Authors: Henrik Bang
ISBN-13: 9780719080944, ISBN-10: 0719080940
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Date Published: December 2009
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Henrik Bang is Director of the Center for Public Organization and Management (COS) at the University of Copenhagen.
Governance is among the most used of new ideas in the social sciences, most notably in the fields of political science, public administration, sociology, social and political theory. As ever, debates within disciplines rarely transcend disciplinary boundaries. This volume, newly available in paperback, brings together authors from these fields to elaborate on the development of governance analysis in new conceptions of political and democratic communication. It not only seeks to identify, describe and evaluate the contribution of each discipline to a theory of communicative governance, but also lays the foundation of a multidisciplinary framework for studying the mediation in communicative governance of societal concerns for effectiveness, order and participation.
The book is theoretical and comparative, drawing on authors and research in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the US. It adopts an anti-foundational approach to deconstruct the essentialist discourses endemic in each discipline and the disciplinary traditions of each country. Notions such as steering and control in public administration, identities and domination in sociology, and the community and self in social and political theory are analyzed in depth. The book will demonstrate clearly how the distinctive traditions of each discipline lead them to construct overlapping, loosely coupled, and sometimes incommensurable ideas about the institutions, politics and policies of governance.
List of boxes, figures and tables | ||
Notes on the contributors | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | Governance as political communication | 7 |
Pt. I | Governance theory and analysis in political science | |
2 | New challenges to governance theory | 27 |
3 | A constructivist bottom-up approach to governance: the need for increased theoretical and methodological awareness in research | 41 |
4 | Decentring British governance: from bureaucracy to networks | 61 |
5 | Activation in governance | 79 |
Pt. II | Sociological analyses of meta-governance, governmentality and symbolic violence | |
6 | Governance and meta-governance: on reflexivity, requisite variety and requisite irony | 101 |
7 | Culture governance and individualisation | 117 |
8 | Pierre Bourdieu's political sociology and governance perspectives | 140 |
Pt. III | Political theory and democratic governance | |
9 | The language of democracy and the democracy of language | 161 |
10 | Contingency and the limits of contract | 180 |
11 | A decentred theory of governance | 200 |
12 | Governing at close range: demo-elites and lay people | 222 |
13 | A new ruler meeting a new citizen: culture governance and everyday making | 241 |
Index | 267 |