-off forms of network framing to hands-on facilitation of and participation in networks (Sørensen 2007). Although governance theorists tend to agree that it is possible to govern self-governing networks and aim to develop a comprehensive overview of how this is and can be done, they disagree about the strength of metagovernance. While governance network theorists such as Mayntz (1999, 7), Scharpf (1994, 41) and Klijn and Koopenjan (2004, 243) regard metagovernance as a forceful way of governing, other theorists like Rhodes (2000, 355) and Jessop (1998, 43) stress the potential weaknesses and likely failures combined with the exercise of metagovernance, which is partly due to the considerable ability of networks to resist attempts to control them and partly due to the fact that all forms of governance are prone to fail. The more or less explicit policy recommendation posed by governance network theorists is directed towards potential metagovernors, and points to how they can metagovern networks as effectively as possibly. The core challenge in this regard, governance network theorists argue, is to strike the right balance between an overand an under-regulation of governance networks. Too tight a metagovernance undermines the motivation of the network actors to put resources into solving public policy problems, and too weak a metagovernance reduces the ability of networks to produce negotiated outcomes that go beyond the lowest common denominator and undermine the coordination of public policy (Kooiman 1993, 255, 2003; Rhodes 1997a, 56; Scharpf 1994; Peters and Pierre 2000). It is difficult

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to measure the degree to which these policy recommendations have had impact on reforms and praxis in the public sector but the ambition to guide practitioners is definitely there, and the current focus on networks as a tool kit for governance suggest that some impact has been made. In sum, it is fair to say that the focus on self-governing networks and their central role in contributing to the production and coordination of public governance under the current conditions of complexity, diversity and dynamism places governance theory at the heart of the politics of self-governance. Other meso level theories, including regulation theory, do the same. Let us take a look at how. 3. Regulation theory In a nutshell, regulation theory is concerned with the analysis of the development of capitalist economies in the medium and long run. Regulation theory aims to account for the cumulative movements of economic expansion and decline, and it does so by offering a theoretically informed analysis of the institutional forms of regulation that facilitate, but do not guarantee, the stable reproduction of the capitalist economy in the face of social antagonisms and structural contradictions. The institutional forms of regulation help to sustain a particular growth model that is founded on a specific technological paradigm and a political compromise between the social classes and capital fractions. However, at some point, the institutional forms of regulation and the resulting growth model will become dislocated by new events which the regulatory complex of institutions and structural forms fail to domesticate and which therefore cause its disintegration and collapse. Regulation theory emerged in the early 1970s as an entirely French phenomenon, with the regulation schools in Paris and Grenoble as the central protagonists (Jessop 1990). Whereas the Parisian regulation school criticized the formalism implicit in the Marxist schemes of reproduction (Aglietta 1979), the regulation school in Grenoble accused the neoclassical equilibrium theorists of relying on automatic adjustment mechanisms that only work in an economy placed outside real time and space (de Bernis 1975, 1977). In the 1980s and 1990s, the regulation approach spread around the world, and towards the end of the 1990s, there were regulation schools in Canada, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and the United States of America (Jessop 1990). Today, the regulation approach is an important, but increasingly neglected, part of what is generally known as heterodox institutional economics. However, it has also had a significant impact on neo-Marxist state theory and critical geography, and the highly fashionable concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism, which were originally advanced by the Parisian regulation school, have become central reference points in the on-going discussions about economic reforms in the capitalist economies. Regulation theory rejects the idea of the classical, Keynesian and neoclassical economists of identifying a single trans-historical motor of economic development (Basle, Mazier and Vidal 1984, 9; Torfing 1998, 102-104). By contrast, the

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regulation approach sets out to analyse qualitatively different and historically specific growth models. The analysis involves a detailed account of the systematic patterns of socioeconomic regulation: their emergence, their consolidation and their disruption. The show case of the regulation approach is the Fordist growth model that was predicated upon a virtuous cycle according to which increasing investments led to high productivity gains that were converted into increases in the real wages that permitted the labourers to purchase and consume the mass produced commodities. The steadily rising demand spurred new investments that further accelerated labor productivity. The regulation theorists provide a detailed historical account of the gradual formation of the Fordist growth model. They show how a new system of mass production emerged in the roaring 1920s in the attempt to overcome the crisis of the competitive forms of capitalism where growth was based on the expansion of the capitalist mode of production. It was the lack of a corresponding system of mass consumption that produced the economic crisis in the 1930s. The Fordist system of mass production and mass consumption was consolidated in the decades after the Second World War and resulted in unprecedented growth and prosperity before it entered into a crisis towards the end of the 1960s when the combination of Taylorist and Fordist production methods no longer gave rise to sufficient productive increases through the exploitation of the economies of scale. Technical limits and political resistance meant that the productivity gains could no longer finance the continued rise in the real wages and the result was stagflation, which in the beginning of the 1970s was further exacerbated by the first oil crisis. According to the regulation theorists, the Fordist growth model is a result of the rise of organized capitalism. The system of administered ‘mark-up’ pricing and the indexation of real wages to anticipated productivity gains were regulatory devices that helped to stabilize the crisis-prone system of capitalism by securing a constant profit margin and matching mass production with mass consumption. The regulatory devices relied on institutionalized compromises obtained through elaborate systems of negotiated governance. Hence, the link to governance network theory is clear. The crisis of Fordism did not lead to a crisis of organized capitalism, but rather stimulated the search for new regulatory devices that could sustain a new growth model. The emerging post-Fordist growth model combines flexible mass production based on economies of scope with specialized life style consumption. The nodal point in the post-Fordist mode of regulation is flexibility. At the firm level, defensive strategies aiming to increase numerical flexibility through increased use of part time labour and better access to hire and fire labour power co-exist with offensive strategies aiming to enhance the functional flexibility of the labourers through re-skilling and introduction of team work (Boyer 1988, 2256). At the level of the labour market, defensive workfare policies aim to enhance the economic incentives of the unemployed to seek work while offensive workfare policies seek to enhance the labour-market skills of the unemployed. At the heart of the various flexibility strategies is the idea that the labourers should govern

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themselves according to particular calculations and responsibilities. Here there is a clear link to governmentality theory that tends to emphasize how individuals are constructed as self-governing subjects in relation to particular governmental norms and rationalities. The French regulation theorists claim that regulation is necessitated by the crisis-ridden character of the capitalist economy. An important distinction is made between cyclical crises that indicate minor down-swings which can be overcome by the current forms of regulation and structural crises that occur when the regulatory forms and the ensuing growth model are problematized by internal and external events and can only be overcome through the development of new forms of regulation (Boyer 1986, 60-72). In both cases, economic crises are solved by regulation. In physics, biology and psychology ‘regulation’ has been seen as an immanent feature of complex systems. However, the absence of natural laws and genetic codes makes it impossible to see the regulation of socioeconomic relations as an adaptive self adjustment of a closed system. As such, the regulation approach defines regulation as an inherently political practice of putting together dissimilar elements into an institutional ensemble that provides the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of the social system of capitalism in spite of its contradictory and confliction character (Boyer 1986, 30, 45-46; Lipietz 1979, 36, 172-76). Robert Boyer (1986) emphasizes the crucial difference between the French notions of ‘réglementation’ and ‘régulation’. Whereas ‘réglementation’ refers to a conscious top-down steering of the economy by particular state agencies, ‘régulation’ refers to a decentered ensemble of rules, norms, procedures and sedimented practices that emerge as a result of chance discoveries and institutionalized compromises obtained in the course of political struggles. The distinction between ‘réglementation’ and ‘régulation’ helps the regulation theorists to distance themselves from the Keynesian dream of a rational steering of the economy through different types of demand-management. Regulation is not imposed from a privileged point outside the economy. However, at the same time, the regulation theorists reject the idea of a spontaneous self regulation of the economic system. Regulation is a result of hegemonic practices aiming to respond to cyclical and structural crises through the articulation of norms, rules and procedures. As such, regulation takes place in a self-governed political and economic space that is located between the Scylla of conscious state steering and the Charybdis of autopoietic adaptation. The concept of regulation informs the elaboration of a conceptual framework that introduces and defines a series of theoretical concepts at decreasing levels of abstraction. At the highest level of abstraction, a regime of accumulation is defined as the systematic distribution and allocation of the social product which brings about a long-run correspondence between the changing conditions of production and the changing conditions of final consumption (Lipietz 1979, 196). The stability of a regime of accumulation is provided by different structural forms that codify and institutionalize the dominant regularities that channel the circuit of capital under the effect of political struggles (Boyer 1986, 71). A minimal degree

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of compatibility, coordination and cohesion of the structural forms is provided by the prevailing mode of regulation that is defined as the ensemble of laws, rules, norms, values, procedures and iterative games that regulate, control and modify the structural forms and their interaction (Boyer 1986, 54-58). A particular regime of accumulation, its structural forms and mode of regulation are articulated into a mode of development that is defined as a regulatory complex capable of providing economic growth and social harmony (Boyer 1986, 60). At the lowest level of abstraction, it is possible to distinguish between contrasted national trajectories that are results of political struggles over how the national resources and capacities are best exploited to ensure the realization of a particular Fordist or post-Fordist mode of development (Mistral 1986). The regulatory complex associated with a particular mode of development contributes to an effective self-governance of the economy as it helps to transform uncoordinated individual decisions into patterns of social behavior that support a particular growth model. The regulation approach contains no explicit reflections on democracy and the prospect of democratic governance. However, the regulation approach has had a significant normative-political impact as the emphasis on the decentered institutional forms of regulation tends to downplay the role of economic state steering in policy recommendation and supports the call for economic reforms that enhance the structural competitiveness of the economy. Although regulation theory rejects the idea of a top-down steering of the economy by the state, the regulation theorists are far from blind to the crucial role of the state in fashioning new regulatory devices. However, according to Delorme and André (1983), the state and the economy should not be seen as counter posed to each other. The state is imbedded in the capitalist economy and, therefore, it is subjected to the same contradictions and tensions as the capitalist economy. The state plays a key role in the organization of the wage-labour relation and in the management of fiscal, monetary and industrial policies, but the circumscribed state is only one instance of regulation amongst other instances of regulation such as firms, families, communities, alliances and associations (Delorme 1987). Nevertheless, the Fordist state is capable of totalizing the plurality of processes of regulation due to its capacity for coordination, legitimization and coercion (Delorme 1987, 1991). Hence, although regulation is a decentered politico-economic practice that relies on negotiated interactions among a wide set of actors, the state has a certain capacity for metagoverning the regulatory complex that enables a stable capitalist reproduction. This argument does not re-introduce an omnipotent rational actor, as the interventions of the capitalist state are constrained by political struggles and economic logics that it fails to control. The policy advice that comes out of this is that structural and cyclical crises can be overcome by a more or less radical re-articulation of the institutional forms of regulation, but that we should not believe that the regulatory changes can be brought about by the state alone. Other institutional actors play a significant role too, and it is important that the state facilitates the interaction among these actors. The outcome of these interactions is the formation of institutional forms of regulation that sustain economic growth

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and development. The renewed focus on institutional conditions for national and regional growth is probably the most significant empirical impact of the growing influence of the heterodox economics that regulation theory is part of. Economic policy makers at all levels are increasingly concerned with the construction of institutional infrastructures that facilitate knowledge sharing, cooperation and access to the key production factors in terms of labour, capital and technology. 4. Post-liberal theories of democracy Theories of democracy have a protracted history that begins with the classical models of direct democracy developed in Greece 300 years BC, continues with the early liberal theories of representative democracy emerging at the birth of the modern mass societies in Europe and USA, and culminates with the current efforts to redefine democracy in ways that make it adaptive to a pluricentric, globalized political world (Bohman 2005; Dryzek 2000; Habermas 1996; Held 2000). As such, the history of democratic theory is marked by two major transformative moments, the first taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the classical understanding of democracy was replaced by a liberal rights-based approach to democracy, which was further consolidated in the twentieth century, and the second occurring with the advent of globalization (Warren 2002; Cain, Dalton and Scarrow et al. 2003). The classical theories of democracy, as outlined by Aristotle, defined democracy as a political regime based on a direct democracy that permitted property-owning men of a certain age to take joint decisions within the confines of the city state. The role of democracy was to identify and govern in the interest of the common good. The reinvention of democracy in and through the liberal revolutions in the eight and nineteenth centuries’ Europe fostered a new theoretical understanding of democracy that was based on: 1) a perception of the nation-state as the natural political unit of liberal democracy; 2) the idea that representative democracy is the only possible way of ensuring political equality among the citizens in a mass society, and; 3) the view that the core ambition and purpose of democracy is to serve the individual. Replacing the city state with the nation-state did not constitute a radical break in democratic thought as it merely meant the introduction of a new and larger territorially defined polity. However, the territorial enlargement served as a lever for conceiving representative democracy as the necessary form of public participation and thus paved the way for a systematic division of the citizens into the representatives and the represented, the governing elite and the governed masses. However, the greatest novelty in this first transformation of democratic thinking is probably the shift from viewing democracy as a means to define the common good of a given community to perceiving democracy as a way of ensuring equal individual rights to liberty and self development. This change of perception was, not least, inspired by the social contract theories that came to dominate democratic thinking in the eighteenth century, especially the liberal version advanced by John Locke.

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The new appraisal of the individual as opposed to community paved the way for a demand for a strict division of society into two parts: a public sphere for collective decision making backed by the legitimate coercion of the state, and a legally protected private sphere of individual liberty and voluntary collectivism in economic and social life. Thus, all the liberal democratic theories developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – whether protective or developmental, elitarian or participatory – subscribed to the idea of a sharp institutional separation between a public realm of government and a private realm of self-governed action in the economy and civil society. However, the long lasting hegemony of liberal theories of democracy is now coming to an end. A new wave of post-liberal theories of democracy has emerged challenging the core claims of liberal theories of democracy as summarized above. First, a number of contemporary democratic theorists claim that the nation-state is no longer the natural and privileged vantage point for defining the demos and call for the development of a theory of democracy that points to how global politics can be democratically regulated. Among these theorists we find David Held and his theory of cosmopolitan democracy (2000) and Jürgen Habermas’ (1996), John Dryzek’s (2000) and James Bohman’s (2005) different contributions of to a theory of discursive democracy that calls for the development of transnational democratic publics and global forms of democratic decision making. Second, a new set of democratic theories claims that the political institutions of representative democracy have not been able to live up to the promises made by the early liberal theories of democracy. Thus, scholars like Paul Hirst (2000), Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright (2003), Iris Marian Young (2000) and John Dryzek (2007) contend that representative democracy has not been able to ensure a satisfactory interaction between the elected politicians and the citizens, wherefore they should be supplemented by a variety of other territorially and/or functionally organized forms of citizen participation and representation. Third, most of the new approaches to democracy mentioned above are much less concerned with maintaining a sharp institutional division between the public and private realms. As such, they tend to suggest that in order to strengthen democracy we need to build democratic institutions that enhance the democratic governance of economic and social life while, at the same time, enhancing the scope for liberty and self-governance within the public sector (Fung and Wright 2003; Hirst 2000). Especially the third deviation from the traditional liberal understanding of democracy can be seen as an expression of the politics of self-governance since it clearly goes beyond the traditional notion of self-governance as the unrestricted self determination of civil society. Instead it seems to suggest that democratic self-governance is facilitated through the political formation and regulation of institutional arenas within and between the public and private sector that enable citizens and stakeholders with a fair and equal opportunity to influence decisions that affect them (Fung and Wright 2003; Young 2000; Hirst 2000). The attempts to explain the emergence of a new democratic approach to selfgovernance among the post-liberal theories of democracy can be divided into two

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competing narratives: a negative one and a positive one. The negative narrative tends to view the current democratic disenchantment as a result of the failure of the institutions of representative democracy to cope with the mounting influence of modern mass media on political life (Bobbio 1989; Pitkin 2004; Stoker 2006). Politicians increasingly communicate with the citizens through mass media, but their fear of being caught wrong-footed makes them hide behind an army of media advisors and spin doctors and forces them to conceal the complex and conflictual character of public policy making behind simplified messages and an apparent consensus. The citizens are gradually reduced to passive spectators and they gradually loose their interest in the mediatized political game resulting in a steady decline in voter turn-out. Efforts to reinvigorate democracy must not only attempt to re-politicize traditional forms of politics and government, but must also increase the involvement of ordinary citizens in public policy making through the introduction of new participatory arenas that permits ordinary citizens and organized stakeholder to influence the output side of the political system. By contrast, the positive narrative claims that the problem today is not the spread of political apathy. The citizens in advanced liberal democracies are still interested in politics and they are better educated and more politically empowered than before. If they are not participating in the traditional forms of parliamentary democracy, it is because their expectations as to how much they can influence political decisions exceed the actual possibilities within the current form of representative democracy (Warren 2002; Cain, Dalton and Scarrow 2003). The solution is to develop new forms of empowered participatory governance that permit active and engaged citizens to take part in public decision making through the formation of self-governing arenas of negotiated interaction (Fung and Wright 2003). The negative and the positive narratives pave the way for a new interpretation of the concept of self-governance. The concept of self-governance is a constitutive feature of liberal democratic thinking where it finds its expression in the vision of the self-governing people. However, today we are witnessing a persistent attempt to disarticulate the notion of self-governance from the image of an undivided, unified people that is held together either by the image of a shared cultural identity or by a set political institutions and procedures. Instead, self-governance is linked to the concept of deliberation that is conceived as a medium for political interaction between relevant and affected actors who aim to define and solve political problems and exploit new opportunities. Deliberation is a communicative practice that links different public and private actors who engage in joint problem solving on the basis of self regulated rules, norms and values. However, the notion of deliberation lends itself to competing understandings. Some scholars concur with Habermas’ conception of deliberation as a reasoned debate based on particular discourse-ethical rules that permit the political actors to agree on a set of common values, norms and solutions (Habermas 1992). But a growing number of scholars criticize what they see as an explicit attempt to eliminate power and social antagonism from politics (Mouffe 2005). Instead they recommend an alternative conception of deliberation which they define as an attempt to cope with power

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and social antagonism through different forms of democratic negotiation that are based on agonistic respect (Bohman 2007; Norval 2007; Mouffe 2005; Connolly 1996). However, regardless of the position they might take in this debate, the postliberal theories share the basic endeavour to develop new forms of participation and representation that not only facilitate horizontal deliberation between citizens, but also vertical deliberation between citizens and political authorities. Another noteworthy characteristic of the post-liberal theories of democracy is that they problematize the liberal democratic idea of a trade-off between democracy and efficiency in processes of public governance (Dahl 1989). Hence, most of the new post-liberal theories of democracy tend to view negotiated interaction between affected citizens and relevant public authorities as a means to enhance public participation and a precondition for formulating and implementing public policies in our increasingly complex and fragmented societies (Dryzek 2007; Fung and Wright 2003; March and Olsen 1995; Young 2000). The scholarly debates regarding the ability to govern democratic selfgovernance have first and foremost focussed on the need to develop and consolidate a democratic ethos or set of norms that spur the formation of democratic identities that internalize the a set of politically defined norms of deliberation and agonistic respect (Connolly 1996; Norval 2007; Dryzek 2000; Bohman 2004; March and Olsen 1995). The policy advice that springs from this perspective is that political authorities should seek to enhance democratic self-governance through the strategic design of deliberative arenas that promote horizontal as well as vertical interaction between specific groups of actors and that they should work hard to shape the democratic identities of the participating actors. The impact that the new post-liberal approach to democracy has had on the development of the democratic institutions in the Western World has been considerable, not least due to the experimental, interactive and applied research approach of many of its proponents. The largest impact is in the area of citizen participation where democratic theorists currently play a central role in developing new ways in which to involve citizens in public policy making. 5. Concluding remarks The above descriptions of meso level theories relating to state, economy and society all seem to bear witness to the increasing impact of the politics of self-governance. Governance network theory, regulation theory and post-liberal theories of democracy tend to focus on the institutional framing of self-governance, and how self-governance adds to the production of effective and democratic governance. The three theories agree that there is a strong need for regulation due to the presence of interdependence, conflicts and power struggles. At the same time, they claim that the possibility of regulating society through imperative ‘top-down’ rule is limited. In decentered and multi-layered societies, they claim, societal regulation must necessarily involve complex processes of self-governance that cut across the

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institutional, political and ideological barriers that, according to traditional liberal democratic thinking, separate state, market and civil society. However, the three theories focus on different issues and aspects of the institutionalized processes of self-governance. Regulation theory focuses on how self-governance in the capitalist economy produces specific institutional conditions for economic reproduction and growth, but it says very little about the nature of the political interaction through which the regulatory complex is produced. The self regulated process of negotiated interaction is the key focus of governance network theory, which also has an elaborate account of how institutional forms of selfgovernance are and can be metagoverned. However, governance network theory is relatively thin when it comes to reflections about the democratic implications of network governance and other forms of interactive governance. This is precisely where post-liberal theories of democracy are particular helpful with their reflections on what democracy can mean and how it can be institutionalized in a decentered society based on high levels of self-governance. As such, we might conclude that the three meso level theories tend to supplement each other. However, regulation theory, governance network theory and the post-liberal theories of democracy draw on different theoretical assumptions and perspectives. As such, the development of a more comprehensive meso level theory about the emergence, functioning and impact of the institutional framing of self-governance is a huge, but important, task for the social sciences in the future. References Aglietta, M. 1979, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, Verso Press, London. Basle, M., Mazier, J. and Vidal, J.F. 1984, Quand les Crise Durent …, Economica, Paris. Benz, A. and Papadopoulos, Y. (eds), 2006, Governance and Democracy, Routledge, London. Bobbio, N. 1989, Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power, Polity Press, Oxford. Bohman, J. 2005, ‘From Demos to Demoi: Democracy across Borders’, Ratio Juris 18, vol. 3, pp. 293-314. Bohman, J. 2007, Democracy across Borders. From Demos to Demoi, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Boyer, R. 1986, La Théorie de la Régulation: Une Analyse Critique, La Decouverte, Paris. Boyer, R. (ed.), 1988, The Search for Labour Market Flexibility, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cain, B.E., Dalton, R.J. and Scarrow, S.E. (eds), 2003, Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Peters, B.G. and Pierre, J. 2000, Governance, Politics and the State, Macmillan/St. Martins Press, Basingstoke/New York. Pitkin, H. 2004, ‘Representation and Democracy: Uneasy Alliance’, Scandinavian political Issues, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 335-42. Rhodes, RAW 1997a, Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability, Open University Press, Buckingham. Rhodes, RAW 1997b, ‘Foreword’, in Managing Complex Networks: Strategies for the Public Sector, W.J.M. Kickert, E.H. Klijn and J.F.M. Koppenjan (eds), Sage, London, pp. 11-5. Rhodes, RAW 2000, ‘The Governance Narrative: Key Findings and Lessons from the ESRC’s Whitehall Programme’, Public Administration, vol. 78, no. 2, pp. 345-64. Ripley, R.B. and Franklin, G. 1987, Congress, the Bureaucracy and Public Policy, Dorsey, Homewood, Ill. Rosenau, J.N. (ed.), 1995, Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Scharpf, F.W. 1994, ‘Games real actors could play: Positive and negative coordination in embedded negotiations’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 27-53. Stoker, G. 2006, Why Politics Matters: Making Democracy Work, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Sørensen, E. 2007, ‘Local politicians and administrators as metagovernors’, in Democratic Network Governance in Europe, M. Markussen and J. Torfing (eds), Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 89-108. Sørensen, E. and Torfing, J. 2003, ‘Network Politics, Political Capital and Democracy’, International Journal of Public Administration, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 609-634. Sørensen, E. and Torfing, J. 2005, ‘Network Governance and Post-liberal Democracy’, Administrative Theory and Praxis, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 197-237. Sørensen, E. and Torfing, J. (eds), 2007, Theories of Democratic Network Governance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Sørensen, E. and Torfing, J. (forthcoming), ‘Enhancing Effective and Democratic Network Governance through Metagovernance’, Public Administration. Torfing, J. 1998, Politics, Regulation and the Modern Welfare State, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Torfing, J. 2005, ‘Governance Network Theory: Towards a Second Generation’, European Political Science, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 305-317. Warren, M.E. 2002, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today, Political Theory, vol. 30, no. 677, pp. 677-701. Young, I.M. 2000, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Chapter 4

Self-Governance in Micro Level Theory Lina Eriksson

1. Introduction Micro level theories take the individual as their starting point, and analyse phenomena as the outcome of individuals’ actions. The difference between micro level theories is the view of the individual and her relations to her environment. The main theoretical micro level framework is rational choice theory (for short, RC theory or simply RCT). It is a big tree with many branches, differing both in the exact assumptions made, methodology and substantive research questions. Two of these branches are directly relevant to self-governance: public choice theory (PCT), and management of common pool resources (CPRs). PCT, at least the part we’re concerned with here, deals with how the political system can aggregate individuals’ preferences into a social preference (that is, collective decision) that corresponds to these preferences in a reasonable way, and implement it. This puts focus on the electoral system, legislatures, the relation between politicians and public servants, and the structure of the bureaucracy and political system in general. More specifically, it puts focus on how the political and bureaucratic system should be organized with respect to the centralization or decentralization of power. The literature on CPRs is mostly based on the same RC assumptions about human behavior, and deals with the same problems. However, it is often focused directly on self-governance by studying how problems of CPR management can be solved locally. Although RCT is the dominating framework for micro level theory, we will also look at alternative approaches that base their account of human behavior on other assumptions. 2. Rational choice theory RCT explains social phenomena in terms of actions by individual agents, and these actions, in turn, are explained by the incentive structures that those agents face. Usually (but not always) agents are assumed to be self interested, and will thus only respond to incentives that concern their own interests. In one sense, then, this theory is thoroughly individualistic. But in another, it is thoroughly focused on structures, because it is institutions, the natural environment and cultures that determine the incentive structures that in turn determine what individual agents will do.

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RC theorists are usually not interested in explaining individual actions per se; what is to be explained are collective outcomes, social phenomena. It is thus a micro level theory not because RC theorists want to explain individual actions, but because they argue that social phenomena are explained by how the incentives on the micro level lead individuals to act in ways that when aggregated give rise to the social phenomena in question. RC theorists see institutions as either the rules of the game or as the equilibrium outcomes of interactions. As rules of the game, institutions define what options people have, the likely consequences of those actions, what expectations it makes sense to have about others’ behaviors; in short, given that rational individuals choose the action that best satisfies their desires, the rules of the game together with facts about what people want, determine the outcome. If we want agents to act in socially beneficial ways, we had better make sure the institutions we create give them the right incentives to do so. This view of institutions lead to a large interest in the incentives that different institutional settings give rise to, and a great body of work on constitutions and the structure of the political system and the government institutions. In general, given that the rules of the game are so important for people’s ability to achieve their goals, it would be surprising if they did not try to shape those rules to their own advantage. Therefore, RCT typically considers institutions to be the outcome of people’s struggles to do so. An institution is an equilibrium between the strategies that people employ in this struggle: it is stable and resilient because in equilibrium nobody has an incentive to change his or her behavior. Consequently, if a change in some external factor sufficiently changes the payoffs, the equilibrium might be upset and the institution changed. Usually, institutions are seen as the deliberate creation by a group of people, reflecting their respective bargaining power and interests. But this need not necessarily be so: actions quite often have side-effects, and the institution in question can be the unintended outcome of interactions based on different motives. What matters is that it is an equilibrium, stable only because and as long as enough people lack incentives to change their behavior. Two branches of the RCT tree concern issues relevant for the politics of self-governance. The first is public choice theory (PCT), dealing with questions about how to construct political authorities and bureaucracies so that people have incentives to act in ways considered collectively beneficial: a good democratic system delivers what voters want, and the task is thus to set it up so that inefficiencies, corruption and biases are avoided. This approach takes as its point of departure existing nation-states with nationwide political authority and bureaucracies. Of particular interest here are questions about local versus central governance, especially those concerning arguments for decentralization. The second branch of RCT concerns self-governance proper, where a group of people together build an institution to govern themselves. This literature is centered around issues of common pool resources and public goods. The main question here is usually

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how to create an institution that is both feasible, that is, an equilibrium for the relevant actors, and changes people’s incentives in ways that solve the underlying problem. 3. Public choice and decentralization A good democratic system delivers policies that correspond to what the people want. PCT focuses on the incentives that face people as politicians, bureaucrats and citizens, and the inefficiencies that can arise with the wrong incentive structures. It is usually traced back to 1948 when Duncan Black published a paper on the rationale of group-decision making (Black 1948), which laid the foundations for the median voter theorem. It was followed by Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), in which Arrow problematized the idea that aggregation of individuals’ preferences (for example through voting) can ever be guaranteed to result in a social welfare function or political decision that corresponds in some reasonable way to a ‘will of the people’. His work spurred a wave of work – social choice theory – on aggregation mechanisms and the conditions under which the people’s will is or is not reflected in the collective decisions. Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy concerned the collective outcomes of actions by vote-maximizing parties. Mancur Olsen (1969) introduced the principle of fiscal equivalence: the responsible level of government should coincide with the range and scope of the public good’s effects on welfare. He also analysed collective action problems. Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent (1962) set the tone for what was going to be known as the ‘Virginia school’; a group of mostly economists who used neoclassical micro economic theory to analyse politics, comparing what they saw as inefficient political institutions to markets that allowed individuals to engage in mutually beneficial exchange. The focus on political failures and problems and a belief in the efficiency of markets let most Virginia school theorists to advocate small governments. Their work greatly influenced for example the Reagan administration. Other seminal work, notably Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), had a different focus: Riker was one of the founders of the Rochester school, a group of political scientists who used game theory and mathematical modelling to study government. They put less emphasis on exchange and more on conflicts of interest, and were less interested in normative policy issues than in understanding how real institutions for elections, legislatures etc work. An influential group of economists in Chicago, including Nobel laureates Stigler, Becker and Coase, were also looking at political phenomena with the help of neoclassical micro economic theory, acquiring an imperialist reputation for taking on other fields’ research questions. Under the name PCT there are thus different schools of thought, with different emphasis, especially when it comes to policy advice. Different schools have dominated at different points in time, but the field has always been characterized by significant disagreement.

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A general trend, however, is the extent of the focus on institutional detail. The first PC theorists painted with a broad brush. Over time, however, theorists came to put more and more emphasis on the details of the institutional structures that determines people’s incentives. Among other things, this included the organization of the political system; centralization or decentralization, the function of competition and politicians’ ability to control the bureaucracy. There are several problems, PCT claims. One is the principal-agent problem: politicians (the principal) must somehow construct an incentive structure that stimulates the bureaucracy (their agent) to act as the politicians wish. But agents often have more information than the principal. Further, it is often impossible to control the agent’s actions in detail. Another issue concerns the problem of fit: when those who benefit and decide about a good are not the same as those who pay for it, the good will be over-provided. Similarly, the externality problem is that our actions often have consequences for others than ourselves, and unless we have the right incentives to take those consequences into account when we decide how to act, we will not act in socially beneficial ways. Each issue will be discussed further below. When it comes to the appropriate level of government, these issues take mainly two forms: 1. to avoid distorting incentives for spending, those who gain and decide about the production of a public good should also be the ones who pay for it; and 2. competition is usually necessary to ensure higher production (technology) efficiency and responsiveness to public preferences, because competition provides more appropriate incentives for politicians and bureaucrats. Much of the PCT literature has been in favor of centralization. These arguments concern the appropriate level for various public goods, the need to deal with externalities, and production efficiency. Public goods are goods such that once they have been created it is too costly to exclude people from enjoying them. As a result, people can free-ride on others: the public good benefits them, but it is even better if others are the ones to pay for it, because one can then enjoy the good at no cost. But when everybody tries to free-ride, the good is either under-provided or not provided at all. A centralized government can efficiently enforce contributions to public goods, thereby raising everybody’s utility level. Another well-known problem is already mentioned: the existence of externalities. When one agent’s actions affect others welfare, either positively or negatively, it would be better overall if those consequences were taken into account by the agent when making her decision, but often she has no incentives to do so. A larger decision-making authority which includes all affected parties can maximize collective welfare because it takes everybody’s benefit and cost into account. A third reason for central authority is production efficiency. Sometimes there are benefits from large scale production (although see Boyne 1996 for a discussion). Further, a centralised government can coordinate its policies and actions better, avoiding the chaos

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that can arise when policy decisions are made on different levels, by different decision-making bodies, and without a good overview of the interaction effects vertically between the different levels and horizontally between the different local governments. But most PC work is deeply suspicious of a drive to create large bureaucracies and political authorities. Sometimes the argument does not directly concern the incentive structure but aggregation problems. For example, if decisions and service production are made centrally, everyone will consume the same set of services. But different people, different groups, different areas may have different needs. Different communities may face different problems, and maybe they can also contribute to unique solutions given their specific resources, needs and possibilities. Further, simple preferences over services can – and do – differ, and making the decisions at a lower level can better satisfy people’s preferences and needs. The incentive structure is however at the core of the problem of how to provide public goods at the right level; the key problem for what is usually called ‘fiscal federalism’. The problem is that since everybody pays taxes, but not everyone prefers the same level of public good provision, a majority of high level-advocates can make a minority pay for a high level this minority doesn’t want. A poor majority, for example, can vote for high progressive taxes financing concerns of the poor by making a rich minority pay for them. Since the winning majority doesn’t pay ‘their share’ of the costs, they do not adequately balance benefits against costs and the public good will be over-supplied – a problem made even worse by logrolling. The normatively laden language of exploitation and ‘too much’ taxes refer to an optimality point where the costs are fully internalized by those who also benefit, so that the marginal cost of the level of provision equals the marginal utility. If there are externalities in the production of public goods and bads across geographical borders, the problem gets even worse: when the decision-makers are not the same as the beneficiaries or those who pay the costs, the level of provision will get wrong. One solution is to have different decision-making levels for different public goods. For a national defence the appropriate level is the nation, for air pollution the continent or the whole world, for spotlights on the sports field, users of and neighbors to the sports facility. The focus on incentives has made many PC theorists draw analogies between markets and government, arguing that political authorities and bureaucracies can be seen as monopolies, which – economic theory tells us – create inefficiencies. The solution is competition (Niskanen 1978). Different fields of PC deal with competition in different political arenas: between politicians within one local political authority (or between bureaucratic departments over budget and departmental size within that authority), between councils themselves, and, finally, between a council and other organizations concerning who gets to produce the services within that local political authority’s boundaries (Boyne 1996). Ørberg and Wright, in their contribution to this volume, draw attention to how this idea of competition as a performance-enhancing governing tool underlies the re-organization of the Danish university funding system: universities are to

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compete with each other for funding on the basis of a number of output-measures, and as a result universities will supposedly perform better on a large number of dimensions. Competition between politicians is supposed to lead to greater responsiveness to public preferences, since politicians gain more votes by satisfying the median voter’s preferences (Downs 1957). Competition is also supposed to help solve the principal agent-problem for the relationship between politicians and the bureaucracy (see for example Epstein and O’Halloran 1999). More directly relevant for self-governance is Tiebout’s (1956) claim that consumer choice can be maximized through a large number of small local authorities. If given autonomy, they will make different decisions about the extent and financing of provision of various public goods. People can then move where decisions suit their personal preferences. Since many PC theorists stress the extent of government failure and the inefficiency of collective decisions, they think this an important factor in determining governments’ responsiveness to citizens’ preferences (Osterfield 1989). Every majoritarian decision has losers, but if people can vote with their feet they have exit and not only voice options; they can choose to live among people who share their preferences instead of just hoping that they might turn the opinion around in their original communities. Further, the competition between different local authorities for tax-paying citizens and businesses means that they have to provide services more efficiently. Whether fiscal migration is a real phenomenon is controversial (see for example Sharpe and Newton (1984) and Dowding et al. (1994). But regardless of whether horizontal competition has actual impact on citizen welfare, it has influenced policy, for example the organization of American local political authorities (Bailey 1993). Competition within the public sphere can also be achieved vertically, by different tiers of government, responsible for different services. When citizens are not given a package price for all services delivered but can see the costs of each service, they can decide what they want to pay for. However, the extra knowledge and attention required for effective citizen choice can incur significant transaction costs (see Shah 2005), and package provision and pricing of public services may still be cheaper. PC theorists also advocate competition between service producers. For a long time, the dominant view was that the service provider also produces the services. But the bureaucracy’s monopoly on service production gives rise to the principalagent problem: the politicians want the production of as much and good service as possible at the least possible cost, but they do not know the real production costs. Only the service producer – that is, the bureaucracy – actually knows this, and since bureaucrats are assumed to want bigger budgets and greater staff numbers, they have incentives to exaggerate the costs reported to the politicians, and lack incentives to keep the real costs down. As a result, the politicians cannot trust them to provide services efficiently. The solution is, again, competition: if the monopoly on production is broken, the true production costs will be revealed when different producers compete for contracts. The political authority’s role is

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that of a service provider, rather than producer: politicians specify an output level, and the producers are responsible for achieving that output, at the agreed price, but control the input and process. The local authority only invites tenders from outside suppliers for services of various kinds. One of many examples of this argument’s policy effects is the 1988 Local Government Act in the UK, which stated compulsory competitive tendering for local political authorities, increasing competition between service providers (Bailey 1993). The establishment of internal or quasi-markets for public services has become quite common in many countries, as the market analogy with political authorities has become more and more influential. Whether service production competition leads to an increase in efficiency, not only lower production costs, however depends on whether the output quality or allocative efficiency remains high even in cases where they are hard to measure. The focus on competition in local governance: horizontally between local authorities, vertically between different tiers of government, and between public and private service providers, is thus supposed to make government more responsive to public demand, more efficient, and to enable individual choices. These claims have had significant policy effect, both in broad influences and in more specific cases. In assessing the influence of PCT, we should ideally distinguish between the impact of economic theory in general and that of PCT, but that is often hard to do. Nevertheless clearly for example the Reagan administration built heavily on advice from PC theorists, most notably through the influence of Niskanen who were the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors at the time; one of Niskanen’s main claims was the need to limit government expansion. And in the UK, for example, Thatcher was much influenced by monetarist and public choice ideas of small government. But although many PCT policy suggestions have been infamously right-wing, many also argue that PCT as a theory leaves open what we ought to do. Looking at the Conservatives’ policies during the 1980s and 90s in the UK, Dowding argues that their goals were reducing public expenditure and increasing accountability efficiency. PC have many things to say on each of these, and the Conservatives were clearly influenced by aspects of the theory. Examples include the poll tax and the empowerment of parents to withdraw their schools from local political authority. But, as Dowding says, whether these reforms had the intended effects is a different matter, and further, the Conservatives adoption of PC was ‘partial, limited and indeed inconsistent with aspects of the public choice approach.’ (Dowding 1996, 55). Indeed, even left-wing conclusions can be drawn from the PC approach. 4. Self-governance RC literature on self-governance proper has usually centered on managing common pool resources (CPRs). These can be understood as Prisoners’ Dilemma games. A Prisoners’ Dilemma game is characterized by the fact that whatever the

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other player(s) do, each player is better off defecting, even though the overall result – overall defection – is worse for each player than if everyone, including themselves, would have cooperated. The (in)famous Tragedy of the Commons, which concerns a CPR problem, illustrates the case. A group of people share a meadow as a grazing field for their sheep. However, if there are too many sheep, they will ruin the meadow for the foreseeable future. Clearly, the group would benefit from limiting the use of the meadow: it is better to be able to feed some sheep for a long time than first a few more sheep for a short time and from then on no sheep at all. But despite this, the meadow – RCT typically predicts – will be overused. One individual’s overuse of the meadow – say, but letting another two sheep graze there – typically is not enough to cause the meadow’s ruin, so if others limit their use, your extra sheep is not a problem: you can free-ride on others’ efforts to limit the use of the meadow. But if others overuse the meadow, it will be ruined no matter what you do, and you had better get what profit you can while the meadow still has some grass. No matter what others do, then, you are better off letting extra sheep onto the meadow. Since this is true for each sheep owner, the result is a ruined meadow. The result holds even if, as often is the case, everyone realizes that everyone would be better off if they could collectively limit their use of it. The same reasoning is often applied to the fate of many other common resources; over fishing the seas or polluting the air etc. A similar argument is also often used to understand the under-provision of public goods. As mentioned earlier, public goods are goods such that nobody can be excluded from benefiting from them once they exist (or can be so only at high cost). Usually, the definition also includes that one person’s use of the good does not leave less for others. This type of good is often under-provided – that is, everyone would prefer more of it than they have, even if that involved paying for it – because of the free-rider problem: if others contribute, your contribution is not necessary, and if others do not contribute, your doing so is not enough to achieve the goal, and will only make you poorer. Since everyone benefits from the public good and good management of a CPR even if they have to pay, it would be better if they could commit to contribute, thereby avoiding the free-rider problem. But the problem is how to make credible commitments: after all, saying that one will cooperate is very far from cooperating when push comes to shove. In fact, if one’s saying that one will cooperate can persuade others to cooperate against their better interests, then so much better; the commons is preserved or the public good provided without any cost to the defector. Problems of collective action are thus not easy to solve. Overcoming them, especially the problem for public goods, has been claimed to be what governance is fundamentally all about (Marshall 2000). RCT traditionally solves the problem in one of two ways. The first is the market: If you own, say, 1/n of the meadow, then you will have an interest in preserving that part of the meadow. Since each person would bear all the costs of ruining her own property as well as all the benefits from preserving it, everyone is best off keeping their respective pieces of land in good condition. Their benefits and costs

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no longer depend on what others do. In analogous fashion, we can create property rights over other common goods – fishing quota rights, pollution ‘tickets’ etc. The second solution is to bring in Leviathan. If everyone could be forced to keep their word, commitments would be credible and cooperation ensured, to everyone’s benefit. Indeed, some claim that the state exists to solve the underprovision of public goods; for example, the tax system is a system for compulsory collective contributions to democratically decided public goods. Without such mechanisms, the traditional RCT prediction for the management of CPR’s or the provision of public goods is however rather grim. Further it often is impossible to create private property rights – and thus necessary conditions for a market – for the goods in question, and that a state is expensive. But when RC theorists like Elinor Ostrom began to study real cases, they discovered that people often are remarkably good at solving these problems without neither markets nor Leviathans. Ostrom’s path-breaking work – Governing the Commons – compared successful and unsuccessful cases of self-governance for CPRs, trying to specify the factors that determined success or lack thereof (see also Ostrom et al. 1994). Several factors turned out to be important for success. Agents must expect to stay in the area long enough to have a strong incentive to preserve the resource. They must also be able to exclude those outside the community from the gains; if the community members constrain their resource use, while there are outsiders who exploit it, the community constraints will not last long. Finally, the sanctioning system must be appropriate: defectors must in general be detected, sanctions against a first violation must be significant but not too high, it must be clear how those sanctions are applied, and so on. Ostrom’s work and RC institutionalism in general now forms the dominant theoretical background against which policy advice for CPR management is framed (see Mosse 1997). In general, the research on CPR’s draws attention to several key issues in RC institutionalism. People are assumed to create institutions to solve problems like public good provision. To overcome the threat of defection, there must be a sanctioning system. But creating a sanctioning system is itself a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem: everybody benefits if defectors are sanctioned, but being the person who sanctions is usually costly, with costs ranging from threat of or actual physical violence to ruined friendships, unpleasantness, gossip by the angry victim, exclusion from possible future beneficial exchanges or trades, and the time and effort it takes to apply the sanctions. Paying a third party to be the sanctioner – as we do with a police force – solves the problem of having to apply the sanctions oneself, but paying the third party is also a public good problem, since it is best for each that only the others pay. What this literature shows is that good institutional design takes creativity and ingenuity. However, this literature has been criticized for painting too pretty a picture of self-governance, failing to consider power inequalities and their consequences. For example, RCT analyses of self-governing local communities do not problematize who belongs and who is excluded from those communities, often missing out on gender, caste and ethnic discrimination. Further, even though some RCT deals

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with symbolic meaning and the way struggles for social position and power is intertwined with struggles over material resources (for example see Chong 2000), these aspects are still missing from most studies. As Mosse (1997) points out, institutions reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and power relations. For instance, in the example above everybody had the same incentive structure, and further, there were only two options; a cooperative and a non-cooperative one. In real life, there are often several possible solutions, and different solutions benefit people differently. They thus have partly common interests– to find a cooperative solution – but also partly conflicting interests, concerning which solution should be chosen. This shifts focus onto how the choice is made between different possible solutions, rather than on whether a solution is viable (Knight 1992). Onto the stage steps bargaining theory, which tells us which solution will be the outcome of the negotiations between the different interest groups or individuals depending on their bargaining powers; their outside (that is, non-cooperative) payoff (which determines whether they can credibly threaten to back out of the cooperative solution if they do not get their way), their political and economic power, their role in possible coalition majorities, the kind of decision making procedure used, etc. In general, different institutional solutions suit different people, and existing power inequalities will show up in the self-governance institutions that will be equilibria of interactions and bargaining between those agents. 5. Micro level theories and human nature In general, PCT focuses on the incentives that different institutional arrangements give the relevant actors. People are in general assumed to be motivated by their own private interest, not by the common good. Further, they think about how to further those interests; they think about options, their likely consequences, and how good those consequences would be from the agent’s point of view. People will thus not behave in the interest of the community unless they have personal interests in doing so. Those that design institutions must thus create an incentive structure that channel people’s private interests towards socially beneficial goals. This view of human behavior and motives has been challenged from many directions. One question concerns the self interest assumption. Not all RCT assumes that people are self interested: many RC theorists claim that all their theory says is that people in general have goals and try to achieve them as best they can; these goals could just as well concern world peace and the eradication of poverty. When other goals are incorporated into the utility functions of the agents populating RC models, the gap between RCT and other theories, especially historical institutionalism, is narrowed quite considerably. While RC theorists learn to make other assumptions about what goals people have, historical institutionalists learn to pay more attention to agency, strategic action and conflicts of interest. What is left of the stereotypical picture of RCT is only that people are goal-oriented and try to do as best as they can. As some RCT work even sees preferences as given

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endogenously by the institutions within which people act (for example see Noll and Weingast 1991), not even the RCT trademark that preferences are taken as exogenous is necessarily characteristic of the theory anymore. But although such a view of human nature takes you a long way towards satisfying the critics of RCT, some argue that the conflict over how to best explain human political behavior concerns more than what goals people have. March and Olsen, for example, put forward a theory about non-goal directed behavior: humans are role-interpreting and – playing creatures within institutions. In their major work Rediscovering Institutions (1989), they introduced the idea that people to some (large) extent get their preferences from their institutional roles. They interpret the roles they happen to occupy, and try to play those roles as well as possible. Thus, instead of thinking in terms of the consequences of actions, they think in terms of a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (LoA): the relevant question is not what would be best if I did, but what should a person occupying the role I happen to occupy do? We thus aspire to be good at those things that occupants of our roles ought to be good at. As academics, we try to be instructive in our teaching, swift in our marking, insightful and clear in our writing and productive in our publishing. This theory of preference formation makes it easier to see why institutions might be more stable than RCT predicts. Once an institution has got hold of people, once they have begun to identify with particular roles within that institution, the temptation to defect decreases. But the theory presupposes that the institutions in question already exist. Before there are roles, there are no roles to identify with, and no logic of appropriateness. However, a strong group identity and strong social norms may very well help in establishing an institution. March and Olsen make strong claims about the motivation to comply with the rules and roles: if we fail to form the right attachments to our identity-making roles we become ‘non-persons’, people without character or depth. To fulfil the identitygenerated obligations and duties thus becomes constitutive of personhood. But, as Sending (2002) has argued, the LoA then threatens to become a holistic rather than an individualistic, micro level theory; people do not have enough distance to their rules and roles to reflect on them and on whether to comply with them to really have a choice. All the explanatory work thus seems to be done by the institutions, identities and rules. March and Olsen (1995) themselves seem to think that their theory leaves significant room for indeterminism, since the appropriate behavior seldom is specified in detail for each situation and agents thus have to interpret situations and roles. But, Sending argues, this is not enough, for if true choice makes people ‘non-persons’ all the relevant work must be done at a nonindividual level. Further, without room for reflection and violation, the theory cannot explain how agents change their institutional framework and identities because such change often requires agents to behave in non-appropriate ways. Note how the problem is analogous to RCT’s problem that incentive structures determine everything. Micro level or not, as a theory about human behavior, the LoA implies that a government that can tap into the existing structure of identities, roles and rules – or

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create new ones – will have a powerful tool. For example, Øberg and Wright, in their contribution to this volume, write about the efforts to create new institutional selves for Danish universities, selves which are able to live up to all the tasks the universities now have. According to the LoA, material incentives are less effective in affecting people’s behavior then are their identities and institutional roles. To make people govern themselves, one should therefore focus on using the latter resource. That might imply a focus on team-building and various other ways of strengthening identification with institutional roles. Identity-creating and -strengthening narratives about the role of the institution and those working within it are also part of role-based management. These narratives concern, among other things, also the values the institution supposedly embodies or promotes, and the characteristics that the people within it are supposed to have. Whether this works better on a local or a national level depends: some successful narratives have made people identify with their nation, ethnic group, religion or language group and other narratives have worked well on smaller scale, making people identify with their particular work team, company or department, their village or even just their local soccer team. 6. Conclusions The dominating micro level theory of governance is rational choice theory (RCT), in all its various forms. More specifically, public choice theory (PCT) has addressed issues of (de)centralization, studying how the political system should be organized to make political outcomes correspond to what voters want. This approach has often, but not always, given rise to policy advice in favor of small government and competition between different political authorities and service producers. RCT has also given rise to analyses of common pool resources and public goods: these analyses concern how local communities can govern themselves and solve these kinds of management problems without a state or a market system. The key issue is whether they can construct a viable institution which gives everyone the right incentives for collectively beneficial behavior. Finally, there are also other micro level theories, operating with different assumptions about human nature and the relations between individuals and their social, economic and political environment. Whether the best theoretical approach is to view people as calculating how to best achieve their goals – self interested or otherwise – or to see them as roleinterpreting agents acting on rules, habit and standards of appropriate behavior, is a question still left unanswered. However, just as RCT does, alternative theories like the LoA balance precariously on the edge of becoming structural, ascribing the important explanatory work to structures rather than agents. What makes them micro level is their methodological individualism: individuals’ actions might depend on the incentive structure (whether in RCT terms or through a LoA) but social outcomes can only be understood as the

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outcomes of interactions between individuals. It is the surprising aggregation and interaction effects that are responsible for the puzzles we find on the collective level. References Bailey, S.J. 1993, ‘Public Choice Theory and the Reform of Local Government in Britain: From Government to Governance’, Public Policy and Administration, vol. 8, pp. 7-24. Boyne, G. 1996, ‘Competition and Local Government: A Public Choice Perspective’, Urban Studies, vol. 33, pp. 703-21. Chong, D. 2000, Rational Lives, Chicago University Press, Chicago and London. Dowding, K. 1996, ‘Public Choice and Local Governance’, in Rethinking Local Democracy, D. King and G. Stoker (eds), Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 50-66. Dowding, K., John, P. and Biggs, S. 1994, ‘Tiebout: A survey of the empirical literature’, Urban Studies, vol. 31, pp. 769-797. Downs, A. 1957, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper & Row, New York. Epstein, D. and O’Halloran, S. 1999, Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate Powers, Cambridge University Press, New York. Knight, J. 1992, Institutions and Social Conflict, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. March, J. and Olsen, J. 1989, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics, Free Press, New York. March, J. and Olsen, J. 1995, Democratic Governance, Free Press, New York. Marshall, G. 2000, ‘Participative Planning and Informal Self-governance of Agri-environmental Conflicts: Lessons from a Survey of Australian farmers Facing Irrigation Salinity’, Conference paper for the 7th Ulvon Conference on Environmental Economics, 19-21 June 2000, Ulvon, Sweden. Mosse, D. 1997, ‘The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History, Ecology and Locality in a Tank-irrigated Landscape in South India’, Development and Change, vol. 28, pp. 467-504. Niskanen, W. 1971, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, AldineAtherton, Chicago. Noll, R. and Weingast, B. 1991, ‘Rational Actor Theory, Social Norms, and Policy Implementation: Applications to Administrative Processes and Bureaucratic Culture’, in The Economic Approach to Politics – A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action, K. Monroe (ed.), HarperCollins Publishers, New York, pp. 237-258. Osterfeld, D. 1989, ‘Radical federalism: Responsiveness, conflict and efficiency’, in Politics and Process, G. Brennan and L. Lomasky (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 149-173. Ostrom, E. 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, New York.

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Ostrom, E., Gardner, R. and Walker, J. 1994, Rules, Games and Common-Pool Resources, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Sending, J.O. 2002, ‘Constitution, Choice and Change: Problems with the “Logic of Appropriateness” and its Use in Constructivist Theory’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 443-70. Shah, A. 2005, ‘A Framework for Evaluating Alternate Institutional Arrangements for Fiscal Equalization Transfers’, Policy Research Working Paper 3785, World Bank, Washington DC . Sharpe, J. and Newton, K. 1984, Does Politics Matter?, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Part 2 Governance in Action

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Chapter 5

The Institutional Design of Self-Governance: Insights from Public-Private Partnerships Keith Baker, Jonathan B. Justice and Chris Skelcher

1. Introduction Public-private partnerships (PPPs) provide an important empirical site for the examination of the new imageries of self-governance because they are the point at which private commercial interests are invited to interact with government in the pursuit of public policy objectives. From a principal-agent perspective, government delegates the responsibility for delivering its objectives to business, which in turn has a degree of autonomy over the way it approaches its responsibilities. Governments face the problem of designing institutional arrangements that are appropriate for the public governance of this relationship. This chapter examines the problems and potential of PPP self-governance through an examination of the institutional designs for two contrasting examples – a long-term strategic service delivery relationship governed through a mix of legal and relational contracting, and a business improvement district which is independently constituted and has high self-governance potential. At the heart of the analysis is the question of the conditions under which selfgovernance becomes institutionalized. Theoretical discussion of these issues notes that market, hierarchical and network forms of governance co-exist in different ways in different empirical sites (see Chapter 2). Self-governance, then, is a possibility constrained and enabled by the prevailing institutional milieu. However the process of introducing a new imagery of self-governance is inherently political. Thus we can expect to see contestation between actors, playing out the dynamics of transformation and resistance. The micro politics of such contestation are not well reflected in the literature. Yet they are essential to document and explore if we are to develop an explanation of how changes to institutional arrangements occur, and why particular settlements are reached. In other words, how does the dialectic of structure and agency work out in the contested world of public governance as it responds to the momentum towards greater self-governance? Government is constructed on the norms of contested elections, transparency and bureaucratic procedure, which provide mechanisms for legitimating action taken in the public’s name. Self-governance presents a challenge to these norms because it fragments the public policy process into specific areas of responsibility, which are allocated to third parties, who

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in turn are decoupled from the wider system of democratic government. These special purpose bodies are given authority over a particular policy domain in which they act on behalf of elected representatives, but have limited connection to them (Skelcher 2007). PPPs provide one example, alongside executive agencies, quangos, collaborative management and various forms of citizen-centered governance. We explore these questions through two contrasting PPP cases. The strategic service delivery partnership (SSDP) involved a long-term contract between a major information and communications technology (ICT) company and a large local government. Its overt purpose was to modernize the local authority’s business processes and infrastructure, and enhance community cohesion. The case shows how the traditional governance model retained a strong hold on political actors in the municipality. This normative frame generated resistance to the self-governance imagery being offered to them as a means to solve particular policy problems. Consequently the decision to adopt the SSDP was hotly debated. The result was a highly regulated principal-agent relationship, resulting in considerable constraints on the PPP’s self-governance. In contrast, the business improvement district (BID) was initiated by business to solve a public policy problem over which the municipality had limited influence. Approving the BID did not challenge political decision-makers’ values. Their normative frame was pro-business and favorable to new institutional arrangements operating at arm’s length to the local government. Thus, the creation of a self-governing jurisdiction with a high degree of autonomy was relatively unproblematic. In this case, the public political principals exercised a hands-off stance and permitted considerable autonomy and self-governance by the BID board. The chapter is structured in the following way. The next section discusses PPPs as a form of self-governance, and locates them within the changing governance imagery discussed in Chapter 1. It then considers the principal agent problems PPPs introduce, and shows how institutional designs – including the use of formal and relational contracting – offer a means by which they can be regulated or metagoverned. We then set out the research design, and follow this by providing an analysis of the two cases. The chapter concludes by discussing how the empirical cases inform the wider debate about self-governance in the public realm. Public-private partnerships as contextualized imageries Globally, the origins and application of PPPs vary from region to region (Common 2000; Greve and Hodge 2005; Hodge 2003; Linder and Rosenau 2000). In the welfare states of northern and Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the post-Communist central and Eastern Europe, they have been rediscovered   We exclude from this definition many of the special districts found in the US, since they typically have an electoral process and constitute single purpose forms of representative government.

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since the latter part of the twentieth century, arising from the impact of new public management ideas and neo-liberal governments. But even here, the use of PPPs has varied considerably. They have been widely adopted in the UK and some Australian states as part of the reform programmes of right and centrist governments, but have made little headway in Denmark and some other Scandinavian nations with their stronger traditions of public and civic provision. In France and southern Europe and in the US and Latin America, there is a longer tradition of the state working with business, especially in the delivery of basic public services. Elsewhere, in Africa and Asia, different patterns of state-business relations are evident, reflecting variation in governmental capacity, tradition and political cultures. Consequently, when we talk about PPPs reflecting a new imagery of selfgovernance, it is important to be aware of the empirical context. This language fits some parts of the world better than others, and the idea of PPPs as self-governance possibilities cannot be treated as a universal. The empirical cases in this chapter come from the UK, which has had one of the most radical programmes of public sector reform globally, with the exception of the transformations that have taken place in states that have recently moved to representative democracy, as in central and eastern Europe. While the findings from the UK case cannot necessarily be generalized to other countries, the fact that they derive from one of the limiting cases does enable us to consider what self-governance might look like under conditions that are favorable to its development, and thus its relation to traditional systems of representative government and public bureaucracies. In general, however, we can say that the normative stance promoting PPPs is associated with the state devolving certain functions to business in the expectation of increased efficiency and effectiveness arising from the competitive incentives that apply in the market place. In addition, this relationship also offers the state a way of shifting risk and, potentially, accessing additional financial resources without the need to increase taxes. This is the prescriptive and theoretical view, which is not necessarily reflected in individual empirical cases. Unpacking the noun ‘partnership’ in the phrase ‘public-private partnership’ begins to reveal the complex of possibilities for the institutional design of selfgovernance, and for the structure of the principal agent relationship through which metagovernance is exercised. PPPs come in many different forms: using public resources to lever private investment; contracting-out; offloading public functions to private governments; franchising monopoly public services; joint ventures for infrastructure development; and strategic partnering for back-office services (Justice and Goldsmith 2006; Schaeffer and Loveridge 2000; Skelcher 2005). Thus ‘partnership’ suggests a variety of possible relationships between principal and agent that is not contained within a single institutional design. Differences in design reflect differences in the way the limits to self-governance are set. What those limits are and how they are determined is considered in the two case studies.

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The challenge of PPP as self-governance The case studies presented below show that the state faces at least two major challenges when it moves towards the realization of a self-governance imagery. The first challenge is that of legitimizing a transformation from representative government and public bureaucracy to arm’s length governance through novel institutional designs as the mechanism for policy implementation. In the traditional model of government, the relationship between political principals and public servants is managed through the logic of appropriateness in which the actions of individuals are deemed legitimate against procedural criteria. Courts, for example, will strike out executive decisions and administrative actions on the basis of non-compliance with publicly sanctioned decision rules. Thus, the provision of public services by government bureaucracies was legitimized through a transparent processes of ex ante electoral contestation, legislatively sanctioned executive decisions, operational activity by a meritocratic and neutrally competent civil service, and ex post scrutiny by political principals, a free media and civil society. However, the neo-liberal agenda that has affected a number of nations in recent decades introduces a discourse of economic efficiency, offering a different set of criteria for judging public services. The critique is based on two beliefs. The first was that public sector organizations were inherently flawed as their actions were governed by a concern for procedure rather than economic efficiency. The second belief was that ‘business’ was superior in terms of performance and efficiency to the public sector because businesses based their decisions upon the production of outputs (Grimshaw et al. 2002). The twin beliefs in the flawed public sector and the efficient private sector produced a series of reforms that came to be known as the New Public Management (NPM). The central argument of the NPM was the public sector organizations should be reformed to resemble private sector businesses (Hood 1991). To achieve these reforms, a variety of agendas and initiatives were pursued ranging from internal performance measurement to the contractually based outsourcing of public services (Pollitt 2003). In general terms, the logic of appropriateness was challenged by a logic of consequentiality in which outputs and outcomes gained precedence over inputs and procedure. The neo-liberal discourse solves the perceived problems of the state by having it give up direct responsibility for outputs and outcomes, and instead outsource to a third party. The concept of outsourcing was based on the view that if the public service could be transformed into a distributor and overseer of contracts, it would do so based upon the need to deliver the highest output for the lowest costs and would award contracts appropriately (Ranson and Stewart 1994). As a result, the second challenge of the self-governance imagery is the metagovernance of the PPP. This involves the design a set of institutional arrangements that will enable the devolution of the obligations and objectives of the political principal to the PPP in a way that will ensure they are reflected in the actions of the agent. The most commonly used institutional device is the contract. Contracts allocate

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the rights and responsibilities of the principal and the agent, and may include statements about what is to be delivered at what price, how monitoring of the agent’s work will be undertaken, and what mechanisms are to be used for payment and any sanctions. The degree of specificity of the contract impacts the level of self-governance by the agent. The use of outsourcing has met with varying responses. In the UK, for example, it was widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s, but also became unpopular with many in the public sector (Newman 2001). The consequential logic was regarded as inappropriate for the public sector, and it was argued that there would be significant information asymmetry and lock-in problems between the principal and the agent (Kettl 1993). Therefore, the process of contracting out would be subject to hidden costs associated with the selection of the agent and monitoring their compliance with the contract (Prager 1994), which would have the effect of reducing the overall level of economic efficiency and could undermine the principal’s public policy goals (Rosenau 2000b). The problems associated with these conventional legal contracts have led to an interest in relational contracting as a means of managing public-private partnerships over the long term (Marchington and Vincent 2004). In a conventional contract, the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved are protected and defined by the governance structure of the contract. However, throughout the operation of the contract, managers will have to reach agreements on the meaning and interpretation of a written contract, and on how to apply it as circumstances change. Relational contracting proceeds from an assumption that shared values and understandings can underpin the contract (Sako 1992), and thus tends to consist of a framework legal agreement that allows for the development of shared understandings between the boundary-spanning managers and self-governance in pursuit of the principal’s policy goals (Marchington et al. 2005). As such managers are freed from reliance on the wording of the contract and are able to take appropriate action to preserve the relationship by working beyond the contract in a partnership. The existence of shared commitment removes the need for extensive monitoring of contractual compliance as each party can rely on the good intentions of the other (Sitkin and Roth 1993). This reduces the costs of creating and managing the contract (Williamson 1996). Furthermore, shared commitment and strong interpersonal relations between boundary-spanners allows for extremely complex contractual arrangements to be managed efficiency as unforeseen problems can be swiftly resolved (Baker 2008). The strategic service delivery partnership case provides an example of these forms of institutional design. Legal contracts and relational contracts are only two points on a continuum of institutional designs for self-governance. A third possibility, giving even greater autonomy, is for a separately constituted entity to take responsibility for public functions. Under this model, a new jurisdiction is created with legal authority to generate revenue and exercise a range of powers within its competence. Here, the logic of self-governance by private actors operating in the public interest is taken even further. This, of course, is not a new model, and can be found in the

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role of private companies in developing urban infrastructure in Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However it is operating in a new context, compared with the minimal state institutions in existence at that time (Skelcher 2005). The BID case provides an example of jurisdictional creation for self-governance. 2. Research design This chapter draws on data collected in two separate empirical studies undertaken in England in the mid 2000s. The cases are purposively sampled to illustrate different levels of contestation over the introduction of greater self-governance and thus to cast light on the theoretical question posed in the introduction to this chapter. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected through interview, analysis of relevant documents, and observation. The data are presented anonymously, in line with the ethical agreement between the researcher and actors in the case study sites. The first case study examines a contractually based strategic service delivery partnership between a large local government and a private company. Here, the capacity for self-governance is important because the intention of the transformation project is to utilize private sector expertise and investment to produce a major improvement in the local government’s performance. This requires the managers and professionals involved to have discretion in realizing the overall goals of the project, as determined by their political principals. Self-governance, then, is about managerial discretion within the hierarchical setting of a single organization. The formal mechanisms for regulating this PPP are a long-term contract between the public organization and the private company, which has both legal and relational elements. The second case study analyses a business improvement district (BID) company. This is a membership body for businesses operating in the leisure and entertainment zone of a major city. The function of the BID is to undertake activities that promote and improve the district, using an additional compulsory property tax on businesses as its source of finance. In effect, the BID provides public functions (marketing, security, etc.) that are additional to those already provided by the local government. In this PPP, the local government is a supporter of self-governance by business actors. The analytical framework focuses on the two questions that derive from the problem posed in the introduction to this chapter (Table 5.1). First, it examines how public authorities reached the decision to adopt a form of regulated selfgovernance with business. It considers the political context and the nature of contestation between the new imagery of self-governance through PPPs and other values for public governance. Secondly, it explores the institutional design for self-governance, including the measures that were introduced to ensure that the public interest would be represented and assured, and private interests would be constrained.

Table 5.1  Summary analysis of the two case studies PPP case study

Policy context and goals

Reaching the self-governance decision

Institutional design for self-governance

North City strategic service delivery partnership

Significant problems of disadvantage, rise of right wing politics, highly partisan politics, and poor leadership and performance by the council. Desire to transform local government service delivery and management by outsourcing to private company, in order to achieve greater efficiency, and community cohesion and wellbeing.

External pressure to adopt SSDP internalized by local political parties. Considerable contestation due to conflict with strong local values of service delivery through local government and antipathy to private sector involvement. Reluctant adopters of PPP solution.

Long-term contract between local authority and private company, and attempt at relational contracting within this. Primary accountability to the local government. Strong regulation exercised by local government due to state-centric norms.

Broad Street business improvement district

Major problems of excessive alcohol consumption, public order offences, and littering problems in city centre entertainment zone. Concern about business profitability. BID designed to develop business-led, integrated actions to improve the attractiveness of the area.

Pro-business local government keen to respond to initiative from local businesses that presented a solution to a problem over which it had limited additional leverage. Local government support for development of BID and its adoption by businesses.

Business-led company, with public partners amongst members. Local government levies additional property tax to fund improvements, passing this to the company to spend as part of its BID strategy. Primary accountability to businesses in the BID jurisdiction. Limited regulation by local government due to pro-business orientation and value-added nature of BID.

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3. The empirical cases North City strategic service delivery partnership The policy context for the SSDP This case study examines North City, which has a population of approximately 200,000 people and is located in the north of England. It is an area where industry has previously been of considerable importance, but over recent years has faced economic decline and social divisions. The politics of North City Council involve considerable antagonism between the two major political parties – Labour and Liberal. Historically, the Labour Party usually held a small majority of the 60 council seats. The electoral system in North City, where one-third of council seats were contested three years in every four, heightened partisan competition between the political parties. The Liberal Party took control from Labour in the 2002 elections. These elections came soon after a number of disturbances on the city’s streets related to issues of poverty and racial disadvantage. The right-wing British National Party (BNP) succeeding in gained a significant share of the vote by capitalizing on public concern with this unrest, as well as public dissatisfaction with the council’s political infighting and inability to tackle the problems it faced. Although it failed to win any council seats, the other parties’ concern at the rise of right wing politics generated a desire to address the root issues. At about the same time, separate independent reports into the city’s racial tensions and the council’s performance both concluded that the adversarial nature of the council’s politics has failed to provide effective leadership for the bureaucracy or the community as a whole. There was a lack of effective senior management in the local authority, enabling the different departments of the council to operate as independent fiefdoms. Corporate services such as finance, human resources, and IT were inadequate. And the council had failed to give sufficient priority to solving the problems of disadvantage and poor public services facing citizens. Although some parts of the council were operating effectively, the overall picture was of poor performance. The local authority was classified as one of the worst performing in the country, and came under close supervision by central government (Baker 2008). Reaching the decision to use a PPP The decision to utilize a PPP solution involved the articulation of a new set of meanings about the purpose of the local authority and its modes of management. Contestation of these meanings in relation to the prevailing discourse was shortcircuited by the external pressure on the local authority and the opportunity created by change of political control. However, contestation was also displaced into the more technical questions about the institutional design of the PPP, as we discuss later.

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On forming its new 2002 administration, the Liberal party politicians were faced with a significant agenda for change. Consultants advised that the council could integrate its disjointed organizational structure and improve its service delivery to citizens by adopting a strategic service delivery partnership (SSDP). SSDPs are complex and long-term public-private partnerships. They typically involve Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), investment in new information and communication technology (ICT), creation of a single-point of customer access through a call centre, outsourcing of corporate and service delivery functions, and creation of infrastructure for business start-up and training. This solution for improving performance had already gained legitimacy in the wider local government community as part of the NPM as it was based on established methods used by the private sector. These solutions were being widely promoted in the context of the New Labour government’s modernization programme (Newman 2001). The creation of a partnership with the private sector would also provide a solution to the council’s lack of resources to fund this investment, since working with a private partner would enable them to access capital funds through the market. The Liberal politicians were more pragmatic than Labour regarding the use of the private sector, and agreed this approach. However when political control changed back to Labour in 2003, the new Administration decided to continue with this initiative. While in opposition, Labour it had rethought its traditional opposition to PPPs, influenced both by the need for the local authority to change and the wider Blairite New Labour platform at national level. Close supervision of the council’s improvement programme by central government officials was also an important incentive for reconstructing the Labour politician’s discourse, although the rank and file councillors did not always fully share the new approach articulated by the leadership. However the key factor in legitimizing the SSDP in Labour councillor’s eyes was the recognition that investment and job creation by the SSDP could promote the council’s regeneration and social cohesion objectives. For example, the key objectives of the partnership are: a. To win back public respect and develop a positive reputation with our communities … b. To secure improved efficiency … c. To provide the capacity to accelerate change … d. To provide additional employment … and improve the quality of work available to the Borough’s residents (SSDP: Report of Deputy Chief Executive, February 2007, para. 3.1).

  Full references to internal reports are withheld in line with the ethics approval governing data collection.

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This made the SSDP more difficult to oppose and provided the project with a firm source of legitimacy. Institutional design for the SSDP The SSDP is intended to facilitate self-governance by the SSDP’s managers, but within a regulatory framework that protects the public interest. The public interest dimension has been a core theme throughout debates on the institutional framework for the SSDP. It was one of the criteria used by the local authority in short listing and selecting a preferred partner during 2003-2005, and in designing the final form of the SSDP that was agreed by the council early in 2007. The public interest concern reflects the narrative of the council’s political and managerial leadership since 2002 – that is, the council is renewing itself to increase community cohesion and the wellbeing of citizens. The council’s mission statement is: ‘to improve everyone’s lives by providing quality public services and effective community leadership in a regenerated borough’ (Corporate Plan 2006-2009). Improved performance is the key objective, and the SSDP is considered to be the only instrument available to achieve this. However assuring the public interest is also the symbol used by backbench Labour councillors who remain critical of the adoption of the SSDP. They are able to exercise this challenge to the design in their role as members of the council’s overview and scrutiny committee, whose function is to review the plans and decisions of the political executive. Public interest considerations were regularly raised at meetings of this committee throughout the design process in 2005-2007, and their recommendations led to a number of changes in the details of the SSDP design, for example on the way in which sub-standard performance by the SSDP would be dealt with (SSDP: Report of Deputy Chief Executive, February 2007). The final design of the SSDP involves a complex set of relationships between the partners, the local authority and two businesses – one with expertise in outsourcing and ICT systems, the other with expertise in engineering. The complexity and long-term nature of these contracts led to a preference to use relational contracting rather than detailed legal agreements. The two businesses formed an alliance, structured as a joint venture company (JVCo #1), to integrate their activities (Figure 5.1). The SSDP was also structured as a joint venture company (JVCo #2), whose equity partners were JVCO #1 and the local authority. JVCo #2 in turn has a subcontract with a major ICT supplier to deliver and maintain the IT infrastructure associated with the SSDP. JVCo #2 is not a publicly quoted company, thus enabling the partners to retain complete control of its activities. The local authority then has a contract with JVCo #2 for 12 years, with a three year extension option. Under this contract, the council transfers to JVCo #2 a number of services, including tax collection, social benefit payments, engineering and transportation, and ICT. Local government staff employed on these services are also transferred to JVCo #2. The JVCo has first refusal on a second tranche of services including human resources, financial management and administration.

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JVCo #2 is under contract to deliver improvements in a number of services retained by the council, through its ICT, customer services and back-office investment. The council pays an annual fee to JVCo #2 to undertake these services. The JVCo is expected to invest £16m and deliver efficiency savings of £30m over the life of the contract. The council, and the other partners, will share in any surplus generated, but will not be liable for any losses. Management of JVCo #2 have considerable flexibility in the ways in which they deliver their contractual obligations. The council’s reports refer to the need for this SSDP to deliver the significant transformation of council services, and see its ability to recruit a ‘skilled independent management team’ as essential to this (SSDP: Report of Deputy Chief Executive, February 2007). The SSDP’s management also has the flexibility to introduce reward systems along private sector lines, including bonuses, thus avoiding the constraints of the highly formalized reward systems found in the public sector. Incorporating the SSDP as a separate legal entity gives its management freedom to own and control assets, employ staff, enter into contracts and raise capital from the market. One of the benefits of constructing the SSDP in this way and managing the inter-organizational relationships through relational contracts is that it provides a high degree of self-governance. This self-governance capacity is generated by the use of relational contracts as these offer the opportunity to create space within the contract for interpersonal relationships to develop and for meaning to be managed. This process allows JVCo #2 to retain operational flexibility, and grants it discretion to act in pursuit of commercial opportunities. JVCo #2’s constitution requires it to work towards the council’s overall objectives, and specifically mandates it to promote community cohesion, further the wellbeing of residents, and conduct its business in a manner that reflects the values of the local authority. Therefore, the local authority has a veto over certain types of decisions that may come before the JVCo #2 board, including approving or changing the business plan and entering into financially significant contracts. The JVCo #2’s main board consists of a 6:3 majority of local authority representatives, including the council’s leader and the leader of the opposition, and the management board also has a council majority. The contract between the council and JVCo #2 specifies the outputs to be delivered, the mechanisms for performance monitoring, and the provisions for financial penalties where there are cases of poor performance. Finally, the council’s overview and scrutiny committee of non-executive politicians has the power to monitor and call for evidence about the SSDP, and question its management and board. Therefore, JVCo #2’s management have capacity for self-governance, but constrained by a strong set of regulatory mechanisms which are designed to promote and protect the public interest in this business venture. The council’s documentation clearly identifies loss of political accountability as one of the risks, and show how the measures set out above will minimize this. In doing so, it assures the legitimacy of SSDP as an operational entity through the institutional

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design that is established. In conclusion, the SSDP institutional structure reflects the tensions that remain unresolved from the original decision.

Figure 5.1  The structure of the strategic service delivery PPP Broad street business improvement district The policy context for the BID Broad Street is the spine of a mixed-use district near the centre of a large English city. The area predominantly contains office and tourist/entertainment uses, but includes large housing developments – some are low-income rentals, and others are up-market executive apartments. Over 300 businesses operate in the area. The Broad Street district underwent substantial redevelopment during the 1990s, a process still continuing on the periphery of the district. This substantially increased its attractiveness for entertainment activity, with large numbers of restaurants, bars, music venues, and similar facilities. The impetus for this business improvement district (BID) was the regime-led reinvention of the city centre as a destination for tourism and leisure activity, in

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response to the decline of manufacturing and resulting urban distress of the 1980s. Broad Street in particular evolved during the 1990s as a bar district servicing the adjacent visitor facilities – including a convention center, convention hotels and an arena – and came to take on a life of its own as a destination for binge-drinking students. The attractiveness of the district and competition between bars resulted in public order problems including drunkenness and other activity associated with excessive alcohol consumption, littering, traffic congestion and occasional violent disturbances. This evening economy co-existed uneasily with the continuing efforts to market the area as a tourist zone, and with the tastes of the developers and occupants of newly developed, upscale office, residential and retail developments in the area. Reaching a decision on the BID At about the same time that public and private actors were recognizing the need for action, legislation was enacted that provided the powers for BIDs to be created. BIDs are business-led special-assessment districts with the power to levy supplemental property taxes from businesses to fund service and capital improvements beyond those normally provided by the City Government. These include supplemental security, street and sidewalk cleansing and place marketing. The opportunity to create a BID fitted easily into a city that already had an established US-style public-private urban development regime. This regime was an alliance of the Labour controlled pro-development City Council, businesses themselves, property developers and other local public agencies such as the police and the quasi-governmental Training and Skills Council, a focus for economic development activity. The self-governance imagery was integral to the regime’s normative frame. Indeed, a city centre partnership (CCP) had been in existence for several years. Its board has a strong majority of business members, and minority council representation. The CCP was resourced by the City Council in collaboration with other partners, and provided an institutional structure within which specialist staff developed programmes to promote the city centre, reduce retail crime and anti-social behavior, and build cooperative activity between the relevant actors. Key actors in the CCP and the regime saw the BID model as a powerful and flexible way to further develop business-led self-governance in support of public and private objectives. The CCP subsequently provided the leadership for the development of the BID. Business leadership is a central feature of the BID governance model. Essentially, it enables the business community in the area to tax itself in order to provide programmes to address common problems. The proposal for the BID was developed after stakeholder consultation and a sales effort that included surveys of the target district’s business operators, employees and visitors, telephone marketing, the production of a glossy-format BID proposal and website, and extensive door-to-door lobbying of the 262 business property taxpayers in the area. The proposal emphasized the self-governance aspects of the BID – that it would be controlled by business and would deliver benefits to them in return for

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the supplemental property tax. Office tenants proved the most difficult to persuade of the BID’s desirability, because they were least affected by the problems the BID was addressing, while businesses serving alcohol for the most part accepted the BID as a more desirable alternative to the otherwise likely imposition of greater public-sector regulation (BID Project Director, interviewed June 2005). When proposing a BID, local authorities are obliged to conduct referenda of the affected ratepayers. The referendum must achieve a double majority: of the number of votes cast from hereditaments subject to the BID levy, and of the rateable value of voting hereditaments. Sixty-five percent of the proposed BID’s hereditaments, and ninety percent by value, voted in favor of the proposal, and the BID began operations in 2005. The BID project, therefore, fitted naturally in to a pro-business self-governance imagery. Institutional design for the BID Legislation does not stipulate a particular organizational arrangement for a BID. In Broad Street, a business-led non-profit company manages the BID. This corporate structure enables the BID to retain independence from the businesses it serves, enhancing its self-governing capacity. It is also a corporate form that is recognizable to the business community. The BID, therefore, avoids the selfgovernance limitations inherent in being a local authority controlled company or a membership organization. The BID company is governed by a 15-member board comprising six representatives of district businesses, three property owners/ developers, two members of the Leisure Forum representing bars and clubs, two members of the local council, and one representative each from the regional police force and the city centre neighborhood forum of residents. The BID provides regulation of the district’s public space by means of street wardens, counters retail crime by the use of a radio system to link businesses, and undertakes other public regulation and promotional activity. Early indications are that the BID is succeeding in its purpose of addressing perceptions of public disorder associated with a large number of bars on the street, both through its service provision and through the mutual and self regulation of bar operators and the local police. This seems likely to improve the area’s attractiveness to targeted tourist sectors, to help the bar operators avoid external regulation, and to help the owners and occupants of non-bar commercial and residential properties in the district enjoy enhanced use and exchange values for their properties. Although the steering committee and shadow board were very active in developing and promoting the BID proposal and its initial operating plan, the BID company’s board is less involved in strategy or day-to-day direction of operations. Given the BID staff’s execution of the intent of the BID’s five-year plan, and the loyalty to its ratepayers exhibited by BID staff, the apparent detachment of the board represents a form of rational ignorance. In addition, there is a hands-off attitude by the City Council. The BID is delivering solutions to problems in the city centre, and self-governance is acceptable for this reason as well as the wider pro-business regime in the city. Consequently there is little public accessibility to

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BID meetings and documents, or a sense that constituencies other than business are relevant actors in regulating self-governance. Overall, the BID appears to be a partnership between the City Government and business interests (Justice and Goldsmith 2006). However it is a partnership in which one of the two actors plays no role other than de facto offering public legitimization. The City Council grants to the business community qua the BID self-governance over certain functions that otherwise it would be under pressure to provide. Because the mandates and institutional details of BIDs are constructed locally, it is unclear the extent to which self-governance of this jurisdiction has socially undesirable consequences. In particular, BIDs have a potential to use their security activity to exclude individuals or categories of individual from the public spaces under their jurisdiction. Exclusion can take the form of direct physical obstruction or ejection, but it can also occur through the creation of an environment in which some groups and individuals may feel unwelcome, or through commercial gentrification that eliminates uses of property attractive to certain groups. To the extent the Broad Street BID serves to restrict only binge drinking, this may not be a concern. But it remains a potential concern, particularly where BIDs address other perceived problems of public order and/or result in significant changes in property values, rents and business mix. So self-governance that is constructed and legitimized in terms of a pro-business and pro-development regime, and where the institutional design of approval requires only the participation and agreement of businesses and the City Council, is only partially legitimated. Users of the public spaces covered by the BID or the wider community are not defined into the relevant constituency for legitimating the BID. As it is currently constituted, the BID board cannot accommodate these interests other than through the very limited membership by the neighborhood forum or residents and the City Council. Further, BIDs are one area in which a larger but less readily measured issue is raised by the conflict between the economizing and democratic logics of institutional design as explicated by Elkin (1985). BIDs are attractive to businesses and local authorities alike, because they can mobilize otherwise unavailable resources to improve public spaces. But political institutions also constitute the relations among citizens and determine how they experience each other. Empowering actors in their roles specifically as agents of business rather than as citizens thus has implications for local democracy and for self-governance at the societal level which may be as significant in the long term as they are difficult to measure in the short term. 3. Conclusion This chapter provides insights into the self-governance imagery in the field of public-private partnerships through the use of two case studies – a strategic service delivery partnership and a business improvement district. The two cases cannot be taken as representative, but rather as exemplars of self-governance under different

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normative frames and mediated by different types of institutional designs. These empirical cases illustrate the forms of contestation that arise around the move to self-governance. They show that the pre-existing regime impacts on the normative frame for self-governance and the institutional design that is adopted. The SSDP case shows that self-governance was still contested within the City Government’s normative frame, leading to an institutional design that imposed a considerable number of constraints on self-governance through relational contracting by managers. Instead, formal contracts were used to assure the delivery of public policy goals and obligations. The BID case reveals a willingness of the City Government as part of a pro-business regime to permit a business-led institution to exercise considerable self-governance – indeed, the board’s limited interest in operational matters frees the managers to develop their own approaches. It is tempting to interpret these two cases as being at different points on a developmental path, from traditional government to self-governance. Thus, the first local government could be regarded as having a strong legacy of state-centrism and accountability through representative democracy, while the second presents a modernized example of a City Council oriented to network governance. This is a proposition that could be examined through further research. It poses questions about the impact of discourses of self-governance on elected politicians whose orientation is towards a representative institution. An alternative explanation is that the first local government is more strongly attached to the needs of local citizens, and guards its role of representing their interests in its dealings with business. This contrasts with the pro-business regime in the second case. By introducing the analytical framework of urban regimes, the chapter poses the question of whether debates about self-governance have ignored the insights of the urban studies literature in terms of the normative construction of different localities. The adoption of a self-governance imagery might not be explained in terms of a developmental path, but in relation to the material conditions in particular localities and the response of elected representatives to working with private partners to affect these. The theoretical implication of the two cases is that self-governance is more likely to be effected where it does not have to contend with pre-existing and institutionalized forms of political authority. In other words, it might be expected to occur most in new policy arenas or where policy involves a range of actors in which elected politicians cannot be veto players. Contestation mediated through elected political representatives can slow the impact of self-governance, for the reason that it challenges norms of public interest decision-making through accountable political institutions. This suggests that the theoretical literature needs to give greater cognizance to policy sectors as an intervening variable in the explanation of self-governance. A wider quantitative study might confirm, reject or modify this hypothesis.

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References Baker, K. 2008, Strategic Service Partnerships and Boundary-Spanning Behaviour: A Study Of Multiple, Cascading Policy Windows, Doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham, Birmingham. Common, R. 2000, ‘The East Asia region: Do pubic-private partnerships make sense?’, in Public-Private Partnerships: Theory and Practice in International Perspective, S. Osborne, Routledge, London. Elkin, S.L. 1985, ‘Economic and political rationality’, Polity, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 253-271. Greve, C. and Hodge, G. 2005, The Challenge of Public-Private Partnerships. Learning from International Experience, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Grimshaw, D., Vincent, S. and Willmott, H. 2002, ‘Going Privately: Partnership and Outsourcing in UK Public Services’, Public Administration, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 465-502. Hodge, G. 2003, ‘Privatization: The Australian experience’, in International Handbook on privatization, D. Parker and D. Saal (eds), Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Hood, C. 1991, ‘A Public Management for all Seasons’, Public Administration, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 3-19. Justice, J.B. and Goldsmith, R.S. 2006, ‘Private governments or public policy tools? The law and public policy of New Jersey’s special improvement districts’, International Journal of Public Administration, vol. 29, no. 1-3, pp. 107-36. Kettl, D.F. 1993, Sharing Power: Public Governance and Private Markets, Brookings Institute, Washington DC. Linder, S.H. and Rosenau, P.V. 2000, ‘Mapping the Terrain of the Public-Private Partnership’, in Public-Private Policy Partnerships, P.V. Rosenau (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Marchington, M. and Vincent, S. 2004, ‘Analysing the Institutional, Organizational and Interpersonal Forces in Shaping Inter-Organizational Relations’, Journal of Management Studies, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1029-1056. Marchington, M., Vincent, S. and Cooke, F.-L. 2005, ‘The role of BoundarySpanning Agents in Inter-Organizational Contracting’, in Fragmenting Work: Blurring Boundaries and Disordering Hierarchies, M. Marchington, D. Grimshaw, J. Rubery and H. Willmott (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford. Newman, J. 2001, Modernising Governance: New Labour, Policy and Society, Sage, London. Pollitt, C. 2003, The Essential Public Manager, Open University Press, Maidenhead. Ranson, S. and Stewart, J. 1994, Management for the Public Domain: Enabling the Learning Society, Palgrave Macmillian, Basingstoke. Rosenau, P.V. 2000, ‘The Strengths and Weakness of Public-Private Policy Partnerships’, in Public-Private Policy Partnerships, P.V. Rosenau (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Sako, M. 1992, Prices, quality, and trust: Inter-firm relations in Britain and Japan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sitkin, S.B. and Roth, N.L. 1993, ‘Explaining the Limited Effectiveness of Legalistic “Remedies” for Trust/Distrust’, Organization Science, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 367-392. Schaeffer, P.V. and Loveridge, S. 2002, ‘Towards an understanding of types of public-private cooperation’, Public Performance and Management Review, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 169-189. Skelcher, C, 2005, ‘Public-Private Partnerships and Hybridity’, in Oxford Handbook of Public Management, E. Ferlie, L.E. Lynn Jr. and C. Pollitt (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford. Skelcher, C. 2007, ‘Does Democracy Matter? A transatlantic research design on democratic performance and special purpose governments’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 61-76. Williamson, O.E. 1996, The Mechanisms of Governance, Oxford University, Oxford.

Chapter 6

Citizen and City: Institutional Reform and Self-Governance in Los Angeles Juliet Musso and Christopher Weare

1. Introduction In 1999 the City of Los Angeles undertook an ambitious new program to increase citizen engagement through the creation of a system of self-governing neighborhood councils with advisory powers. As part of a voter-approved reform to the city charter, the city embarked upon a multi-year planning and implementation effort that has resulted in a citywide system of neighborhood councils with the stated goals of increasing citizen participation and improving the city’s responsiveness to its constituent communities. Los Angeles provides a fascinating basis for study of neighborhood governance. The city has long been maligned as a place lacking in civic resources, and has been governed by a progressive era structure in which city governance was depoliticized through nonpartisan elections and strict separation of policy formulation and the administration of city service delivery. This was also manifest in the pro-growth policies that were pursued by the tightly knit business elite, such as the Committee of 25 that constituted the city’s mid-twentieth century governing regime. Its automobile driven development has created a city lacking a central core that brings its varied citizens together. More recently, it has witnessed great waves of foreign immigration that have made its civic fabric ever more diverse and difficult to weave together. To the extent that citizen participation reforms can take root and change patterns of governance within the historical and institutional framework of Los Angeles, it has even greater promise in more receptive urban environments. The reform is also of interest because it has many of the characteristics of a social experiment. The neighborhood council provisions included in the reform city charter were the result of a complicated political dynamic that included two competing charter reform commissions. One was appointed by the City Council. The second, calling for elected members, was established by Mayor Riordan in direct opposition to the council, but Riordan’s slate of commissioners was roundly defeated by union-backed candidates. These dual commissions made for a process that was not fully under the control of political elites. Moreover, citizen participation was not the primary issue at stake (union candidates for the elected commission introduced the idea in their campaign as a strategic appeal to voters). Thus, citizen participation reform was foisted onto a city government that neither

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fully expected it nor welcomed it. Subsequently the planning and implementation processes unfolded through a complex political dynamic, in which pressure from the grass roots – typically oriented toward increased power and engagement in city political processes – encountered tokenistic administrative concessions on the part of city leaders. Now almost a decade following approval of charter reform, this essay considers how political dynamics during policy formulation and implementation ultimately shaped the political character of neighborhood governance in Los Angeles. During the lengthy process of policy formulation, system planning and implementation, we have seen a shifting narrative about the character and purpose of neighborhood governance in Los Angeles. In the period leading up to the charter reform, the primary tension was between a public-choice style ‘exit’ in the form of formal secession from the city, versus a more participatory ‘voice’ in the form of neighborhood representation in city governance process. This shifted during the planning process to a debate pitting the city’s impulse toward top-down control and standardization against the desire of community activists for self-determination and self-governance. Then as the neighborhood councils emerged from the certification process, they frequently (though not universally) eschewed more open participatory forums in favor of highly formalistic structures of representation that mimicked the functions of City Council, even down to required speaker cards and time limits on public comment. The neighborhood council system has tended to promote reactive mobilization against city political decisions, and many local councils have acted in a relatively protectionist manner toward local land use and transportation proposals (Musso 2007). Virtually lacking in almost ten years of political development was an acknowledgement that the City Government itself was part of the neighborhood council system, and hence there was limited investment in institutional reforms that might engage neighborhood councils constructively within policy making or service delivery. As a consequence, neighborhood councils continue an uneasy hybrid existence, constrained from the overt lobbying that non-governmental entities engage, but at the same time often marginalized by the Mayor, many City Council members and city departments. The chapter proceeds as follows. We begin with a review of urban theory that discusses the different political arenas in which citizen participation reforms may change patterns of policy formulation and service delivery to promote selfgovernance. We then describe our research objectives and methodology, followed by an examination of the way that different political narratives appeared during the development and implementation of neighborhood councils. We conclude by drawing broader lessons about citizen governance from the Los Angeles experience.

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2. Narratives of urban governance reform As Wildavsky (1979) has argued every policy or political reform has as its basis a causal theory that explicitly or implicitly connects the ways in which changes in institutional structures, incentives, rules and flows of information will lead to the desired ends. The creation of neighborhood councils within Los Angeles’ charter is no different, though the definition of the political problem it aimed to address was understood differently by different actors, and hence was negotiated during a protracted process of negotiation during policy formulation and implementation. In broad terms, the neighborhood governance movement in Los Angeles was a response to a need to broaden the basis of urban governance by making governance regimes more inclusive, empowering new interests, and opening up administrative bodies. There was a more fundamental subtext as well, a hope among some that they might promote the broader constitutive elements of democratic participation including the development of social relationships, the inculcation of civic virtues, and the development of civic skills. To understand the competing narratives concerning the character and purpose of neighborhood governance, it is useful to review theories of urban governance to distinguish the distinct but related arenas in which neighborhood organizations operate. These include: the entrepreneurial arena of growth and development; the political arena of policy making, and the managerial arena of urban service delivery. As Table 6.1 illustrates, each of these reflects a different arena of urban governance, and different conception of the ‘problem’ that neighborhood governance might address. Reform of entrepreneurial governance An entrepreneurial view of city governance views the primary role of cities as the pursuit of broad, unitary and mainly economic, interests. As Peterson (1981) argues a city must strive to ‘maintain or enhance the economic position, social prestige, or political power of the city taken as a whole … by promulgating policies that ‘… enhance the attractiveness of the city as a locale in which to live and work’. Such goals emphasize major city projects such as the development of public spaces, such as downtown revitalization projects, or through the support of public projects such as major infrastructure projects (e.g. highway or port construction) or the attraction of sports franchises. Resentment of Los Angeles growth politics fueled the development of the neighborhood governance movement. From this standpoint, neighborhood councils were viewed as a method for challenging the centralized growth policies that drive city governance yet ignore the needs of neighborhoods (Ferman 1996). Success would then determined by whether neighborhood interests could gain a voice in the governing coalition that effects major decisions. An early supporter of neighborhood councils and a charter member of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners summarized these effects succinctly:

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Becoming a player in a growth regime requires breaking into a tight cohesive clique of elite players. Stone 1980 argues that these regimes arise over time through a determined effort to coordinate actions between public and private actors and is contingent on the resources that the various actors may bring to the table and their particular interests. Whether neighborhood actors can find admittance to this regime and contribute to it positively depend on the resources they have to provide and the degree to which they can become useful to the governing coalition (Long 1958; Stone 1980). This can be difficult for neighborhood players, who rarely possess the institutional and economic resources of most interest to the extant coalition. Los Angeles’ political structure, in particular, hampered the development of neighborhood coalitions. Its fragmented and de-politicized electoral arenas, especially in comparison to machine-style urban politics, diminished the importance of neighborhoods as a forum for political organizing. In addition, Ferman (2002) points that civic organizations have received only token levels of funding from city resources which limits the degree to which they are tied to the city and to each other. While Los Angeles is not characterized by the machine-style politics that operate in many other American cities, its fragmented and de-politicized electoral arenas create significant barriers to influence because they hamper development of strong neighborhood coalitions.

Table 6.1 Narratives of urban governance and democratic reform Urban governance narrative Entrepreneurial

‘Democratic’ problems Lack of voice (politics are quiet) Crystallized networks (regimes)

Political

Centrifugal threats to political institutions Elite control of political arenas

Managerial

Objectives of reform Community networks destabilize and penetrate elite networks

Transformative possibilities From rentier to partner

Counter-narratives NIMBYism

Political incorporation and From supplicant to citizen Conflict mobilization Exclusionary politics

Distance of administrative Information transmission state Co-production Bureaucratic silos

Disillusionment and apathy From customer to collaborator

Inefficiency and inexpertise Inequity

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Reform of political governance As with the entrepreneurial vision, within the political vision of governance citizen participation reforms are intended to challenge the current exercise of political authority. The main difference is that these politics are concerned more with resource distribution enacted in the everyday arenas for policy formulation and implementation: city budgets, service delivery; local planning decisions. Here the goal would be for neighborhood governance to mediate between citizens and the city. In so doing neighborhood councils may equalize access to policy making, distribute political resources more evenly, distribute power more broadly, and make political decisions more transparent through active monitoring (Berry and Portnoy et al. 1993). This balance of political power can be shifted in a number of manners including electoral politics, agenda setting and advocacy. As an organized base of interests within communities, neighborhood governance can change the dynamics by which electoral coalitions are formed, possibly advantaging candidates who are more open to community interests. Elections, however, are only the most prominent mechanism that translates the mass of political interests into governance institutions. Neighborhood actors can also become agents in determining the relatively small number of issues that are elevated from the ‘policy primordial soup’ of problems and policies promoted by various interests to consideration on the active decisional agenda elites (Cobb and Elder 1972; Kingdon 1984). More generally, inter-electoral influence in agenda-setting and policy decisionmaking is generated through the creation of coalitions that can more effectively lobby for shared goals through interest group politics. These coalitions can be formed in a manner similar to the creation of social movements in which a core of leaders attract a network of adherents around a common set of problems and goals (Musso and Kitsuse 2002), or can become more institutionalized interest groups such as a chamber of commerce or the Sierra Club. Alternatively, effective voice may be developed through the development of active leadership, and organizing within the community and with other organizations (Chaskin 2001, 2003; Brown et al. 2001). Reform of managerial governance From the managerial vision of urban governance citizen participation reforms are an effort to improve the responsiveness of the administrative state by providing administrators with greater access to localized information and by improving neighborhood capacity for problem identification and problem solving (Fung 2004). Given that city-provided services are for the most part monopolies, and given the cost of relocation, citizens have limited recourse to exit to signal their dissatisfaction with services, elevating the importance of voice in improving and maintaining urban services (Hirschman 1970). While economists have argued that exit is an option – citizens can vote with their feet and move between neighboring

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urban jurisdiction to find better providers of municipal services – this option, remains a blunt and expensive method for communicating service desires to public agencies, and it does not eliminate the fundamental problems associated with monopoly control of services within any particular jurisdiction (Lowery and Lyons et al. 1995; Musso 2001). Moreover, Hirshman (1970) argues that the combination of exit and voice paradoxically may make service delivery agents (public or private) less responsive. This is because the service recipients most able and willing to exercise voice are also those with the resources or intense preferences that make them likely to exit in case of dissatisfaction. Their exit will leave behind a population of service recipients with lower capacity and/or less interest in exercising voice to improve services. From this standpoint, efforts to encourage loyalty as an alternative to exit are an important avenue for administrative improvement. Loyalty may be fostered through the development of strong networks connecting the neighborhood to administrative agents. The manner by which participatory reform may affect managerial governance depends on the relationships that develop between neighborhood councils and city administrators. Archon Fung (2004) in his analysis of participatory reforms instituted in Chicago for the Police Department and Schools identified a number of features associated with productive relationships. The first was facilitating an interactive dialogue at the local level among citizens and between citizens and public managers. This dialogue, properly constructed, develops consensus about problems and appropriate solutions and builds trust between managers and neighborhood residents. Such dialogue, however, requires careful nurturing. In Chicago Fung found that to ensure effective and inclusive problem solving required extensive outreach, training of individuals and public managers, centralized oversight to address conflict and the development of ‘cognitive templates’ that guided the problem solving process. In addition, these participatory reforms were conditioned by concomitant administrative reforms that created organizational incentives to respond effectively to public input. Research objectives and methodology In sum, different notions of self-governance are expressed within the varying narratives or visions that describe urban policy making and implementation. The objective of this article is to explore the complexity of governance reform in Los Angeles by tracing how the three narratives of urban reform played out during the implementation of neighborhood councils. We then use the framework to structure conclusions regarding the character of participatory governance in Los Angeles. The analysis is based on a decade of funded research, undertaken between 1997 and 2007, in which an interdisciplinary team of researchers documented the formulation of the neighborhood council reform, the planning process, and ultimately, the implementation and function of neighborhood councils in Los Angeles. The evaluation used a multi-methodological approach, combining field

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observation, survey research and semi-structured interviews. Primary sources of data collection include two surveys of neighborhood council board members; two surveys of Department of Neighborhood Empowerment project coordinators; in-depth interviews with neighborhood council members, City Council staff and city department executive liaisons to neighborhood councils; a survey of city department staff who interact with neighborhood councils; content analysis of news articles and neighborhood council by-laws and meeting agendas; three focus groups involving neighborhood council members; and field observation of neighborhood council meetings and city events. 3. The politics of neighborhood reform in Los Angeles As a reform, non-partisan city that has developed along dispersed, car-based patterns, Los Angeles lacks both a history of civic engagement and a sense of a core city. The notion of neighborhood council reform, nevertheless, arose as Los Angeles began to experience increasing tensions in the entrepreneurial, political and management arenas. Growth politics played a central role as more peripheral areas of the city (e.g. the San Fernando Valley and the Harbor) revolted against the downtown control of fiscal and land use policies and began to organize to secede from the city to regain greater control over local development. Politically, Los Angeles was plagued by the fragmentation of political institutions. The city itself has been characterized by relatively depoliticized and weak political arenas (Ferman 2002), and an uneasy balance of power between its traditionally weak Mayor; its 15-member City Council; and the more than 40 boards and commissions that govern city departments. In 1993, dissatisfaction with City Council contributed to the passage of a ballot initiative limiting the tenure of the Mayor and City Council to two four-year terms. Term limits have made political regimes much less stable; in 2001, the city replaced its mayor, along with more than half the City Council. In terms of management, Los Angeles posed extraordinary challenges. It combines vast scale (466 square miles of territory) with a functionally fragmented bureaucracy. The tensions between locally understood needs and the decision making processes of the administrative state that are common to large cities were particularly acute, leading to a high degree of alienation expressed toward the city bureaucracy (Cooper and Musso 1999). During the mid-to-late 1990s, these governance tensions fed increasing alienation and resentment on the part of neighborhoods who complained bitterly about their exclusion from downtown development decisions and about an unresponsive and distant bureaucracy that failed to provide their communities with a ‘fair share’ of services. Out of these dissatisfaction arose competing discourses of ‘voice and exit’ (Hirschman 1970). The discourse of ‘exit’ characterized communities mobilizing around neighborhood secession, while ‘voice’ was heard in the form of proposals to create a neighborhood council system to connect communities to City Hall politics.

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The politics of exit could be understood in theoretical terms as a micro response to dissatisfaction with City Government, which would create new and presumably more homogenous city entities, capture tax revenue, control land use locally. While many critics saw secession as a form of ‘white flight’ from the immigration experienced by many areas of the city, Hogan-Esche (2001) argues that the secession movement was primarily promoted by more localized growth regimes constituted by wealthy homeowners and local businesses against land use and development policies on the part of the Los Angeles downtown political regime. The secession movement, which was ultimately unsuccessful, was the impetus for charter reform, but it also fueled resentment of the city and cynicism toward the neighborhood council reform, not fertile territory for successful development of greater citizen participation. The neighborhood council movement can be understood as a response in part to these secession attempts, an effort to generate ‘voice’, by empowering community members to advise city officials. The development of neighborhood self-governance in Los Angeles was rooted in early advocacy efforts by a small number of political leaders in the mid 1990s. Perhaps most importantly, Council Member Mark Ridley-Thomas, created an ‘Empowerment Congress’ to stimulate grassroots engagement in his district. Other council members also had supported development of neighborhood advisory bodies, some district wide, some with more distinct community boundaries. Council member Joel Wachs introduced a motion to create a system of neighborhood councils in 1996, but the measure never received majority support from the City Council, and ultimately, was killed in committee (Medina 1999). Only with the broader City Charter reform effort in 1997, did neighborhood council reform become feasible. While the charter reform was initiated largely in response to the secession effort; interestingly, neither the City Council nor the Mayor viewed neighborhood council reform as an important part of the charter deliberations. Neighborhood governance was brought to the table by advocates on each commission, and largely captured the agenda during public deliberations. (Sonenshein 2004). During the charter reform debate, the discourse about neighborhood governance shifted from the tension between voice and exit to a debate about the appropriate level of autonomy and formal authority to be granted the councils. Some advocates, primarily neighborhood activists and the Chair of the elected commission, argued that the neighborhood councils should be autonomous elected bodies, with delegated decision authority over some issues related to land use. They feared that bodies lacking these formal powers would do little to change the nature of city politics. Others, including the business and developer communities, and most of the City Councils’ appointed commission, argued that they should be self-selected bodies with advisory powers only. Interestingly, some of the early debate characterized advisory councils as ‘neighborhood lobbyists’; the term ‘lobbyist’ was later dropped as some found it had negative connotations (Medina 1999, 6).

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Delegated power was ultimately rejected by the Commissions for both political and pragmatic reasons. Developers and the business community opposed given legal authority to neighborhood councils, concerned that this would create additional bureaucratic hurdles to development, and fuel Not-in-My-Backyard (NIMBY) sentiments. Additionally, pragmatists in the charter reform movement argued that existing American neighborhood council systems were pretty universally advisory, and questioned whether requiring elections and granting legal powers was practicable. Ultimately the neighborhood council governance provisions included in the charter were informed by the experiences and practices of other cities, and particularly Berry, Portney and Thomson’s (1993) seminal Rebirth of Urban Democracy, but the charter remained broad in its conception, intentionally leaving many details of neighborhood council formation and operation to be settled by ordinance. The charter was clear that the neighborhood council system should be citywide, and it created a new department, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, which was charged with ensuring that every part of the city have an opportunity to be included within the system. The charter also required that the councils represent all stakeholders within a neighborhood, and defined stakeholders as those who live, work or own property in the neighborhood. The neighborhood councils were given no formal powers, a setback to advocates who sought veto power over land use. The charter did however contain several provisions intended to improve neighborhood participation in the city policymaking process, including creation of an ‘Early Warning System’ to support information to and feedback from neighborhoods councils. This was the sum total of the charter provisions. The neighborhood council system directive was so broad as to provide little guidance regarding operations: To promote more citizen participation in government and make government more responsive to local needs, a citywide system of neighborhood councils, and a Department of Neighborhood Empowerment is created. Neighborhood councils shall include representatives of the many diverse interests in communities and shall have an advisory role on issues of concern to the neighborhood. (Los Angeles City Charter, 1999, Article IX, Section 900)

This broad character meant that advocates as well as antagonists were able to read their own political goals into the charter, leaving to be solved during implementation the hard fights over a wide array of poorly articulated goals. 4. Implementation games Examining the implementation process highlights the mobilization of resources to attain the charter goals as interpreted by city and community actors thereby shedding light on the goals and resources of the major actors in this drama. The

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genesis of the reform (e.g. a compromise between two charter reform commissions not vetted by elected officials) has had serious consequences in that it emphasized community mobilization at the cost of political reform and affected the manner in which the city subsequently reacted to the rise of community representing organizations. The implementation of neighborhood councils unfolded as a pushpull process that involved both ‘top down’ processes flowing from the originating charter (Mazmanian and Sabatier 1980) and bottom up development of new networks of association and interest (Hjern 1982). From the outset neighborhood governance faced serious ‘top down’ obstacles in that the framing of the charter by ambivalent political leaders did little to support integration or empowerment of neighborhoods. A majority of City Council and three successive mayors that oversaw implementation of the system viewed neighborhood councils with wariness and ambivalence. In response to tokenistic ‘implementation games’ by city officials (Bardach 1979), individuals responded with bottom up mobilization of policy networks that proved effective in setting in place a self-organizing citywide system of councils. Ironically, the decisions made by neighborhood organized in structuring councils emphasized quasirepresentative, formalistic governing bodies that in effect mimicked the structure and style of City Council decision making. This mimetic isomorphism, along with limited city investment in arenas for deliberation, limited the quality, scope and depth of participation promoted by the emergent neighborhood council system. Planning and the politics of self-determination As we discuss in more detail elsewhere (Musso 2007; Musso and Kitsuse 2002), the enactment of the Charter in 1999 was followed by a two-year planning process in which the Mayor’s appointed Board of Neighborhood Commissioners and the new Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) developed a plan for development and certification of the system of neighborhood councils. During this planning process the discourse regarding neighborhood governance shifted yet again, focusing this time on the tension between control and regulation from the top, and self-determination of neighborhood governance at the grass roots. The development of the plan solicited public input through a series of townhall style meetings in which community members were placed in workshops to consider a series of questions about how they envisioned their neighborhood boundaries, and how they thought that the neighborhood council system should be structured. This planning process fueled some skepticism among neighborhood activists; the running joke was that the plan was already a ‘DONE deal’. This skepticism was perhaps not misplaced, as DONE staff members were drawing neighborhood boundaries, based on census and other city boundaries, in isolation from the planning process that purported to solicit neighborhood council boundaries. Moreover comments made by the DONE general manager in City Council committee meetings clearly contradicted the messages she promoted

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in the planning workshops, that the plan was a ‘blank slate’ to be drawn up by community members. There were two particularly important political developments during the twoyear planning process. First, the protracted planning process, and the perceived resistance of City Hall to neighborhood governance, provided impetus for a movement of community activists to begin organizing their neighborhoods for selfgovernance, and to lobby the city for self-determination in the planning process. During the planning period, communities initiated self-organization in a dozen or more neighborhoods across the city, including in some hotbeds of secession such as Hollywood and the Harbor area to the south. The early social movement politics both shaped the planning process and provided leadership for early organization of the neighborhood council system. Secondly, at least in part due to pressure from these dedicated community activists, the debate regarding neighborhood council self-determination was largely decided in favor of self-governance and self-organization at the grass roots. For example, the DONE’s effort to create a map of neighborhood council boundaries to become part of the plan was abandoned in favor of language requiring the neighborhood councils to justify self-designated neighborhood boundaries in the application for certification. Few regulatory requirements were imposed on neighborhood councils. Perhaps most importantly, an effort by the business lobby to assert a single form of organizational structure was also rejected in favor of permissive language allowing neighborhood councils to designate their own bylaws, with few restrictions on structure of self-governance. A minimal size of 20,000 was established, due to concern about manageability in a city of almost four million, although councils were allowed to be smaller based on considerations of community identity. They were also prohibited from establishing a majority of any particular stakeholder group on their governing council, although this measure was later interpreted by the certifying Board of Neighborhood Commissioners as a ‘de juris’ rather than ‘de facto’ restriction, in that they were not allowed to designate a majority of protected seats for a group such as homeowners, but were allowed to have general elections in which homeowners ended up capturing a majority of seats. To the extent that substantive restrictions were placed on neighborhood councils, they were not political decisions but rather legal opinions from then City Attorney James Hahn. The City Attorney’s office issued opinions requiring neighborhood councils to comply with State of California open meeting act requirements, preventing them from suing the city, and prohibiting more participatory townhall style neighborhood council governing structures in favor of a designated formal governing board. They were also prohibited from endorsing candidates, which would constrain their ability to achieve political power by fundraising and electioneering. These decisions were all rooted in a legal finding that because neighborhood councils were created by Charter, they were effectively entities of the city, and in turn, subject to many of the formal laws governing city boards and commissions. Ironically, many of the measures that made neighborhood councils

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more formal had the effect of constraining them, such that increased formality led to reduced political power. Self-organization and the structure of representation Following submission of the plan to the City Council in December of 2000, the DONE turned attention to assisting organizational activity throughout the city. Project coordinators provided technical assistance and worked to identify areas of the city that did not have active organizing efforts underway. By 2004, 81 neighborhood councils were certified; among certified neighborhood councils, 74 had elected governing boards. During this process, political discourse focused primarily on the structural requisites of neighborhood council bylaws. For example, a Venice community council organizer was observed by one of the authors to liken the development of the bylaws to a constitutional convention, stating ‘just like the United States has rules and structures governing the Congress, we need to have similar rules and structures.’ Although self-determination allowed some leeway about how neighborhood councils might organize their own deliberative processes, there was a tendency toward the development of structures that mimicked a ‘little city council,’ often with rules and policy committees similar to those found in City Hall. An exception was the community of Sunlund/Tujunga, which initially sought to create a Toquevillian style ‘town hall’ structure where decisions would be made through debate of the entire membership present at regular meetings. Organizers described their proposal thus: ‘If you come once, you have a voice; if you come twice, you have a vote’. This proposed governance structure was struck down, however, by the City Attorney on grounds that it did not provide an identifiable and accountable governing board. Another theme that emerged was concern about controlling access and preventing ‘takeover’ of neighborhood councils. For example; a number of neighborhood councils restricted committee membership to members of the board, while others put in place voting requirements related to identification and stakeholder status documentation. In the community of Venice, a bitter dispute about whether absentee voting would be permitted became explosive when a neighborhood activist registered her dog ‘Raku’ to vote as an absentee stakeholder. Although neighborhood council organizers paid service to the rhetoric of inclusion and diversity, there was limited investment in targeted outreach to traditionally underrepresented groups such as more recent immigrants or renters. Moreover, the formalistic nature of governing board meetings, with their speaker cards and heavy reliance on parliamentary procedure (many neighborhood councils included a parliamentarian on their boards) was not conducive to involvement among individuals who were less educated or from different political cultures. In sum, the ability of communities to self-organize across the city suggests that Los Angeles had significant reserves of untapped civic volunteerism and strong community desire for self-determination. At the same time, self-organization

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tended to attract elites, and to promote a discourse of formalistic representation and agenda control. This placed at disadvantage community members with fewer resources or less civic experience. In turn, this perpetuated development of neighborhood council governing boards with a strongly elite character that were descriptively unrepresentative of the broader population of city residents (Guo and Musso 2007). City arenas for participation in governance During both planning and implementation, the political discourse tended to focus on debate regarding the power, structure, and function of the council system, with a striking lack of attention to the potential for the city to reform its own administrative functions. Although an array of City Attorney decisions emphasized that neighborhood councils were city entities, the actions of the Mayor’s office and many city departments implicitly treated them as akin to other non-governmental issue groups such as homeowner associations or community organizations. As Table 6.2 illustrates, the new charter that created the neighborhood council system contained five provisions aimed at creating institutional forums for engagement of the new neighborhood councils. Almost ten years following passage of the charter, there has been limited progress in reforming city administrative operations to include neighborhood councils. The most progress has been in providing public information, perhaps because this is consistent with long-standing state laws requiring public information. While the city has not fully implemented an early notification system as envisioned by Charter reformers, the city has succeeded in putting all agendas on line, and has also created electronic dissemination of the 72 hour notice required by California open meeting act requirements (Musso and Weare 2005). The city has failed to institutionalize other political innovations, such as a Congress of Neighborhoods and involvement of NCs in monitoring of city service delivery. Budgetary involvement, which has been a centerpiece of neighborhood involvement in other American cities, has been largely tokenistic because there is not strong interest in the process among neighborhood council, while the Mayor’s finance office has not demonstrated support for or understanding of the role neighborhoods might play in resource allocation.

Table 6.2  Status of empowerment provisions Institutional Target

Charter Provision

Need for networking and deliberation City will provide support for a citywide opportunities to orient NCs toward citywide Congress of Neighborhoods (Section 901c) issues, reduce parochialism, and create a sense of belonging to the larger City of Los Angeles

Status →  The DONE organizes a Congress of Neighborhoods that functions primarily for technical assistance not public deliberation

Public has little access to decision making by City Council, boards and commissions because public notification occurred only 72 hours in advance, through physical posting at hearing venue (typically downtown)

‘Early Warning System’ to notify neighborhood of pending city decisions with ‘reasonable opportunity to provide input’ (Section 907)

→  City provides automated distribution of agendas, but agendas are distributed only 72 hours prior to meeting, no earlier than before

City Council deliberations are centralized in downtown Los Angeles and distant from community stakeholders

City Council may delegate hearing authority to neighborhood councils on matters of local concern (Section 908)

→  No action by City

Prior to charter reform public involvement in Neighborhood councils may make budget budgeting occurred in public hearings by City requests to Mayor (Section 909) Council, after decisions had already been made

→  Mayor’s budget process elicits only general information about board priorities, and involves other NGOs as well, providing no special status to councils.

Service delivery is simultaneously centralized downtown and fragmented between city departments

→  City has not adopted consistent policies for feedback on service delivery

Neighborhood councils will monitor service delivery and meet periodically with responsible officials (Section 910)

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5. Implications for self-governance: The Los Angeles experience The effect of the reform on self-governance has been mediated by neighborhood council capacity for action. Given that neighborhood councils voice community preferences to downtown policy makers, issues of representative legitimacy are central. It is difficult given the complexity of Los Angeles and the relative newness of the city to determine the complex question of substantive representation, whether these emergent councils actually ‘act for’ their constituents (Pitkin 1967). What is evident, however, is they do not appear descriptively representative of the city. In terms of neighborhood council accomplishments the experience is mixed. A number of neighborhood councils are demonstrating community-level accomplishments in such areas as advising on land use policy, facilitating service delivery, and supporting community events such as neighborhood beautification projects and youth activities. Others continue to struggle with procedural problems, personality conflicts or lack of strategic direction. In sum, the basic problems of collective action exacerbated by the difficulties of negotiating across ethnic and class divides have hindered the ability of neighborhood councils to develop sufficient institutional resources to be of use to the elite networks involved in entrepreneurial management. In the political realm, neighborhood councils have experienced many more successes, but these vary greatly over time and geography, and ethnic and class divisions. The city’s existing political institutions and administrative norms have not, moreover, adjusted to the creation of neighborhood councils. We find widespread resistance to adopting the reforms due to the fact that elected officials and administrators felt that these reforms were imposed from outside and that they posed potential risks to existing sources of influence and power in the city. Through electoral politics a number of avowedly pro-neighborhood council members have been elected to the City Council, they as of yet have failed to become a ruling majority. As a result, neighborhood councils appear to be replicating the very entrepreneurial politics that motivated their creation, inasmuch as they are strongly oriented toward the issues of growth and development in Los Angeles. Their meeting agendas emphasize land use and development much more heavily than service delivery or city policy making. They do not however appear to be developing the types of vertical networks that will allow them to develop greater partnership with downtown policy makers and elites. To date they do not report, and are not perceived, to have much influence on the broader politics of growth in City of Los Angeles. Most of their influence on development appears to be sporadic, and to depend heavily on neighborhood council capacity, and on the degree to which their local City Council member is supportive of their involvement in land use issues. In this manner, neighborhood governance in Los Angeles appears to reinforce Berry, Portney and Thomson’s findings from smaller cities, that neighborhood entities are influential primarily with respect to localized planning and development issues and have little citywide impact.

Table 6.3  Urban governance frames and neighborhood reform in Los Angeles Urban governance model

Objective(s) of reform

Transformative possibility for residents

Counter-narratives

Status of the system

Entrepreneurial

Community networks destabilize and penetrate networks

From rentier to partner

NIMBYism

Some planning consultation and network mobilization but little influence on major city-wide projects

Political

Political incorporation and mobilization

From supplicant to citizen

Mayhem

Some efforts to challenge agenda setting but largely elite agenda is represented. Exclusionary politics pushed to local level?

Managerial

Information transmission

From client to collaborator

Inefficiency

Variable capacity and some level of infighting; danger of irrelevance due to negative perceptions of representative legitimacy

Co-production

Inequity

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The counter-narrative of neighborhood council opponents, that widespread NIMBYism would stifle development in the city have not been widely evident, although there are some examples to their taking stands in opposition to affordable housing development. At the same time, the democratic hope that they will create alternative spaces for deliberation, and empower communities to partner with – or challenge – city officials does not appear to be emerging. Rather, they appear to be replicating the politics of growth at the community level. The boards are composed primarily of relatively elite community members, and their agenda setting around community issues proceeds often with limited input from community members, and particularly, little involvement of lower income residents. From a political standpoint, we find mixed evidence of neighborhood council involvement in mediating political conflict regarding the who/what/when/where/ how of resource allocation. There is relatively little involvement of Councils in ongoing City Council deliberation (e.g., they do not use the neighborhood council impact provisions much). Moreover we find little evidence that the Councils are developing as mediating associations (e.g., we do not see evidence of strong political networks down to the neighborhoods and up to city policy makers). The political linkages that are developing appear to be among neighborhood councils, providing some degree of capacity for regional mobilization in response to city issues. There are several cases of mobilization in response to city decisions, the most notable of which was the actions of neighborhood council organizers in response to a proposed DWP rate increase. Moreover NCs are lobbying for input into city agenda setting, having put forward a proposal to be able to request creation of a Council file (which places an issue on City Council agenda). To date this proposal, which might increase NC input and influence, has been resisted by City Council. It is perhaps not surprising that neighborhood councils have difficulty altering the political dynamics of elections, agenda-setting or advocacy. Influence requires the mobilization of a significant number of new actors in the political process, and it has proven difficult for neighborhood councils to advance populist concerns are dim. This is consistent with other studies of urban populist movements that find them to be dominantly middle class in character, drawing from groups that possess greater reserves of the types of civic skills required to operate effectively (Howard and Lipsky et al. 1994; Verba and Schlozman et al. 1995; Chaskin 2003; Musso and Weare et al. 2004). In Los Angeles, neighborhood councils in lower income communities have indeed struggled, and hence they have arguably developed the most influence within communities that already had the resources to mobilize. The development of horizontal networks among NCs will likely be to increase the reactivity of communities to city policy making, due to the development of new political networks both within the community and across the city (Musso 2007). In other words, it is likely that the system will create a sort of accelerated pluralism as a result of increased information and political coalitions that result from neighborhood council networking. This will likely be a form of sub-elite politics, as there is little evidence that neighborhood councils are serving as

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institutions for incorporation of historically disenfranchised individuals into city politics. Rather, they seem to be replicating citywide patterns of elite political control, but at the community level. The empowerment capacity of neighborhood councils appears to be significantly limited by infighting and problems with organizational maintenance. At the same time, the relatively impenetrable administrative culture of many city departments has made it difficult for councils to interact around administrative practices. The managerial counter-narrative that citizen involvement will interfere with service delivery and make it less efficient, certainly has not been borne out, if only because neighborhood councils have not, for the most part, developed sufficient organizational capacity to interfere regularly in service delivery. Our interviews with city departments suggest that neighborhood councils are viewed as largely irrelevant by ‘street level’ administrators. In sum, the Los Angeles experience both highlights the promise of participatory reforms and the deep rooted constraints that such reforms face. Institutional innovations, as represented by neighborhood councils, do change individuals’ behavior, bringing thousands of volunteers together even in a city known for its lack of civic culture. Moreover, the networks created by this cadre of volunteers do have political ramifications. Nevertheless, a lack of city support for community organizing combined with the inherent difficulties of collective action severely limit their effectiveness in the entrepreneurial and managerial dimensions of governance. In addition, the institutional logics of governance regimes and the administrative state are not naturally receptive to the more open forms of collaborative governance that successful participatory institutions envision. Consequently, in the absence of strong political leadership that supports the incorporation of neighborhood voices in these areas, it is uncertain that changes in the political landscape instigated by neighborhood councils alone can force the development of such governance and administrative reforms. References Bardach, E. 1979, ‘On Designing Implementable Programs’, in Pitfalls of Systems Analysis, G. Majone and E. Quade, John Wiley, New York. Berry, J.M. and Portnoy, K.E. et al. 1993, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, The Brookings Institution, Washington DC. Chaskin, R.J. 2003, ‘Fostering Neighborhood Democracy: Legitimacy and Accountability within Loosely Coupled Systems’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 161-189. Chaskin, R.J. and Brown, P. et al. 2001, Building Community Capacity, Aldine de Gruyter, New York. Cnaan, R.A. 1991, ‘Neighborhood-Representing Organizations: How Democratic are they?’, Social Service Review, vol. 65, pp. 614-634.

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Cobb, R.W. and Elder, C.D. 1972, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building (II need to merge with version at PPIC), Allyn and Bacon, Boston. Cooper, T. and Musso, J. 1999, ‘The Potential for Neighborhood Council Involvement in American Metropolitan Governance’, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 199-232. Ferman, B. 1996, Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh, University of Kansas Press. Ferman, B. 2002, Broadening the Franchise: Charter Reform and Neighborhood Representation in Los Angeles, John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation Conference: ‘Reform, L.A. Style: The Theory and Practice of Urban Governance at Century’s Turn’, University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development, September 19-20, 2002, Los Angeles, California. Fung, A. 2004, Empowered Participation, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Guo, C. and Musso, J. 2007, ‘Representation in Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations: A Conceptual Framework’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 308-326. Hirschman, A. 1970, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hjern, B. 1982, ‘Implementation research: The link gone missing’, Journal of Public Policy, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 301-308. Hogan-Esche, T. 2001, ‘Recapturing Suburbia: Urban Secession and the Politics of Growth in Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle’, Political Science, PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Howard, C. and Lipsky, M. et al. 1994, ‘Citizen Participation in Urban Politics: Rise and Routinization’, in Big city Politics, Governance, and Fiscal Constraints, G.E. Peterson (ed.), Urban Institute Press, Washington DC. Kingdon, J.W. 1984, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Little, Brown & Company, Boston. Long, N.E. 1958, ‘The Local Community as an Ecology of Games’, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 251-261. Lowery, D. and Lyons, W.E. et al. 1995, ‘The Empirical Evidence for Citizen Information and a Local Market for Public Goods’, The American Political Science Review, vol. 89, no. 3, pp. 705-707. Mazmanian, D. and Sabatier, P. (eds), 1980, Effective policy implementation, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA. Medina, R. 1999, ‘The Political Evolution of Neighborhood Councils in Los Angeles’, Neighborhood Participation Project working paper, University of Southern California (available from the authors). Musso, J.A. 2001, ‘The Political Economy of City Formation in California: Limits to Tiebout Sorting’, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1, pp. 139-153.

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Musso, J. 2007, ‘Community Networks and Power in Los Angeles: Implementation of Neighborhood Governance Reform’, in Public Administration in Transition, E. Sørensen and G. Gjelstrup (eds), McGill Queens. Musso, J.A. and Kitsuse, A. 2002, Urban Regimes, Social Movements, and the Politics of Neighborhood Councils in Los Angeles, John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation Conference: ‘Reform, L.A. Style: The Theory and Practice of Urban Governance at Century’s Turn’, University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development, September 19-20, 2002, Los Angeles, California. Musso, J. and Weare, C. 2005, ‘Implementing Electronic Notification in Los Angeles: Citizen Participation Politics by Other Means’, International Journal of Public Administration, vol. 28, no. 7-8, pp. 599-620. Peterson, P.E. 1981, City Limits, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Pitkin, H.F. 1967, The concept of representation, University of California Press, Berkeley. Siegel, F. 1997, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, The Free Press. Sonenshein, R. 2004, The City at Stake: Secession, Reform, and the Future of Los Angeles, Princeton University Press. Stone, C.N. 1980, ‘Systemic Power in Community Decision Making: A Restatement of Stratification Theory’, American Political Science Review, vol. 74, no. 4, pp. 978-990. Verba, S. and Schlozman, K.L. et al. 1995, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics, Harward University Press, Cambridge, MA. Wildavsky, A. 1979, Speaking Truth to Power: The art and craft of policy analysis, Macmillan, London.

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Chapter 7

Paradoxes of the Self: Self-Owning Universities in a Society of Control Jakob Williams Ørberg and Susan Wright

1. Introduction Of all self-governing institutions, universities, with their ideologies of academic autonomy, offer one of the best sites for critically examining what is meant by self-governance: what kind of a ‘self’ does a university as an institution create or project? What relations does the governance of this organizational ‘self’ entail with government and the ‘surrounding society’? The OECD and the Trends Reports of the Bologna process both call for reducing state control and increasing university autonomy. The Danish government responded by passing a law in 2003 which claimed to be ‘setting universities free’. Danish universities were taken out of the state bureaucracy and given the legal status of ‘self-owning institutions’. That is, by becoming ‘self owning’, universities were to be made into coherent organizations that would govern themselves in an accountable fashion (hence, selvejende institutioner is translated as self-governing institutions in the English translation of the law). Partly, as we have argued elsewhere (Wright and Ørberg 2008), universities were subject to the same reform as had already been implemented for most other education institutions, and indeed most other ‘service providers’ in the modernized Danish welfare state. Through the government setting the ‘aim and frame’ for steering a sector, by converting parts of the bureaucracy into ‘self-owning’ service providers and entering into contracts with them, and by only paying if the service provider met the outputs and performance indicators specified in the contract, the aim was to give politicians much stricter and stronger control over service delivery and the machinery to ensure that, when politicians changed their aims, contractors responded quickly. By these means, contractors would be held to account to the public and especially to parliament for the spending of public funds. Following this ‘modernizing state’ discourse about reform, which originated in the Ministry of Finance, the new status of universities turned them into just another service deliverer contracted to the Danish state: the reforms removed rather than increased any special legal status associated with ‘university autonomy’ and although the law states that ‘the university’ must protect research freedom, it put the conditions for exercising such freedom in question. Another strand in the discourse of university reform, emanating from the Ministry of Research,

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highlighted that the purpose was very specifically to set universities free, or at least give them ‘degrees of freedom’ to organize themselves to meet the challenges of the globalizing knowledge economy as imagined by organizations such as the OECD (OECD 1998, 1999, 2004). The subsequent Globalization Strategy gave universities a very special role of not just providing a service to the state or the economy, but of driving the initiatives and the knowledge transfer that, it is assumed, will ‘maintain Denmark’s position as one of the wealthiest countries’ in the world (Danish Government 2006, 4). In sum, the 2003 University Law contained a twoway movement: it both reorganized the universities with a stronger and more unified management capable of strategic planning and increased independence from direct ministerial control; and it used other steering instruments to tie the universities’ activities more closely to government and ministerial policies. The Danish university reform can be seen as a case of empowering universities to govern themselves according to government ambitions. The 2003 University Law brought a range of developments and experiments that had been set up during the previous 20 years into a new assemblage: output based funding for teaching (the taximeter system), development contracts between the university and the state, changes to degree programmes associated with the Bologna process; systematic evaluations of teaching quality; knowledge transfer as a major third leg of university activities; and the first examples of self-owning universities (the Danish University of Education in 2000, and the Danish Technical University in 2001). These developments happened at different moments over the 1990s, each informed by a different political logic, and some resting on quite contrary rationalities of governance of others. As the concept of the self-owning institution, the centre piece of this assemblage of governing technologies, was gradually formed through the 1990s, it meant quite different things at different moments. This paper focuses on three moments – the introduction of development contracts in 1999, the passage of the University Law in 2003, and the subsequent definition of accountability procedures in 2007 – to analyse changes in the meaning of self-governance. The literature on self-governance tends to focus on the shaping of the self of individuals in new strategies for governing society (e.g. Dean 2007), whereas we focus on the subjectivity of an organization. Where the literature does consider the self-governance of social institutions, this is often quite abstract (Kooiman 2003, 79-95). In contrast, we focus ethnographically on the precise ways that a government’s methods of steering require an institution, such as a university, to develop and perform a particular kind of self. The kind of institutional ‘self’ and its form of ‘self-governance’ will also be specific to a particular country or a different moment in time. As this book makes clear (Chapter 1), there are substantial differences in the emergence, causes and consequences of the politics of using self-governing institutions in different regimes, for example, in a marketstate like the UK as against a social-democratic state like Denmark. We contribute to teasing out those differences. But our central purpose is to explore the changing meanings of the two separate terms ‘self’ and ‘governance’ and their hyphenated

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relationship. What is the kind of self that an institution is meant to produce and stage at different historical moments? What is the role of that institutional self in processes of institutional management and in relations of power and systems of national governance? These questions are central to an understanding of the new forms of rule discussed in this book, but they have not been sufficiently explored. There is a tendency to treat the ‘self’, both of organizations and of individuals, as self-evident, unitary and consistent, uncontested, and stable through time. Yet feminist scholarship (Moore 1994; Hollway 1984) has long identified that people juggle with multiple selves, which are in multiple power relations with different family members and surrounding people and institutions. Making these diverse selves into a coherent whole and staging a performance as a single actor is at best a stupendous effort, and may be unrealistically over-ambitious. Is the ‘self’ of selfowning institutions similarly multiple and located in diverse power relations with the institutions of government and the surrounding society? Does it take a similarly stupendous effort to stage this self as a coherent unity? How are the internal forms of institutional governance mobilized to create an image of a competent actor? And how is that projection of a coherent and competent institutional self deployed in the politics of governance in the modernized Danish state? 2. Moments and transformations We address these questions through a reading of a number of policy documents pertaining to different moments in the transformation of Danish universities. We use the word transformation here to mark the difference between reform, which we see as the implementation of a defined political agenda for universities, and the actual process of change, which this agenda affects or plays into. The material for this chapter comes out of the larger research project, ‘New Management, New Identities? Danish University Reform in an International Perspective’ funded by the Danish Social Science Research Council to study the changes brought about by the Danish university reform of 2003. The project includes studies of policy documents, interviews with policy makers, university managers of all levels, academics and students, studies of speeches and publicly accessible accounts of events, and material collected through participant observation at universities. This   This ‘multi-sited’ research project takes four perspectives on the transformation of Danish universities. This article draws on research by Jakob Williams Ørberg and Susan Wright on policy makers’ debates about university reform from the 1970s to the present. In addition, Stephen Carney from Roskilde University has studied changes to university governance and management, John Krejsler of the Danish School of Education, Århus University has focused on academics’ responses to changing management and working conditions, and Gritt Nielsen, PhD student at the Danish School of Education, Århus University, has researched students’ participation both in their own learning and in university governance.

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diverse material makes up the context for the analysis of specific documents and events in this chapter, and it allows us to appreciate the significance of singular events and documents while letting them speak to the larger transformations they form part of. The first moment in our account, the introduction of development contracts between universities and government in 1999, challenged universities to project themselves as a new kind of ‘self’. We argue that the language and method of the first generation of these development contracts was one of self improvement on the side of universities. Universities were supposed to become better at defining overall objectives and priorities and at organizing themselves in a coherent and effective manner. Successful projection of a coordinated ‘self’, it was argued, would enable them to take on a strategic role hitherto played by central government. The second moment is the passing of the 2003 University Act, which set universities up as self- owning institutions and brought together a number of existing measures, including development contracts, into a new assemblage of steering technologies. This moment was argued through and celebrated as the final emergence of the university subject, as a strategically-led and coherent actor in the Danish economy and society. To use Saskia Sassen’s language (2006, 9-10), we argue that this moment was a ‘tipping point’, when universities stood on the cusp of switching from one form of governance to another. We share Sassen’s view that an epochal transformation cannot be pinned down to ‘before’ and ‘after’ but can best be studied by focussing on the process of change, by seeing how a major state institution, like a university, becomes the site of its own partial disassembly and re-ordering according to a new organizing logic. The ‘tipping point’ is when such a process takes on an air of irreversibility and points to a future model for the institution. The 2003 University Law set up the university as a coherent organization, no longer under direct state control but now able to govern itself according to national policies. After that, the government no longer directed its efforts towards the construction of the university as a coherent, self-managed and accountable organization. The university as a subject was henceforth assumed already to have a solid existence. From then on, government turned its attention to developing ways of securing state influence over the university’s self-governance, especially through measuring and rewarding universities’ outputs and performance. The law set up stringent conditions within which the university was to perform: the purpose of universities was expanded and defined more precisely and a new internal system for governing and managing universities was established, with responsibility for prioritizing and performance. Universities were also obliged to change the way they reported their activities; and the subsequent state-wide introduction of accrual budgeting meant that universities had to calculate the capital cost of their activities and calculate their profitability. Further reforms meant that universities now rented instead of owned their buildings and began the process of relating outputs and performance to payments. These last two reforms in particular placed universities very clearly in an indebted position in relation to

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the state, which we shall argue is a key to understanding the power relations in which universities are located. The third and last moment started in autumn 2007 and is still underway. A state report sets out how the audit system for universities is being reconfigured. In parallel, the Ministry is developing a system for making all of a university’s activities count towards performance-based funding. Our argument is that these activities signal completion of the shift in the government’s steering system towards measuring the university’s activities rather than being concerned with the configuration of the university as a subject. The ability of the university, especially in the person of the rector, to stage a coherent self is now taken for granted. But just at this moment, the university as a coherent self becomes hard to hold together because the proliferation of different government funding and accountability systems makes it extremely difficult for universities to plan their finances and establish strategies and priorities. As the funding systems move towards output payments, this also means that universities will be in a debt relationship with government: they receive a cash advance at the beginning of the year, and pay back at the end of the year if their outputs are less than expected. We end our chapter by analysing the performance of the Rector of Copenhagen University at the 2006 annual celebration. As if he embodied the current dilemma of the Danish state-funded, self-owning, indebted university, in his speech he promised to defend the classic university values, while creating an efficient organization and delivering on all the outputs and indicators contracted with the government. Fulfilling this ambitious institutional performance he described as a feat on a par with the invention of ‘the flop’ that transformed Olympic high jumping. This is a powerful image of the effort required to produce and project a coherent self, the prerequisite for effective performance in the politics of self-government. The Rector’s performance points to a paradox: the university for which he stands as the figurehead is assumed by government to be a coherent organization, at the same time as the government’s performance criteria, on whose fulfilment much university funding depends, demand that the university splits its efforts in several directions at once. This is similar to Deleuze’s (1992, 3-7) image of the control society where the indebted person is split up like a ‘divid’ (as opposed to an individual), by the diverse systems that constantly monitor the different kinds of activities in which he or she engages. The need for the university, as represented by its Rector, to keep performing in one context after another, each according to different criteria, also requires that it presents itself as different kinds of self in each instance. This reminds us of the people described by Emily Martin’s (2007, 275-280) who, with or with-out diagnosis of mental disorder, use pharmaceutical products to adjust moods so as to perform optimally in each of the diverse situations that make up their life. The Danish university, rather than being the coherent and strategically planned organization the government now presumes it to be, has become a manager of diverse performance-enhancing projects and is constantly stressed to live up to ever-increasing demands imposed from the outside.

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3. Governing through body and a soul The first moment in the process of transformation we are describing, the introduction by the Danish Ministry of Research in 1999 of a development contract with each university, is marked by an attempt, in Rose’s terms, to govern ‘through the soul’ (Rose 1989). To do this, the Ministry had first to persuade those who worked at universities to think of themselves as forming a ‘body’. Only if they thought of a university as having some kind of collective presence could it have a soul, a will or desire to achieve something. This collective presence was to be personified by the rector. A reform in 1993 had tried to establish clearer and more hierarchical university management, but the Ministry was concerned that the reform had not yet worked as intended. The reform had not brought about a more strategic leadership, nor had it increased the responsiveness of universities to ‘the surrounding society’ and especially not industry. The Ministry now hoped to induce these kinds of changes by offering each university the voluntary possibility of entering into a development contract. The idea was that, in order to enter into a development contract with the Ministry, a university would have to coordinate its efforts and set up aims for future activities. In short, universities would turn themselves into more coherent and strategically-acting organizations. The then Minister of Research, social democrat Jan Trøjborg, outlined the concept of development contracts in the report entitled Universitets- og forskningspolitisk redegørelse 1998 (Forskningsministeriet 1998). As the development contracts were supposed to be a voluntary tool for the enhancement of the university-ministry relationship they were not intended to be connected in any systematic way to the funding of universities. Rather they were presented as a technology the universities could use to organize themselves in order to become strategic actors within the new Danish research policy. Universities were supposed to be active players in the national knowledge system, so instead of simply carrying out teaching and research, universities were to become suitably outward-oriented partners for knowledgeproducing research institutes and private sector innovators. Universities were expected to enter more actively into partnerships with such elements in ‘the surrounding society’ and to respond to increased government funding by reflecting concern for the needs of society in their planning and prioritizing of research. The development contracts were thus meant to enhance universities’ ambition and ability to organize themselves in such a way that they could begin to deliver on the diverse demands of society (Andersen 2006). In the so-called ‘modern welfare society’ universities would in this way take on responsibility for increased wealth creation. With the first development contracts in place in 1999 two things became evident. First, as predicted, universities were called upon to transform themselves as organizations, and, second, their ability to centralize their executive powers and develop strategies covering the entire organization was put in question. Universities decided for themselves how ambitious to be in the activities and aims to be included in the development contracts. Many of the development contracts,

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especially those of the larger multi-faculty universities, were clearly attempts by the universities’ central governing bodies to establish cross-faculty initiatives or develop existing ones. Yet most of the universities’ activities still fell outside the development contracts as they were under the control of faculties. The development contracts provided evidence of both the university leaderships’ lack of strategic influence and their attempts to establish such a strategizing power. As stated in the 1999 report, Udviklingskontrakter. Stærkere selvstyre, stærkere universiteter (Forskningsministeriet og Undervisningsministeriet 1999), the development contracts were a means for universities to clarify and enhance their internal organization both for their own benefit and as a means of communicating their presence and activities to the surrounding world. It was expected that development contracts would increase the ambition of universities and that universities, if given the freedom to do so, would ‘consolidate, progress and innovate’ (ibid., 4). It is clear that the introduction of development contracts into the university system was intended to be more a tool for a university’s leadership to gain control of its organization than for the Ministry to control the universities. The new technology was a pedagogical instrument to enhance a certain organizational formation – or self formation – at universities. The development contracts were voluntary, not tied to funding, and built around universities’ own ambitions. If there was a wish by the Ministry to control universities, this came only second to the prime aim of encouraging universities’ self organization. The latter was an aim shared by the Ministry and many of the Rectors. Indeed, a centrally located official at the Ministry of Education told us in one interview that it was then a common practice for rectors to tell deans and other members of the university’s governing committees that ‘the Ministry’ wanted or intended certain developments, as a ploy, to get their own policies accepted. The development contracts in this sense were merely a formalization and continuation of this kind of politics. 4. Top-steered, self-owning universities If the creation of a self for universities was an intention behind introducing development contracts, then the second moment in the process of transformation, the reforms of 2000 and 2003, seriously changed the way this self was enacted. The management reforms included in the 2003 University Law established Danish universities as legal persons. They were no longer administered through the state bureaucracy and instead became ‘self owning’, but in most cases without really owning anything (Wright and Ørberg 2008). As explained below, the ownership of university property had been transferred to an agency under the Ministry. Therefore universities did not control their own building assets, nor did they have funds or savings to provide a net equity. They had hitherto functioned as state bodies with responsibility to spend their funds within the budget year rather than save them up, and with no real guarantee that unspent money would stay in their budgets.

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Since 1970, university management at all three levels of the central administration, faculty and department had been elected by academics, administrative staff and students. The direction of the flows of power and accountability in this system were reversed with the 2003 university law. Now a university board – a new construction made up of university representatives and a majority of members from other private and public organizations – appoints the rector who in turn hires the deans, who then hire the heads of department. Whereas the leadership in the old system had been accountable to the community that elected it, the new system’s leaders are accountable upwards to the level of management that has hired them. This was Parliament’s very bold way of establishing the ‘self’ for universities that the development contracts had attempted to engender through a voluntary and bottom-up process. All that remained to be done was to secure the subjection of this new self to the power of the government. If we study the make-up of this new university self, the ways it can be steered become clearer. The first university to be established on the self-ownership model was the Danish University of Education, which had been set up in 2000 as a way to secure a strong position for education research and development in Denmark. The same year, the Social Democratic Finance Minister, Mogens Lykketoft, reformed the administration of the real estate of all public institutions, so that state property occupied by universities was transferred to a government agency under the Ministry. Universities now had to pay a market-level rent for the use of their premises for which they were compensated through a government subsidy, which was calculated on a standard payment for each student who passed exams each year. Since the rents were commercial but the government subsidy was a standardized output payment, this system favored universities located in areas with low property prices and a high ratio of students per square meter of buildings. One university in particular did not meet these criteria, the Danish University of Technology (DTU). DTU had large research facilities but few students and was for this reason pressed to find an alternative solution in negotiations with the Ministry. DTU asked the Ministry to re-establish it as the country’s second self-owning university. DTU agreed to buy its own buildings with state money borrowed against their assessed value. In addition, DTU expected to raise a private sector mortgage on its buildings to pay for their modernization and to mark the birth of a new, bold DTU. However, the arrangements immediately hit financial problems since the valuation, which the agreement was based on, turned out to be highly exaggerated. By 2002 DTU was in severe financial difficulty again, and nobody would lend to the university. This experience sent shock waves through the sector, and other universities were reluctant to take on these risks of self ownership. In 2001 a new Minister of Research, Helge Sander, had taken office with a mandate to expand the self-ownership model to all universities. In light of the DTU crisis, however, he proposed self ownership without ownership of buildings or ‘institutional self ownership’ as the model to be followed. Universities could

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continue to own whatever assets were already indisputably theirs but the ownership of the state buildings they occupied would not be transferred to them. Apart from these property issues, self ownership meant setting universities up as a kind of public corporation within the public sector, funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The universities’ new governing boards were to have a majority of external members all appointed in their own personal capacity and not representing specific sectors or interest groups. The chairman of the board was elected from among the external majority. This board, which also included representatives of university staff and students, was to appoint the university’s top management, the rector and pro-rectors. As mentioned above, the rector then hired the administrative management and appointed deans to lead faculties. Deans appointed heads of departments, who are given the right of management over both non-academic and academic staff. The old representational influence survived in the study boards. A remnant of the previous Senate, now called the Academic Council, is meant to make comments on cases presented to it by the management. Only the Workers’ Council (samarbejdsudvalg), established in all Danish work places under employment law, is able to raise some issues (those relevant to working conditions) and to require answers from the university management and leadership. Otherwise it is now solely a question of management style whether and how academics can be involved in the planning and running of the university. One important reason for reversing the line of accountability at universities was, it was argued, to ensure that universities were accountable to government for their use of public money especially in light of the increased financial freedoms resulting from self ownership. Whereas previously, universities, as part of the government hierarchy, had had a right to draw on an account in the National Bank, now self ownership meant they were given their own income. Technically this was a shift from drawing rights to subsidy, which was accompanied by a different kind of monitoring and auditing (tilsyn). Whereas universities before had been audited by the state auditors as a part of the state hierarchy, now they had to develop a dual auditing regime with a private auditing company to do their company audits and the state auditors to control their activities for the correct use of public money. As we shall see later this was to become much more than a check on the legality of spending and turned into a whole new way of steering the self-owning institutions. The 2003 law brought the development contracts into the centre of the Ministry’s assemblage of steering technologies. If the contracts had hitherto functioned as a tool for reform and experimentation, with the new law, they became the Ministry’s prime tool for directly influencing university agendas. The new law stated that the Governing Boards and the Minister were to enter into three-yearly contracts. In practice, the commitments made in a university’s development contract are delegated to faculties and then to departments in a chain of contracts between the rector and deans, and between the deans and department heads. At department level, some department heads organize their department’s effort to fulfil the

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contracts through constructing formal agreements (aftale) or binding work plans for their academic employees. The hierarchy of hired leaders (departmental head, dean and rector) is thereby made responsible upwards to the governing board, and thence to the ministry, for fulfilling the performance aims and indicators in the development contract. This process of setting universities ‘free’ as accountable self-owning contractual partners for the Ministry happened in parallel with other reforms that were part of the Ministry of Finance’s ‘modernization programme’, which set up ‘frame and aim’ steering in the public sector. The principles in frame and aim steering would ideally turn the education sector into a service provider for parliament. Parliament allots a budget for a whole service area, such as education or research, and has the ministry decide how to fund the required outputs and activities in the individual institutions. These principles have influenced Danish state organizations since the early 1980s, and here we will briefly dwell on two aspects that have been important in the assemblage of mechanisms to steer universities brought about by the 2003 reform. The first is the gradual shift to performance or output funding and the second is the state-wide accounting reform, which introduced accrual accounting and budgeting into all state institutions starting in 2005 and was completely implemented from the fiscal year 2007. As mentioned above, university teaching and a subsidy for the rent of buildings is already funded by the Ministry entirely through output payments. Introduced in 1994, a standard sum is allocated each time a student passes an exam for a module in a degree programme – and thereby clicks up one more payment on the so-called ‘teaching taximeter’. These taximeter payments are standard across universities, but vary enormously across disciplines. For example, a university is paid 96,000 Danish kroner for a student who passes a year’s worth of exams in a ‘wet’ (laboratory) subject such as physics, whereas a university only receives 40.400 Danish kroner for a student passing a year’s worth of exams in a ‘dry’ subject, such as Greek. Only research is still partly funded by a basic grant (bevilling), which functions almost like a retainer for universities’ research functions. However, this is increasingly supplemented by researchers’ competing for funds especially from the national research councils and other private and public funds (including EU’s FP7-program). As these external funders often demand institutional co-funding, this increasingly ties the basic grant to specific projects. Across the universities there are different ways for dividing up the basic grants, with some universities using the basic grants to secure a percentage of each researcher’s time for selfdefined tasks (often including applications for external research funding, while others use parts of the basic grant to fund research prioritized by the university leadership but not sufficiently funded from external sources. This situation will be further complicated when the Ministry devises a competitive way to allocate basic research funding to universities on the basis of research outputs and performance targets. The intention to make this move has been declared, but keeps being delayed and is now likely to be implemented in 2009 or 2010 at the earliest (UBST 2008a, 2008b).

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The Ministry’s system of giving universities a cash advance at the beginning of the year and settling accounts on the basis of actual output at the end of the year not only makes the university continually in debt but also pushes risk down the system. Responsibility for efficiency and accountability is passed from the Ministry to the university, and internally down the subcontracting elements within the university, ultimately to the individual academic or research group. One academic we interviewed described how, in his university, each department’s and each subsection’s economic viability is calculated on a spread sheet which shows their income from students’ passing exams (taximeter payments) set against the number of teaching hours they had expended. Strong measures have been taken to remedy economic shortfall. In each academic’s annual appraisal, they are confronted with how much taximeter income they individually had produced during the year – their own personal viability – regardless of how many courses or students they had taught. Each cost centre within a university is supposed to access the market for their activities at the beginning of the year and then hope that they are lucky or skilled enough to bring home the expected revenue by the end of the year. There are echoes of the way the private sector deals with risk. The Danish government talks of self-owning institutions having to present an annual company (virksomhed) account, to the ministry, which refers to itself as the corporate level (koncernniveau). These metaphors refer to the equivalent in the private sector where a parent corporation (koncern) sets up a subsidiary company to rid itself of the liability of engaging in, for example, a financially risky initiative. Each subsidiary company is an independent, self-managing (selvstyrende) organization, set up in this way so that if it fails, it can be shed, and it does not take the parent corporation down with it. In this way, individual universities are economically self-managing and can be declared bankrupt without affecting the Ministry’s overall enterprise of delivering on policy aims to Parliament. In practice, the treatment of a university as a company is no longer a metaphor, but an accounting reality. From 2005 all universities had to transfer from cashbased accounting to accrual accounting, and in 2006 universities presented their first annual ‘company’ report based on the same system of accrual accounting as used in industry. This way of accounting is based on the ‘costing’ of activities. Potentially the income from every output can be matched against the ‘real’ cost of its production, given the availability of data for its calculation such as depreciated value of assets, use of space, staff costs and materials. Whereas, previously, in cashbased accounting, the usual method of public sector accounting, the focus was on probity in the use of funds, accrual accounting makes a standardized calculation of the profitability of each activity, which is then taken as a measure of efficiency. This shift from the traditional value rationality of universities to the pecuniary rationality of business systems of accounting, incurs, according to Ciancanelli (2008a, 2008b), a moral hazard. In a university context, accrual accounting neither supplies the information necessary to fully assess the commercial viability of activities, nor does it make it possible to assess whether a university is achieving its aims as a public-benefit organization.

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5. Auditing outputs The reorganization and self ownership of Danish universities, which placed them outside the usual state bureaucracy, has not only created new platforms for the enactment of university leadership, but is also transforming the way the state relates to and seeks to control the universities. This shift marks a third moment, when the state is no longer concerned about how the university is configured as an organization – that is assumed to have been successfully achieved. From now on, the state focuses on steering and measuring the activities and outputs of that subject. The Ministry’s need to influence universities is not diminishing: budgets for the Danish higher education sector are rising and universities’ ability to generate innovations, on which Denmark’s prosperity in the competitive global economy is thought to depend, has moved universities to the centre of political attention. As the political importance of universities increases, so the Ministry develops ever more tools for the coherent steering of universities. One example is an often overlooked clause in the revised University Law of 2007, which states that the development contract should now not just reflect the university’s priorities, but cover the university’s total activities (Ministeriet for Videnskab, Teknologi og Udvikling 2007). Another example is the development of a new comprehensive regime for auditing which was first published as a draft report in June 2007, but which a senior Ministry official informed us in an interview already largely reflected current practice. This report, Udvikling af universiteter – et moderne tilsyn (UBST 2007) has on its front page a picture of an open hand reaching out towards a blue sky – an image that invokes aspirations to improvement, but which when seen against the content of the report, also signals the measurement of continually improving yields from activities, which Strathern finds is the original meaning of ‘enhancement’ (Strathern 1996/7, 4) The report states that the new auditing system it proposes addresses self-owning universities in such a way that the universities’ self ownership and ability to govern themselves are not endangered. However, the ministry sees it as its responsibility to help the universities to enhance their performance. This is why the ministry divides its procedures into a reactive and a proactive audit. Reactive audit is the annual reporting and ad hoc interventions into universities whenever there is suspicion that they are not conducting their business according to the law. Proactive auditing is a constant optimizing of the universities’ abilities to deliver efficiently on society’s expectations. Legally, universities not only have to follow   Just as this article was going to press, the final report was published online in October 2008. While most activities referred to in the draft report still existed in the new report, they had been substantially revised so that they were not integrated to the same degree in a comprehensive new auditing concept and did not seem so intrusive. The publication of the final report does not negate the fact that the draft report was the Ministry’s published vision of audit for more than a year and that it represents an important phase in the thinking about the continuing reform of Danish universities.

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the law in their spending of public money, they also have to spend the money according to the conditions for its allocation. This last side of audit opens the way for rich interpretations. The Ministry’s proactive audit responsibilities translate into a very busy yearly activity cycle where ministry officials meet with university administrators at all levels in an effort to have a continuing dialogue on specific details. Part of this dialogue is to follow up on activities related to development contracts and to construct contract supplements to include problem areas or new policy initiatives, which have been taken after the main development contract was agreed. The development contract continues to be the main strategic tool for the coordination of university activities, but now through a focus on the output of activities. The Ministry’s intention is to coordinate development contracts to such a degree that they can be used for benchmarking the performance of universities against each other. This benchmarking functions in parallel with the gradual shift of university funding to a performance-based system. This means that money will be sent to where the best performance is, rather than to specific institutions. However, the main use of the development contract according to the drafted new audit regime is to function as an instrument providing information on the basis of which the ongoing steering and adjustment of university activities can take place. Compared to the birth of the development contracts in 1999 the focus has substantially shifted. Where initially the development contracts were a means to provide space for universities to state ‘themselves’, the development contracts, as they are described in the new audit regime, today have become technologies for the Ministry’s control and optimization of university activities. Furthermore, where the initial purpose of development contracts was to transform universities into coherent organizations capable of responding to the demands of society in the modern welfare state, the new audit system seems to have a different function. The new audit regime, or at least the ‘proactive’ part of it, focuses primarily on the outputs of the university’s activities and thus on university conduct. The organization of the coherent self of universities seems to be assumed after the university law of 2003 set up the new leadership system. Responsibility for keeping up this self and solving any contradictions in its activities is now left for the university leadership to solve. In this sense the new audit system involves a constant optimization or modulation of the universities’ incentive structure in order to secure high performance. The instability of this system reaches its most radical expression in the Ministry’s intention to include in the audit a recurring evaluation of the university law’s suitability for the high performance of universities (UBST 2007, 23). Where audit reveals that the law itself is limiting universities’ optimization of performance, it will produce suggestions for amendments to the law. Instead of providing a stable framework for what it means to be a university, the law becomes just another dynamic element in the Ministry’s steering assemblage, undergoing constant modulation and adjustment.

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6. The performing self: Coherence versus fragmentation Whereas Rose’s (1989) study of governance through the free choices of the individual focused on the role of social technologies in forming a subjectivity that would think of itself and act on itself as a ‘governable subject’, what we are analysing here is a further shift in liberal governance. The focus on the changing role of universities’ development contracts reveals this transition. First they were a pedagogical tool encouraging universities voluntarily to create themselves as the kind of freely acting governable subjects described by Rose (1989). By responding to the ‘opportunity’ to engage in development contracts with the government, universities were to create themselves as strategically acting organizations capable of delivering on the expectations of the ‘surrounding society’. Second, the government shortcut this process of ‘setting free’ bureaucratically managed institutions and converting them into governable selves: in the 2003 University Law, the government’s image of the kind of subject they needed universities to become – a free, rational, coherent, strategizing organization – was imposed on them. The university leadership, installed by this law, was required to enter into development contracts with the state as a way to tie their activities to the purpose of their funding. Third, the existence of this ‘free’ subject was assumed, and government’s concern turned to how to control it, how to measure and optimize its outputs, and especially how to steer it to ever-enhanced performance. From this point on, the university owns the problems of creating itself, or rather, the responsibility for organizing the university is passed to the new leaders. They have ‘freedom to manage’, and government is henceforth only concerned with performance and outputs, not with how they are achieved. Anders Fogh Jensen (2007) in his PhD thesis about the neo-liberal project in Denmark has argued similarly: whereas in the disciplinary society, the government’s project was to form the individuals and institutions that would contribute to governance by exercising freedom, the post-disciplinary, control society organizes itself around the output and performance of specific activities. The technologies associated with this shift are, first, the change from funding universities in advance, as an essential capacity for the nation-state, to funding in arrears, tied to achievement of specific outputs and performance measures, and, second, the use of development contracts as a tool for continual adjustment of these measures. At present, some university performances are directly related to government funding while other activities are stated as output indicators in the development contract and not yet directly related to a particular payment. These output and performance indicators will be used to measure the success of universities and may be translated into future funding criteria. Universities are continuously ‘just about to’ meet the outputs they have contracted to achieve, or are continually trying not to fall short of ever-rising expectations attached to their funding. If the Ministry finds from its audits of universities that a university is not meeting their measures of outputs or their scores on performance indicators, they have the capacity to adjust the development contract system in order to change

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the intensity or direction of the university’s effort. The emerging framework in which universities are to be enacted is one of constant modulation based on constant optimization of university activities in different areas. At the same time, the fact that the development contract now covers all aspects of the university’s activities, limits the possibilities for universities to develop a more independent strategy, or to plan outside of the logic set up by the contractual indicators, the incentive structure of taximeters and the planned competitive system for allocating universities’ basic grants. The very tool that was initially devised as a way to get universities to set up a general strategy through which to plan and organize their actions and create themselves as coherent organizations, is now used to tighten universities’ responsiveness to governments’ demands for a plethora of different performances. The consequence of this shift from the production of a coherent, governable self to a focus on performance, we argue, is that the university now has to perform its self to multiple contexts according to diverse criteria, and this fragmentation puts the assumed coherence of the self in jeopardy. At the University of Copenhagen’s annual ceremony in 2006, in the presence of the Queen, the Minister and other dignitaries, the Rector, Ralf Hemmingsen, whose role it is to project the university as a governable self, described in his speech the great effort and inventiveness needed to covert the internal energy of the university into a performance that would surmount the government’s ever-rising expectations and indicators. He devoted his speech to a reformulation of the strategic mission of his university. The speech came in the midst of a process in which the University of Copenhagen was tying to construct a coherent strategy for its activities, involving much debate around the university. It also came as the university was about to form two whole new faculties out of a merger with the Agricultural and Veterinarian University and the Danish Pharmaceutical University. The merger was shifting the profile of the university in the direction of the life sciences. There was a need for the leadership to create a visionary strategy for the benefit of both the merged institutions and the government, at the same time as reassuring the parts of the university that felt threatened. In his speech, the Rector promised to the government that he would deliver on all its current demands: • • • • • • • •

original basic research α higher number of world class graduates competition for research funding worldwide competition on quality knowledge transfer to the rest of the education system top class further education programmes help innovate new products cooperate with businesses

The Rector said that in order to do all these things, the university had to organize itself around the core academic values of research freedom and unstinting quality.

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He described the current mission of universities as a radical project of self formation. Whereas the Kantian enlightenment project had been about the selfformation of the individual attending university in the nineteenth century, now there was just as profound a change in the self-formation of the university as an organization. It was up to him, as Rector, the figure that stands for the university as an organization, to create coherence out of the multiple tasks the university is measured on. He presented an image of his summoning up all the efforts of the different parts of the university – the bottom-up logic of the way a university works – and turning them into a coherent response to the government’s ever-rising expectations of what this university can achieve, in terms of its top-down logic. In an image which summed up the inventiveness and sheer effort involved, as well as maybe involuntarily underlining the absurdity of trying to convert the university’s strategy and its core values into the government ambitions, he promised that the University of Copenhagen would create a performance as innovative and striking as the first ‘flop’ which transformed Olympic high jumping. This is a long way from the government’s attempts in 1999 to get universities to build systems internally that would enable them to prioritize, state their own ambitions and give the appearance of a coherent self. The Rector’s speech in 2006 exemplified the super-human effort needed to coordinate all the diverse commitments, outputs and performance indicators that now needed to be made to look like a coherent prestation to government, to ensure economic survival in this heavily top-down steered system of governance. This tension is also outsourced down the system, so academics are also responsible, as freely contracting agents, for performing according to a vast variety of different parameters. They may be expected to incur a similarly huge effort to coordinate their multiple tasks in an academic self. For the rector, the only way he could imagine staging the university as a coherent actor in this system of governance, and meeting all the diverse criteria that the university and he himself were being measured on, was to try and summon up energy and performance from throughout the university to make a breakthrough that seemed as stupendous (and as unlikely) as inventing a new way of high jumping. 7. Conclusion To address the four questions posed by this book, in the public governance of universities, self ownership and the system of development contracts are tools for the construction of the subjectivity of an organization to make it ‘freely’ responsible and accountable for the achievement of government’s aims. The driving force behind these reforms is to change the role of universities. No longer just concerned with producing truths and graduates, the university is now to be a central actor in Denmark’s positioning in the global knowledge-based economy, with responsibility for ensuring that Denmark maintains its position as one of the wealthiest in the world. The effects are to organize universities according to a top-

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down logic, with a system for ordering its activities in response to this logic so that its strategic leader can deliver them as performances to meet the expectations of government. However the diverse incentives systems and performance indicators to which a university responds mean that it takes a stupendous effort to gather up the university’s diverse activities into a coherent reading of its organization as a self. It is worth asking whether, potentially, over-stretching the university’s responsiveness to these diverse external demands could endanger the day to day work, the bottom up initiatives, which the leaders convert into the prestation that an apparently coherent organization makes to government and surrounding society. The normative assumption about the creation of governable subjects is that they are unified and coherent, and that the incentive structures to which they ‘freely’ respond encourage the formation of such coherent selves. This study suggests that neo-liberal governance in Denmark is no longer focusing on the kinds of self that its steering instruments induce. Instead government is focusing on the performance and outputs of its free subjects. The incentive structures, payment systems and performance indicators are increasingly being brought together into a consolidated tool for governing, and for constantly adjusting the efforts and performance of its subjects. But from the subject’s point of view, these steering instruments make demands to act as different kinds of selves in many diverse contexts at once. Feminism has long seen the coherent self and the fragmented self as two alternatives, based on quite different theoretical premises. If the 1970s idea that gender is a social formation based on biological sex differences, gave ‘women’ a fallacious, but strategically useful, basis for collective action, the 1990s notion that women, both as a category and as individuals, are situated in so many contexts, with so many diverse demands for different kinds of performance in different relations of power, made their project one of managing the fragmented self. It was the iconic, 1990s image of ‘the superwoman’, who tried to create a unity out of being different kinds of woman – a high-flying employee, an ideal mother, loving wife and good, participating citizen – who cracked open the fallacy of trying to maintain a coherent self in the face of demands for diverse performances. The form of governance being developed in Denmark is creating organizational subjects who are fragmented selves, responsive to diverse demands and constantly recalibrated expectations, but one of those expectations is also that they will become, and present themselves as, coherent selves. The image of the rector, engaged in inventing a way to turn the diverse efforts and fragmented subjectivity of the university into one coherent jump over the government’s everrising bar, sums up the stupendous effort entailed in overcoming the emerging tension of demanding that fragmented performances be presented as a coherent self in the Danish form of self-governance.

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References Andersen, P.B. 2006, ‘An Insight into Ideas Surrounding the 2003 University Law. Development Contracts and Management Reforms’, Working Papers on University Reform, Danish School of Education, University of Århus. Ciancanelli, P. 2008a, ‘The business of teaching and learning: An accounting perspective’, Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 155-183. Ciancanelli, P. 2008b, ‘Will Market-based Ventures Substitute for Government Funding? Theorising University Financial Management’, Working Papers in University Reform, no. 8, Danish School of Education, University of Århus. Danish Government 2006, Progress, Innovation and Cohesion. Strategy for Denmark in the Global Economy – Summary, available at <www.globalisering. dk>, accessed 2008-06-05. Dean, M. 2007, Governing Societies, Open University Press/McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead. Deleuze, G. 1992, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, OCTOBER 59 (Winter), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Forskningsministeriet 1998, Universitets- og forskningspolitisk redegørelse 1998, Forskningsministeriet, København. Forskningsministeriet og Undervisningsministeriet 1999, Udviklingskontrakter for universiteterne – stærkere selvstyre, stærkere universiteter, Forskningsministeriet, København. Hollway, W. 1984, ‘Gender difference and the production of subjectivity’, in Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, J. Henriques, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine, Methuen, London. Kooiman, J. 2003, Governing as Governance, Sage, London. Jensen, A.F. 2007, Projektsamfund, PhD thesis submitted to the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Martin, E. 2007, Bipolar Expeditions, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Ministeriet for Videnskab, Teknologi og Udvikling 2007, Bekendtgørelse af lov om universiteter (Universitetsloven), LBK nr 1368 af 07/12/2007, available at , accessed 200806-05. Moore, H. 1994, A Passion for Difference, Polity Press, Cambridge. OECD 1998, Redefining Tertiary Education, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris. OECD 1999, The Future of the Global Economy. Towards a Long Boom?, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Publications, Paris. OECD 2004, Reviews of National Policies for Education: University Education in Denmark – Examiners’ Report, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris. Rose, N. 1989, Governing the Soul. The Shaping of the Private Self, Free Association Press, London.

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Sassen, S. 2006, Territory, Authority, Rights – From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Strathern, M. 1996/7, ‘From improvement to enhancement: An anthropological comment on the audit culture’, Cambridge Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 1-21. UBST [Universitets- og Byggestyrelsen] 2007, Udvikling af universiteter – et moderne tilsyn. Udkast. UBST, København. UBST [Universitets- og Byggestyrelsen] 2008a, available at , accessed 2008-06-06. UBST [Universitets- og Byggestyrelsen] 2008b, Resultatskontrakt for 2008 – mellem Universitets- og Byggestyrelsen og Videnskabsministeriets departement, available at , accessed 2008-06-06. Wright, S. and Ørberg, J.W. 2008, ‘Autonomy and Control: Danish University Reform in the Context of Modern Governance’, Learning and Teaching: International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 27-57.

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Chapter 8

Self-Governance and the Disappearance of the Human Body Herbert Gottweis

1. Introduction In this chapter I will address a special problem in the current debate on selfgovernance: the tension between the construction of the autonomous, self-governed individual and the patient in medical-ethical and public discourse, and what seems to be a dissolution of the human body in contemporary biomedical practice. I will explore this tension by looking at the field of genomics, and in particular at biobanks. While the dissolution of the human body as we know it can be viewed as a general phenomenon in contemporary, genomics-based medicine, the study of the relationship between biobanks and the human body allows us to put it into a specific and detailed empirical perspective. Unlike many other projects in the biomedical sciences, biobanks are neither something mainly theoretical or conceptual, nor are they a project of the distant future. They are very ‘real’, involve substantial infrastructures, personnel, investments and already have a significant impact on the way biomedical research operates, and how patients are being conceptualized and treated. I will argue that biobanks are not only an object or topic of governance, such as in regulation policies, but they can also be seen as something through which the governance of life and of human bodies operates. Their representations of and interventions in life constitute a new, heterogeneous space of governance in which, for example, relationships between patients and doctors, between genes and disease, scientists and the public, the pharmaceutical industry and medical sciences, or images of collective identity are defined and re-redefined. A key aspect of contemporary bioethical discourse on biobanks is the construction of the individual, autonomous patient as simultaneously constituting the somatic and legal pre-condition for any biospecimen collection, and potentially benefiting individually from it through medical advance. It is precisely this image of the self-governed and freely-deciding patient upheld in the public representation of biobanks and their relationship to society that is being put in question by the very operation of biobanks. Correspondingly, we are currently observing tendencies towards a communitarian re-interpretation of biobanks and their relationship to society that seem to offer new approaches for how we should deal with biobanks, self-governance and the dissolution of the human body.

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2. What are biobanks? Starting with the great public and scholarly interest in the Icelandic Health Sector Database, and later with other genetic database projects such as those in Estonia and in the United Kingdom, biobanks have become a much debated topic over the last decade. Biobanks are by no means new in the world of medicine and biological research. The systematic collection of human cells and tissues has been going on for many years, even dating back to the nineteenth century, including fixed and processed as well as frozen viable and nonviable material. In Europe and in many other countries, millions of tissue samples are being permanently stored, for example, in the context of pathology institutes. Only relatively recently were large patient registries and population surveys initiated, enabling the coupling of biological and genetic data and general patient data. But these ‘early’ repositories had very different operational and scientific goals than the current biobank projects. Pathology collections, like today’s biobanks, were oriented to identifying and understanding diseases. However, medical doctors in the past, for example, in the nineteenth Hapsburg monarchy working at the University of Graz which held a central pathology collection of the Empire, approached questions of disease differently than Swedish medical doctors at Umea Hospital today. Needless to say, then, the phenomenon of biobanks must be located within a larger transformation in the biological sciences (Gottweis and Petersen 2008). Two major areas of life science development have led to a new impetus to create biobanks or use old biobanks in new ways: one, the methodological breakthroughs in molecular biology and proteomics with possibilities to handle large databases, and, two, the systematic collection of fresh material from large populations. These transformations and their application potentially began to raise completely new sets of issues. Furthermore, biobanks, located at the disciplinary intersection of medical science, genomics, genetics, molecular biology and informatics can also be well contextualized within a new discourse and knowledge on the body and health. They promise a new and systematic approach towards disease and drug development based on insights from genomics, proteomics and pharmacogenomics. Among other things, they claim to predict the likelihood that an individual will develop a disease so that pharmaceutical drugs could be used to prevent its onset rather than resorting to treating the symptoms once a disease has developed. Lifestyle advice could be targeted to those deemed ‘genetically susceptible’. Based on evidence from biobank research, pharmacogenetics could help to improve the efficacy and safety of medicine. Thus, biobank policies would constitute a major effort in establishing a preventive and, so the story goes, much more cost-efficient approach towards medicine. The individual patient would not only benefit from these developments, but operate in a new field of choice, decision-making and determining health and treatment options. Ultimately, so the narrative told in many locations goes, biobanks might be an important step towards the improvement and development of preventive, genetic and ‘personalized’

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medicine. But it is precisely the idea of the ‘person as we know it’ that is put in question by contemporary genomics in a particular way. 3. Decorporalization, molecularization, informationization Biobanks are not only new infrastructures for biomedicine, they are also an important expression in the tendency towards decorporalization in modern biopolitics. They are the perfect location to observe the dissolution of the human body. In fact, in biobanks, the human body of biobanks is an inherently decomposed body (Brown and Webster 2004), a body split into systems and collections of blood, proteins, serums, genes and SNPsAs. The elements of the decomposed body in a biobank obtain their relevance through their connection with each other in the system of the biobank. What we observe here is a management of living fluids and living cells that do not represent other, larger bodies but form their own bodies. Thus, biobanks create a new ‘bodily’ phenomenon and a new structure for moving bodies and their parts and establishing relationships between them. In the Japanese biobank project, for example, the central goals are to assemble blood samples and DNA as well as clinical information on about 300,000 individuals, based on standard ‘informed consent’ protocols to store this information in line with appropriate data safety measures; to determine specific groups of symptoms or reactions to medication using the clinical database and to perform an analysis covering all genes; and to develop appropriate software tools for the analysis, and application of the various datasets created by the project. The goal of the project, therefore, is to create a database that can be used to determine the genetic basis of drug susceptibility and to identify genetic traits related to disease susceptibility, disease progression or responsiveness to certain forms of therapy. While individual bodies and their diseases are what shall be better treated with the help of biobanks in the future, these bodies become part of a larger agglomeration and loose what constitutes them as human bodies as they enter biobanks. Important dimensions and preconditions of decorporalization are molecularization and informationization. Molecular biological approaches, advances in computer and information sciences, and the convergence of these two domains have also led to a fundamental reconceptualization of health and disease in medical discourse. Contemporary biology is characterized by its strategy of studying biological phenomenon at the level of macromolecules. Since the 1930s, the focus of modern biology has begun to shift from the cellular to the subcellular level of biological phenomena. In the practice of modern biology, the locus of life phenomena was conceptualized at the submicroscopic level (Kay 1993). Subsequently, with the shift from the protein paradigm to the DNA paradigm during the late 1950s, explaining the operation of DNA and understanding and handling its manipulation moved to the center of biological and medical interest. During the 1970s, genetic engineering, then, during the 1980s, genetic testing, gene therapy and the human genome project seemed to delineate a new future

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for biomedicine whereby the knowledge and mastery of DNA were the keys to solving many of the important problems in medical research (Nelkin and Lindee 1995). Informationization refers to the process by which information technologies have transformed practices and organizational features of fields such as medical research. The rise of biobanks as a key tool of medical research and drug development is inseparable from computerization and highly sophisticated information technology. In 1998, the Icelandic Ministry of Health announced its plans for the construction of a Health Sector Database on the entire Icelandic population. These plans, initiated by the private company deCODE Genetics, specified how and under what conditions to assemble medical records – and, possibly, combine them with genetic data and genealogical records for the purposes of tracking the presumed genetic bases of diseases and economizing the National Health Service. The founding premise of deCODE Genetics was that although the nuclear family has proved to be a useful unit in the study of ‘monogenic’ disorders, for complex or ‘polygenic’ disorders that are ‘sporadic’, skipping generations, more information and higher resolutions are needed. Researchers from deCODE reasoned that a Health Sector Database might be useful in this context. Although information on DNA, medical data, and genealogical records would only be combined in the context of specific research projects and would be monitored by ethics committees and public officials, their synergistic coexistence was supposed to enhance each other’s economic and medical value. These developments were inseparable from the rise of bioinformatics, multidisciplinary research at the interface between informatics and biology, with additional input from statistics and mathematics. In parallel to bioinformatics, several related and partially overlapping research areas have evolved, such as computational biology mathematical biology and biostatistics that all are key to biobank research. Biobanks display a rhizomic character. It seems that in general, modern biopolitics is not dominated by a strong state, but by a highly decentralized, but nevertheless interrelated, rhizomic assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Such assemblages consist of a multiplicity of heterogeneous objects the unity of which comes from the fact that these items function together, that they work together as a functional entity. They comprise discrete flows of people, signs and chemicals, knowledges, tissues, genes and institutions (Patton 1994, 158; Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 607). The focus of such networks is not the disciplining or control of bodies but the transformation of the body into information and binary codes so that they can be rendered more mobile and comparable (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 613). Biobanks are structured in precisely this manner: the trend is to form large gene collections in order to explore comparatively small bits, which, it is hoped, will grant insight into the genetic basis and the contribution of gene-environment interactions to disease (Cambon-Thomsen 2004, 867). Ideally, the combined insights will result in predictive models that relate genetic disposition to drug development and drug consumption. As the Japanese biobank project demonstrates, biobanks are not necessarily located in one site, but across

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several sites; they comprise a broad array of actors, artifacts and machines that are assembled and reassembled in the project. The result is a highly complex infrastructure that spans hundreds of local hospitals to the University of Tokyo and the Reiken Center. From there, in the form of the HAPMAP project (see below), this infrastructure of collection interrelates with data collections in other countries and assumes transnational character. Thus, modern genetic databases are sites where molecularization and informationization crystallize in the form of biological infrastructures that create new trajectories of organizing dispersed human bodies. These ‘dispersed bodies’ co-exist with the evocation of ‘individualized bodies’ in discourses of health, bioethics and international economic competition (Gottweis 2008, 27). 4. Bodies individualized and commodified Biobanks are located at the disciplinary intersection of medical genomics, genetics, molecular biology and informatics, and they belong within a new discourse on the body and health within which new trajectories of body monitoring materialize. Because the new discourse on the body and health promises a new and systematic approach towards disease and drug development, lifestyle advice and pharmacology could be targeted to those ‘genetically susceptible’ to prevent the onset of certain diseases, which could in effect reduce costs. Thus, the contemporary genomics discourse not only leads to bodies dispersed across a multitude of sites of action, but also creates visions for a rebuilding of health care, the categorization of patients, the definition of disease and susceptibility, the determination of points of entry for treatment, and the emergence of new actors in the field of health policy. Thus, biobanks are economically highly relevant phenomena that raise numerous, far-reaching expectations with respect to their social and medical impact. An important aspect in this context is a tendency in political rule towards the transition from macro steering (such as by the state) to micro-steering, the rise of new actors in medical research and health care, and the increased emphasis of the importance of self-steering. The contemporary genomics discourse must be understood in close relationship to a fundamental change in current health policy practices and disciplinary transformations in medical research. During the 1980s and 1990s throughout the OECD, privatization had been introduced as a tool to increase both allocated and technical efficacy in the financing and provision of medical services and to meet patient preferences for individual choice in health care. Unlike in earlier years, national health care systems no longer prefer solutions that have grown out of their historical, institutional and cultural environments, but instead adopt similar approaches cross-nationally. The result of this has been the increasing integration of management-concepts in the health care sector throughout the OECD (Oxley and MacFarlan 1995; Stewart 1999). Health care reform, which focused on macro managing for a long time, turned to micro-managing. Costs, insurance rates, efficiency, effectiveness and incentives have become important

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concepts. Corporatization and commodification of health care and medicine are the result of the moves by private corporations to appropriate increasing areas of the health care sector under private ownership and/or management. Simultaneously, private companies, often financed by venture capital, have become key actors in the field of genomic medicine driving the dynamics of the field. The gradual establishment of a regime of appropriation via patenting has been a central technique for defining the structure of the emerging medical-genomics apparatus. Ever since the landmark 1980 US Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that ruled that genetically modified bacteria were patentable, intellectual property rights have become a key topic in genomic medicine. Today the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) holds that even ‘natural’ DNA as a chemical compound once isolated and purified is patentable. Thus, the PTO and the European Patent Office (EPO) have treated isolated and purified nucleoide sequences as if they were the same as biochemicals (Andrews 2002, 803). To date, the PTO has patented approximately 20 percent of the human genome, or about 4,500 genes (Jensen and Murray 2005). Human Genome Sciences has filed applications encompassing 7,500 full-length genes. The French company Genset SA has generated over 90,000 sequences of 5-prime untranslated region sequence tags of human full-length cDNA clones, and patent applications will be filed. Today we observe in health and medical policy a tendency for the state to pull out of financing and decision making, and new actors, ranging from health care providers, patient groups, citizen groups and private companies to move into the center of health and medical policy decision making. This social reorganization of the health care sector has also shaped the dynamics of biobank strategies. In Iceland, the company that led the shaping of the country’s Health Sector Database was deCODE, physically located in Iceland but registered in the United States. In Estonia, the Estonian Genome Project was initially funded by the private company EGeen. In the United States, private health care providers such as Marshfield Clinic or companies such as Genomics Collaborative Inc. play a central role in organizing biobank projects. In France, the private nonprofit sector patient organization, Association Française contre les Myopathies (AFM) is identifiable as the major actor in the field of biobanking. In total, the AFM runs 14 biobanks and collections around the world and is extremely active in the areas of genetic research, patient care and legal issues. At the same time, biobanks have also been conceptualized as a mechanism to promote international competitiveness. Among other things, they are seen as being capable of significantly influencing knowledge industries and creating the competitive advantage of certain regions or countries. It is often argued that Europe’s national health care systems seem to have a strong advantage in particular vis-à-vis the United States, where the absence of a national health care system is seen as an obstacle for population-based studies complemented by health data. In Estonia, for example, the Estonian Genome Project has been presented as a potential catalyst for the national biotechnology industry. While governments continue worldwide to be major actors in biobank initiatives, private

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and nongovernmental actors have come to assume a crucial role. At the same time, in some countries such as Israel and Iceland, narratives of genes as national assets co-exist with privatizing tendencies in biobank development. As a result of these and other developments, biobanks are closely associated with the rise of a new politics of biovalue. Catherine Waldby has defined biovalue as ‘the surplus of in vitro vitality produced by the biotechnical reformulation of living processes’ (Waldby 2000, 2002). Tissues can be leveraged biotechnically so that they become more prolific or useful, through processes such as the fractioning of blood, the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the amplification of genetic sequences, the creation of cell lines, genetic engineering or cell nuclear transfer. The biovaluable engineering is often associated with the requirements for patenting, so that surplus in vitro vitality may eventually be transformed into surplus commercial profits, as well as in vivo therapies (Waldby and Mitchel 2005). Needless to say, the issues of ownership and patenting have become major topics in the discussion on genetic databases. Access, control and ownership of biobanks and their applications are in particular at the centre of those projects where private industry plays an important role. In Iceland, deCODE Genetics received the license to construct the genetic database in return for a fee paid to the medical service. A rival biotechnological company, UVS, was established in the heat of the debate on the Health Sector Database, partly to challenge deCODE’s ‘monopoly’ of biomedical research in Iceland. Much of the discussion of the database project focused on issues of property, ownership and control. The arguments of the proponents of the Icelandic project tended to emphasize the opportunities it provided in terms of medical advances, work, entrepreneurship and private initiative, in the age of the challenging ‘new economy’ and stagnant or declining fishing stocks. A fundamental debate developed concerning the ownership of and access to genetic information and medical records. The property issue has often been discussed with reference or in comparison to ongoing debates about another thorny common-property issue, namely, the allocation of individual transferable quotas to rights in fish. For many of the critics, the commodification of biomedical data was problematic. The dominant focus in the debate was on the fact that a private multinational company proposes to explore the genetic bases of common diseases in the entire Icelandic population and to commercialize its results. In Estonia, the preparation and establishment of the Gene Bank was funded by investors through the limited company EGeen, which was granted an exclusive commercial license. But the Estonian Genome project was construed as more than just a large research project; it was defined as a way of pushing Estonia’s post-Soviet economy towards Western standards. Thus, commodification, patenting, the rise of new, private actors in genomic medicine, and the new politics of biovalue are integral part of the new politics of biobanks. As much as biobanks are about ‘decomposed bodies’, in health and economic discourses on biobanks an image of citizens actively in control of

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their health choices is conjured up that is reinforced by images of biobanks as inseparable for the growth of the new knowledge economies. Futhermore, biobanks seem to be characterized by its deterritorialized, transnational/global character, which neither excludes national projects nor a national rhetoric. But neither the nation-state nor populations are its main or exclusive technical-scientific point of reference, but rather global/transnational networks and assemblages. In general, increasingly more technological and scientific advancements in medical genomics are the result of collaboration on a global scale. For example, although Celera Genomics completed the sequencing of the human genome, and the US government sponsored HGP and the core of the work was performed in the United States and the United Kingdom, the international human genome sequencing consortium included scientists at 16 institutions across France, Germany, Japan and China. A similar picture develops in the biggest follow-up project to the sequencing effort of the 1990s: the HapMap project, which has significant ties to a number of biobank projects, such as the Biobank Japan project. Launched in 2002, it charted genetic variation within the human genome. The central idea of the HapMap project was to create a human haplotype map. The HapMap project’s goal was to allow geneticists to scan the entire genome rapidly for disease genes by analysing some 300,000 SNPs (as compared to the some 10 million common SNPs scattered throughout the human genome). To create the HapMap, DNA will be taken from blood samples from Nigeria, Japan, China and the United States with public funding from agencies scattered all over the globe, from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to Genome Canada in Ottawa, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing to the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. In the field of biobanks, the structure is currently still dominated by a national branding, such as ‘Biobank Japan’ or ‘UK Biobank’; however, other projects such as the Icelandic and the Estonian biobank project already display strong transnational features in the financing structure and product development strategy. At the same time, there is much discussion and preparation going on at the transnational and EU level to connect the various biobank projects, the leading protagonists, infrastructures and strategies in a common effort, such as the emerging Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI) initiative. Thus, it seems that much activity in the new government of life has expanded into the global arena where new forms of linking local and global fields of operation seem to be developed. Finally, biobanks and their expressed goal to contribute to the development of a ‘personalized medicine’ can be seen as part of a larger tendency in the medical/ health system to shift the burden of health responsibility from macro actors such as the state to the individual level. Today, health is increasingly discussed throughout the West in terms of self-control and framed within the language of an ethics of health that requires the disciplining of the individual conduct of life (Crawford 1984, 72-76). The creation of cohorts of susceptibility and risk in the discourse of personalized medicine is part of this strategy. This managing of the self (Foucault 1979) is also reflected in a multitude of technical and organizational

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novelties within health care, where managed care is the most important and most paradigmatic example. In the past, health policies were based on the collection and tabulation of numerical information about populations and provided the rationale for hygienic strategies. Likewise, strategies to minimize risks of the environment, labor conditions, or the maintenance of the body were central elements for public health strategies. Although these strategies continue to be important, the focus of strategies has begun to shift from the group to the individual level. As has been argued by Nikolas Rose, the ideal of the omnipresent state that would shape, coordinate, and direct the affairs in all sectors of society has lost its grip on the public imagination. Accordingly, in the health field concentration has moved from ‘society as a whole’ to ‘risky individuals’, individual susceptibility (to genetic disease, for example), and, accordingly, to ‘risk groups’ (Rose 2001). The proactive management of the human body has become a core element of collective and individual strategies of health maintenance. Personalized medicine, with biobanks as one of its key instruments to create cohorts of susceptibility as points of reference for individual orientation, is part of this tendency in the new biopolitics towards self-steering. It was no coincidence, for example, that the ‘Biobank Japan’ was first called, the ‘Tailor-made Medicine Realization Project.’ Launched in 2003, Biobank Japan was conceived both as a research project and as an effort that should lead, within a five-year frame, to actual output in the form of new therapies. In fact, the entire initial goal of the project was not with creating an infrastructure for future biomedical research but with the development of new therapeutic approaches for a new type of medicine, ‘personalized’ medicine (Gottweis 2008). 5. Biobanks, collective identity and the future of the human body These new features of contemporary biobank development – decorporalization, molecularization and informationization , micro-steering, the politics of biovalue, their rhizomic character, transnational/global orientation, and a new politics of self-management arising as a related health care paradigm – allow us to see better what it is biobanks are ‘doing’ today and how they related to the idea of selfgovernance. As I pointed out, throughout the various dimensions of biobanks, the idea of the self-governed, freely-deciding, autonomous individual and/or patient is a key feature in explaining and justifying biobanks in the socio-political context. Thus, biobanks, how they are explained and justified seem to be part of the emergence of what Adrina Petryna has called ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna 2002), which underlines the increasing significance of specific biological presuppositions in conceptions of what it means to be a citizen (Rose and Novas 2005, 440). Building on Marshall’s work on citizenship (Marshall 1950), Rose and Novas argue that, increasingly, biological images, explanations, values and judgments get entangled with a more general contemporary ‘regime of the self’ as the prudent individual who actively shapes his or her life through acts of

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choice. Thus, citizenship can be understood as an ‘evolutionary process’ with civil rights granted in the 18th century, to be continued with the extension of political citizenship in the 19th century and of social citizenship in the twentieth century. In its collective expression, biological citizenship is articulated in new forms of ‘biosociality’, collectivities defined by categories of corporeal vulnerability, genetic risk and susceptibility (Rose and Novas 2005, 441-442). Correspondingly, in bioethical discourse, the issues of informed consent, personal integrity, selfdetermination, confidentiality and nondiscrimination play a major role in current debates about biobanks and convey the image of individual citizens actively taking care of their rights and needs in the context of biobank development and practice. But active (biosocial) citizens who insist on their interaction with the biomedical system based on the respect of their rights as citizens and human beings is only one facet of the currently emerging biopolitical order. To be sure, current bioethical, health policy and legal discourse in the field of biobanking literally conjures images of the human being of modernity, the coherent self-determined and rational individual equipped with human and individual rights. At the same time, as I have shown in the previous sections, the applied medical-scientific practices and technologies seem to deeply question and undermine this eighteenth and nineteenth century version of the human subject. The ‘politics of the dispersed bodies’ can also be seen to be in conflict with the conjuring up of an image of the person that might have been lost in the data storage systems of contemporary biobanks. Key medical ethics principles such as confidentiality or informed consent face huge difficulties in the implementation of large biobank projects with shifting purposes and goals that were unknown when they were initially launched. In a way, the disappearance of bodies in biobank systems has raised the question of the disappearance of the modern citizen or patient as we know him and her. A key feature of the disappearance of the human body is that many of the key legal and ethical principles, such as informed consent, are increasingly difficult to implement. For example, patient data that circulate in international networks with changing purposes and open time-horizons are difficult to consent to as it is unclear what exactly the content of this informed consent would constitute. This situation has led to different reactions. The obsession with informed consent (Brekke and Sirnes 2006), confidentiality, and privacy in bioethical and legal discourse in the context of biobank regulation was one important reaction. But recently, in what can be seen as a ‘communitarian turn’ the bioethics community has also begun to question the idea of the modern human being as its benchmark. In a remarkable paper published in Nature Review Genetics by two of today’s leading bioethicists, Bartha Maria Knoppers and Ruth Chadwick, we can already read that today there are more and more calls ‘to rethink the paramount position of the individual in ethics’. The authors continue in their discussion by approvingly quoting a recent WHO report on genetic databases that states:

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The justification for a database is more likely to be grounded in common values, and less on individual gain. … It leads to the question whether the individual can remain of paramount importance in this context. (Knoppers and Chadwick 2005, 75)

Knoppers and Chadwick then go on in the development of their argument by discussing ‘new ethical principles’ such as reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity as possible strategies to go beyond the more traditional ‘individual-centered’ approaches in ethics. It seems that in the face of mounting difficulties in biobank projects to deal with individual-centered approaches in ethics, such as in informed consent, bioethical ideology has already begun to develop a ‘new pragmatism’ (Knoppers and Chadwick 2005, 78). Through the invention of a new ‘community of responsible patients/citizens’ the idea of the self-governed individual is hardly eliminated from the discourse, but now supplemented by a new construction that seems to deal with the fact of human bodies disappearing into the socio-technical networks of biobanks (Gottweis 2008). 6. Conclusions This chapter explored the tension between the construction of the autonomous, self-governed patient in medical-ethical discourse, and the dissolution of the human body in contemporary medical practice. By looking at biobanks, a major development in contemporary genomics, I argued that biobanks are not only scientific projects and infrastructure developments, they, simultaneously constitute a new way of governing life through highly complex social/scientific assemblages consisting of a multiplicity of heterogeneous objects, such as people, signs, chemicals, knowledges, tissues, genes and institutions that increasingly transcend the boundaries of the nation-state and take on a globalized character. While the imagery of the self-determined individual of modernity remains key in the discourse on biobanks, we also witness today the emergence of new concepts dealing with the phenomenon that in the context of biobank development the human body as we know it and attached identity constructions seem to have reached their limits. Communitarian imageries increasingly seem to supplement neo-liberal concepts of self-governance in an effort to react to modern biomedicine’s reconstruction of the human body, and its gradual dissolution. Thus, concepts such as solidarity, reciprocity and the common good (re)enter the political discourse, and with them the potential for struggles over what constitutes a community and shared benefits in the globalized world of biomedical research. While biobanks are very ‘real’ in terms of their materiality, collections and the their utilization in research, except in places like Iceland, Estonia and the United Kingdom they have neither become very visible to broad populations, nor much debated. As biobanks continue to be built and developed in the years and decades to come, it can be expected that struggles over participation, impact and meaning will intensify.

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Enrolling ever larger parts of the population as research populations in studies and projects will as much be challenge for research as potentially lead to contestations and resistances. The networks of biobanking might turn into spaces of exploring new modes and strategies of contemporary self-governance. References Brekke, O.A. and Sirnes, T. 2006, ‘Population Bio-banks: The Ethical Gravity of Informed Consent’, BioSocieties, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 385-398. Cambon-Thomsen, A. 2004, ‘The social and ethical issues of post-genomic human bio-banks’, Nature Review Genetics, vol. 5, pp. 866-873. Crawford, R. 1984, ‘A cultural account of “health”: Control, release, and the social body’, in Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care, J. McKinlay (ed.), Tavistock, New York and London, pp. 60-106. Dean, M. 1999, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage, London. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987, A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. 1977, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Allen Lane, London. Foucault, M. 1979, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Allen Lane, London. Gottweis, H. 2008, ‘Bio-banks in Action: New Strategies in the Governance of Life’, in H. Gottweis and A. Petersen, Bio-banks: Governance in Comparative Perspective, Routeldge, London, pp. 22-38. Gottweis, H. and Petersen, A. 2008, Bio-banks: Governance in Comparative Perspective, Routeldge, London. Haggerty, K.D. and Ericson R.V. 2000, ‘The surveillance Assemblage’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, pp. 605-622. Jensen, K. and Murray, F. 2005, ‘Intellectual property landscape of the human genome’, Science, vol. 310, no. 5746, pp. 239-240. Kay, L.-E. 1993, The Molecular Vision of Life. Calltech, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of the New Biology, Oxford University Press, New York. Knoppers, B.M. and Chadwick, R. 2005, ‘Human genetic research: Emerging trends in ethics’, Nature Review Genetics, vol. 6, pp. 75-79. Marshall, T.H. 1950, Citzenship and Social Class: And Other Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Nelkin, D. and Lindee, M.S. 1995, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, W.H. Freeman and Co., New York. Oxley, H. and MacFaraln, M. 1995, ‘Health Care Reform: Controlling Spending and Increasing Efficiency’, OECD Economic Studies, vol. 24, pp. 7-55. Parthasarathy, S. 2007, Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology and the Comparative Politics of Health Care, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Patton, P. 1994, ‘MetamorphoLogic: Bodies and power in A Thousand Plateau’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 25: pp. 157-169. Petryna, A. 2002, Biological Citizenship: Science and the Politics of Health after Chernoby, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Plummer, K. 2003, Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London. Rabinow, P. 1999, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rabinow, P. and Dan-Cohen, T. 2005, A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Princeton. Rose, N. 2001, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 18, pp. 1-30. Rose, N. and Novas, C. 2005, ‘Biological citizenship’, in Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, A. Ong and S.J. Collier (eds), Blackwell, London, pp. 439-463. Sewell, G. 1998, ‘The discipline of teams: The control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance – Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Organizational Control’, Administrative Science Quarterly, June. Stewart, A. 1999, ‘Cost-containment and privatization: An international analysis’, in Market Limits in Health Reform. Public success, private failure, D. Drache and T. Sullivan (eds), Routledge, London. Waldby, C. 2000, The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine, Routledge, London and New York. Waldby, C. 2002, ‘Stem cells, tissue cultures and the production of biovalue’, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 305-323. Waldby, C. and Mitchell, R. 2005, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, Duke University Press.

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Chapter 9

Public Administration in Teams: Self-Governing Civil Servants Birgitte Poulsen

1. Introduction Social science scholars from different corners of the discipline have recently been occupied with describing and conceptualizing what they see as a profound transition of current western societies. This transition is articulated differently depending on the academic heritage of the scholars. Some describe the transition through the widely used notion of a development from government to governance (for an overview see Sørensen and Torfing 2007), others focus on the impacts of globalization (Hardt and Negri 2000), and those inspired by Foucault diagnose the present times as being characterized by an emerging governmentalization of society as described in Chapter 2 (see also Dean 1999; Rose 1996, 1999; Deleuze 1995). This chapter takes its departure in a governmentality perspective that views the current changes as a part of a large scale transition from a society in which discipline is the dominant form of power to a society based primarily on control power (Deleuze 1995, 174). The aim of the chapter is to examine the consequences of this transition from one form of power to another for how public administrations are organized and for the identities and practices of the civil servants that inhabit them. The aim of this chapter is to propose that the governmentality perspective provides a fruitful theoretical perspective for understanding recent reforms in public administrations in Western societies. What has been taking place here is a movement away from bureaucratic forms of governance that is organized the principle of legality and the view of civil servants as implementers of law, towards what has been called a ‘post-bureaucratic’ (McHugh et al. 2001, 35), ‘post-modern’ (Volberda 1998) or, most recently, ‘networked’ forms of governance (Hales 2002, 54). In this new institutional context that I shall call the network administration, the main activity of the civil servants is no longer to implement law and to follow orders, it is to improve the performance of the public sector (Behn 2001, 10; March and Olsen 1995, 155) by stimulating ‘entrepreneurial’ behavior among employees and other relevant actors, and to unleash creativity, innovation capacity and risktaking (Hales 2002, 55). This task calls for civil servants with a greater ability of self-governance.

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As the chapter aims to show, this transformation of public administrations and of the understanding of what it means to be a civil servant fits well into the main line of argument advanced by the governmentality literature. The first task undertaken here consists in a presentation of the diagnosis proposed by the governmentality theorists. Next, I will present the results of a micro level case study of how the transition from a society based on disciplinary power to a society relying on control power has manifested itself in a Danish Ministry – the Ministry of Business Affairs – for the period from 1995-2001. Following Bent Flyvbjerg (1991, 150) approach to case studies, the Ministry of Business Affairs represents an extreme case. A more radical reorganization of a Danish Ministry has not been previously seen. Accordingly, the purpose of the case study is not to argue that the Danish public administration has undergone a full fledged transformation into a system based on control power. Rather, the case study intends to illuminate the challenges that this kind of institutional transitions raises at the micro level for the involved civil servants. An extreme case helps to show the full impact of a transition from disciplinary power to control power if it were to take place. As the case study also helps to illuminate, real life transformations tend to be messier than theoretical story lines tend to propose, and it is often more productive to search for what I term archaeological layers of past and present forms of power. 2. From disciplinary to control society On a general level, the transition from disciplinary to control power (governmentality) involves a renewed understanding of the way in which power is manifested in society. In disciplinary society, power is exercised through institutions of confinement. The most referred to institution is the prison – Panoptikon – that is analysed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977). The term Panoptikon symbolizes prisons that are organized so that the prisoners cannot see their surveillers. Foucault illustrates how this knowledge of constantly being surveilled, disciplining the prisoners so that they become the harshest surveillers of all. Analogues to other institutions – in modern society – have been made. Examples of such institutions are the school, the hospital, the factory and the barracks (Deleuze 1995, 177). Through life in disciplinary society, individuals go from one disciplining institution to another. Each institution is seen as a closed system, each having its own laws (Deleuze 1995, 177). Bureaucracy as a form of organization may also be seen as analogue to the institutions of disciplinary society. The characteristics of bureaucracy have often been described and debated since Max Weber’s conceptualization of the modern state as an organizational ‘ideal type’ (Merton 1966; Mintzberg 1979; Harmon and Mayer 1986; Du Gay 2000; Hales 2002; Olsen 2006). The most important characteristics of this bureaucratic ideal type are rule and hierarchy.

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Bureaucracy is where the work of specialist or expert administrators is arranged in a detailed division of labour of closely-defined and specified roles, coordinated and controlled by a combination of detailed, centrally imposed rules and procedures and a hierarchy of graded levels of responsibility linked by vertical reporting relationships and accountability. (Hales 2002, 52)

Bureaucracy is, thus, a closed system and the bureaucrat is constantly being surveilled by superiors controlling the work carried out in the bureaucracy. In a society based on control, power is no longer embedded in differentiated institutions of discipline. The stable units that institutions of discipline are built upon are being transformed power takes on a different form than discipline. For example, the school is no longer regarded as the institution for education and learning. Instead, individuals continuously engage in life long processes of learning and self-development (see Triantafillou 2003 for an analysis of the history of the employee in Denmark). Hospitals are still important for combating diseases, but to a great extent medical treatment becomes a matter of prevention aimed at keeping people out of the hospitals and thus keeping individuals in a constant potential pathology (Esmark 2006, 464). Even the prison is substituted by surveillance cameras and electronic house arrest (ibid., 464). Thus, power in society based on control is no longer primarily encapsulated in institutions of discipline alone. Power in control society is pervasive, transcending the old disciplinary institutions (Deleuze 1995, 175). Disciplinary institutions and their associated form of power are challenged by new forms of power linked to the control society. Power in the control society is fluctuating and manifested through temporary networks. Public administration network organizations may be seen as analogues to the transition towards a control society. Network organizations are organized around a number of self-governing, often temporary work units or teams within which there is a fluid division of labor. Thus, the organization consists of ‘temporary, contingent, self-organizing teams, constantly forming and dissolving according to work demands and trading and collaborating with each other as required’ (Hales 2002, 54). Gone is the superior constantly surveilling the work carried out by civil servants ranking lower in the hierarchy. Instead, all civil servants have become self-governing individuals in a floating network structure. Although public sector institutions are not being dismantled, some of them and their traditional bureaucratic characteristics are changing. The transition from a disciplinary to a control society also creates a different subjectivity relevant for the analysis of the civil service, since power takes on new forms. First, an implication of the diagnosis of control society is the creation of in-distinction zones. When the characteristics of traditional institutions of confinement are dismantling, punishment, education and health care are potentially ever present in every individual’s life disconnected from those same institutions. In health care we see open hospitals and teams providing home care creating an in-distinction between home and hospital; education is no longer linked to one institution differentiated from other institutions (the school), the work place has

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also become central for the idea of life-long learning. Thus, school and work place are no longer distinct institutions each having their particular purpose and associated identities. Second, the lack of clearly differentiated (distinct) institutions each having their purpose creates hybrid identities. When the individual no longer goes through life from one distinct institution to another each of which creates a distinct identity, for example as a child, pupil, employee and/or patient, the different identities are potentially present all at once. ‘Hybrid identities’, thus, refers to the fact that identities are floating, detached from one particular institution and potentially ever present all at once. Hybrid identities are also constantly modulating identities intertwined throughout the individuals’ lives. Third, the subjectivity in control society is characterized by self-control as opposed to self-discipline. In disciplinary society, self-government is equated with self-discipline, which is based on a constant, potential surveillance of another, i.e. the guard, the teacher, the doctor or in the bureaucracy: the superior. In control society, self-government is the same as self-control, which is willingly embraced by the individual, who adopts self-control as an important part of his or her personal identity. Self-government in control society is based on the individual’s identity as a self-governing subject; a subject that is not self-disciplined through the potential surveillance of another person, but a subject that freely and willingly chooses to act in certain ways as self-control has become an integrated part of who the person is – the person’s individual identity (see also Chapter 2 in this book). In this sense, power is functioning in and through the formation of identities that are increasingly detached from particular disciplining institutions. In Figure 9.1 below, I have summed up the potential consequences of a development towards control society for the subjectivity of the individual.

•

Establishment of in-distinction zones

•

Hybrid identities

•

Self-controlling individuals

Figure 9.1  Characteristics in control society and its associated subjectivity

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The chapter now turns to a presentation of the results from the case study of the Danish Ministry of Business Affairs. Since it is an extreme case of a public sector institution turned entirely into a network organization, it is an analysis of the more specific consequences of the overall diagnosis of a transition towards a control society for the subjectivity of the civil servant. The focus is set on how the theoretical concepts of ‘in-distinction zones’, ‘hybrid identities’ and ‘self-control’ are manifested in a public sector network organization. 3. The Ministry of Business Affairs 1995-2001 The results presented below are based on a qualitative case study carried out in the Danish Ministry of Enterprise between 1995 and 2001. The case study is based on studies of various internal documents and 10 qualitative interviews with civil servants in the administration, these were conducted in 2001. Civil servants at all levels within the organizational hierarchy, i.e. from the permanent secretary to the ministerial clerks were interviewed. The questions asked pertained to their role within the political system, the main criteria of success and failure within the organization, the primary difficulties of day-to-day business, dilemmas and coping strategies. Questions also covered broad self-perceptions and interpretations of what it means to be ‘a good civil servant’. The translation of Danish occupational terms into corresponding English can be somewhat difficult, as the two political systems differ. I have chosen to translate the occupational terms in the following way: departementschef as ‘permanent secretary’, afdelingschef as ‘head of division’, kontorchef as ‘head of office’ and fuldmægtig as ‘ministerial clerk’. The creation of a network organization The Ministry of Business Affairs was established in 1994 and was a result of a merger between two very different ministries: the relatively new and small Ministry of Coordination and the old and much larger Ministry of Industry. The Ministry of Industry was established in 1914 and had 1,700 employees in 1993. It had a bureaucratic form of organization (see Figure 9.2). The Ministry was characterized by a clear division between separate functional units and a clear hierarchy among them. Every civil servant held a fixed position in a hierarchical structure and referred to a civil servant further up in the hierarchy. The Ministry of Coordination was established in 1993 and had 40 employees. The task of the Ministry was the coordination of Business policies among regional and national stakeholders. Due to its small size and its coordinating function, the Ministry could hardly be described as having a bureaucratic form of organization. All civil servants in the organization knew each other and worked together.

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Figure 9.2  The Ministry of Industry before 1994

Note: This figure is a translation into English from one of the Ministry’s internal documents (2001).

It was the Permanent Secretary from the small Ministry of Coordination that was appointed as the new Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Business Affairs in 1994. He wanted to transform the department into a network organization and thus made the new Ministry of Business Affairs a reminder of the former Ministry of Coordination. The declared aim of the organizational restructuring was that 80 percent of the department’s resources should be used on strategic policy development (Henningsen 1999, 17). The means was the creation of a network organization where civil servants worked together in teams. Administrative tasks were decentralized to the Ministry’s different sub-units (styrelser) and a profound organizational restructuring was started in 1995. In 1997 the reorganization was fully implemented. The reorganization consisted of an abolition of functional units placed in a hierarchical structure. Instead, three main centres were established and substituted former units such as offices and divisions. The three centers – the Centre for Business Economy, the Centre for Business Law and the Centre for Business Policy – overlapped, meaning that employees worked together across centre lines and work tasks were not necessarily placed in one centre alone. Furthermore, a general office was established as a new unit called the Business Policy Unit (Erhvervspolitisk Sekretariat). Its primary task was to function as a link between the minister and the work conducted in the department as well as in the Ministry’s different sub-units. Figure 9.3 illustrates the form of organization after the restructuring was fully implemented.

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Figure 9.3  The Ministry of Business Affairs after 1997

Note: This figure is a translation into English from one of the Ministry’s internal documents (2001).

Self-governance through team work Teamwork was seen as the primary means to enable strategic policy development. Day to day case work was reduced due to the decentralization of administrative tasks to the Ministry’s sub-units and released time to teamwork on selected policy themes. A team consisted of at least three clerks and they would typically work on a subject for six months. Then new teams were constituted with new tasks to carry out. The work conducted in teams was called ‘projects’. The heads of division functioned as so called ‘project-owners’. They worked out a contract for the specific project that described its objectives and the course of action. During the six months, it was the head of division’s job to revise the contract if necessary. The heads of office were not team members, but functioned as ‘partners’ whose aim was to facilitate the teamwork through consultations. A clerk describes the conditions of team work in the following way. ‘As a clerk you are not employed in a specific office. Every six months you are thrown into the air and then you have to collaborate with new people’. In this respect, the functionally divided units known from a traditional bureaucratic form of organization were abolished in favor of civil servants engagement in shifting teams. The aim of the reorganization was to enable civil servants – executives and non-executives – to think more independently and thereby actively participate in

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the development of new policy ideas. Any reminiscence of the rule of following orders within a classically organized hierarchy and on behalf of professional skills disappeared. Instead, the ideal of self-governance through team work substituted the ideal of following orders. Employees needed to take an active part in the policy formulation and show the ability to work in teams. A clerk explains how the demands in the network organization differ from the demands in a more traditional bureaucratic organization like the one he worked in before. He says: ‘You need to be much more self-governing. You are supposed to be the driving force behind your own development in the organization regarding your competencies and regarding the work tasks that you want to conduct. In this respect you have a huge influence. But you need to have ideas and know what you want to work on.’ Thus, self-governance became an important ideal for civil servants in the network organization. No one gave you direct orders. Instead, you were responsible for your own self-development and the work tasks that you chose to conduct. The promotion of self-governance implied that civil servants were expected to take on a great deal of responsibility for their own work. Civil servants should not constantly involve a superior civil servant, but instead show the ability to solve problems on his or her own. All paperwork and files should only go through one executive civil servant before they reached the minister. In the bureaucratic form of organization – known from the Ministry of Industry – most files would pass through first the head of office, then the head of division and finally, before they reached the minister, the permanent secretary. In the following I examine more closely the consequences of the organizational transformation and the ideal of self-governance for the subjectivity of the civil servant using the theoretical concepts of in-distinction zones, hybrid identities and self-control. In-distinction zones in the Ministry of Business Affairs First, in-distinction zones were manifested through the fact that overlapping centres substituted the units of the functional hierarchy such as for example offices. Employees were floating around in the organization and thus were detached from a structure of clear distinction. Civil servants kept their traditional titles such as clerk, head of office or head of division. However, they no longer held a fixed position in a hierarchy of functional units such as offices and divisions. Heads of division and heads of office became so called ‘floating’ executives which meant that they were no longer attached to a certain group of employees as was the case in the former Ministry of Industry. In the same way clerks had no primary superior to which they always would have to report and they would work together in new team constellations every six month. A clerk tries to describe her lack of a fixed position working in the network organization. She says: We do not have a clear office structure within our organization, which means that you as an employee are floating; you are not able to place yourself clearly in relation to others, you do not have one executive and you do not have fixed

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colleagues with whom you normally work. In this way you are floating around within the organization.

The lack of a fixed position in a functional hierarchy was appreciated by the same clerk, since it also meant that the tasks she carried out constantly changed. She says: I like that I can move around and get new tasks. I am not locked into a certain policy field in the organization. In a way one gets a bit addicted to the fact that one is not ‘boxed in’.

In this way, the clerk also indirectly talks about her job as freedom. She is ‘addicted’ to the fact that she is not ‘boxed in’. Thus she is not ‘imprisoned’ through a fixed position in a functional, bureaucratic hierarchy, instead, she feels free in her ‘floating’ position constantly addressing new tasks. Second, in-distinction zones were created between work identity and private identity. The subjectivity of the civil servant in the network organization tended to put a focus on civil servants personality on behalf of their professional skills or experience. Asked about which skills are important in order to work in the ministry, the head of division responsible for recruitment and organizational development explains: ‘It is not so much about your former experience, or your educational background. What is important is your personality’. Asked about what kind of personality is required, he stresses that civil servants must have an ability to work together with other people, they need be open minded towards other people, they must possess social skills, and they should be able to tackle conflicts. When he conducts job interviews he creates role-plays for the applicant in order to test his or her personality. He says: ‘We really test people’s personality, since we want them to work in teams. It is very important that they have such a (teamwork) mentality’. In general, the same head of division thinks it is important that employees – including himself – experience a continuous personal development through their work. He says: ‘I think it is very important that you consider the job you have and in which way it can help you develop your personality … You need to consider who you are as a person and how to develop your-self as a human being.’ In this sense the network organization creates an in-distinction between the employee’s work identity and personal identity and thus a hybrid identity. Employees were regarded as ‘whole persons’ and their personalities were assets in the work place together with other ‘skills’ such as educational background and experience. Hybrid identities among civil servants The phenomenon of hybrid identities came across in various ways. Hybrid identities were expressed through the demand for interdisciplinary team work, the

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demand for flexibility regarding one’s field of expertise and through the already described in-distinction between work and personal identity. The creative processes through teamwork were believed to be stimulated through interdisciplinary team work, since it forced employees to look at the same subject from different perspectives. The head of division who is responsible for recruitment and organizational development says: If people with the same educational background are put together in a team, then it is almost guaranteed that nothing interesting or new will be the result. Instead, if you have a mix of people with different backgrounds and different approaches, something new will grow; something new and interesting; something you have never seen before.

Interdisciplinary team work was seen as one of the most important elements in the development of new political ideas, and it was a criterion that all team members should come from different educational backgrounds. A single educational background in, for example, law or economics was, thus, never enough in order to be able to perform in the organization. It was a proclaimed value in the organization that civil servants should be able to critically reflect upon their own educational background and incorporate alternative approaches deriving from other educational backgrounds. This proclaimed value stimulated the existence of hybrid identities. Civil servants could not just refer to their educational background when they had to describe themselves and their function in the organization. It would never be enough just to be a civil servant with an educational background in law or in economics. Instead, civil servants were supposed to distance themselves from their educational background in order to be able to participate in inter-disciplinary team work. The same kind of hybrid identity was stimulated by the fact that no civil servant became an expert within a particular policy field – as for example was the case in the old bureaucratic form of organization known from the Ministry of Industry. The temporary teams and their changing tasks were believed to create a dynamic organization where creativity blossomed compared to a bureaucratic form of organization. If employees were experts on a small policy field – it was argued – they would loose their ability to ask new questions and think untraditionally regarding particular policy fields. A clerk explains: ‘We are constantly working criss-cross; no one sits in the same place for 12 years going into greater and greater detail.’ Thus new ideas and change were favored values compared to knowledge and experience with a small, precisely defined policy area. A head of office puts it as follows: ‘We are not limited by experience.’ Thus experience regarding a certain policy field was believed to be a potential problem for a civil servant’s ability to develop new ideas in relation to that specific policy field. Consequently, no one in the organization was allowed to have a fixed identity as a specialist within a particular policy field. Instead, the constantly shifting fields of expertise created civil servants with hybrid identities. Finally, the in-distinction between

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work and personal identity may also be seen as important for the creation of hybrid identities in the organization. The self-controlling civil servant The civil servants may be regarded as self-controlling as opposed to self-disciplined meaning that they happily embrace the ideals in the network organization turning them into their own ideals and thus making these ideals a part of their own identity. Self-governance through interdisciplinary teamwork is not carried out because superiors are dictating that this is the way to carry out work in the organization. Instead, the ideal of self-governance is internalized and is becoming part of who they are as civil servants. An example of the way in which the organizational values are internalized is through the fact that work hours in the Ministry are long. A ministerial clerk explains: ‘It is a profound value in the culture of our organization that it is expected that the employees are always able and willing.’ When I asked in what sense the civil servants need to show flexibility, whether it has to do with work hours or a need to show flexibility in relation to professional skills, the clerk replied: ‘Flexibility is the centre of everything.’ However, no superior expects civil servants to work long hours or at least that was not the referred to reason for the long working hours. Instead, the reason should be found in the ideal of self-governance and in the general freedom that was associated with work in the Ministry. Civil servants in general appreciated that they were able to work creatively and to a large extent influence the work they conducted. A head of division says: ‘We have a lot of freedom in this organization. Ninety percent of the work I do, I define myself.’ Because of this sense of freedom associated with work in the ministry, most of the civil servants thought it was the best place to work compared to other ministries in the Danish state administration. They valued the great amount of freedom that they felt they were embraced with due to the fact that they were carrying out most of their work in self-governing teams. Thus, most of the employees – both executive and non-executive – seemed very enthusiastic about their work and found it satisfying. The civil servants’ sense of influence on their own work situation was, thus, experienced as a form of freedom and stimulated civil servants enthusiasm and willingness to work long hours. The same head of division is aware of how he should conduct his role in order to stimulate this creativity. He says that he does not see his role as a controlling one regarding the work conducted by clerks or heads of office, and claims that he is not worried by the fact that he does not have a 100 percent control over the content of all files that are presented for the minister. Instead he states: ‘I want to give people the freedom to develop new ideas.’ Direct control of the work of clerks is not a principal part of his job. According to himself he is not a controlling superior judging the work of others. Instead he explains that he asks the clerks what they think of their work themselves. And if they say that the work is fine, then he sees no reason for him as a superior to proofread it. According to him control is, thus, substituted by confidence in people that will

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set them free to develop new ideas. Self-discipline through the awareness of a constantly potential external control is thus, substituted by self-control through the embracement of self-governance. From the interviews in general it seemed that employees worked with enthusiasm instead of out of a sense of duty. A head of division says: ‘I do not have demands regarding a particular position that I want to hold in my career. But I do have demands in the sense that what I do needs to be fun for me.’ Work is thus not something that is an instrument to getting a salary. Work has to be fun, work stimulates freedom and your work identity and personal identity is inseparable. In Table 9.1 below, I have summed up the characteristics of the subjectivity of the civil servant as bureaucrat working in a bureaucratic form of organization as opposed to the self-governing civil servant working in a network organization. Table 9.1  The subjectivity of the civil servant in disciplinary and control society Disciplinary society and the Bureaucrat: Rule-following Distinction between work and personal identity Singular identity based on educational background and field of expertise Freedom from work (freedom outside the workplace) Self-discipline through the potential control of a superior

Control society and the self-governing civil servant: Self-governance In-distinction between work and personal identity Hybrid identities and focus on ‘who you are as a whole person’ Freedom through work (self-realization) Self-control

I will now turn to some of the problems arising in the Ministry of Business Affairs. Dilemmas in the network organization The dilemmas associated with the role of the civil servant under self-governance primarily had to do with the fact that the organization was still a ministry and thereby a political, administrative organization that could not afford mistakes – neither political nor legal/economic mistakes. Although the primary criteria for success in the network organization were expressed in terms of inventiveness and creativity, the organization as such still needed to ensure that no mistakes were made. A head of division explains it as follows: There are always contradictory demands … In our organization, we want to be highly orientated towards new policy developments and act with a high

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willingness to take risks and dare to try out new things. At the same time we are not allowed to make any mistakes. If an unpleasant story ends up in the newspaper and the mistake is yours, then you might have done some very good stuff, but it is very quickly forgotten.

Thus, it turned out to be equally important to prevent errors. However, the mechanisms known from the bureaucratic form of organization were not available in order to ensure that. In this sense a dualistic organization with potentially opposing criteria for success was created. A head of office explains: We are a very dualistic organization. We must be creative and challenge things, but at the same time we must be able to ensure zero-errors when it comes to serving the minister.

Another dilemma in the network organization was specifically connected to the ministerial clerks. An important part of the reorganization was to increase effectiveness in the organization. Thus for the ministerial clerk it was important not to involve more than one executive level in the organization, if the case you as a civil servant were involved in, was a ‘routine case’. However, it was difficult for the individual ministerial clerk to judge whether something was just another routine case or the case had turned into a politically important one, or if things were simply going ‘the wrong way’. A ministerial clerk provides an example of the pressure you may feel when something goes. She says: When the permanent secretary then had to involve himself once again, he thought all of a sudden that what we had done was all wrong. And we thought that we had done exactly what had been agreed upon. In situations like that there is an enormous pressure on you. I felt like the most stupid person in the world.

Although civil servants working in the organization mostly appreciated what they regarded as freedom through work, dilemmas occurred particularly in relation to the demand on the organization as such not to commit mistakes. Besides this dilemma, not every civil servant could adjust to the subjectivity of the self-governing policymaker and did not necessarily experience the job as a liberating and empowering one. I will now illustrate how the network organization and the new subjectivity lead to self-exclusions of civil servants that could not fulfil the new role. From exclusion to self-exclusion The organizational transformation meant that civil servants who did not approve of the reorganization left the ministry in the late 1990s, which was also referred to as the ‘personnel cleaning’ (Henningsen 1999, 20). Many employees with professional legal skills also found the new form of organization difficult to live with and left the organization. The permanent secretary,

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who himself had an educational background in economics, questioned traditional legal competences, which led to broader discussions about law in general. A head of office explains: We have had many discussions about our employees with professional legal skills … What does it mean to work in an organization like ours if you have professional legal skills? … It is important to be able to understand law within a larger societal frame. What is law nowadays? For what purposes can we use law? What constitutes rules and how do they work in a society like ours?

As the quote demonstrates law, rules and legal competencies were debated in the ministry at a more general level, i.e. ‘what is law nowadays?’ Law was no longer seen as the primary way to govern society which corresponds to the idea of a changed role of the state in the literature on Governance (see for example Bevir et al. 2003 and Sørensen and Torfing 2007). Thus, working in the ministry as a civil servant with professional legal skills, you could no longer just be a civil servant as you used to be. Instead you were forced to reflect upon your educational background more profoundly than civil servants with other educational backgrounds, for example economics or public administration, were. This may be one of the reasons that many civil servants with legal skills chose to leave the organization. A civil servant with professional legal skills who stayed and enjoyed his work says: When it comes to civil servants with a professional legal background, we want someone who is not a traditional case officer … There are many ways in which you can choose to be a civil servant with a professional legal background. You can choose to be the one who claims that everything is impossible because you always make reservations, or you can choose to develop new ideas and find new ways. And if you like the latter, then this is a very interesting work place, because you are almost never stopped if you have a good idea and know how to argue for it.

Thus, it was possible to work in the organization if you had professional legal skills, but you should not aim at being ‘a traditional case officer’. Instead you should show the ability to reflect on the law as one way of governing among others, and you should not be the one pointing to the impossibility of new ideas due to existing laws. The overall quality favored in the ministry was the ability to invent new ideas that were on the edge of traditional thinking and maybe existing laws. Others were exhausted by the amount of work and left the organization. A head of division gives an example of two clerks that could not live with the work pressure and therefore chose to leave the organization. Importantly, nobody was fired due to the reorganization itself or due to particular educational skills. Instead, many civil servants chose to leave the ministry

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themselves because they could no longer fulfil the new role of the civil servant and the way it was reformulated. Power was, thus, not manifested through formal exclusions of civil servants that were misfits in the new form of organization, since nobody was fired. There were no formal rules or explicit disciplining of civil servants. No one dictated to civil servants how to conduct their work. In this sense, civil servants were freed from rules and a particular position in a rigid hierarchical structure. Instead, exclusions were individualized and self-imposed. Thus, if civil servants were misfits and could not function in the network organization, they needed to take responsibility for the situation themselves through self-exclusion. Superiors did not take responsibility by for example firing them. In this sense, possible conflicts between the subjectivity created through the network organization and civil servants were individualized. The transition from disciplinary society and bureaucracy as a form of organization to control society and network organization was, thus, also a transition from exclusion to self-exclusion. 4. Conclusion In November 2001 Denmark gained a new government, and both the minister and the permanent secretary were replaced, and that was the end of the network organization in the Ministry of Business Affairs. It may be that Colin Hales is right when he states that alternatives to bureaucracy are likely to remain exceptions. The alternatives ‘will be confined either to small-scale or expressive fringes of the organization terrain or to temporary periods of experimentation by large organizations before the visible hand of hierarchy retightens its grip’ (2002, 65). A statement he bases on an overall argument that bureaucracy ‘regardless of its operational inefficiencies is a highly effective form of legitimized domination’ (ibid.). I do agree that bureaucracy as a form of organization still plays a very important role when we want to understand public sector organizations. However, the alternative forms of organization promoting self-governance and ‘entrepreneurship’ in the public sector seem to have come to stay, and they radically change the subjectivity of the civil servant compared to the subjectivity of the bureaucrat. I find the theoretical perspective of a transition from disciplinary to control society a fruitful one in the analysis of recent developments in Public Administration thinking and the consequences for the subjectivity of the civil servant. The concepts of in-distinction zones, hybrid identities and self-control associated with control society help analyse the more specific consequences of the overall development towards self-governance in public administration. Through a micro level analysis of an extreme case of a public sector network organization, this chapter has examined how the ideal of self-governance fundamentally changes and recreates the subjectivity of the civil servant. Indistinction zones are created through the dismantling of functionally divided units, which are substituted by teamwork in a network structure. Civil servants,

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thus, no longer hold a fixed position in an organizational hierarchy. The case study also illustrated how in-distinction zones between work and personal identity were created. Work and personal identity were inseparable, since the personality of the civil servant as a ‘whole person’ was regarded as an important asset in the organization. Consequently, the proclaimed ideals in the network organization were integrated in the personality of each civil servant turning the ideals into the civil servant’s own ones. This integration of work and personal identity also created hybrid identities, since the identity of the civil servant is not associated with one institutional setting separable from another institutional setting. One of the results of this hybrid identity was that ‘work never stopped’, since it was inseparable from private life. Hybrid identities were also created through the fact that distinct educational background and experience were regarded as less important assets in the organization compared to ‘the personality’ of the individual civil servant. The subjectivity created through the network organization is, thus, one of constant self-development, and an individualization of responsibility regarding work and even exclusions. Power is not manifested through self-discipline and following orders from superiors. Instead power is manifested as an individualized responsibility for self-development and a demand for flexibility regarding work hours, work tasks and personality. It is not possible to be a civil servant in the network organization if you want to obtain a fixed position in a functional hierarchy with precisely defined work tasks, who thinks personal life and working life should be separate. However, a superior does not impose the process of self-development and self-governance. Instead it is the employees that constantly engage in self-developing projects and chase new ideas and thus impose the paradigm of self-governance on themselves. Some civil servants embraced this subjectivity and happily fulfilled their role. Others found the network organization unlivable and suppressive and chose to selfexclude. An important consequence of control power in a public administration n organization is, thus, that even exclusions are self-imposed. My intention has not been to argue that the civil servants embracing the new role of self-governance were not ‘really’ free or that they suffered from false consciousness. On the contrary self-governance may be regarded as empowering for the civil servants that loved the possibilities encompassed in their work. However, one could argue that the paradigm of self-governance was not unproblematic, since it was very exclusive of other values. Experience, educational skills and continuity were regarded as blocking the on-going development of new ideas and creativity of civil servants. And it is highly questionable whether these values are not important ones in public sector organizations like for example a ministry. The freedom experienced by the civil servants who chose to stay in the organization was also a particular kind of freedom. Employees were, for example, not free to choose continuity in their work or favor experience as values they encompass. Civil servants were constantly in a process of renewal and selfdevelopment. In this sense it was a particular kind of freedom and subjectivity

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that was established through the network organization and it was not every civil servant that experienced this subjectivity to be liberating or empowering. References Behn, R.D. 2001, Rethinking democratic accountability, Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC. Bevir, M., Rhodes RAW and Weller, P. 2003, ‘Traditions of governance. History and diversity’, special issue of Public Administration. An international Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 1. Dean, M. 1999, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, Sage Publications, London. Deleuze, G. 1995 [1990], ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations, G. Deleuze (ed.), University of Columbia Press, New York, pp. 177-182. Du Gay, P. 2000, In praise of bureaucracy: Weber – organizations – ethics, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, UK. Esmark, A. 2006, ’Michael Hardt og Antonio Negri: Kontrol og suverænitet i Imperiets æra’, in Magtens tænkere: Politisk teori fra Machiavelli til Honneth, C. Bagge and J. Myrup (eds), Roskilde Universitetsforlag, Frederiksberg, pp. 455-481. Flyvbjerg, B. 1991, Rationalitet og magt, Akademisk Forlag, Copenhagen. Foucault, M. 1977 [1975], Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison, Vintage Books, New York. Hales, C. 2002, ‘’Bureaucracy-lite’ and Continuities in managerial work’, British Journal of Management, vol. 13, pp. 51-66. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Harmon, M.M. and Mayer, R.T. 1986, Organization Theory for Public Administration, Chatelaine Press, Burke, VA. Henningsen, U.R. 1999, ’Strukturændringerne i Erhvervsministeriet’, Arbejdspapir 20/1999. Demokratiprojektet, Department of Political Sciences, Copenhagen. Hill, M. 2005, The Public Policy Process. Pearson Longman, Essex. March, J. and Olsen, J.P. 1995, Democratic Governance, Free Press, New York. McHugh, M., O’Brian, G. and Ramondt, J. 2001, ‘Finding an alternative to bureaucratic models of organization in the public sector’, Public Money & Management, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 35-42. Merton, R.K. 1966, ‘Bureaucratic Structure and Personality’, in Sociological Theory. A Book of Readings, 2nd edition, L. Coser and B. Rosenberg (eds), Collier-Macmillan, London. Mintzberg, H. 1979, The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of The Research, Prentice Hall, New York. Olsen, J.P. 2006, ‘Maybe it is Time to Rediscover Bureaucracy’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1-25.

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Rose, N. 1996, Inventing ourselves: Psychology, power and personhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rose, N. 1999, Governing the Soul, 2nd edition, Free Association Books, London. Sørensen, E. and Torfing, J. 2005, ‘The democratic Anchorage of Governance Networks’, Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 195-218. Triantafillou, P. 2003, ‘Psychological Technologies at Work: A History of Employee Development in Denmark’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 411-436. Volberda, H. 1998, Building the flexible firm. How to remain competitive, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Weber, M. 1975 [1922], Makt og byråkrati – essays om politick og klasse, samfunnsforskning og verdier, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, Oslo.

Chapter 10

Governing the Responsible Prisoner: A Comparative Analysis Mary Bosworth

1. Introduction Of late, scholars working in criminology, sociology and law have drawn from the rich theoretical literature on risk, governance and governmentality to offer a series of interconnected explanations for the punitive sentiments and practices that seem to characterize criminal justice policy in the United States and the UK (see among others Sparks 2000; Simon 2007; Garland 1997, 2001; Hannah-Moffat 1999, 2005; O’Malley 1992, 1999, 2004; Pratt 2007). Breaking with earlier, more empirical and positivist traditions of prison studies, these authors consider the criminal justice system as more than just a structure for dealing with those who break the law but also as a primary means of creating accountable and thus governable and obedient citizens. Notwithstanding divisions among them, they view punishment as central to the project of ‘neo-liberal governments … to create “responsibilised” subjects … who are expected to take over personal responsibility for the government of many of life’s familiar risks to health, employment, wealth and personal safety’ (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley, 2007, 2). Following a decline of faith in rehabilitation in the 1970s, practices based on ‘penal welfare’ were replaced by what David Garland (2001) has dubbed a ‘culture of control’. Whereas previously, policy-makers and penal administrators had sought to reform offenders through various treatment-based approaches, as crime escalated and rehabilitative efforts seemed to fail, rhetoric and policy changed. On the one hand, crime was normalized, and became an accepted (if unwelcome) part of everyday life. Such figures, it was initially suggested, would be dealt with by ‘actuarial justice’ as the state deployed statistical risk-based measures to identify and control populations (Feeley and Simon 1992). On the other hand, certain kinds of offenders – like those addicted to drugs in the US and more lately pedophiles in the UK – were vilified (Garland 1996). Holding offenders fully responsible for their wrongdoing, lawmakers increasingly championed expressive forms of punishment on both sides of the Atlantic that swept more people in the penal system for longer periods of time (Newburn and Jones 2005; Sparks 1998). Alongside this ‘punitive turn’, and to a large extent driving it, a new ‘penal populism’ began to characterize political discourse in Britain and the USA (Pratt 2007). In both places politicians affirmed their credentials as leaders by pursuing

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policies that were ‘tough on crime’. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, neo-liberal governments sought to govern their prisons like other social institutions ‘at a distance’ (see Chapter 7 of this collection). Various aspects of prison life were contracted to the private sector – food provision, cleaning and so on – while in some cases entire institutions were handed over to private prison companies to build and manage. Those institutions that remained in the public sector were encouraged to emulate the private sector as states enthusiastically adopted the ideas of New Public Management. Offenders were to be managed efficiently and administratively like any other ‘client group’. In this paper I draw on the literature from the sociology of punishment to interpret official management discourses in England and Wales and in the US federal prison system as they are set out in admission handbooks that are distributed to inmates on arrival. In selecting these particular countries I am influenced by others who identify similarities and overlaps in the ideology and penal policy across the Atlantic (Garland 2001; Newburn 2002). Unlike most of these accounts, however, which paint with broad brushstrokes (see also Chapter 2 of this collection), I take a micro approach by concentrating specifically on the prison and on the documents distributed to inmates (see Chapter 4 of this collection). In so doing, though I identify a number of contradictions between and among the two countries under analysis. Responding to O’Malley’s (1999) warning to criminologists about diversity in the manifestation of punitive sentiment in different countries, I use the induction manuals to tease out differences and identify similarities between England and America (see also Tonry 2007). Whereas the US handbooks wholeheartedly embrace the rhetoric of neo-liberal economic and social governance, those from England and Wales continue to espouse welfarist goals of care and treatment. Such rhetoric sits uneasily within the more punitive rhetoric that tends to characterise British crime control policies. So too, it seems at odds with the expectations about individualism and rationality that characterize the managerialism that shapes national prison policy and penal administration. Yet, at the same time, a paternalist discourse does not radically challenge either of these aspects of penal administration. Using concrete examples from the admission manuals I show how many of the ideas articulated in the literature on governmentality form the backdrop of everyday prison life in both countries as prisons seek to create governable inmates (Foucault 1991; Dean 1996; Garland 1997, 2001; Rose 1999). Though there is some evidence of the ultimate ability of the state to enforce its desires, the power of the sovereign state is, for the most part hidden. Instead, prisoners are enjoined in these documents to act as entrepreneurial subjects, governing themselves (Rose   Much of this chapter is based on research I conducted for an earlier article I published in Punishment & Society in 2007 (Bosworth 2007). Though there are some overlaps between these two pieces, the present one re-examines my earlier findings on the US through a comparison with England and Wales.

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and Miller 1992). The handbooks, in other words, hope to maintain order and control by ‘procedures that actively seek to “subjectify” and “responsibilize” individuals’ (Garland 1997, 191). Though of course, these documents cannot tell the ‘whole story’ of how penal policies are shaped by wider penal philosophies and government, nor can they illuminate individual experiences of such ideas, they do provide a window on the otherwise hidden world behind bars. Much of what follows in this chapter could and should be supplemented by empirical research and further investigation. Only in that way, could moments of resistance be identified, as well as other aspects like racial and gender differences in the application and experience of power. Nonetheless, as formal statements of policy, the handbooks are a rich source of information on the aspirations of the governors and their plans for the governed. 2. Handbooks and research methods All incoming US federal prisoners are meant to participate in an Admission and Orientation (A&O) program (Federal Bureau of Prison Program Statement 5290.14). As part of the arrivals’ process incoming prisoners should attend presentations, be taken on a tour of their prison and receive written material outlining three interconnected areas: rights and responsibilities, institutional opportunities and their facility’s disciplinary system. During their orientation prisoners are usually given an A&O handbook. This booklet, which varies in length but is usually around 70 pages, sets out the rules and regulations of the prison as well as basic guidelines about jobs, education and other opportunities. The A&O lecture program that accompanies the booklets may last as long as two weeks or be as brief as some hours. Though institutional orientation is meant to occur within four weeks of arrival, many inmates receive admissions information late in their sentences. Reflecting Program Statement 5290.14, §9d(1) that directs A&O programs to outline ‘mandatory national policy issues as well as local issues and procedures’, admissions packs summarize key Bureau rules and regulations while also delineating the specific concerns and goals of the individual establishment. All contain the same information about the discipline system, listing offenses, the punishment they will provoke and the procedures that inmates who violate good order and discipline will undergo. Likewise, each booklet lays out the organizational structure of the institution, explaining the unit management system

  Prisoners may also receive instruction manuals from other divisions within the prison, including work, religion and education.   An institution may elect not to collate the information into a booklet form, but merely to hand out separate pieces of information. Whichever option they choose, institutions must provide written materials to supplement the A&O program.

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to the incoming prisoner. Regulations and opportunities pertaining to work, visits, and education programs are also always included. I obtained copies of the booklets for each US federal prison by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2000. These items trickled in over the course of about 18 months. Some booklets were sent in electronic format and others were mailed in hard copy. Together they provide an overview of official BOP policy as well as giving concrete examples of the system’s managerial ethos and orientation. When read in comparison with one another, they also illuminate the range of local institutional cultures that exist across the large and heterogeneous penal system. As in America, ‘all prisoners new to custody or to an establishment’ in England and Wales should be ‘provided with an appropriate induction process. The aims are to assist and support the prisoner’s integration into the establishment; to continue the assessment process; and to enable the prisoner to remain safe, make the best use of their time in custody, and prepare for a law abiding life after release. (Prison Service Order (PSO) Number 0550) The PSO dictates that ‘every establishment must devise its own prisoner induction policies and procedures, to show how it will fulfill the requirements of … PSO [0550]’. Such plans must be reviewed annually and available to ‘staff, prisoners and IMB [Independent Monitoring Boards, previously boards of visitors]’. Those in the induction program, as in the US, are usually held separately from mainline prisoners. To help prisons devise written guidelines for induction, the HM Prison Service, in conjunction with the national charity the Prison Reform Trust (PRT) has produced a series of booklets for several distinct populations behind bars, as well as one that addresses visiting in particular. There is, therefore, a Prisoners’ Information Book for ‘Women Prisoners and Young Offenders’ (HM Prison Service and PRT 2003), for ‘Male Prisoners and Young Offenders’ (HM Prison Service and PRT 2003), for ‘Life Sentenced Prisoners’ (HM Prison Service and PRT 2001) and for ‘Disabled Prisoners’ (PRT 2004). There is also a separate set of guidance on ‘Visiting and Keeping in Touch’ and a booklet entitled Information and Advice for Foreign National Prisoners (2004) that the Prison Reform Trust has produced in partnership with the London Probation Service. These general handbooks exist alongside institutionally-specific ones which not only cover how each prison works, but also outline particular programs and regimes, from   I originally sought these documents to compile the appendix for a study of the US Federal Prison system (Bosworth 2002).   The Prison Reform Trust seeks to assist serving prisoners and their families and to lobby the government for meaningful penal reform, cf. <www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk>.   In the introduction to each publication, it is stressed that ‘This is not the “Rule Book”’, however, it does explain ‘some of the Prison Rules and Prison Service Orders (PSOs)’. Urging the reader to look for copies of such rules and regulations ‘in the prison library’, it reminds prisoners that they all ‘have a right to see them (even if you cannot get to the library because you are sick or on segregation)’ (HM Prison Service and PRT 2002, 2003, Introduction).

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induction and first night cell handbooks, to the ‘Counselling, Assessment, Referral, Advice, Throughcare’ (CARAT) teams. Both the PRT handbooks and a sample of ones from various institutions form the basis for my analysis of the governance of prisoners in England and Wales. While the institution-specific induction manuals are only distributed inside the prison, the national booklets are freely available to the general public for downloading on the HM Prison Service website and are produced in a number of languages, including, but not limited to, Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Gujarti and Polish. I obtained a sampling of the in-house induction books through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request and have combined these with the more readily available national guidebooks. Both kinds of information should be made available to prisoners and both respond to the instruction of Prison Rule 10(1) that: Every prisoner shall be provided, as soon as possible after his [or her] reception into prison, and in any case within 24 hours, with information in writing about those provisions of these Rules and other matters which it is necessary that he [or she] should know, including earnings and privileges, and the proper means of making requests and complaints.

As with the readily available national booklets, the Prison Rules are available as a free download on the Prison Service’s website <www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk>. Although such documents cannot show us how penal philosophy and policies are implemented in practice, as official statements they provide information about ideas and strategies of governance within the two prison systems through which we can compare them. In the American case, the handbooks follow closely the logic of neo-liberalism, holding prisoners, like homo economicus to be rational and responsible for their choices. At the same time, however, in their frequent exhortations and warnings about good order and discipline, the documents lay bear the manner in which the prison administration, wields ultimate control over people’s lives. In contrast, the English documents present a more sympathetic and caring, penal administration. Yet here too, the limits of tolerance in the welfare state can also be mapped, since the help that is offered to prisoners is meant to enable them to act more responsibly and enact the requisite changes to become law abiding citizens.

  This is the name given to the national drug treatment program in prisons in England and Wales.   And even then, only inconsistently. When I requested a handbook from the prison nearest to Oxford, for example, I was informed that they had run out of copies and were in the process of updating their manual. They were unclear how long it would take, but estimated at least some months.

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3. Creating governable inmates Induction and information handbooks are designed to inform prisoners about their rights and responsibilities, as well as about the individual culture and expectations of particular institutions. Though both prison systems seek to govern inmates with as little conflict and difficulty as possible, they clearly have quite distinct expectations of their confined population. Whereas the English Prison Service Orders and manuals stress the ‘needs’ and vulnerabilities of those behind bars, the US equivalents present a rights-based strategy of responsibilization set within a strict disciplinary regime. Those arriving at prison for the first time in England are urged to ‘tell the health care staff if you feel very down or panicky or if you can’t cope with your feelings or worries (HM Prison Service and PRT 2001, 2002, 1). Even at a high security prison like HMP Wakefield, the Governor sympathises ‘I am aware that moving to a new prison can be a worrying and stressful period … Our aim is to provide you with all the help you will need to settle’ (4). Such compassion is rarely articulated in the comparable documents from the US, where federal prisoners are expected to exercise self-control and obedience. They are assumed to know their rights and responsibilities and, despite the limited options of life behind bars, expected to take control of their own destinies. From low security institutions to supermax, the message is the same: prisoners can and must take responsibility for their own lives. At the federal correctional complex (FCC) Coleman (2001, 2), for example, ‘All inmates are responsible for their personal conduct’ while on the other end of the security spectrum at ADX Florence (2001, 5), ‘All inmates have certain rights; such as, the right to be treated humanely. By the same token, inmates are expected to act responsibly’. Whereas the English prisoner requires paternalistic care and assistance, the American one is more autonomous and capable. He is the proto-customer: always assessing his options and then selecting, rationally and soberly, the best among them. Behavior once thought to reflect socio-economic factors and opportunities is, in other words, presented in the federal handbooks as a simple matter of choice. In England, however, despite the commitment to managerialism evident across the prison service, the welfarist role of the state remains high. Even when the responsibility of a prisoner is mentioned, it is usually in relation to the care the prison can provide. Thus, for example, in the CARAT handbook from the low security, Open conditions, HMP Hollesley Bay, the prisoner is informed that ‘You are the best person to make decisions about your drug use. That is why we believe that you are the best person to ask to see the CARAT team if you think we can help you’ (3). Prisoners in both penal systems may earn certain rights or privileges. Their ‘entitlement’ to certain goods and services is dependent on the way they behave.   Given Agency status in 1993, HM Prison Service has been at the forefront of administrative managerialism in England, held to account with targets, key performance indicators and ongoing institutional review.

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Yet, beyond this basic similarity, the two systems approach rights and privileges quite differently. In America, for example, each federal handbooks includes a section labeled ‘Inmate rights and responsibilities’ (PS 5290.15, para. 1). This list, which is usually placed near the end of the document, just before the institution’s disciplinary procedures, tackles a range of issues, from treating others humanely to gaining access to the courts. In each instance, as in the civil society, a person’s ‘rights’ are presented with a mirror image of his or her duties. Prisoners, in this list, act as citizens. They ‘have the right to health care, which includes nutritious meals, proper bedding and clothing and a laundry schedule for cleanliness …’ At the same time, however, they must recognize their own responsibility ‘not to waste food, to follow the laundry schedule, maintain neat and clean living quarters …’ etc., etc. This trope of citizenship in prison, functions both as an aspirational goal and as a means of control. It is, in other words, a strategy of governance. Not only does this kind of language seek to ensure the efficient operation of power within the prison but it helps legitimize the institution by appealing to ‘commonsense’ ideas and values that appear beyond reproach. Yet, both in the US Federal system and elsewhere, from ethnographic literature and first hand accounts of life behind bars, we know that prisoners in the federal system and elsewhere are not always provided with appropriate healthcare or nutritious meals (Bosworth 2002; Santos 2004). Indeed, these everyday issues often worsen the ‘pains of imprisonment’ as prisoners have little control over them. Though the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution protects US prisoners from ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, legally safeguarding prisoners’ rights to certain goods and services, in practice, particularly since the passage of the Prison Legal Reform Act (PLRA), 1996 that greatly reduced their access to the courts, prisoners have little means of ensuring their delivery. In contrast, the institution has an array of sanctions it may implement when inmates are found not to have upheld their end of the bargain. In contrast to America, ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’ are dealt with quite separately in the English handbooks. While prisoners have to earn their privileges and thus must act responsibly, their ‘rights’ are, for the most part, presented as inalienable. Prisons like all institutions are subject to the Human Rights Act, 1998, meaning that prisoners in England and Wales, maintain their basic human rights within the limits of security and good order required by a penal institution (PRT 2002, 69). For a number of reasons, however, the rights-based approach in England and Wales does not radically shift strategies of governance. English prisons are not institutions of equals. There, too, prisoners are expected to take responsibility for their actions and govern themselves. Although they may expect a little more help from the prison administration and their basic human rights should be respected, prisoners in England Wales too are exhorted to improve themselves. Observing basic human rights, or what the prison service describes as ‘treating people with decency’, is represented as a means of encouraging offenders to ‘live useful and law-abiding lives that will benefit them as individuals and society as a whole’.

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In any case, the rights-based discourse operates at a macro level limiting the actions of those who govern rather than trickling down onto prison landings. Prison officers receive no ‘human rights’ training, and prisoners no information about such legal safeguards. Instead, daily life in prisons in England and Wales is shaped by the far more utilitarian national ‘Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme’ (IEP) that was rolled out across the penal estate in the mid-1990s. Central to the modernization and managerialism of the Prison Service, the IEP scheme places prisoners under constant monitoring. As the name of the scheme suggests, individuals are rewarded with ‘privileges’ for good behavior, and punished by their removal for poor. All new entrants are placed on ‘standard’ regime. After a certain period of time has elapsed they may be moved up to ‘enhanced’ or down to ‘basic’. The scheme operates in all establishments, yet there is considerable variety in its implementation, Some prisons, for example, allow in-cell televisions for everyone on standard (for a fee), while others provide such ‘luxuries’ only for those on ‘enhanced’ status. Moreover, certain restricted inmates, such as those on Rule 45 – who are mainly sex offenders – are often allowed television sets to keep them occupied rather than as a reward. This pragmatic and localized aspect of prison governance is missing from most of the handbooks and points to the need for further empirical investigation of governance in practice. The IEP determines all prisoners’ access to certain goods and services above and beyond their basic ‘rights’ (see for example, PRT 2002, 119-122). Demonstrating its centrality to prison life, it is described in each handbook in considerable detail. According to the PRT Prisoner information booklet, it has fives aims: • • • • •

that privileges should be earned by prisoners through good behavior and performance and can be taken away if you fail to maintain acceptable standards; to encourage responsible behavior; to encourage hard work and other constructive activity; to encourage you to progress through the prison system; and to create a more disciplined, better controlled and safer environment for prisoners and staff (PRT 2002, 119).

The scheme, like most methods of governance, has a normative as well as an instrumental set of goals. Certain effects, like ‘responsible behavior’ and ‘constructive activity’ appear as unquestionably desirable, while ‘progress through the prison system’ and most obviously of all a ‘safer environment’ are more closely tied to prison management or governance needs, rather than to any lofty sentiment of personal transformation. By rewarding the good and punishing the bad, it is implied that prisoners will internalize appropriate behavior. Of course, given that prisoners do not control their designation in the scheme, but rather are continually monitored, the extent to which they internalize rather than display obedience is unclear.

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The booklets, in both England and Wales, and in the US federal system, gesture towards reciprocal power sharing in statements about how prisoners and staff should interact. Unlike traditional sociological studies that represent inmates and guards pitted against one another (Sykes 1958; DiIulio 1987), many of the wardens’ messages depict an environment based on respect and a free exchange of ideas. The Warden at FCI Seagoville, for example, explains that ‘only through mutual respect, communication and cooperation can we ensure the institution operates for the positive benefit and to the advantage of all inmates’. In England and Wales this relationship is institutionally embedded in the ‘personal officer’ scheme. Represented as ‘someone to turn to for help or advice’ (PRT 2002, 107) a personal officer is allocated to each and every inmate in England and Wales, both to offer them help and to monitor their progress in the IEP. Personal officers, in other words, have a duty of care and control. Both prison systems suggest in their manuals that a certain level of reciprocity exists. Neither, in other words, admits to governing through total control. Prisoners, all the handbooks imply, are active participants. They are engaging, on some level, in a social contract, in which trust and respect are goals worthy of themselves. The implications of this view are worth teasing out, both in terms of the commonalities between the systems, and in terms of their differences. For a start, of course, the US federal prison system does, on numerous occasions, offer examples of total control, in ‘control units’ and, most explicitly in the supermaximum secure ADX Florence, where prisoners are on continual lock down in solitary for years at a time. Increasingly, England and Wales as well has resorted to ‘control units’ for convicted and suspected terrorists, where the capacity for choice and agency is severely constrained. More generally, the logic of prisoner engagement appears somewhat differently in the handbooks. Thus, when the warden of FCI FCI Talladega (2001, 1) in Alabama intones, ‘Neither I nor my staff believe that we can coerce you to change’, he is not suggesting that the prisoners have a (free) choice, but rather that it is the prisoner’s own responsibility to change himself. Further on, in that booklet, the disciplinary code reminds the prisoner what will happen if he refuses to cooperate. Though such disciplinary measures exist in England and Wales, the handbooks rarely mention them. Instead, far more attention is spent on ‘softer’ mechanisms for ensuring obedience. Prisoners are governed not only by the IEP program, but also by a range of ‘compacts’ that cover a variety of behavior from pledges not to misbehave to agreements to learn and take treatment options seriously. Thus the prisoner information handbook (PRT 2002, 60) specifies that ‘Entry into a voluntary drug testing programme or VTU will depend on you signing a compact. The compact will set out a number of requirements you must abide by, the procedures to be followed and the action likely to be taken’. In lieu of simple institutional self-interest – although there is some of that as well – prison administrators in both countries evidently try to co-opt the prisoners into regulating their own behavior. Both sets of manuals describe provisions for courses and treatment that were previously central to the rehabilitative model:

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i.e., in psychology, work and education and suggest that is in the prisoners’ own self-interest to be law abiding and obedient. Not only will changes individuals make to their behavior and value system help them to avoid punishment but, in a shift that resonates with much of the Foucauldian literature on governmentality acceptance of the need to reform will assist them in constructing a new, more orderly, obedient and better sense of self (Foucault 1991; Dean 1996; Rose 1989, 2000). Again, however, profound differences between the availability and centrality of treatment options exist between the US and England and Wales. Formal counseling and psychology services in most federal establishments have been dramatically cut since the demise of the rehabilitative ideal and, to a large extent, have been replaced by so-called ‘self-help’ courses run by inmates or by prison officers known as ‘correctional counselors’. Prison psychologists instead, are employed in devising and applying risk-needs assessment tools, concentrating on security rather than reform. The counseling that remains, particularly that offered at women’s institutions like the Federal Medical Centre (FMC) Carswell seek to address issues of ‘self-esteem’. More vaguely, at FCI Tallahassee in Florida (2000), ‘Unit Counselors and other staff provide a variety of other personal growth groups for inmates working towards self improvement and better coping skills’ while prisoners at FCI Talladega are informed most obliquely of all that they are ‘strongly encouraged to take advantage of any program that can lead you to a more complete understanding of yourself and your surrounding environment’ (2001, 1). In contrast, in recent years, English prisons have witnessed a resurgence in treatment programs, as prison psychologists and other ‘helping professionals’ have clawed back some of their previous status and role in prison management (Towl 2005). Drug treatment (CARAT), Anger-Management and ‘offending behavior’ programs are offered in most prisons, in addition to work and education, and are mentioned in the handbook. As in the US, however, much of the personal transformation required of the prisoner is left up to the individual, working with his or her personal officer and through the mechanism of ‘sentence planning’. Sentence planning, the information booklet explains, focuses on areas of risk, such as you coming back to prison, or committing certain types of offence, and on risk to yourself. You will be shown the print-out of a computer programme which indicates the statistical risk in certain areas. Sentence planning also makes sure that the best use is made of your time in custody. A sentence plan will be drawn up with you that will assess your needs and set targets for you to try to achieve. It is hoped that your sentence plan will enable you to tackle your offending behaviour, and give you experience of work, training and education, to help prepare you for release.

Recasting risk as need (and vice versa), sentence planning elides paternalist care with custodial aims and security concerns, suggesting that differences between the rhetoric of both systems may be less significant in terms of governance and control than they first appear.

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Packaging rehabilitation as a matter self-help or self-esteem as occurs in the US, or relabelling the reasons people may be prone to reoffend as identifiable risks that can be plugged into some kind of sentence plan as in England, disregards broader (financial, social, race or gender-based) problems ex-prisoners may encounter in any bid to avoid re-offending (Maruna 2001; Petersilia 2003). In those institutions like FCI Waseca and FCI Yazoo City, where the entire enterprise of work and education have been re-labeled under the title of ‘self-improvement’ it also disguises the utility of many programs in maintaining institutional order and in contributing real economic benefits. Presenting personal transformation in this way also overlooks the manner in which the fundamental qualities of liberty and freedom of choice that are necessary for meaningful individual change and development are deeply compromised by imprisonment. The power of prison officials is always underlined by their monopoly on force and the power to punish; ‘Those who refuse to become responsible, to govern themselves ethically’, as Nikolas Rose observes (2000, 202), ‘have also refused the offer to become members of our moral community. Hence for them, harsh measures are entirely appropriate’. When the diffuse mode of governance encouraged by the language of ‘responsibilization’ fails, in other words, the true might of the prison’s rigorous and punitive ‘moral economy’ becomes apparent. This aspect of prison life – the emphasis on security – is predictably enough, emphasized most strongly in the US publications. Though all of the handbooks usually remind prisoners of the limits to their freedom by peppering the text with warnings and admonitions, the English ones present a far more compassionate and paternalistic style of governance. Instead, the federal handbooks seek to control all forms of inmate behavior from the mundane to the serious. In all establishments, the values of prudence, care and docility are encouraged. At Federal Prison Camp (FPC), Lompoc in California, for instance, inmates are warned that ‘Smoking, whistling and boisterous conduct are not permitted in the dining hall’ (Inmate Handbook, January 2001, 18). Similarly, at G-Unit of FCI El Reno in Oaklahoma, ‘Loud voices, horseplay, etc., shall not be tolerated and is [sic] not permitted in the unit’ (Inmate Handbook, 2000, section 4).10 Some manuals are more explicit about the limits to an inmate’s freedom. The Warden of FCI Miami, for example, first welcomes incoming prisoners in his introduction by promising them ‘a wide variety of educational and self improvement opportunities’. He then goes on to remind the new arrival that, ‘what you gain during your stay here will depend largely on you’. They must be self-disciplined, for though, ‘Staff will make every effort to meet your basic needs … you, on the other hand, will be expected to 10  Though it may appear self-evident that penal institutions would not condone the kinds of physical behavior that might be considered ‘boisterous’ or ‘horseplay’, both are a notable choice of word, since they are usually attributed to children rather than adults. Likewise, the ban on whistling seems driven by values from an earlier period, unless the kind of whistling that is of concern is somehow provocative to others, such as wolfwhistling at female staff.

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provide good work habits and a positive attitude’. Lastly, prisoners are reminded that ‘Violations of institution rules and/or regulations will not be tolerated’ (FCI Miami, 2) since all inmates are subject to formal disciplinary proceedings. It is in this final area that the sovereign power of the federal prison (Butler 2004) is unmasked as each US handbook includes a detailed ‘Prohibited Acts and Disciplinary Severity Scale’ which provide instead a detailed list dividing offenses and sanctions into greatest severity, high severity, moderate severity and low moderate severity derived from the Program Statement 5270.07 on Inmate Discipline and Special Housing. According to this list, punishments for the crime of ‘killing’ range from denial or delay of parole, while someone found guilty of ‘interference of a staff member in performance of duties’ so long as that interference is of a ‘low moderate nature’ may be subject only to a warning or reprimand. What this catalog makes clear is that those behaviors which are elsewhere presented in the handbooks as personal problems that prisoners must manage for their own good are, in fact, subject to strictly graded punishments. Inappropriate appearance, for example, which I shall discuss in more detail below, is an offense of moderate severity. Likewise, prisoners found to have contravened prison rule 330, or ‘being unsanitary, failing to keep one’s person and one’s quarters in accordance with posted standards’ may receive any one of a number of sanctions that range from being placed on disciplinary segregation to losing his or her job. In contrast, the English handbooks, even in high security prisons, spend little time on the matter of discipline and punishment, mentioning only that prisoners will face adjudication if they ‘fail to comply to the rules and regulations of the Prison’ or ‘commit an offence against discipline’ (HMP/YOI Hollesely Bay, ‘Induction Briefing for New Receptions’, 4). Instead, it seems, the handbooks from England and Wales seek to assert more of a normative framework for maintaining order, stressing in particular institutional concerns about ‘race relations’ and ‘bullying’. Indeed, the ‘Prison Service’s commitment to Racial Equality’ is the first piece of administration that is mentioned in each handbook. According to this policy, which must also be displayed on notice boards throughout penal establishments, the prison service recognizes and ‘will challenge as completely unacceptable all and any improper discrimination on the basis of color, race, nationality, ethnic or national origin or religion’. The handbooks vary in the disciplinary issues they raise. HMP/YOI Holloway, the largest woman’s prison in the country, for example, spends considerable time on issues of the women’s appearance and, as is often the case in women’s prisons, their intimate relationships with one another. Their ‘Decency Policy’ reads, in part: Prisons are a public place; as such the behaviour that prisoners demonstrate should mirror what is acceptable within the community. For example it would be acceptable for prisoners to hold hands or offer a comforting embrace to someone who is distressed … It is not acceptable for prisoners to display behaviour that may be seen as offensive to a third party, this includes anyone working within the prison or other prisoners. For example, kissing, passionate embrace or fondling

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each other, anywhere in the prison, this includes in cells. If you are caught doing any of these you will be asked to stop and an entry will be made into your wing file to say that you have been warned. If you refuse to stop you will be placed on report.

Such concern over the risks posed by women’s sexuality can also be found in the American handbooks (Bosworth 2007; see also Chan and Rigakos 2002). Each articulation of the power of the prison paradoxically undermines and simultaneously reinforces the logic that prisoners act rationally, make their own choices and are thus fully responsible for their actions. Whereas the threat of sanctions in the US handbooks makes it all the more necessary for inmates to monitor their behavior while simultaneously reminding them that they are constantly under review, the welfarist paternalism of the English examples renders the prisoners less than fully competent adults. There is, in other words a tension. Though prisons ostensibly aspire to create an autonomous responsible subject, rather than a dependent one, the promise of punishment on the one hand, and the rhetoric of care on the other, suggest that this project will only ever be, at best, partially accomplished 4. Neo-liberalism There has long been a tendency in prison studies and the sociology of punishment to compare the United States and the UK. Yet, how useful, and accurate is this tendency? Are Britain and America really walking in lockstep to the same drum beat? For a start, of course, it is necessary to be considerably more specific and precise about which penal systems are under discussion. The US after all, contains within it a number of different legal jurisdictions operating simultaneously at the local, state and federal level (Barker 2005). Cultural and regional differences among these, as well as distinctions among the populations they process makes nonsense of any overarching ‘American’ system. Likewise, Britain is split into three legal jurisdictions: Scotland, Northern Ireland and England and Wales. Yet, even if we are more specific about which of the jurisdictions we are comparing – in the case of this chapter, the US Federal prison system with the public sector prison system of England and Wales – we are still left with two systems that may, differ considerably. Despite claims by figures such as David Garland (2001), Loic Wacquant (2001) and Michael Cavadino and Paul Dignan (2005) that the US and England and Wales are both shaped by the ideals and rhetoric of neo-liberalism, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the US may simply be an extreme outlier in criminal justice matters (Simon 2007). Certainly, the main measure of penality that is proffered by most academics – the imprisonment rate – seems skewed so dramatically that it is unclear how Britain is ‘like’ the US, other than that it incarcerates the most people per capita in Europe. Yet, even with this level of

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punitiveness, England and Wales pales besides almost any state in the US and particularly against its national rate. Thus, while criminologists in both places speak of the primacy of ‘popular punitivism’ (Bottoms 1995; Garland 2001), the base-line, or the limits of accceptability are quite different. In part, reasons for the extent and nature of punitive sentiment rest on quite practical legislative differences. In the US while prisoners are, to some extent, protected by the Constitution, not only are certain constitutional rights (like privacy) abrogated by a custodial sentence, but, more importantly, federal judges, are, for the most part, loath to intervene, until the situation behind bars has become particularly parlous. Even as an increasing number of state correctional systems have been placed under judicial oversight, such intervention only occurs following significant problems. In California, for example, it was found that the state killed one inmate per day due to medical negligence, before the federal government stepped in. In any case, legislation passed under President Clinton, like the PLRA 1996 and the Omnibus Crime Control Act 1994, dramatically reduced federal prisoner access to the courts, education and leisure activities. In contrast, the 1998 Human Rights Act in Britain, and the 1999 Prison Rules have shored up a rights-based discourse in the UK which both practically and symbolically offers English prisoners more robust safeguards. So, too, the official endorsement by the Prison Service of the ‘Decency Agenda’ and an anti-racism policy indicate a desire to raise the standard of care across the penal system. This is not to assert that English prisons are without problems. Overcrowding is, for instance, straining all aspects of the carceral system, with rising suicide rates to prove it. Likewise, in 2008 the public sector prisons experienced industrial action from their staff for the first time in over two decades. What is more important to consider, for this chapter, however, are the reasons for and the effect of the welfare rhetoric in the Prisoner Information booklets as compared to the more typical neo-liberal individualism of the federal handbooks. Is the apparent ongoing commitment to a certain discourse of care and rights at odds with neo-liberal governance, or merely a different manifestation of it? In her work on Canada, Kelly Hannah-Moffat has demonstrated how current classification tools and treatment redefine certain ‘needs’ as ‘criminogenic’ and thus as indicative of ‘risk’ (Hannah-Moffat 2005; Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2006). Rather than there being a welfare/risk binary, in other words, she identifies a continuum, in which welfare becomes absorbed into a particular kind of neoliberal governance. In Canada, she argues, this subtle shift enables the ‘logic of risk’ and all the strict governance of populations that entails, to have currency in a cultural climate which opposes the ‘punitive, over-the-top American penal politics’ (Maurotto and Hannah-Moffat 2006, 451). There is much evidence that a similar dynamic is present in England. While there are certain populations for whom actuarial tools are used without question – such as those subject to anti-terrorism legislation, or the increasing number being held for indefinite terms under IPP sentencing – for the most part, recent policy

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makers have remained influenced by Labour’s 1997 rallying cry, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. Though seemingly more benign, as in Moffat’s analysis of Canada, the penal welfarism displayed in the English prison manuals may neither guard against, nor necessarily have a significantly different effect from the more brutal neo-liberal approach embodied by the American handbooks. Care and paternalism may simply make more palatable that which remains a relationship of considerable inequality and suffering. 5. Conclusion: Governing through care and control Both sets of handbooks appear committed to changing prisoners for the better. Referring to goals, compacts, sentence plans, values and rights, these conveniently disguise the particularity of prisons, placing them instead on par with hospitals, schools or any private enterprise. They also mask the near-limitless sovereign power underpinning penal practice. Holding inmates responsible for all that may happen to them is, at best, disingenuous and at worst, symptomatic of a belief system in which individuals deemed outside the norm are found unworthy of sympathy and become expendable. This is the process labeled by Garland (2001) as a ‘criminology of the other’ in which greater sanctions are used with ease against entire communities who have been found lacking and judged to be dangerous. What these handbooks suggest is that this punitive shift both occurs through and is upheld by the seemingly objective and banal language of managerialism as well as by the more sympathetic ideals of welfare. By presenting the goals of the institution as in the interest of those governed by them they effectively denigrate alternative view points and behavior. So, too, through everyday language and beliefs they render uncontroversial practices and institutions that should concern us all. References Bosworth, M. 2007, ‘Creating the Responsible Prisoner: Federal Admission and Orientation Packs’, Punishment and Society, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 67-85. Bosworth, M. 2002, The U.S. Federal Prison System, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Butler, J. 2004, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, London. Chan, W. and Rigakos, G. 2002, ‘Gender, Risk and Crime’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 743-761. Dean, M. 1996, ‘Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority’, in Foucault and Political Reason, A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds), Chicago University Press, Chicago. DiIulio, J. 1987, Governing Prisons, The Free Press, New York. Federal Bureau of Prison 2001, Security Designation and Custody Classification Manual, PS5100.07 <www.bop.gov>.

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Federal Bureau of Prisons 2004, Inmate Discipline and Special Housing, Program Statement 5270.07 <www.bop.gov>. Federal Bureau of Prison 2003, Admission and Orientation Program, PS5290.14 <www.bop.gov>. Federal Bureau of Prison 1997, Management of Female Offenders, PS5200.01 <www.bop.gov>. Feeley, M. and Simon, J. 1994, ‘Actuarial Justice: The Emerging New Criminal Law’, in The Future of Criminology, D. Nelken (ed.), Sage Publications, London, pp. 173-201. Foucault, M. 1979, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin, London. Foucault, M. 1991, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Garland, D. 1996, ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society’, The British Journal of Criminology, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 445-471. Garland, D. 1997, ‘Governmentality and the Problem of Crime: Foucault, Criminology, Sociology’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 173-214. Garland, D. 2001, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Oxford University Press, New York. Hannah-Moffat, K. 1999, ‘Moral Agent or Actuarial Subject: Risk and Canadian Women’s Imprisonment’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 71-94. Hannah-Moffat, K. 2004, ‘Gendering Risk at What Cost: Negotiations of Gender and Risk in Canadian Women’s Prisons’, Feminism & Psychology, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 243-249. Hannah-Moffat, K. 2005, ‘Criminogenic Needs and the Transformative Risk Subject: Hybridizations of Risk/Need in Penality’, Punishment and Society, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 29-51. HMP Hollesely Bay (nd) CARAT Team Information Booklet, HMP Holleseley Bay, Woodbridge. HMP Hollesely Bay (nd) Information Booklet for New Prisoners, HMP Holleseley Bay, Woodbridge. HMP Holloway (nd) Your Guide to the First Night Centre and Induction Process, HMP Holloway, London. HMP/YOI Holloway (nd) HMP/YOI Holloway Decency Policy, HMP Holloway, London. HMP Wakefield. (nd) Induction Booklet, HMP Wakefield. Maruna, S. 2001, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts reform and Rebuild their lives, American Pyschological Association. Newburn, T. 2002, ‘Atlantic crossings: “Policy transfer” and crime control in the USA and Britain’, Punishment & Society, vol. 4, pp. 165-194. Newburn, T. and Jones, T. 2005, ‘Symbolic politics and penal populism: The long shadow of Willie Horton’, Crime, Media, Culture, vol. 1, pp. 72-87.

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O’Malley, P. 1992, ‘Risk, Power and Crime Prevention’, Economy and Society, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 252-275. O’Malley, P. 1996, ‘Risk and Responsibility’, in Foucault and Political Reason, A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds), UCL Press, London, pp. 189-208. O’Malley, P. 1999, ‘Volatile and Contradictory Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 175-196. O’Malley, P. 2002, ‘Globalizing Risk? Distinguishing Styles of “neo-liberal” criminal justice in Australia and the USA’, Criminal Justice, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 205-222. O’Malley, P. 2004, ‘The Uncertain Promise of Risk’, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 323-343. Petersilia, J. 2003, When Prisoners come home, Oxford University Press, New York. Pratt, J. 2007, Penal Populism, Routledge, London. Prison Reform Trust 2003, Prisoners’ Information Book: Women Prisoners and Young Offenders, Prison Reform Trust, London. Rose, N. 2000, ‘Government and Control’, in Criminology and Social Theory, D. Garland and R. Sparks (eds), Clarendon Press, Oxford. Rose, N. and Miller, P. 1992, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 172-205. Santos, M. 2004, About Prison, Wadsworth, Belmont, CA. Simon, J. 1997, ‘Governing through Crime’, in The Crime Conundrum: Essays on Criminal Justice, L. Friedman and G. Fisher (eds), Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Simon, J. 2007, Governing through Crime, New York University Press, New York. Sparks, R. 1998, ‘States of Insecurity: Punishment, populism and contemporary political culture’, in The Use of Punishment, S. McConville (ed.) (2003), Willan, Collumpton, pp. 149-174. Sparks, R. 2000, ‘Perspectives on risk and penal politics’, in Crime, risk and insecurity: Law and order in everyday life and political discourse, T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Routledge, New York. Sykes, G. 1958, The society of Captives, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Tonry, M. (ed.), 2007, Crime, Punishment, and Politics in Comparative Perspective, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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Chapter 11

Self-Governance through the Committees in the Open Method of Co-ordination: The Cases of Employment and Social Inclusion Caroline de la Porte, David Natali and Philippe Pochet

1. Introduction Scholars in comparative welfare studies agree that the various EU level social policy instruments (legislation, financial support instruments, the European level social dialogue and – our concern here – the Open Method of Coordination, OMC) together have a considerable impact on Member States. This has raised questions about the mechanisms by which the different modes of governance in EU social policy function, and how they can and do influence Member States. Recently there has been considerable interest in how the OMC – a soft and non-binding mode of governance – operates and how it influences Member States. The question about how and the extent to which the key actors in the OMC – civil servants involved in OMC committees – shape common European policy objectives and thereby constitute a ‘self-governing entity’ has been addressed indirectly in various national case studies (Büchs 2007; Zeitlin and Pochet 2005; Linsemann et al. 2007) and directly in analyses of the committees themselves (Jacobsson and Vifell 2003; Jacobsson and Vifell 2007; de la Porte and Nanz 2004). Recent comparative research has shown that among national civil servants in employment and social affairs ministries, there is higher support for the OMC and the Lisbon agenda, which is not binding, than there is for legislation, which has a more direct impact on social policy (Kvist and Saari 2007). This may be because the OMC is the most appropriate way for Member States to discuss reform challenges in the social policy area, while retaining decision-making power. This contrasts with case-law, which creeps in on Member State sovereignty, where, recently, the effects have been considerable in the area of health policy (Ferrera 2003). Exactly how decisions are made in the committees and which factors may influence those decisions are still   The research undertaken for this chapter has been funded by INTUNE (Integrated and United: A quest for citizenship in an ‘ever closer Europe’) an integrated project funded by the Sixth framework programme of the European Union (<www.intune.it>).

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debatable. This chapter seeks to address these issues and to determine the extent to which the OMC committees, ultimately, constitute self-governance entities, which are the units where socialization (and deliberation) leads to constructive policy debates and decisions. The OMC – a soft policy coordination mechanism – first emerged in the area of employment in 1997, and is now also applied to other areas, including social inclusion and pensions, as well as health and long-term care. In each area to which it is applied it consists, first, of reform objectives defined for all Member States at the EU level (the European Council); second, the implementation of those objectives by Member States (reflected in national reports); third, peer review and assessment of progress at the EU-level (Commission-Council). This policy cycle – defining common EU objectives, national reporting and EU level assessment – is iterative. It is the OMC’s iterative character which has led to analyses of the OMC according to its ‘learning’ potential (Trubek and Mosher 2003), where civil servants ‘learn’ by regularly discussing policy reform across the EU through their participation in the EU committees. Indeed, although the OMC is not binding, it is expected that, through social learning and socialization, it will incrementally change perceptions of policy problems and the identification of alternative policy solutions among key policy actors (the civil servants involved in the committees). This should thereafter lead to policy change, where civil servants contribute, either directly or indirectly, to transposing ideas for policy reform in their domestic contexts (de la Porte and Pochet 2004). This chapter does not focus on the policy promoted through employment and social inclusion discourses of the OMC, as this has been discussed and analysed elsewhere (Büchs 2006; de la Porte 2007, 2008; Kvist and Saari 2007; Zeitlin and Pochet 2005). This contribution instead focuses on an element which has been understudied in the literature on the OMC – OMC committees and the extent to which they constitute self-governing entities. How socialization, deliberation and negotiation take place in these committees has been the object of some analyses (Jacobsson and Vifell 2003, 2007). Jacobsson and Vifell argue that OMC committees are deliberative fora, akin to ‘comitology’ committees (Joerges 2001), where the delegates appointed to the committees attempt to find solutions on the basis of their status as scientists. But the extent to which political priorities of governments (civil servants, after all, represent their governments in the OMC), national identities and other factors play a role in OMC committees is still contested. We seek to cast light upon the conditions that could favor constructive socialization (i.e. who are the members of the OMC committees and what is their propensity to work together), and how regular participation (and socialization) in an expert group leads to a common sense of identity (that includes the development of common policy proposals or solutions). To determine whether and if so, how, self-governance takes place in the committees, we analyse the features of the participants in the committees and the type of socialization that takes place within the committees. In other words, we focus on two research questions: What are the main characteristics of the members in the EU OMC committees? And, what are

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the means of socialization and self-governance in the EU OMC committees under examination? In terms of self-governance, the main self-governing units under examination are treaty-based committees in the area of social policy – the Employment Committee (EMCO) and the Social Protection Committee (SPC). The main members of the committees are national civil servants (two per member state). The European Commission also appoints two members to each Committee and also provides the secretarial services for the Committees. However, the Commission does not have any agenda-setting power, since it is a member state representative that has the role of chair in each of the committees. The type of self-governance we are interested in refers to the capacity of the members of the EMCO and the SPC to self-govern – that is to develop a common perception of policy problems and to agree on common policy objectives – in the areas of employment and social protection policy, respectively. What characterizes self-governance is the capacity of the members of the committee to develop an autonomous intra-committee policy dialogue and policy vision, independently of their primary professional allegiance (in this case a member state or the Commission). This chapter is organized as follows: first, we present a brief literature review about socialization, particularly in EU institutions and working groups. Secondly, we discuss the structure of the EU employment and social policy committees and how they are connected in the overall vertical governance structure in EU social policy. Third, we analyse the features of the members of the committees and discuss how they are related to socialization and the capacity to self-govern. Fourth, we discuss socialization within the committees and vertical inter-group coordination and how these impact policy development. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the self-governing capacity of the committees. 2. Literature review Different types of literature address issues of self-governance by experts, in particular the literature on socialization and social learning, both directly related to the sociological vein of institutionalism (Hall and Taylor 1996). In sociology, the concept of socialization refers to the process by which an individual becomes part of a group by integrating its formal and informal rules, norms, values and modes of actions. In professional life, individuals may have a core identity-conferring job and various other secondary groups that each have a partial identity-conferring function. This may be variably compatible with their core professional function (and identity) (Boudon et al. 1993, 208; Dubar 1995, 102). Other factors that may have an important influence on professional identities are earlier socialization (family, school, religion) including political socialization, understood here   The chair to the EMCO and SPC is appointed for a two-year period, elected by members of the committee.

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broadly as the core belief structure obtained from ideological perspectives on how to organize society (Langton 1969). In EU studies, where working groups and committees are mostly the groups of secondary professional affiliation where individuals from member states participate, a core question is the extent to which national interests predominate (intergovernmentalism) and the extent to which the development of a European solution (neo-functionalism) develops. How does (full or partial) integration in an EU institution or group affect (change) the behavior (and strategy) of an individual and of the group? Abundant sociological research has shown that socialization in a particular professional setting contributes to the development of a (partial) group identity that enhances the likelihood of self-governance in the sense that it leads to the development of common norms and perceptions of policy problems. The process of identification with the secondary group strengthens over time (Dubar 1995). Marsh and Olsen (1989) identify two logics of decision-making in professional environments – a softer one, aimed at finding ‘appropriate’ solutions (associated with sociological institutionalism) and another rational logic, aimed at maximizing profit or power, operating according to a logic of ‘consequentialism’ (rational institutionalism). In EU politics, different theoretical approaches would predict different degrees of socialization effects as a result of participation in an EU group. Intergovernmentalists (who would in general not be sympathetic to the sociological institutionalist approach and learning) would claim that national interests would persevere and determine the position and strategy of participants in an intergovernmental working group. In other words, they would predict that the national positions would prevent the development of a common identity and minimize the common identification of problems and solutions. Socialization would essentially be defensive in nature, and would not be oriented towards the development of common solutions. Neo-functionalists would claim that the European (or supranational) identity and policy vision would progressively be acquired among members of a group through socialization and social learning. This approach would therefore assume that members of the expert groups seek to develop a common understanding of policy problems and to find common solutions to those problems. Socialization would take place according to a higher degree of initial trust where conditions would be created for the participants in the process to develop, a) a common perception of policy problems; and b) common solutions. The existing empirical findings show that neither approach can entirely explain socialization, identity formation and decision-making in European groups. Here a brief synthesis of the state-of-the-art about socialization in European committees and working groups is made to locate our own research. Intuitively, the European institution where the development of such a supranational identity is the most likely to materialize is the European Commission that has the exclusive legislative right of initiative as well as considerable power in the development of common policy discourses in areas where the legislative competence of the European Union

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is weak, such as those where the Open Method of Co-ordination is used. The officials in the European Commission exercise their function as ‘guardians of the Treaty’ full-time. In other words, the European Commission is their primary source or professional allegiance. In practice, they work in (increasingly specialized) Directorate Generals (akin to national ministries), and in addition to the legislative right of initiative, they play a considerable role in policy development (Hooghe 2001). In the OMC, the Commission develops proposals for policy objectives (which are then discussed within the OMC committees) and organizes peer review and evaluation. According to theories of socialization and neo-functionalism, officials in the European Commission would be likely to develop strong EU identities in their professional activity and to act in a way that will consistently enhance their power and also further deepen European Integration. Some empirical work indicates that in many policy fields, this is the dominant logic of action in the European Commission (collectively). Some authors would argue that this mainly takes place according to rationalistic interest oriented behavior rather than sociological learning (Garrett and Weingast 1993; Bauer 2002; Pollack 1997, 2003; Talberg 2002; de la Porte 2008). Other findings contest this rationalistic interpretation of the socialization patterns in the European Commission (Hooghe 2001, 2005). In her in-depth case study, Hooghe (2001, 81) has found that only half of the top officials in the European Commission support further development of European Integration in their area; this means that the strategy and means of socialization among Commission officials is more complex and nuanced and is influenced by multiple factors. On the basis of her empirical work, she argues that the predominant sources of influence on the Commission officials’ position towards European Integration are previous career patterns and political socialization as well as national networks and national economic interests. In essence, the main finding is that ‘top officials’ preferences for a supranational or intergovernmental European Union are primarily shaped by outside influence – not inside the Commission’. Only one ‘supranational’ indicator – ‘positional-power’ influence (i.e. the possibility for Commission officials to advance in their careers) – plays a role in determining the officials’ positions and strategies. Furthermore, compared to the other socialization indicators, it has comparatively weaker explanatory power (Hooghe 2001, 116). But what about socialization and identify formation in the Council of Ministers (and its different policy specific formations) and its working groups and committees (levels C1 and C2 in Figure 11.1), which is what we are interested in here? Contrasting with the European Commission, the Council (and each of its working groups) is above all intergovernmental. As mentioned above, the OMC committees with which we are concerned here are predominantly intergovernmental committees. Starting from the bottom-up, the operation of the Council includes a ‘bureaucratic level’, made up of various issue-specific working groups. In the academic literature on the role and power of Council working groups, findings, mostly qualitative, indicate that decisions on EU legislation and policies (70 to

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80 percent) are taken through a consensual approach in the issue area Council formations and their respective working groups (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 1997; Beyers 2005, 905; Sherrington 2000). But what are the characteristics of the individual members of the group that could favor this socialization? Are there specific socialization patterns in expert groups concerned with the area of social policy? If a national position is systematically defended (the Intergovernmental explanation), then decisions on common objectives would be almost impossible to reach. It is imperative to analyse and take account of the role of socialization in the development of common positions (whether on legislation, policy or discourse). An important factor that facilitates socialization is the fact that there are few formal rules that shape Council officials’ role conceptions. Furthermore, there are no formal rules that would require member state representatives to restrict their role to defending national interests or acting exclusively in the view of the Community common good (Beyers 2005, 905-906). In addition, the officials that are involved in Council deliberations are often sector specific specialists with technical and/ or policy expertise, an important distinction from traditional career diplomats (Beyers 2005, 907). Similar to the findings by Hooghe (2001, 2005), Beyers finds that domestic career and political socialization as well as involvement in various governmental and non-governmental activities in their job influences the type of socialization and role playing that takes place in Council working groups and ministerial meetings. Expertise and knowledge about a policy problem (in a Member State) among national experts favors the adoption of supranational role conceptions and acts as fertile ground for the development of European policies (Beyers 2005, 899). But how does socialization take place within the Committees under scrutiny? The Committees, like the Council working groups, are mainly intergovernmental. To provide some answers to this question, the next section presents the features of the committee members and discusses how these features are related to socialization, identity development and self-governance. In particular, it focuses on the relative importance of national and European professional and personal identities among the members of the group. It also explores the type of socialization that takes place in the committees, to cast some light upon the processes of deliberation and decision-making in the committees. This analysis thus provides answers to questions about OMC committee (self-) governance, which have up to now remained rather opaque (with some exceptions, see Jacobsson and Vifell 2003). 3. A closer look at the structure of EU employment social policy governance and methodology The Lisbon strategy, first defined at the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, is an economic and employment growth agenda that also includes anti-poverty, environmental, research and innovation aims. Each year, the heads of state and government re-define these objectives for the EU at the annual ‘Spring Summit’

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of the European Council (level A in Figure 11.1) that takes place in March every year. In this way, the agenda is mainly defined from the top-down, on the basis of their political priorities. But the Lisbon agenda is also defined through bottomup policy, expertocratic and technocratic work by the members of the Council working groups and committees (levels B to D in Figure 11.1) combine policyoriented, expertocratic and technocratic governance (Jacobsson and Vifell 2003). The policy reform role is developed by identifying key objectives to guide member states’ reforms; the expertocratic role is developed by referring to policybased expert solutions in discussions of paths for reform; the technocractic role is developed by proposing technical (for example statistics-based) solutions to political or policy problems and challenges. The issue-specific Council formations (level B) meet formally several times a year to take decisions on the main issues, but there are also an increasing number of Informal meetings of the Council formations. Since the mid-1990s, the role of the informal council has changed from a loose ideational forum to a policy-setting forum (de la Porte and Adao e Silva 2007). The issue-specific Council formations decide upon the issues that have been settled, proposed or framed within the Informal formations of the Council. But often it is at an even lower level that new issues are put forward – the Council working groups (level C1 in Figure 11.1) or the committee level (level C2 in Figure 11.1). Our analysis focuses mainly on the socialization patterns of the Employment and Social Protection Committees (level C2), which will enable us to determine the extent to which these committees are ‘self-governing’. Both committees have been established to understand policy problems and to develop common solutions to respond to them (through the Open Method of Co-ordination), but without transferring sovereignty or legislative power to the European level. The Employment and Social Protection Committees, while having specific mandates and manoeuvring differently in their respective policy areas, have comparable characteristics, functions and operational mechanisms. Both committees have been established for the (European level) execution of the Open Method of Coordination. The Employment Committee, established in 1997, works to implement the European Employment Strategy, that endeavours to increase the quantity and quality of jobs in the Union and to ensure conditions for being able to combine family and working life (see de la Porte, 2002; Goetschy 2003; Trubek and Mosher 2003; Zeitlin 2005 for more details on the policy aims under the EES). The Social   The Lisbon Strategy is the only issue on the agenda at this summit. The Spring Summit contrasts with the regular six-monthly meetings of the European Council that have a broad agenda, where the most politically salient issues vary.   As mentioned above, the questionnaires which we administered to EU social policy experts include members of the Council’s Social Questionsuestion Working Party (who discuss all social policy issues on the EU agenda, not only those deriving from the OMC). Eleven of the 13 members of this working party are also alternate members of the OMC committees under examination. Thus, it is not the main focus of the analytical discussion.

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Protection Committee, established in 2000, works to implement the Open Method of Coordination in Social Protection that includes anti-poverty and social inclusion policies (Ferrera et al. 2002), economically and socially sustainable pensions policies (de la Porte and Pochet 2002; Pochet and Natali 2005) and policies for the reform of health care systems. The committees meet approximately 10 to 12 times per year (most often in Brussels) and their members maintain regular informal communication via telephone and e-mail. As discussed above, the committees play an important role upwards in setting or specifying the policy agenda in employment and social protection policy. Downwards, the member state delegates in the Committees should ensure integration of the objectives defined through the OMC in Member States (national, regional and local levels of government) (see Zeitlin and Pochet 2005; Linsemann et al. 2007; Büchs 2007 for case studies about integration in domestic contexts). The employment and social protection committees also mandate the development of statistical indicators (to support the policy objectives in each area) to (subordinate) indicators working groups. These are, respectively, the Employment Indicators’ Working Group and the Social Protection Indicators’ Working Group (Level D in Figure 11.1). The work of the indicators’ working groups is predominantly technical in nature, where the aim is to find the most appropriate indicators. Furthermore, the membership has been relatively stable, building trust among the members that are present (Interview 1 Employment Indicators’ working group, January 2005; Interview 2 Employment Indicators’ working group, December 2004; Interview 1 Social Protection Indicators’ Working Group, January 2005; Interview 2 Social Protection Indicators’ working group, July 2005). In order to understand the type of socialization that takes place within the Committees, we discuss in the next section the features of the ‘ordinary’ members of the Committees, i.e. those that do not have a specific function or task (such as chair or secretariat). Methodologically, the best way to understand how socialization operates in these issue-specific OMC committees is through participant observation. However, this has not been possible as the committees are closed to external observers, which is why alternative means to obtain data have been used: standardized questionnaires and in-depth interviews with members of the committees. Regarding the interview process, a list of (open) questions was sent to the interviewee prior to the planned meeting. In order to encourage the interviewees to be as open as possible:

  For information on the composition and modes of action of the Employment and Social Protection Committees and the design of the questionnaire, please contact Caroline de la Porte.

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1. The interviewees were ensured that the interviews would remain confidential and anonymous; 2. The interviews took place without a recording device. The first part of the analysis, focusing on the characteristics of the members of the committees, on the basis of professional and personal identities, draws on the responses from 30 questionnaires that were administered to experts in the Social Question Working Group of the Council (level C1 in Figure 11.1) and the members of the Employment and Social Protection Committees (level C2 in Figure 11.1). It is relevant to note that most individual experts participate in more than one expert group: 13 are core members of the Social Questions Working Group (level B in Figure 11.1) and 11 of these are alternate members in the Employment and Social Protection Committees (level C2 in Figure 11.1); 15 respondents are core members of the Employment or Social Protection Committees that do not participate in the Council working group. The answers to the questionnaires are treated as qualitative data because of the small-n. The second part of the analysis, focusing on the actual socialization within the committees, draws on the answers to the questionnaire and on several in-depth interviews with committee members (level C2). In this way, we develop a micro level analysis on the basis of qualitative data. This enables us to characterize the committees and to understand how intracommittee socialization and to ‘self-governance’.

  In order to be able to use the interviews as empirical material for the thesis, the transcription process took place in three phases:



1.  The interviews were hand-written during the actual interview; 2.  They were then typed up on the basis of the written notes, if deemed essential as empirical material. If complementary material, then they were not transcribed; 3.  They were sent to the interviewee for amendments and/or additions, which were subsequently integrated into the interview text. In case the interviewees did not respond, the assumption was that the transcription was correct.

Figure 11.1 EU governance structure for economic, employment and social policies

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4. Analysing the members of the employment and social protection committees The core membership of the committees is made up of ‘ordinary members’ from Member States and the European Commission. Both Member States and the Commission appoint two regular members and two alternate members (Council of the European Union 1996, 2000a, 2000b, 2004). First, as ordinary members, all representatives stand on an equal (institutional) footing. Regarding their socialization, they participate in the regular meetings and debates, and vote when this is required. Through this activity, they contribute to the decisions taken within their respective committee. Differences among ordinary members are due to various factors. The factors that have been analysed are degree of expertise, personal, geographical and political identity, interaction with EU institutions, length of membership in the committee and language skills. The factor that is identified as the most important one is genuine expert and policy representation of a Member State, where the expert should show in-depth knowledge about policy problems in the domestic situation. This knowledge provides the member state representative with an expert status and comparative informational advantage for their country. Members that do not appear to have that type of knowledge are less respected within the group as they are not considered to be full experts (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 2 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 1 Social Protection Committee, January 2005; Interview 2 Social Protection Committee, January 2005). The empirical data from our survey shows that most members of the Committees and Social Affairs working groups are highly educated: 30 percent of respondents have a PhD degree, and the remaining 70 percent have a university degree (Law, social and political science or economics). Most respondents (24 out of 30) foremost identify their professional role as representing their country and are affiliated primarily with a national ministry (Ministry of Labour and/or Social Affairs). Three of the respondents were permanently affiliated to academic institutions, suggesting considerable interplay between bureaucrats and academics (whose expert profile is greater than that of the bureaucrat). What these parameters indicate is that the members are most likely to be considered as experts. This evidence suggests (similar to the findings of Hooghe (2001, 2005) and Beyers (2005) on the importance of domestic career socialization) the committee members’ own perception of their task is to understand policy problems and to devise a policy solution for their own country.   The countries that have appointed academic experts in a Committee have done this for a short spell of time, as they do not work for the government. In addition, the academic experts themselves are uncomfortable with the role of representing the national interest of their country in a committee (several interviews and informal knowledge, 2002-2006).   While the general attitude towards European Integration varies among the public in Member States (where Euroscepticism is particularly high for Sweden and Denmark)

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At the same time, a very high number of respondents – 90 percent – believe that the development of social policy is important for the EU. This suggests that there is strong support for the development of social policy objectives at EU level among the members of the committees and the social questions working party. This complements the issue addressed above regarding the importance of expertise among members of the committees and this is not surprising, as participation in the committees is a secondary part of their professional identity. The members of the committees and working groups are highly exposed to the EU actors (and policies): 21 out of 30 respondents (70 percent) have contact with EU level actors and institutions at least once a week, while 7 out of 30 (23 percent) have contact with EU level actors and institutions less frequently (once a month). It is clear that interaction with EU level actors and institutions and thus exposure to EU policy debates and issues, is much higher for the civil servants participating in the committees than for civil servants in national administrations who do not participate in a European level working group. For socialization, it means that exposure to policy problems and their resolution in other countries as well as how they are conceptualized (and integrated) at the EU level (through the OMC) is a factor that is specific for members of an EU level working group or Committee. This also suggests, in line with the research by Beyers (2005), that the Committees and Council Working Groups in the employment and social policy areas are fertile for the development of common solutions, on the basis of a common conceptualization of the problem (Bauer 2002; de la Porte 2008). The empirical evidence from the questionnaires shows that personal beliefs and allegiances are reasonably well correlated with professional functions and identities. According to our survey 87 percent (26 out of 30) of the respondents are attached or very attached to their respective countries, and a similar number is recorded for attachment to the European Union, where 27 out of 30 (90 percent) respondents are very or fairly attached to the EU. In addition, 22 out of 30 respondents (73 percent) have lived in another country than their own for more than three months. This finding is consistent with the work of Hooghe and Marks (2003) on EU and national identities, who find that national attachment is not mutually exclusive with European attachment or support for European Integration (Hooghe and Marks 2003, 19). But 22 out of 30 (73 percent) respondents are very or fairly attached to their town of origin, while a significantly lower proportion – 17 out of 30 respondents (57 percent) – are very or fairly attached to their region. This means that the EU-national levels were perceived as being more important than the regional-local levels as factors of personal identification and allegiance. This corresponds to the professional allegiance that is first the national level and second, the EU level. Another factor that enhances the perceived strength of individual members in the committees and working groups is the length of membership: the longer (Hooghe and Marks 2003), the position among elites is generally more favorable, particularly if it has a partial identity-conferring effect, such as the case of the committees.

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the membership, the higher the likelihood of influencing the debates through incremental acquisition of knowledge of the codes and rules associated with the (internal) functioning of the Committees. Regular participation in the meetings is important, and creates the conditions for individuals to introduce new issues and/or to develop alliances with other members of the Committees. There are no stable alliances – these vary with the issues addressed (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004). Interviewees confirm that the development of trust within the group is enhanced when members are as stable (in terms of duration) as possible (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 2 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 1 Social Protection Committee, January 2005; Interview 2 Social Protection Committee, January 2005). The average length of service in the core ministry represented in the committee or Council working group was four years. It is at committee level that the space and time for discussing new issues is more predominant. The members in the Employment and Social Protection Committees are relatively stable. However, in some countries, the members are changed quite often, in line with changes in government. The latter members have less influence compared to those that are on the committees for longer periods of time (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 2 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 1 Social Protection Committee, January 2005; Interview 2 Social Protection Committee, January 2005). The fact that there is some duration in length of membership allows for the development of a common perception of problems and solutions. On the other hand, the fact that the average length of membership is approximately four years suggests that there are considerable possibilities for the introduction of new ideas when members change. In this way, there is a certain degree of self-governance in the committees and this is maintained with a certain degree of dynamism (due to changes in membership). It must also be taken into consideration that the Commission has developed a particular vocabulary in each area to which the OMC is applied (such as ‘employability’ in the EES and the ‘multi-dimensionality of social exclusion’ in the OMC/inclusion) for framing the terms of the debate (Barbier 2005; Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 2 Social Protection Indicators working group, July 2005 August 2005; Jacobsson 2004; de la Porte 2008). It is clearly the members who have been present in the committees for long periods of time that are the most socialized to this vocabulary and who are therefore best able to follow and to contribute to the deliberations within the committees. Compared to the (more political) committees, membership is more stable in technical working groups (the indicators working groups (Figure 11.1, level D) that are subordinate to the Employment and Social Protection Committees (Figure 11.1, level C2). The discussions and tasks of these working groups are mostly technical, and where the aim is to agree upon the best (i.e. most accurate) indicator. This does not exclude political issues from entering the deliberations. There was for instance a considerable debate about which cut-off point to adopt for the poverty threshold, where 50 percent of the median income as threshold

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would show a lower rate of poverty than a threshold of 60 percent of the median income. This issue was debated within the Indicators Working Group of the SPC. There was national resistance to the poverty threshold at 60 percent of the median income in those countries that traditionally had virtually no poverty (in particular the universal welfare states) and/or that had a poverty rate of 50 percent of the median income. After considerable debate within the Indicators Working group and also the SPC, the poverty threshold adopted was at 60 percent median income, sometimes to the detriment of national interests. The European statistical indicators have been developed significantly within the indicators working groups, where self-governance mainly took shape around technical considerations (Interview 2 Social Protection Indicators’ working group, July 2005). However, while the debates in the technical working groups are around the issue of the best indicators, it is at the level of the European Council that decisions are taken about which sets of indicators to work on. During the Belgian Presidency in 2001, the European Council agreed to create a set of statistical indicators around the issue of quality in work. Subsequently, 60 indicators were created around this issue in the indicators’ working group of the Employment Committee. Technical deliberations were predominant in the deliberations about which indicators to choose and what they should consist of, but some issues, such as the level of wages – a key indicator for quality in work – were excluded due to political sensitivities of some countries, in particular the UK (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004). Another (more instrumental) element that is important for determining the type of self-governance that can take place in the OMC committees is that of language skills, where English is the most important one, as it is the working language of the Committee: all discussions are in English and all documents are written in English. Quite obviously, those that have English as a mother tongue – the representatives of the UK and Ireland – are in the strongest position, as all documents are written in English. Conversely, members that have difficulties with English can be considered to be in the weakest position (Interview 1 Employment Indicators working group, January 2005). Regarding the informal debates and alliance building around particular issues, then the possibility of following several of the discussions that take place during the breaks between the formal meetings is important. In this way, knowledge of several languages is of added value, to be able to understand and to actively participate in debates (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004). According to our survey, the average number of languages spoken among members of the committees or working groups is 3.4. Governments from new member states mostly appoint members that know many languages, but who are often younger and not such experienced experts. The delegates of new member states thus mainly have an important role to provide information about the EU level deliberations to their ministries, and indeed, they tend to respond more positively to the policies deriving from the OMC. However, there tends to be a high turnover among the representatives of new member states, due to lack of resources within the new member states (Horvath 2008). The pre-2004 member

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states predominantly appoint members that have knowledge of the domestic policy problems and members tend to be appointed for longer periods of time, enhancing the possibility for cooperation. Thus far, we have analysed the characteristics of the members of the OMC committees in order to determine which type of self-governance takes place within the committees. First, expert and policy representation is the most important feature and from the questionnaire we can reasonably conclude that these characteristics are present among the members of the committees. Second, the primary function of the experts in the committees is to present the policy of their country, to represent the position of their country in the committee and to adopt relevant issues from the EU level OMC processes. Among the members of the OMC committees, who are frequently exposed to EU level actors and institutions, the development of EU social policy was considered to be as important as representing the policy in their own country. Third, regular participation of the same members in the committee ensures consistency in the self-governance of the committees, while changes in membership presents the possibility of introducing novel ideas into the deliberations of the committees. Fourth, knowledge of the English language is important for the members to be able to follow and participate in the formal debates of the committees, while knowledge of other languages is important to be able to follow the informal debates and alliance-building that takes place on the sidelines of the formal committee meetings. 5. Dynamics of socialization within committees Having presented the features of the members of the committees and discussed how these are related to intra-committee self-governance, this chapter will now explore socialization within the committees. Our questionnaire included some questions that tap on the type of socialization within the committees, notably to find out whether socialization was mainly consensus-based (implying openness) or conflictual (implying defensiveness). According to the results of the survey, an overwhelming majority (27 out of 30 – 95 percent) of Committee and Working Group members consider their prevalent style of interaction as ‘consensus-based’, whereas only the remaining 5 percent describe it as ‘conflictual’. The consensusbased socialization suggests that dialogue is open and favors the development of a common frame of reference (the policy problems and solutions). This also suggests that there is consensus-based cooperative self-governance within the committee. This is in line with evidence in the literature on the mode of interaction in the Council and the Council working groups (in particular Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 1997; Beyers 2005). This is also in line with the evidence about the social OMCs, where common discourses about main policy challenges and responses have developed over time (see Jacobsson 2004; de la Porte 2007, 2008 on this point). As a complement to this, most respondents (20 out of 30 – 67 percent)

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maintained that the attitude of participants in their committee or working group was mostly cooperative and consensus seeking or trustworthy. The remainder (10 out of 30 – 33 percent) identified rational bargaining or skepticism as the main attitude. The respondents in our survey assessed that conflicts within the Committee deliberations were mainly due to different political beliefs (10 out of 30 – 33 percent) followed by territorial interests (8 out of 30 – 27 percent). The remainder of the respondents assessed that the prevalent source of conflict was due to social/cultural beliefs, attitudes towards the market or attitudes towards European integration. The latter is in line with our finding about the beliefs of respondents, which from a professional perspective believed the development of an EU dimension of social policy would be important and from a personal perspective placed more importance of the EU-national dimension of territorial identification than the regional-local dimension. The skeptical attitude, most likely to be associated with defending national policies, was strongest in the social affairs working group, which takes more political decisions than the committees. The committees on the other hand operated with a more trustworthy attitude, since its functions are mostly either bureaucratic (implementing the different tasks involved in the OMC policy cycle, discussing policy objectives of the basis of Commission proposals, ensuring that the member states report on national policies according to the OMC policy objectives, making a critical comparison of policies between Member States (peer review), discussing the draft Commission report which assesses how Member States have fared with regard to each OMC policy objective) or delegated from the top-down (i.e. implementing a decision taken at the level of the European Council during the Spring Summit). As discussed above (see in particular section 3, A closer look at the structure of EU employment social policy governance and methodology), the social committees and working group represent one element of a complex and integrated group of actors in the social policy. Their policy debates are integrated with and draw on the positions or knowledge of other actors, often to do with their professional allegiance. First, and unsurprisingly, members of the Social Affairs working group above all valued the views of their national governments in their work. As national representatives in a European committee, this feature is important. But while most respondents represent their governments, only 45 percent sustain that the view of their government is the most important to take account of. This implies that in their work the representatives do much more than just represent their governments, they also act as social policy experts in the OMC committees, where social policy challenges and how to best resolve them are discussed. Twenty percent value the work of academics most in the development of their own positions, which shows that the findings of academic experts are considered to complement the work of the experts in the OMC committees. This is also consistent with the output of the social OMCs, where expert (academic) work and reports have directly contributed to further development of objectives and/or indicators via reports that have been   However, the peer review of the OMC is rather underdeveloped (Lefresne 2004).

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mandated by the committees (see Atkinson et al. 2004, 2005). The position of the relevant interest organizations is also taken into account by the OMC committee members: 20 percent value the views and positions of civil society (mostly for anti-poverty policy) and 15 percent of trade unions (mostly employment policy). Only a minority of committee members believes that the position of the European Parliament10 or think tanks is important (8 percent together). Coordination of Committee members with their counter-parts both upstream and downstream is important. Concerning their upstream coordination, the closer the relationship between a Committee member and their respective counter-part in the Labour and Social Affairs Council, the stronger the influence of that particular national delegation (both for influencing the debate in the social OMC committees and the social questions working group and also for influencing the debate in the Labour and Social Affairs Council). Likewise, the coordination of Committee members with their respective counter-parts downstream is important. In case the various delegates of a Committee and its indicator working groups are not very coordinated, their position and their overall influence in the process is likely to be weaker and vice-versa (Interview 1 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 2 Employment Committee, December 2004; Interview 1 Social Protection Committee, January 2005 Interview 2 Social Protection Indicators working group, July 2005). The downstream national integration of the policies agreed through the OMC is, however, much more complex (see case studies in Zeitlin and Pochet 2005; de la Porte 2007, 2008). Our in-depth interview material confirms that where Member States have a particular policy problem and in cases that the members of the government (and national administration) are actively seeking to find a solution or appropriate policy measure, then bringing the issue to the European level via the OMC can be used as a strategy. Examples include combating undeclared work for the Italian case (Ferrera and Sacchi, 2005; National Employment Report Italy), increasing the employment rates of older workers for Belgium, France, Italy (National Employment Reports Belgium, France, Italy various years ), targeting and eliminating child poverty for the UK (Armstrong 2005) and Portugal (National Social Inclusion Report Portugal ). In these and other cases sensitive issues have been brought onto or strengthened on the national agendas via the OMC. As discussed in this chapter, in other cases, the EU level policy solution 10  The OMC has often been criticized for excluding the European Parliament in the process. But several things can explain the weak level of participation of the European Parliament in the OMC. First, the European Parliament has much more direct power and influence in the legislative process in the social policy area (interview President EAPN, December 2004). Second, due to the OMC policy cycle, the European Parliament would have a very short time of the OMC policy cycle, as the time of response of the EP is de facto very short.

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is resisted by the national level, particularly where they are highly salient and/or would require a significant budgetary commitment. This includes the workfarist tendency of the activation policies in the UK, the cornerstone of Tony Blair’s Third Way policy. Through the EES, the Commission has criticized the UK continuously and persistently for these policies, specifically recommending that the policies develop a stronger social dimension. The UK delegate in the Committee is aware of this, but supports the government (Büchs 2005). In the Irish case, resistance by the Finance Ministry to devote financial resources to adult training and education although this has been recognized as an acute policy problem by national experts and civil servants in the Ministry of Social Affairs. This confirms one of our main findings, that the position of the representatives in the Committees depends above all on where their main allegiance lies, on the strength of the ties between the Finance and Labour/Social ministries, and on the requirement for accountability towards the national social affairs ministry (see de la Porte and Pochet 2005 for an analysis on the Labour/Finance Ministry constellation of members in the committees). Thus far, it appears that the socialization in the Employment and Social Protection Committees is mostly governed by a propensity to develop a European level policy solution (that is not binding), but where Member State representatives guard their interest in the most politically salient or economically demanding policies. Regarding the national integration of OMC objectives, which has only been discussed briefly, the EU level can be used to introduce an issue on the national agenda or to strengthen support for it. In this section, which analysed socialization within the committees, it was firstly clear that deliberations and decision-making were predominantly consensusbased. But when conflictual issues were discussed, it was mainly due to political sensitivities, followed by territorial issues. Second, while all delegates believed that it was important to take account of the position of their respective governments, they did not feel bound by this position. This implies that the representatives on the committees and the social questions working party do have a considerable degree of self-governance capacity. The delegates in the committees took careful account of the work and/or position of two other types of actors – academics and representative interest organizations (civil society organizations in the area of antipoverty policy and trade unions in the area of employment policy). Third, the most successful self-governance of actors within the EU-national social policy sphere was obtained through coordination among the various national actors in the different EU level working groups and committees. Fourth, we commented briefly on coordination downstream – i.e. integration of OMC policy objectives in the national context – where agenda-setting nationally could be developed as a result of the OMC and where delegates in OMC committees could set national issues on the EU agenda.

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6. Conclusion In order to understand whether, and if so, how, there has been self-governance within the OMC social policy committees, we have first scrutinized the main features of the members of the committees and then shed some light upon the main style of deliberation and decision-making within the committees. We have found that the committees operate (discuss policy and take decisions) through socialization and this enhances their self-governance capacity. First, we found that expert policy profiles pre-dominantly characterize the members of the committees where strong national-EU professional and personal identities create the conditions for consensus-based socialization and decision-making. Second, while the experts represent their country in the deliberations of the committee, they are frequently exposed to EU level actors and institutions, and they consider that the development of an EU dimension for social policy coordination is important. Third, regular participation of the same members in the committee strengthens trust within the committees and ensures continuity of the work of the committees, while alterations in membership create fertile conditions for introducing novel ideas into the deliberations of the committees. Fourth, knowledge of the English language among members is important for full participation in the formal debates of the committees and working groups, while knowledge of other languages is essential for following the informal debates and for developing alliances. The conjunction of these features creates conditions for self-governance in the committees, where the result is the agreement of common policy objectives for all member states (to be implemented through EU policy coordination) but also the defense of national policies and interests for salient policy issues. Socialization in the committees is primarily consensus-based, which confirms the findings in the literature on EU working groups. In addition, the delegates have the possibility to self-govern within the committees, by developing common perceptions of policy problems and defining European solutions. They do this on the basis of their own expertise and knowledge and also taking account of academic work. However, while socialization is mostly consensus-based, this did not signify that there is an absence of tensions in the process of self-governance. Indeed, tensions arise due to ideological/political positions and fears of EU intervention in national policy, on the basis of the subsidiarity argument, according to which the EU should only intervene in national (social and employment) policy when it provides an element of added value. Second, while delegates represent their respective governments, they do so not only by defending national positions for sensitive issues, but also by acting as self-governing experts in areas that are less salient and where there is some scope for introducing new ideas or developing new polices. This is why the delegates in the committees take careful account of the work and/or position of two other types of actors – academics (who are independent experts) and representative interest organizations (civil society organizations in the area of anti-poverty policy and trade unions in the area of employment policy). Third, the most successful self-governance of a position or

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proposal is obtained through the vertical coordination among the various national actors in the different EU level working groups and committees. How the result of the self-governance of the experts is integrated into the national level was touched upon in this chapter, but has not been fully addressed due to the complexity of analysing channels of transposition of an idea or policy from an EU committee to the domestic policy arena. There is a lot of emerging research in this area, which suggests that domestic political priorities and the role of individual entrepreneurs are important factors in this transposition process. References Armstrong, K.A. 2005, ‘How Open Is the United Kingdom to the OMC Process on Social Inclusion?’, in The Open Method of Coordination in Action. The European Employment and Social Inclusion Strategies, J. Zeitlin and P. Pochet (eds), with L. Magnusson, P.I.E.-Peter Lang, Brussels, pp. 287-310. Atkinson, A. et al. 2004, ‘Indicators and Targets for Social Inclusion in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 47-75. Atkinson, A. et al. 2005, ‘Taking Forward the EU Social Inclusion Process’, Report commissioned by the Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union, July 2005, downloadable at <www.ceps.lu/eu2005_lu/inclusion>. Barbier, J.-C. 2005, ‘The European Employment Strategy, a Channel for Activating Social Protection’, in The Open Method of Coordination in Action. The European Employment and Social Inclusion Strategies, J. Zeitlin and P. Pochet (eds), with L. Magnusson, P.I.E.-Peter Lang, Brussels, pp. 477-509. Bauer, M. 2002, ‘Limitations to Agency Control in European Union PolicyMaking: The Commission and the Poverty Programmes’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 381-400. Beyers, J. 2005, ‘Mutliple Embeddedness and Socialization in Europe: The Case of Council Officials’, International Organization, vol. 59, pp. 899-936. Boudon, R., Besnard, P., Cherkaoui, M. and Lécuyer, B.-P. 1993, ‘Socialisation’, in Dictionnaire de la Sociologie, R. Boudon, P. Besnard, M. Cherkaoui M. and B.-P. Lécuyer (eds), Larousse, Paris, pp. 208-210. Büchs, M. 2007, New Governance in European Social Policy: The Open Method of Coordination, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Council of the European Union 1996, Council Decision 97/16/EC of 20 December 1996 setting up an Employment and Labour Market Committee, OJ L 6, 10 January 1997, pp. 32-33. Council of the European Union 2000a, Council Decision 2000/436/EC of 29 June 2000 establishing a Social Protection Committee, OJ L 172, 12 July 2000, pp. 26-27. Council of the European Union 2000b, Council Decision 2000/98/EC of 24 January 2000 establishing the Employment Committee, OJ L 29, 4 February 2000, pp. 21-22.

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Council of the European Union 2004, Council Decision 2004/689/EC of 4 October 2004 establishing a Social Protection Committee and repealing Decision 2000/436/EC, OJ L 314 of 13 October 2004, pp. 8-10. de la Porte, C. 2002, ‘Is the Open Method of Co-ordination Appropriate for Organising Activities at European Level in Sensitive Policy Areas?’, European Law Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, March 2002, pp. 38-58. de la Porte, C. 2007, ‘Good Governance via the OMC: The cases of employment and social inclusion’, European Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, April 2007 <www.ejls.eu>. de la Porte, C. 2008, ‘The European level development and national level influence of the Open Method of Coordination: The Cases of Employment and Social Inclusion’, Phd thesis, European University Institute, Florence. de la Porte, C. and Adao e Silva, P. 2007, ‘The role of the Informal Social Affairs Council in EU Social Policy’, Policy Paper prepared for the Social Affairs Ministry in Portugal for the Portuguese Presidency in the second half of 2007. de la Porte, C. and Nanz, P. 2004, ‘OMC – A deliberative-democratic mode of governance?, The cases of employment and pensions’, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 267-288. de la Porte, C. and Pochet, P. 2002, ‘Public Pension Reform: European Actors, Discourses and Outcomes’, in Building Social Europe through the Open Method of Co-ordination, C. de la Porte and P. Pochet (eds), P.I.E.-Peter Lang, Brussels, pp. 223-250. de la Porte, C. and Pochet, P. 2004, ‘The European Employment Strategy: Existing research and remaining questions’, Journal of European Social Policy, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 71-79. de la Porte, C. and Pochet, P. 2005, ‘Participation in the Open Method of Coordination. The Cases of Employment and Social Inclusion’, in The Open Method of Coordination in Action. The European Employment and Social Inclusion Strategies, J. Zeitlin and P. Pochet (eds), with L. Magnusson, P.I.E.Peter Lang, Brussels, pp. 353-389. Dubar, C. 1995, La Socialisation: Construction des identités sociales et professionnelles, Armand Colin, Paris. Ferrera, M. 2003, ‘European Integration and National Social Citizenship: Changing Boundaries, New Structuring?’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 611-652. Ferrera, M., Matsaganis, M. and Sacchi, S. 2002, ‘Open Coordination against Poverty: The New EU “Social Inclusion Process”’, Journal of European Social Policy, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 226-239. Ferrera, M. and Sacchi, S. 2005, ‘The Open Method of Co-ordination and National Institutional Capabilities. The Italian Experience’, in The Open Method of Coordination in Action. The European Employment and Social Inclusion Strategies, J. Zeitlin and P. Pochet (eds), with L. Magnusson, P.I.E.-Peter Lang, Brussels, pp. 137-172.

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Chapter 12

Conclusion Eva Sørensen and Peter Triantafillou

The purpose of this edited volume has been to map the emerging governance imagery, which we denote the politics of self-governance. Each of the chapters has made its important contribution to visualizing how the politics of self-governance is articulated through social and political science discourses, governing practices and institutions. The chapters have shown how these governance activities assume the self-governing capacities of societal actors as a crucial resource for governing society. The mapping of the governance imagery serves to unravel, first, that self-governance is seen as a necessary element in the governing of society and, second, that self-governance capacities cannot be taken for granted, but need to be nurtured, facilitated and strategically shaped in order to ensure that they contribute to the production of public purpose. The three theoretical chapters make it clear that the social and political science discourses of self-governance are more than neutral descriptive analyses of such practices. They also inform and possibly structure such practices through their ontological diagnoses and more or less explicit normative biases articulating the need for self-governance. Paying attention to this dual function of social and political science discourses (as that which analyses and represents political practices on the one hand, and as that which informs and structures political practices on the other), may seem to lack analytical clarity. However, we shall claim that in trying to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the status of the governance imagery, we need to pay attention to both of these functions. By doing so, the theoretical chapters have helped to illuminate the manifold ways in which the politics of self-governance penetrates some of the most influential contemporary social and political science theories including macro level theories such as systems theory and discourse theory, meso level theories such as governance theory, regulation theory and democratic theory, and micro level theories encompassing different versions of rational choice theory. Although the theories analysed hold diverging conceptions of governance and self-governance and follow different analytical strategies, they all distance themselves from top-down or centrist perspectives on how governance is being produced. Instead they emphasise the decentered character of governance processes. Luhmann’s systems theory sees this decenteredness as deriving from a(n escalating) functional differentiation of industrial societies, whereas Foucauldian genealogical analysis views it as a key feature of the way in which governmental power is exercised in contemporary liberal democracies. Governance theory,

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regulation theory and post-liberal democratic theory tend to regard decenteredness as going hand in hand with the development of new forms of regulation that cut across the traditional boundaries between state, market and civil society. Finally, due to its adherence to methodological individualism, rational choice theory tends to assume that governance is ultimately based on the bargaining and more or less stable agreements (institutions) formed by individual actors pursuing their selfinterest. However, the theories do not only share a decentered approach to governance. They also share the view that the capacity for self-governance is considerable among decentered actors, be they individual or collective. To Luhmann any system is, by definition, autonomous qua its status as a system. Other systems may try to interfere/communicate with that system, but they will never be able to effectively take over other systems because of differences in communicative codes. Likewise to Foucault, power, by definition, entails freedom and the possibility of resistance. The meso level theories all assume that self-governance is possible under more or less benign political circumstances, even if norms, rules and decision-making procedures are crucial to the actual possibility for self-governance to unfold. Finally, the rational choice inspired approaches assume that interests are always already given, regardless of the political conditions, even if developed and put to the service of wider public purpose. This presence of pre-given interest is seen as a central driving force of individual self-governance. The empirical chapters have contributed to visualizing the multiple ways in which the new governance imagery manifests itself in different policy areas, in different political cultures, at different levels of governance and in different sectors. The empirical studies include policy areas such as business policy, higher education, health policy, prison management, employment policy, local democracy and public management. Added up, they cover the major aspects of public governance: the exercise of authority, service delivery, regulation and facilitation of market and civil society, and public sector organization. It is shown how the politics of self-governance has influenced the way of thinking about governance in contemporary governance activities by materializing itself in the discourses, strategies and design of reform programmes found in these policy areas. However, the studies also reveal how the new governance imagery takes many different forms depending on the policy context and other contextual factors. This fact is not least apparent in Barker, Justice and Skelcher’s comparative study of publicprivate partnerships (Chapter 5) that indicate the importance of whether or not the policy area has traditionally been controlled by public authorities or not, and whether the governance activities are initiated from below by the involved stakeholders or from above by public authorities. Political culture appears as another important contextual factor that seems to influence how and to what degree the politics of self-governance is played out. The analyses confirm that the new governance imagery is becoming increasingly dominant as a way of thinking about what kind of problems governance should

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try to address and the possible ways in which such problems could and should be handled. However, the studies also indicate that political cultures, in the sense of historically sedimented norms and styles of political intervention, make a difference with regard to the specific version of the policy discourses and narratives and how they are implemented in practise in different countries. Bosworth’s comparative analysis (Chapter 10) of prison management discourses in the US and UK captures the impact of political culture by showing that although the prison management discourses in both countries are clear expressions of the politics of self-governance, we see important differences between the neo-liberal inspired US penal practices and discourse and the welfarist inspired British ones. Furthermore, the empirical analyses have illuminated how the politics of self-governance is identifiable, in different ways and shapes, at all levels of governance in the increasingly multi-level political institutions of advanced liberal democracies, i.e. local, national and trans-national levels. Musso and Weare’s study of institutional reform in Los Angeles (Chapter 6) unravels how political authorities at the municipal level seek to increase the self-governing capacity of local communities and the problems, power games and contradictions that emerge in this process; Poulsen’s study of the reorganization of a Danish Ministry (Chapter 9) visualizes how efforts to develop a network administration capable of a high level of self-governance challenges traditional role perceptions among public administrators; and De la Porte, Natali and Pochet (Chapter 11) demonstrate how the EU’s attempt to coordinate and shape the employment and social policies of its member states depends on the functioning of more or less self-governing network like Committees. The empirical studies also indicate how the politics of self-governance leads to the involvement of actors from all societal sectors. Some processes of self-governance exclusively involve public authorities and public employees, while other processes of self-governance cut across traditional sector boundaries and bring public and private actors together in a shared effort to govern a particular issue. As such, the new governance imagery materializes itself through assemblages of discourses, practices and institutions that subjectify particular sets of individuals and groups as capable, empowered, and/or responsible selves capable of self-governance. In other words, the decentered ‘selves’ that are expected to govern themselves are being produced in and through these assemblages. As shown in Chapters 7 and 8, however, this production of decentered ‘selves’ tends to be a paradoxical endeavour full of contradictions and ambiguities. Gottweis’ analysis of biobanks points out how the construction of the individual as an empowered actor capable of making qualified choices is being undermined by the very process of fragmenting the human body into parts that can be sold as commodities. This ambiguity in governance strategies inspired by the politics of self-governance between efforts to construct competent, unitary selves and forces that lead to their fragmentation is also illuminated in Ørberg and Wrights’ study of how the increasing autonomy of Danish universities is currently being counteracted by forms of performance measurement that tends to dismantle them into separate functions.

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In sum, the empirical studies presented in the book have shown that the politics of self-governance has indeed manifested itself in advanced liberal democracies, but that the form and degree it takes and its impact in specific situations are conditioned by a multiplicity of contextual factors. The politics of self-governance does indeed seem to have become a new hegemonic frame of mind for governing societies by serving as a point of reference for governance programmes. While this point of reference seems very hard to dispute, it does open a space for articulating conflicting opinions, goals and strategies about how self-governance should be put into practice. These conflicts and debates play an important role in the ongoing rearticulation of the politics of self-governance. The features, forces behind and consequences of the governance imagery In the introduction we pointed to the need for more knowledge about three important issues: 1) How has the politics of governance put its mark on public governance? 2) What are the driving forces behind the politics of self-governance? 3) What are the effects of the new governance imagery? Although the book fails to give us full answers to these questions it has increased our insight into these issues in significant ways. With regard to the first question, the most significant contribution of the book is that it helps us to better understand the complex role of the state in advanced liberal democracies. Students of the politics of self-governance have over the last 10-15 years discussed the extent to which the emerging forms of self-governance have weakened state power in general and sovereign rule in particular. The theoretical and empirical chapters in unison have helped to demonstrate that neither sovereign rule (understood as power based on the monopoly of exercising legalized coercion) nor state rule (understood broadly as any kind of power exercised by a government and bureaucratic machinery) are on their way out. The chapters show that while the state rarely applies coercive means, sovereign rule is relevant not only in handling criminal offenders, but also in pressing through reforms of institutions of higher learning, in defining mandates for public-private partnerships attending to social services, in (dis-)allowing community councils to play a role in attending to local policy concerns, and in the EU’s difficulties in trying to shape the policies of its member states. However, even if sovereign rule remains an important method of state rule, the latter is increasingly supplemented by a whole range of governing methods, procedures and techniques that in a certain sense by far outstrip sovereign rule in their importance. Some of these procedures and techniques, such as public-private partnerships, development contracts with public institutions, project-based work groups and community councils, have been discussed in the preceding chapters. Other instruments used by the state are various performance measurement regimes, consensus conferences, focus groups and customer satisfaction surveys. On the one hand, such methods enable the exercise of rule over domains and issues that

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go far beyond anything ever imagined by sovereign rule. On the other hand, it becomes increasingly difficult to see such instruments as just another instance of state control, even if they are launched and supported by the state. True, the state is increasingly and extensively engaged in promoting, funding, monitoring and at times even directing the development of both public and private individuals and organizations with a view to making them capable of governing issues of public concern. In this sense, the exercise of state power is alive and kicking. However, even if ICT has enhanced the monitoring capacities of state institutions, the proliferation of the number of actors engaged in the production of public purpose in new and complex ways makes it more reasonable to view the state as a relay rather than as a control chamber of these new instruments of rule. In order to better understand the role of the state in today’s liberal democracies, we need first to reconsider the relationship between rule and autonomy. In different ways, the theoretical chapters all suggest that autonomy is not necessarily at odds with rule be it in its sovereign or other forms. Rather, autonomy seems increasingly to be supported by and sometimes even the outright product of various forms of state rule. This may imply forms of autonomy that are strictly regulated or forms that place self-governing actors in a situation where they have to face expectations and norms that are not of their own choosing. Yet, rather than dismissing such forms of autonomy and reducing them to mere reflections of state rule, we may be better off acknowledging that self-governance always takes place under the influence of forces. Autonomy as self-governance may be distinguished from autonomy as self-determination, i.e. a self constituting itself in complete insulation from the influence of norms and rules exercised by others. By linking our understanding of self-governance to the concept of autonomy rather than to the concept of self-determination our focus of attention is directed towards the manifold ways in which hierarchic rule conditions self-regulation through the construction of empowered actors and autonomous spaces. If our depiction of the governance imagery is correct, albeit far from complete, then liberalism’s division of society into three distinct spheres (state, market and civil society) each having their own governing logics and freedoms seems highly problematic. While such divisions may have been helpful in the fostering of liberal governance over the last two centuries, they are hardly useful when seeking to understand contemporary forms of governing. Above all, the chapters in this book help to illuminate that rule and self-governance co-exist across a wide range of political issues and institutional boundaries. The recognition of this intertwined relationship between rule and autonomy helps us to re-orientate our governance ambitions from the unproductive search for ways and places to draw the line between rule and autonomy, which has characterized the political and philosophical debate in the twentieth century, to a more complex debate about forms and strategic interactions between the two. We stop asking where to draw the line between rule and autonomy and start asking: How is the self-governing capacity of societal actors exploited through the strategic construction of governing selves and to what

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extent are these constructions adding to the successful achievement of defined governance objectives? Moreover, the empirical studies show that while current political reforms may still refer to the classic liberal spheres, they not only work across such divisions, but employ a whole range of new mechanisms the working of which cannot be reduced to the logics of liberalism’s three spheres or any simple combination thereof. We are thinking here not only of the governing of recent scientific and medical treatments and institutions, such as genetic screening and biobanks, but also of petty and lowtech mechanisms such as non-legal contracts, team-based management, publicprivate partnerships and performance measurement instruments. These kinds of governing mechanisms and institutions create new domains to be governed, such as genetically disposed citizens, obliged organizations, responsible team-members and auditable selves, and thereby new objects around which power and autonomy is exercised. To try to reduce such phenomena to the logics of state, market, civil society or some combination of these, is simply not tenable. Accordingly, a new conceptual understanding of governance is clearly needed, and the theoretical chapters indicate the direction to take. A new conceptual understanding of governance offers the promise of a better understanding of the tensions that emerge when concrete acts of ruling are exercised through the shaping of autonomy. As illuminated in Chapters 5, 6, 9 and 10 such tensions are manifested as ambiguous institutional conditions and role perceptions that make it difficult for the involved actors to decide how to act. The actors are often placed in messy situations of regulations and more or less clearly articulated expectations about how to act independently. In such situations, public authorities tend to revert to sovereign and bureaucratic modes of rule, while business firms, NGOs and citizens may resist, exit or rearticulate the mechanisms of rule seeking to direct their autonomy in particular ways. By conceiving of rule and autonomy as interrelated and as indispensable aspects of governance as proposed by the politics of self-governance, an analytical space is cleared for studying the variety of strategic ways in which politicians, bureaucrats, businesses, employees, organizations, social movements and individual citizens are trying to cope with, accommodate, exploit and possibly change the contemporary ways of conducting self-governance. With regard to the second question concerning the driving forces behind the emergence of the politics of self-governance, the book contributes to the search for ways in which to escape functionalist and structural explanations on the one hand and methodological individualism on the other even if it does not come up with a new comprehensive explanation. The absence of a general explanation may be seen as a sign of epistemological cowardice or weakness, but it could also be taken as a sign of prudence and recognition that the emergence of the politics of self-governance is not readily explained by any single or just a few factors. At any rate, if we turn to the macro level theories, it is clear that while Luhmann’s systems theory ultimately implies a systems-functionalist explanation, it is at great pains to reject any simple societal function as the underlying cause of

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the emergence of the politics of self-governance. While functional differentiation and the proliferation of distinct systems and sub-systems can be seen as a driving force behind the emergence of the politics of self-governance, the latter is in turn given momentum by codes and discourses that view self-governance as desirable for the promotion of societal governance. Such reinforcing effects cannot be explained and certainly not predicted simply by referring to the functional requirements of any given system. Foucauldian inspired governmentality analyses not only challenge methodological individualism by stressing how subjectivities are shaped in and through particular discourses, they also carefully study how such subjects exercise their freedom, contest existing power relations and contribute to produce discourses in new and unpredictable fashions. The meso level theories make a particular effort to escape structuralism by illuminating how social action is conditioned, not structured, by institutions. Thus, the meso level theories share the view that institutional features such as norms, rules incentives and routinized practices stabilize social action and in some cases produce path-dependencies that block change. Yet, they maintain that institutional set ups are in most cases complex, ambiguous, contradictory and fragmented and made subject to situated and competing interpretations and articulations. Accordingly, their ability to structure social action in any strict and coherent meaning of the word is limited and depends to a considerable degree on the presence of a relatively stable and detailed institutionalized governance narrative that functions as a strong hegemonic point of reference for the involved actors. Finally, the micro level theories which are analysed here consist of different versions of rational choice theory and make a decisive effort to moderate the methodological individualism on which it is founded. This is done by stressing a variety of situated relational factors that might influence the individual actors’ rational choices such as the making of negotiated agreements and institutions, trust, logics of appropriateness and strategic political narratives that suggest what type of choices are in the best interest of particular groups of actors. In unison the outlined theories, point out how discourses and institutions simultaneously enable and restrict political action. Approached from this perspective, the emergence of the politics of self-governance can be seen as a result of an on-going attempt to recast self-governance. The current struggle over self-governance, the way it should be governed and the way it can be thought of is obviously heavily indebted to early liberal governance discourses. Even if the categories of state, market and civil society may be inadequate as analytical devices, they are, as mentioned earlier, still informing political practices and debates. However, a number of technical developments and popular claims have contributed to stretching and, in our view, transforming the liberal way of thinking and practicing self-governance. These developments and claims include, among other things, new medical technologies that challenge and expand the potential for governing public health, computer technologies raising new possibilities of auditing and monitoring of public services, new claims by citizens to the right

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of choice and participation in the making and delivery of public services, new consultative decision-making procedures in the EU, and calls by employees for more influence on their work. These and other developments and claims have in different ways contributed to reshaping and possibly inventing new forms of self-governance and constituting the governance imagery as the hegemonic frame informing political reforms and policy designs. The third major contribution of the book is its illumination of the different positions in the complex task of evaluating the effects of the politics of selfgovernance. Academics studying the politics of self-governance tend to come up with surprisingly differentiated verdicts. While some draw a gloomy picture of the effects, others make a more positive assessment. Those who draw the gloomy or negative picture view the politics of selfgovernance as a new and more advanced and interventionist form of oppression than we have seen before. It is advanced and interventionist in the sense that it creeps into all corners of society and becomes a constituting feature of the very identity of the involved actors. Such an evaluation of the politics of self-governance is most apparent in Chapters 7, 8 and 10, which are inspired by a Foucaultian governmentality approach to the politics of self-governance. While we agree that the new governance imagery has become hegemonic, we find it problematic to see this imagery as determining political action and/or as rendering resistance impossible. As we have tried to argue above, the governance imagery opens up new spaces not only for the exercise of power but also for new forms of freedom and resistance. As the diversity of health, welfare and penal policies between liberal democratic countries show, the politics of self-governance does not dictate particular policy objectives or designs. In other words, there is room, sometimes wide and sometimes narrow, for political forces to shape the particular ways in which the governance imagery is articulated and put into practice. Moreover, if we are right in asserting that the governance imagery is a rather recent phenomenon brought about by a range of technical developments and political claims, there is no reason to assume that it is immutable to change or even to outright dissolution. Other scholars tend to view the politics of self-governance as a positive contribution to obtaining a more just, democratic and effective society. Thus, the increased empowerment and participation of self-governing citizens and stakeholders that goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the potentials of selfgovernance is viewed as an important element in developing a more responsive political system, a more participatory democracy, and a smoother implementation process. This benevolent view of the potential of the politics of self-governance is most apparent in Chapters 5, 6 and 11, which are all inspired by different strands of governance theory. It is not that these analyses are uncritically endorsing the various practices of self-governance. Rather, they remain sceptical about policymakers’ willingness to govern at a distance and of the room for citizens and other stakeholders to influence policy agendas. However, what they tend to criticize is the insufficient implementation of the politics of self-governance rather than the imagery itself. While we agree that the politics of self-governance

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does allow for new practices of autonomy, we simultaneously acknowledge the power-laden relations that are part and parcel of the new forms of self-governance even in their most benign form. Recalling the many illiberal ways in which earlier forms of liberal government have treated those deemed unable or unwilling to exercise their autonomy properly, we need to pay attention to the way that the contemporary politics of self-governance handles those who refuse or are regarded as unfit to govern themselves according to the norms of freedom espoused by the governance imagery. By bringing these two sets of normative evaluations of the politics of selfgovernance together, the book illuminates the difficulties involved in gauging the effects of the many new ways in which rule and autonomy are strategically intertwined. Such difficulties are not least condensed in the notion of empowerment that points both to the process of being capacitated through the assistance and the direction by somebody other than the person empowered, and to the ability of the self of being able to articulate its own opinions and act on its own behalf. In other words, by latching on, nurturing and trying to direct the autonomy of individuals and groups, the politics of self-governance may be exercised less conspicuously and spread much more extensively than other forms of power. It is exactly because the politics of self-governance depends on individuals and groups acting by themselves that the processes and outcomes implied by such forms of rule are highly difficult if not outright impossible to fully control or determine. Rather the processes and outcomes remain vulnerable to forces, interests and resources of the actors engaged in them. This is also why it makes little sense to make general conclusions and evaluations of effectiveness and desirability of the politics of self-governance. While we contend that evaluations of these political processes are fundamental, they must be based on detailed analyses of concrete cases. Moreover, the normative standards applied to evaluate such cases must take into account the intertwined relationship between rule and autonomy. If we regard any form of (state) interference into self-governing activities as something negative or as indicating a fraudulent form of autonomy, then we are bound to end up in despair and political resignation. Instead of looking in vain for autonomy understood as self-determination, something hardly of this earth, we may be better off gauging the processes and outcomes of the politics of self-governance by the extent to which they allow reversals of the power relations implied in this form of rule, and by the extent to which they open up new domains for the articulation of more or less new interests, desires and freedoms.

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Index accountability 46, 67, 87, 92, 118, 121, 124-125, 127, 153, 204 assemblage 17, 27, 37, 118, 120, 125-126, 129, 140, 144, 147, 213 audit 121, 125, 128-130 autonomy 2, 10, 31, 66, 77-78, 81, 103, 117, 213, 215-216, 219 autopoiesis 30, 32 biobanks 137-147 bioethics 141, 146 bureaucracy 34, 61, 64, 66, 80, 84, 102, 117, 123, 128, 152-154, 165 business improvement district 77-78, 82, 88-92 City Council 84, 89-92, 95-96, 102-103, 105, 107, 110, 112 civil servants 17, 151-153, 155-161, 163166, 187-189, 198, 204 classical 3, 33, 48, 52, 158 coalition 70, 97, 98, 100, 112 co-governor 2 common pool resources 16, 61-62, 67, 72 competition 16, 64-67, 72, 84, 89, 131, 141 complex 1, 5, 8, 17, 45-46, 48, 50-51, 54-56, 79, 81, 85-86, 96, 110, 140-141, 147, 174, 191, 202-203, 214-215, 217-218 contestation 16, 77, 80, 82, 84, 92, 148 contract 11, 52, 66, 78, 80-82, 86-87, 92, 117-118, 120-126, 128-132, 157, 177, 214, 216 contractual partners 126 control 14, 28, 34, 36, 47, 51, 64, 67, 8487, 95-96, 101-102, 105, 108, 113, 117-118, 120-123, 125, 128-129, 130, 140, 143, 151-155, 161-162, 165-166, 169-171, 173-179, 183, 215, 219

control society 28, 121, 130, 152-155, 162, 165 culture of control 169 decentralization 47, 61-64, 157 deCODE Genetics 140, 143 decorporalization 139, 145 degrees of freedom 118 democracy 5, 33, 46, 51-56, 79, 91-92, 212, 218 Denmark 15, 79, 118, 124, 128, 130, 132133, 153, 165, 197 development contracts 118, 120, 122-126, 128-132, 214 disciplinary society 27-28, 130, 152, 154, 162, 165 discipline 3, 7-8, 26, 28, 32-33, 35-37, 44, 126, 151, 153, 171, 173, 180 dynamic 36, 46, 95-96, 129, 160, 182 economics 48, 52, 160, 164, 197 employment committee 189, 193 EU employment and social policy 189, 192 exclusion 34, 39, 69, 91, 102, 163, 165-166 exit 11, 66, 96, 100-103, 216 Fordism 48-49 Foucault, Michel 15, 25-33, 35-38, 151152, 212 freedom 1-3, 9, 17, 29, 31-33, 36-38, 87, 117-118, 123, 125, 130-131, 159, 161-163, 166, 179, 212, 215, 217219 functional differentiation 27, 34, 36-37, 39, 211, 217 Garland, David 169, 181, 183 governance 1-11, 13-16, 18, 25-26, 28, 31-32, 34-37, 43-49, 53-56, 68, 72, 77-78, 80-81, 89, 95-97, 100106, 108, 110, 113, 117-120, 130,

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132-133, 137, 151, 169, 173, 176, 178-179, 182, 187, 189, 192-193, 211-219 governmentality 15, 27-29, 35-36, 50, 151152, 169-170, 178, 217-218 Hannah-Moffat, Kelly 182-183 hegemony 4, 7, 53 history 27, 33, 52, 102 human body 17, 137, 139, 141, 145-147, 213 hybrid identities 154-156, 159-162, 164165 ideal 4, 12, 31, 33, 133, 145, 152, 158, 161, 165-166, 178, 181, 183 identity 14, 54, 71-72, 106, 137, 145, 147, 154, 159, 160-162, 166, 188-190, 192, 195, 198, 218 implementation 8, 11-12, 16, 44, 46, 80, 95-97, 100-101, 104-105, 108, 119, 176, 188, 218 incentives 34, 49, 61-66, 70, 72, 79, 97, 101, 133, 141, 176, 217 in-distinction zones 153-155, 158-159, 165-166 institution 62-63, 71-72, 92, 117, 119, 152154, 165, 175, 177, 180, 183, 190 institutional design 37, 69, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 90-92 legitimacy 85-87, 110 liberalism 3, 5, 28, 34, 36-37, 215-216 local government 67, 78, 82, 85-86, 92 logic of appropriateness 80, 217 Luhmann, Niklas 15, 25-32, 35-39, 212 managerialism 170, 174, 176, 183 market 1, 11, 44-45, 47, 56, 67, 69, 72, 79, 127, 202, 212, 215, 217 Marxist 43, 48 meso-level 16, 25, 43, 47-48, 55-56, 211212, 217 micro-level 14, 16, 25, 61-62, 70-72 modernizing state 117 molecularization 139, 141, 145

narrative 6-7, 27, 54, 72, 86, 96-97, 101, 112-113, 138, 143, 213, 217 neighborhood council 16, 95-98, 100-108, 110, 112-113 neo-institutionalism 43, 45 neo-liberalism 173, 181 networks 3, 10-13, 27, 35-36, 45-48, 101, 105, 110, 112-113, 140, 144, 146148, 191 network organization 153, 155-156, 158159, 161-163, 165-167 NGO 2, 9, 12, 216 open method of coordination (OMC) 11, 18, 187-189, 191-194, 198-205 outsourcing 80-81, 85-86 penal populism 169 penal welfare 169, 183 performance 2-4, 17, 21, 34, 65, 80, 82, 84-87, 117, 119-121, 126, 128-133, 151, 174, 176, 180, 213-214, 216 planning 1, 13, 95-96, 100-101, 105-106, 108, 110, 118, 122, 125, 178 political science 4, 6-8, 25-26, 44, 197, 211 politicians 2, 11, 53-54, 61, 63-67, 85, 87, 92, 117, 169, 216 politics 1, 3, 5-7, 9, 10, 12-15, 18, 25-27, 38-39, 43, 45, 48, 53-55, 62-63, 77, 84, 97-98, 100, 102-103, 106, 110, 112, 118-119, 121, 123, 143, 145, 190, 211-214, 216-219 post-liberal 15, 43, 52-53, 55, 56, 212 power 25-26, 28-32, 34-38, 45, 47, 49, 54-55, 62, 69, 70, 87, 89, 96, 100, 102, 104, 110, 119, 121, 124, 151154, 165-166, 170, 175, 177, 179, 181, 190-191, 193, 203, 213-214, 216-219 political 5, 47, 97, 100, 106 purchasing 9 sovereign 17, 33, 180 state 214-215 prison 17, 28, 152-153, 169-183, 212-213 privatization 10, 141 public administration 7-8, 44-45, 151-152, 164-166

Index public choice theory (PCT) 7, 16, 61-64, 67, 70, 72 public interest 81-82, 86-87, 92 public-private partnership (PPP) 2, 16, 7782, 84-85, 88, 91, 212, 214, 216 punishment 153, 169-171, 175, 178, 180181 rational choice theory (RCT) 61-62, 68-72, 211-212, 217 reform 5-6, 10, 26, 44, 79, 95, 97, 100-105, 108, 110, 117-119, 122, 125, 127, 169, 172, 175, 178, 187-188, 193194, 212-213 regulation 8, 12-13, 43, 45, 48-53, 55-56, 90, 105, 137, 146, 211-212 responsibilisation 174, 179 Rose, Nikolas 122, 130, 145, 179 self-control 144, 154-155, 158, 161-162, 165, 174 self-discipline 154, 161-162, 166, 179 self-exclusion 163, 165 self-governance 1-7, 10-13, 15-17, 26, 28-31, 33-36, 47, 51, 53-56, 61-62, 66-67, 69-70, 77-82, 86-87, 89-92, 96, 101, 103, 106, 110, 117-118, 120, 133, 137, 147-148, 151, 157158, 161-162, 165-166, 188-190, 192, 195, 199, 200-201, 204-206, 213-219

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politics of 1, 5-7, 10, 13-15, 18, 25-26, 30, 34, 37-38, 43, 45, 48, 53, 55, 62, 211-214, 216-219 self-owning 114, 118, 121-122, 124-128 service providers 4, 34, 67, 101, 117 social protection committee 189, 193-195, 197, 199, 204 socialization 18, 188-195, 201, 204-205 sociology 4, 7-9, 25-26, 169-170, 181, 189 sovereignty 28, 32-33, 35, 187, 193 State 1, 3-6, 8-10, 12-14, 17, 25, 28-29, 33-37, 44-46, 48, 50-53, 55-56, 69, 72, 79-80, 82, 100, 102, 113, 117118, 120-121, 123-126, 128-130, 140-142, 144-145, 152, 169, 170, 173-174, 182, 212, 214-217, 219 steering technologies 120, 125 subjectivity 38, 118, 130, 132-133, 153155, 158-159, 162-163, 165-167 systems theory 15, 26, 29, 30, 32, 39, 211, 216 team work 49, 157-160 third way 9, 204 tokenism 96, 105, 108 universities 16-17, 65-66, 72, 117-132, 213 university reform 17, 117-119 urban politics 98 voice 11, 66, 96-97, 100-103, 107, 110