CorporatisCorporatism and Beyond? A Strategic-Relational Approach
Transcript of CorporatisCorporatism and Beyond? A Strategic-Relational Approach
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Corporatism and Beyond? A Strategic-Relational Approach
Bob Jessop
Adopting a novel, and prima facie improbable, combination of Marxist form
analysis and Luhmannian systems theory, this paper undertakes four tasks
that bear on the overall ITEPE research projects concern to develop a long-
term historical perspective on the evolution and inter-connectedness of three
types of intermediary institutions in the European context from the 1850s till
today, namely corporatist, neo-corporatist and governance institutions (ITEPE
2013). First, it revisits the meaning of corporatism and offers a periodization of
its successive forms in capitalist social formations and aims to establish the
differentia specifica of governance (in its narrow sense) as one mode of
coordination in complex societies. Second, it links the transformation and
strategic reorientation of corporatism (including governance) to problems of
complexity reduction and to the limits of its different forms in the course of
governing relations characterized by complex reciprocal interdependence.
This also relates to ideas of governance failure. Third, it introduces three
linked notions, namely, society effects, societalization (Vergesellschaftung)
and competing societalization principles (Vergesellschaftungsprinzipien); and
explores their meaning in Marxist and Luhmannian terms, asking whether,
while all functional systems are equal, some are more equal than others. This
has implications for any analysis of the nature and limits of governance that
assume the equality of functionally differentiated systems and/or the
indifference of different sites of societal governance in the context of the world
market, the world of states, and world society. Fourth, in the light of steps two
and three, it critically assesses the postulated fourth phase of corporatism
(governance and meta-governance) and identifies its specific limits and crisis-
tendencies. The paper concludes with some general remarks on corporatism
and governance in complex societies.
I. The Core Meaning of Corporatism
Corporatism is aword with many meanings, reflecting the long history of the
phenomena to which it refers and the range of economic, political, and social
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interests that it mobilizes and affects. However, a broadly consensual core
definition is that it comprises an ongoing, integrated system of representation,
policy-formation and policy implementation that is organized in terms of the
function in the division of labour performed by those involved.1Other features,
however important in practice, should be regarded as contingent.
To illustrate some of the contingencies in basic arrangements:
1. Function could refer to income categories (capital, wage-labour, land
ownership, intellectual property), occupational categories, position in the
division of knowledge (types of expertise or other forms of knowledge),
branches of the national economy (or other territorial unit of representation),
fractions of capital (e.g., profit-generating, interest-bearing, domestic or
export-oriented, size of capital, national or transnational), position in a system
of functionally differentiated systems, or some combination of these
categories (which are internally heterogeneous and not mutually exclusive).
2. Policies could be determined by the designated leaders of functional bodies
and/or through consultation with members of functional corporations; and
could emerge through internal debate channelled upwards, through direct or
indirect horizontal discussion and negotiation among functional bodies, and/or
through the some other mechanism of functional decision-making that leads
to credible commitments of action on the part of the respective bodies.
3. Policy implementation could be direct (through functional corporations
themselves), undertaken by the state as the agent of corporatist bodies (e.g.,
because of its distinctive state powers and capacities), or delegated to other
economic, political or civil organs.
4. The state could be an active, passive or silent partner in establishing and
operating corporatist arrangements, which can include organizing the
conditions of corporatist organization in the form of collibration (Dunsire 1996;
see also below); and
5. Corporatism could be separate from or linked to other forms of political
representation, such as clientelism, one or more political parties in a party
system, or a pluralistic pressure group system.
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Other aspects of contingency include: ideological justification; the economic
and/or political legitimation; the specific functional bases and precise
organizational forms of representation; the levels and sites on which
corporatist structures are organized in different functional systems,
institutional orders, and social spheres; the stakes at issue in specific
corporatist arenas; the actual scope, purposes, and mode of policy-making;
the particular forms of implementation; and the overall place (if any) of
corporatism in the overall state system. Thus historical and comparative
studies have shown that corporatism can be limited to specific sectors or
provide the basis for more general concertation; need not be confined to the
primary or secondary sectors of the economy but could extend into the
service sectors and/or welfare, health, education, scientific and other
subsystems; and can exist on one or more levels of the economy (micro,
meso and macro). These and the more basic contingencies noted above all
depend on the specific economy (local, regional, national, or pluri-national) in
which corporatism develops and its place in the world market, the specific
political discourses and practices into which corporatism gets articulated, and
the changing balance of forces involved in corporatist activities. The
continually changing nature of corporatist institutions and practices and their
different crisis-tendencies excludes a valid transhistorical definition or easy
generalization from specific cases, especially if these are drawn from different
phases or types of social formation.
For example, Schmitter contrasted two basic forms of corporatism according
to whether it was imposed from above or emerged from below. Statist
corporatism is imposed by the state. It occurs in centralized, bureaucratic
systems, with purely plebiscitary or even non-existent elections, weak single-
party systems, and inaccessible authorities with a limited recruitment base;
and it often suppresses class, ethnic, linguistic and/ or regional differences.
Conversely, societal corporatism emerges from below as a form of economic
crisis management and general economic and social bargaining. It is
embedded in political systems with: relatively autonomous, multilayered
territorial units; open, competitive electoral processes and party systems;
ideologically varied, coalition-based governments; and is compatible with a
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plurality of social cleavages. Societal corporatism was also defined as: a form
of policy intermediation based on organized labour, business associations,
and the state; a third species of political economy between capitalism and
socialism; a distinctive type of state; a pattern of industrial relations; a partial
structure or strategy linking different societal spheres; a form of trade union
incorporation; and system of private interest government. There is also an
extensive literature on statist or authoritarian forms of corporatism, notably in
Spain, Portugal and Latin America (see Collier 1980; Williamson 1989); and
on corporatist patterns in some developmental states in East Asia (Weiss
1999). Schmitter also noted that, whereas state corporatism is anti-liberal,
usually associated with delayed capitalist development, and forms part of an
authoritarian, neo-mercantilist state, societal corporatism is post-liberal, well
suited to advanced capitalism, and associated with democratic welfare states.
These issues have generated much debate in regard to the design of
corporatist programmes and institutions and in scientific studies of corporatist
institutions and practices. In the latter regard, it is also important to distinguish
corporatist strategies (efforts to introduce and consolidate patterns of
corporatist behaviour) and corporatist policy regimes (institutionalized
structures). Corporatist strategies could simply be ad hoc responses to
specific problems with limited long-term significance (apart from possible
path-dependent effects of success or failure). Furthermore, corporatist
structures could be dignified rather than efficient (to use Bagehots
distinction). More generally, it became clear that, as a political form,
corporatism has a priori consequences for the balance of forces; it is best
seen as a structurally and/or strategically selective form of political
organization whose effects depend on organizational, strategic and
conjunctural factors. Much research also indicates that, in almost all its
manifold forms, displayed chronic tendencies towards instability. This issue
relates to the question of governance failure, i.e., the typical ways in which
different modes of governance fail (e.g., market failure, state failure, network
failure, failures of solidarity), and the first to nth-order responses to such
failure. Corporatist strategies may emerge in response to market or state
failure but this does not guarantee that such strategies will be institutionalized,
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let alone compensate as expected for the failures of other modes of
governance, alone or in combination. This raises issues of governance,
governance failure, meta-governance, and meta-governance failure.
II. Four Phases of Corporatism and their Relation to Governance
Corporatism (or, better, the development of corporatist tendencies) has seen
four main phases in the development of capitalist social formations (especially
in the core and semi-peripheral regions of the world economy). It also has a
pre-history in pre-capitalist orders. It first arose as a politico-ideological
critique of liberal capitalism. It reflected oppositional movements among
feudal and traditional petty bourgeois classes (such as artisans and yeoman
farmers), Catholic and/or other religious groups and some intellectual circles.
They criticized the rampant individualism, social disorder and open class
conflict that accompanied the transition to capitalism and its subsequent
laissez-faire operation; and they demanded the restoration of social order
through co-operation among professional and vocational associations.
Inspired in part by medieval occupational guilds and estate representation and
also oriented to a universalistic, harmonistic state and society, this organic
corporativism was both reactionary and utopian. It could not halt the rise of a
liberal capitalism that was mediated through anarchic market forces nor of a
mass democracy based on individual suffrage.
The second phase was more practical than ideological in orientation. Its rise
coincided with that of monopoly capitalism and growing competition among
capitalist economies and it was linked with notions such as organizedcapitalism. The dominant corporatist projects did not oppose capitalism as
such, which was now consolidated and had begun to display monopolistic and
imperialistic tendencies, but aimed to avoid the risks that its logic would
generate political revolution by organized labour and/or economic domination
by foreign capital. Thus corporatist projects called for new forms of interest
organization and/or societal regulation to defuse social unrest as well as for
new institutional means and strategies to promote national economic
competitiveness. This sort of corporatism was typically urged by firms and
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business associations but, especially in times of acute political crisis,
prolonged war or immediate post-war reconstruction, it was also promoted by
the state. How far labour movements were engaged alongside business and
the state depended on their economic and political orientation and the
balance of economic and political forces. The crisis-ridden interwar period
reinforced corporatist tendencies, leading to two outcomes. Some corporatist
structures and strategies were imposed from above by fascist or authoritarian
regimes to address acute economic, political and ideological crises. This
occurred in the context of representational and/or parliamentary crises and
further undermined the legitimacy of parliamentarism. Others emerged from
below (often with state sponsorship) to assist economic or political crisis-
management in more liberal democratic regimes, helping to compensate for
parliamentary crisis or instability by reducing governmental overload by
sharing governance responsibilities with functional bodies and/or securing
extra support by mobilizing economic interests with an interest in stability.
These patterns were so common in this period that one political theorist
predicted that the twentieth century will be the century of corporatism just as
the nineteenth century was the century of liberalism (Manolesco 1936). But
these tendencies were not all-powerful and, indeed, corporatist projects were
sometimes little more than an ideological cloak for other practices, especially
in the more authoritarian regimes of this period.
The third wave emerged in attempts at economic crisis-management in liberal
democratic regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and was based on corporatist
tendencies in post-war reconstruction. It usually took a tripartite form
(involving business, organized labour and the state) reflecting the nature ofpost-war settlements. It was often partial and tendential, intermittent and ad
hoc, and nowhere did it lead to continuous, fully institutionalized corporatist
bargaining across all sectors of the economy and state. Successful cases
helped to stabilize societies oriented to economic growth and mass
consumption by supporting already existing macro-economic measures with
incomes, labour market and industrial policies. Thus corporatism was not now
intended to replace the market economy or liberal parliamentary democracy
and nor did it do so in the core capitalist economies although elements of
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state corporatism did survive from the inter-war period in some semi-
peripheral states. Instead, it was meant to supplement and reinforce them by
legitimating new forms of state intervention that went beyond traditional
methods of parliamentary and bureaucratic rule and by securing more
effective representation for different producer interests than could occur
through a generalized pluralism or catch-all electoral parties. They were
intended to help to stabilize the post-war mode of economic growth (by
moderating its tendencies towards stagflation) and to manage the initial
reaction to its growing crisis in the 1970s. In this context, corporatism seemed
able to provide, for a time, a real basis for securing and consolidating working-
class gains within capitalism subject to certain additional structural and
conjunctural conditions. These include strong, centralized industrial unions;
strong, centralized employers organizations, and a state which has the
capacities to intervene in economic management but also depends on co-
operation from its social partners (Notermans 2000).
It was the relative novelty of this form of corporatism and its apparent
compatibility with liberal democratic capitalism that prompted social scientific
interest in neo-corporatism and the dynamics of generalized political
exchange in the 1970s. Where the preconditions for stable corporatism were
absent, however, corporatist strategies failed to secure favourable tradeoffs
between growth, jobs and price stability and generated severe conflicts in
corporatist associations (especially trade unions). As national economies
became more open and the states primary economic concerns shifted from
macroeconomic management to supply-side innovation and international
competitiveness, however, the old neo-corporatist structures and strategies
seemed less viable. Nonetheless, the usefulness of some forms of
representation based on function within the division of labour is reflected in
the development of the fourth phase of corporatism and the emergence of
new justifications and descriptions for this phenomenon.
.
The fourth phase emerged in the 1980s, is still expanding, and is a key theme
in the ITEPE project. In contrast to the three other phases, which correspondto particular conjunctures in the development of capitalism, this phase is not
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tied specifically to the profit-oriented, market-mediated logic of accumulation
in a market society but is related to the more general development of complex
societies marked by increasing functional differentiation. In this sense, it also
has a pre-history outside the logic of a market economy embedded in a
market societyone that overlaps with the preceding phases of corporatism.
Its differentia specificais that it involves a wider range of functional interests,
including local authorities, scientific communities, professional associations,
non-governmental organizations, and social movements; and it extends
beyond reactive economic and political crisis-management to include
proactive strategies for competitiveness and, in addition, for activities in many
other issue areas marked by their inherent complexity and political sensitivity.
Despite some research on Eurocorporatism, reflecting European economic
integration and the rescaling of statehood, such developments are less often
discussed in corporatist or neo-corporatist terms (in part due to negative
association with the crises of the 1970s and allegedly over-mighty unions).
Instead they are analysed in diverse contexts as public-private partnerships,
networking, inter-organizational collaboration, regulated self-regulation, stake-
holding, productive solidarities, productivity coalitions, learning regions, the
social economy, and associational democracy. These developments are
connected, as we shall see below, to the challenges allegedly posed by the
growing complexity of social formations. One way to connect these diverse
forms is through the concepts of governance and meta-governance (for
discussion of the terminology of governance, see Jessop 1995; on meta-
governance, see Meuleman 2008; see below for further discussion of both).
III. Phase Four: Neo-neo-corporatism or Governance?
Although the notion of governance has a long history, with the first recorded
uses of the term (or its equivalents) occurring in the 14th century and referring
mainly to the action or manner of governing, guiding, or steering conduct, it
was revived from the late 1970s onwards in relation to the alleged shift from
government to governance in politics and analogous shifts in other societalspheres. This coincided with the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and the Keynesian
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welfare national state and, later, in the mid-1990s, with recognition of the
limitations of the neo-liberal solution of more market, less state. The 1970s
saw growing concern about governmental overload, legitimacy crisis, steering
crisis, and ungovernability and a search for new forms of governance to
address these problems. In particular, this prompted theoretical and practical
interest in the potential of coordination through self-organizing networks,
partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration. This is reflected in
studies of a growing range of economic governance mechanisms (such as
relational contracting, 'organized markets' in group enterprises, clans,
networks, trade associations, and strategic alliances) which coordinate
economic activities in other ways (e.g., Campbell et al., 1991; Grabher 1993;
Hollingsworth et al., 1994; Salais and Storper 1993; Storper 1993; Teubner
1993). In international relations there was a parallel growth of interest in
governance without government (e.g., Rosenau and Czempiel 1992).
Likewise, in political science and policy studies, there was growing concern
with the role of various forms of political coordination that not only span the
conventional public-private divide but also involve 'tangled hierarchies',
parallel power networks, or other forms of complex interdependence across
different tiers of government and/or different functional domains. This was
signified in terms of a shift from a narrow concern with governmentto a broad
concern with a wide range of political governance mechanisms with no
presumption that these are anchored primarily in the sovereign state. In
addition, by highlighting the growing role of associations, regulated self-
regulation, private interest government, etc., such concerns challenge the
idea that civil society is the residual site of community and/or the field par
excellence of bourgeois individualism. This was also a period when civil
society was celebrated and efforts were made to absorb community
organizations and social movements into new governance mechanisms.
In this respect, the fourth phase partly reprises the second, with its twin
emphases on tackling a perceived democratic deficit in current political
institutions and on mobilizing relevant private, public, third sector, and civil
society stakeholders to develop more effective economic and social policies
in an increasingly complex world. In the 1990s this also became part of the
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Third Way/Die neue Mitte agenda as well as neo-communitarian political
theory (Giddens 2000; Etzioni 1995). And, just as its advocates in the third,
tripartite phase sought to distance their view of corporatism from the
discredited period of authoritarian corporatism, current advocates often seek
to distance themselves from organized labour by calling for wider participation
in corporatist arrangements and define the latter in such terms as new
governance, social or territorial pacts, public-private partnership, the
networked economy, and so on. The development of the open method of
coordination in the European Union is an important example of this new
phase, linked as it is with concerns about competitiveness, the democratic
deficit, social cohesion, and the complexity of policy-making and policy-
implementation in a global era (Zeitlin and Pochet 2005).
Indeed, far from just responding to demands from social forces dissatisfied
with state and market failure, state managers have actively promoted these
new forms of governance as adjuncts to and/or substitutes for more traditional
forms of government. They do so in the hope and/or expectation that policy-
making and implementation will thereby be improved in terms of efficiency,
effectiveness, and transparency and also made more accountable to relevant
stakeholders and/or moral standards, leading to good governance. This shift
from government to governance has occurred on all scales from local states
through metropolitan and regional governments to national states and on to
various forms of intergovernmental arrangements at the international, trans-
national, supranational, and global levels. Another sign of change is use of the
notion of multi-level governance to describe new forms of public authority that
not only link different territorial scales above and below the national level but
also mobilize functional as well as territorial actors. More generally, new forms
of partnership, negotiation, and networking have been introduced or extended
by state managers as they seek to cope with the declining legitimacy and/or
effectiveness of other approaches to policy-making and implementation. Such
innovations also redraw the inherited public-private divide, engender new
forms of interpenetration between the political system and other functional
systems, and modify relations between these systems and the lifeworld as the
latter impacts upon the nature and exercise of state power.
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IV. Complexity Theory
Various currents in the social sciences explain the growth of governance in
terms of the evolutionary advantages that the institutions and practices of
governance offer for learning and innovation in an increasingly complex and
turbulent environment. Inter-organizational negotiation and inter-systemic
context steering are said to involve self-organized guidance of multiple
agencies, institutions, and systems that are operationally autonomous from
one another yet structurally coupled due to their mutual interdependence.
Whilst their respective operational autonomies exclude primary reliance on a
single hierarchy as a mode of co-ordination among relevant agencies,
institutions, and systems, their interdependence makes them ill-suited to
simple, blind co-evolution based on the 'invisible hand' of the market or the
iron hand of command. Governance is said to overcome these problems in
providing a 'third way' between market anarchy and top-down planning. Self-
organization is especially useful in cases of loose coupling or operational
autonomy, complex reciprocal interdependence, complex spatio-temporal
horizons, and shared interests (cf. Mayntz 1993; Scharpf 1994).
One way to locate these arguments is in terms of Luhmanns analysis of three
historical modes of organizing social formations (Vergesellschaftungsmodi):
segmentation, centre-periphery, and functional differentiation. I build on this
typology by suggesting that (1) these principles are not mutually exclusive
from the perspective of world society and (2) the codes and programmes
associated with particular functionally differentiated systems can be more or
less dominant within world society. It can be shown that these extensions are
more or less implicit in Luhmanns work and, even if they were not, they are
nonetheless useful and powerful heuristic principles for understanding the
production of society effects.
The concept of society effects rests on the claim that the existence of a
'society' cannot be taken for granted: it must be constituted and reproduced
through more or less precarious social processes and practices that articulate
diverse social relations to produce a 'society effect'. The nature of any society
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varies with its collective identity (self-description) and how its conditions of
existence are secured. It would emerge from and be based on a more
extensive substratum of social relations which included many more elemental
relations than those which are articulated to form this particular set of 'society
effects'. There are always interstitial, residual, marginal, irrelevant,
recalcitrant, and contradictory elements and, indeed, these may serve as
reservoirs of flexibility and innovation as well as actual or potential sources of
disorder. Moreover, insofar as alternative societies are possible, there is
scope for conflict over rival 'societal projects' as well as for emergent
contradictions among institutional logics. In this sense effective societalization
has both a 'social' and a 'system' integration aspect (cf. Lockwood 1964).
The concept of functional differentiation is tied to claims about a dramatic
intensification of societal complexity. In addition to the increased functional
differentiation combined with increased interdependence among functional
systems, other reasons advanced for growing complexity include:
increased fuzziness, contestability, and de-differentiation of institutional
boundaries; increased complexity of spatial and scalar relations and horizons of
action as national economies, national states, and national societies
cease to be the main axes and reference points in societal
organization;
increased complexity and interconnectedness of temporalities and
temporal horizons, ranging from split-second timing (e.g., computer-
driven trading) to an acceleration of the glacial time of social andenvironmental change;
multiplication of identities and the imagined communities to which
different social forces orient their actions and seek to coordinate them;
increased importance of knowledge and organized learning; and,
because of the above,
the self-potentiating nature of complexity, whereby complex systems
generally operate in ways that create opportunities for additional
complexity.
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Even if these trends cannot be accurately measured and affirmed, this
Zeitdiagnostikstill has important effects. Indeed, narratives of complexity have
their own performative force and are often used instrumentally and
strategically to effect change in response to growing complexity. These
trends (or their narration) certainly seem to have promoted shifts in the
institutional centre of gravity (or institutional attractor) for policy coordination
away from hierarchy towards heterarchy or reflexive self-organization (which
is sometimes conflated with governance tout court in claims that there has
been a shift from government to governance). But disillusion with the utopias
of communism, the welfare state, and, more recently, the unfettered
dominance of market forces should not lead us to put all our trust in the atopic
vision of good governance based on horizontal and vertical solidarities and
the mobilisation of collective intelligence (Willke 2001). It is not just markets
and imperative co-ordination that are prone to fail; heterarchic governance
and solidarity are also failure-prone albeit for different reasons, in different
ways, and with different effects. In general, the greater the material, social,
and spatio-temporal complexity of the problems to be addressed, the greater
are the number and range of interests whose heterarchic co-ordination is
necessary to resolve them satisfactorily. In addition, the less direct and visible
are reciprocally interdependent interests, the more challenging is efficient,
effective, and consensual co-ordination regardless of the method of co-
ordination. These simple and obvious remarks already indicate some basic
problems of a (world) state as a governance regime.
Ignoring for the moment whether complexity has actually increased, the world
is too complex to be grasped in all its complexity in real time, let alone to be
governed in all its complexity in real time. One reason for this is that the
causal mechanisms that generate the present moment are complex, have
different spatio-temporal depth and rhythms, and manifest themselves at
different sites, scales, and over different time horizons. Indeed, rather than try
to theorize complexity, it is often more productive to explore how systems
and/or actors reduce complexity (cf. Jessop 2007). In the social world,
complexity is reduced in two main ways. The first is simplification through
semiosis (meaning- or sense-making), which is associated with specific
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power/knowledge relations associated with governmentality, and the manner
of subjectivation, that is, the production of subjects capable of governing,
being governed, and self-governing. Likewise, from Marxist or analogous
critical perspectives, the objects of governance are also important because
they may contain contradictions and/or generate strategic dilemmas that resist
any simple effort at governance. Overall, this involves concern with questions
of problem-definition, power asymmetries, and domination and the effects of
specific modes of calculation, dispositive configurations, and social practices.
Complexity and complexity reduction are relevant to corporatism and/or
governance in both respects. For the success of these coordination
mechanisms and social practices depends on the adequacy of their
associated social imaginaries to the complexities of the real world and on the
relevance of the associated modes of coordination to the objects that are to
be governed. In short, for social agents to be able to go on in the world and
to govern it, at least two conditions must be satisfied. First, they must not only
reduce complexity by selectively attributing sense (Sinn) and meaning
(Bedeutung) to some of its features rather than others; but, second, their
simplifications must have sufficient variety to be congruent with real world
processes and to remain relevant to governance objectives. In short, the
success of governance depends on the adequacy of social imaginaries to the
complexities of the real world and on the relevance of the modes of
governance to the objects that are to be governed.
V. Corporatism and Modes of Governance
Four modes of coordination of complex, reciprocal interdependence are
conventionally distinguished: exchange, command, network, and solidarity
(see Table 1). This is the domain of what Kooiman (1994), implicitly
confirming the bias of steering theory and socio-cybernetics, calls first-order
governing or problem-solving. In each case, success depends on the
performance of complementary activities and operations by other actors
whose activities and operations depend in turn on the performance ofcomplementary activities and operations elsewhere within the relevant social
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ensemble. The forms concerned are: ex post co-ordination through exchange
(e.g., the anarchy of the market), ex ante co-ordination through imperative co-
ordination (e.g., the hierarchy of the firm, organization, or state), reflexive self-
organization (e.g., the heterarchy of ongoing negotiated consent to resolve
complex problems in a corporatist order or horizontal networking to co-
ordinate a complex division of labour), and solidarity based on unconditional
commitment to others (e.g., loyalty within small communities or local units or
across imagined communities in times of crisis).
Market exchange is characterized by a formal, procedural rationality that is
oriented to the efficient allocation of scarce resources to competing ends. The
capitalist market has a formal, procedural rationality that prioritizes an endless
'economizing' pursuit of profit maximization. It requires demanding conditions
if it is to work efficiently even in its own limited terms. Imperative co-ordination
has a substantive, goal-oriented rationality that prioritizes 'effective' pursuit of
successive policy goals. It also has demanding preconditions. For, in addition
to the usual problems of creating and maintaining appropriate organizational
capacities, the algorithms required for effective ex ante co-ordination in a
complex and turbulent environment impose heavy cognitive demands. In
addition, both market and imperative co-ordination are prey to the problems of
bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity2 (Coulson 1997).
Reflexive self-organization has a substantive, procedural rationality that is
concerned with solving specific co-ordination problems on the basis of a
commitment to a continuing dialogue to establish the grounds for negotiated
consent, resource sharing, and concerted action in mutually beneficial joint
projects. Solidarity in turn is characterized by unreflexive, unconditional
commitment. Its thickest form is generally confined to to small units (e.g., a
couple, family, or tight-knit communities or fate, or Bund) and, the larger the
unit, the thinner and less intense solidarity tends to become. Eventually it
changes into more unilateral forms of trust in the expertise of skilled
practitioners providing goods and services that their clients cannot provide
themselves (on trust and its failure, see Adler 2001; Fukuyama 1995;
Luhmann 1979; Gambetta 1988; Misztal 1996; Nooteboom 2002).
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SOLIDARITY
Unreflexiv
eand
value-orie
nted
Requited
Commitment
Love
Homofide
lis
Anytime,
anywhere
Betrayal,
Mistrust
Co-depen
dency
Asymmetry
DIALOGUE
Reflexiveand
Proced
ural
Negotiated
Consent
Networks
Homopoliticus
Re-sca
ling,path-
shaping
'Noise',
'TalkingShop'
Secrec
y,
distorted
commu
nication
COMMAND
Sub
stantiveandGoal-
Oriented
Effe
ctiveGoal-
Atta
inment
State
Hom
oHierarchicus
Org
anizationalSpace,
planning
Ineffectiveness
Bureaucratism,
Red
Tape
EXCHANGE
Formaland
Procedural
EfficientAllocationof
Resources
Market
HomoEconomicus
WorldMarket,
reversibletime
Economic
Inefficiency
Market
Inadequacies
Rationality
Criterionof
Success
Typical
Example
StylizedMode
ofCalculation
Spatio-temporal
horizons
PrimaryCriterion
ofFailure
SecondaryCriterion
ofFailure
Table 1: Modes of Governance
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Turning to the differentiaspecificaof reflexive self-organization or heterarchic
governance, it is based on instituting negotiation around a long-term
consensual project as the basis for both negative and positive coordination
among interdependent actors. The key to success is continued commitment to
dialogue to generate and exchange more information (thereby reducing,
without ever eliminating, the problem of bounded rationality); to weaken
opportunism by locking partners into a range of interdependent decisions over
short-, medium-, and long-term time horizons; and to build on the
interdependencies and risks associated with 'asset specificity' by encouraging
solidarity among those involved. The rationality of this mode of governance is
dialogic rather than monologic, pluralistic rather than monolithic, heterarchic
rather than hierarchical or anarchic. It operates on three levels. The first
concerns interpersonal networks based on trust, the second concerns inter-
organizational coordination based on negotiation and noise reduction, the
third concerns de-centred context steering oriented to the coordination of
inter-systemic relations based on negative coordination. These levels can be
nested such that interpersonal ties lubricate inter-organizational coordination
and the latter in turn facilitates de-centred context-steering.
Each of these modes of coordination of complex reciprocal interdependence
has a distinctive primary form of failure and typical secondary forms of failure.
Market failure is said to occur when markets fail to allocate scarce resources
efficiently in and through pursuit of monetized private interest the response
to which might be further extension of market mechanism or compensatory
state action. State failure is said to occur when state managers cannot secure
substantive collective goals determined on the basis of their political divination
of the public interest. Typical responses have been attempts to improve
juridico-political institutional design, knowledge, or political practice or a policy
of 'more market, less state'. More recently heterarchic governance has been
seen as a magic bullet that overcomes the problems of market and state
failure without creating its own problems. But heterarchy is also prone to
failure albeit for different reasons, in different ways, and with different
effects. Insofar as such governance aims to modify goals through ongoing
negotiation and reflection, failure would involve the inability to redefine
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2009; Hood 1998). Third, 'meta-heterarchy' involves the reflexive organization
of the conditions of reflexive self-organization by redefining the framework in
which heterarchy (or reflexive self-organization) occurs3and can range from
providing opportunities for 'spontaneous sociability' (Fukuyama 1995; see also
Putnam 2000) through various measures to promote networking and
negotiation to the introduction of innovations to promote 'institutional
thickness' (Amin and Thrift 1995). Lastly, meta-solidarity involves forms of
therapeutic action, whether spontaneous or mediated through therapeutic
intervention, to repair or refocus feelings of loyalty and unconditional
commitment.
Meta-Exchange
Meta-Command
Meta-DialogueMeta-Solidarity
Redesignindividualmarkets
De- and re-regulation
Re-ordermarkethierarchies
Organizationalredesign
Re-orderorganizationalecologies.
Constitutionalchange
Re-ordernetworks
Reorganizeconditions ofself-organization
New forms ofdialogue
Develop newidentities andloyalties.
From old tonew socialmovements
New forms ofsolidaristicpractice
Table 2 Second-Order Governance
Beyond such attempts at second-order governance, we find what Kooiman
calls third-order governance. This could also be called second-order
metagovernance, meta-metagovernance, or, best of all, in part because of its
etymological roots as well as its conceptual precision, collibration (cf. Dunsire
1996). This can be defined as the judicious re-articulating and rebalancing of
modes of governance to manage the complexity, plurality, and tangled
hierarchies found in prevailing modes of co-ordination with a view to achieving
optimal outcomes as viewed by those engaged in metagovernance. In this
sense it also means the organization of the conditions of governance in terms
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of their structurally-inscribed strategic selectivity, i.e., the asymmetrical
privileging of different modes of co-ordination and their differential access to
the institutional support and the material resources needed to pursue
reflexively-agreed objectives. Collibration is no more the preserve of one actor
or set of actors than it is confined to one site or scale of action. Instead it
should be seen, like the various first-order forms of coordination of complex
reciprocal interdependence and the various second-order forms of meta-
coordination, as fractal in character, i.e., as taking self-similar forms in many
different social fields.
Metagovernance involves not only institutional design but also the
transformation of subjects and cultures. Whereas there has been much
interest in issues of institutional design appropriate to different objects of
governance, less attention to the reform of the subjects of governance and
their values. Yet the neoliberal project, for example, clearly requires attempts
to create entrepreneurial subjects and demanding consumers aware of their
choices and rights as well as actions to shift the respective scope and powers
of the market mechanism and state intervention. This is an area where
Foucauldian students of governmentality offer more than students of
governance. For they have been especially interested in the role of power and
knowledge in shaping the attributes, capacities, and identities of social agents
and, in the context of self-reflexive governance, in enabling them to become
self-governing and self-transforming (cf. Miller and Rose 2008). This raises
important questions about the compatibility of different modes of governance
insofar as this involves not only questions of institutional compatibility but also
the distribution of the individual and collective capacities needed to pursuecreatively and autonomously the appropriate strategies and tactics to sustain
contrasting modes of governance.
Governments play a major and increasing role in all aspects of
metagovernance in areas of societal significance, whether these are formally
private or public. They get involved in redesigning markets, in constitutional
change and the juridical re-regulation of organizational forms and objectives,
in organizing the conditions for networked self-organization, in promoting
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social capital and the self-regulation of the professions and other forms of
expertise, and, most importantly, in the collibration of different forms of first-
order governance and metagovernance. This is especially true during periods
of crisis that threaten system integration and/or social cohesion. This is where
the link between meta-governance and passive revolution is especially strong
and where we also find major transitions in accumulation regimes, state
projects, societal visions, and so forth. Neo-liberalism is only the latest
example of such a fundamental shift in the metagovernance of capital
accumulation and its associated forms of state in their inclusive sense.
More specifically, governments provide the ground rules for governance and
the regulatory order in and through which governance partners can pursue
their aims; ensure the compatibility or coherence of different governance
mechanisms and regimes; create forums for dialogue and/or act as the
primary organizer of the dialogue among policy communities; deploy a relative
monopoly of organizational intelligence and information in order to shape
cognitive expectations; serve as a 'court of appeal' for disputes arising within
and over governance; seek to re-balance power differentials and strategic
bias in regimes by strengthening weaker forces or systems in the interests of
system integration and/or social cohesion; take material and/or symbolic
flanking and supporting measures to stabilize forms of coordination that are
deemed valuable but prone to collapse; subsidize production of public goods;
organize side-payments for those making sacrifices to facilitate effective
coordination; contribute to the meshing of short-, medium- and long-term time
horizons and temporal rhythms across different sites, scales, and actors, in
part to prevent opportunistic exit and entry into governance arrangements; tryto modify the self-understanding of identities, strategic capacities, and
interests of individual and collective actors in different strategic contexts and
hence alter their implications for preferred strategies and tactics; organize
redundancies and duplication to sustain resilience through requisite variety in
response to unexpected problems;4and also assume political responsibility as
addressee in last resort in the event of governance failure in domains beyond
the state (based in part on Jessop 2002: 219; see also Bell and Hindmoor
2009).This emerging role means that networking, negotiation, noise reduction,
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and negative as well as positive co-ordination occur 'in the shadow of
hierarchy' (Scharpf 1994: 40). It also suggests the need for almost permanent
institutional and organisational innovation to maintain the very possibility
(however remote) of sustained economic growth.
Governance is certainly not a purely technical matter limited to specific
problems defined by the state (or other social forces) that can be resolved by
experts in organizational design, public administration, and public opinion
management. How different modes of co-ordination operate depends on their
relative primacy within the political order (government and governance in the
shadow of hierarchy) and the uneven access of stakeholders to institutional
support and resources. Among crucial issues are the flanking and supporting
measures that are taken by the state; the provision of material and symbolic
support; and the extent of any duplication or counteraction by other co-
ordination mechanisms. Moreover, as both governance and government
mechanisms exist on different scales (indeed one of their functions is to
bridge scales), success at one scale may depend on practices and events on
other scales. Likewise, co-ordination mechanisms may have different
temporal horizons and there may be disjunctions between the temporalities of
different governance and government mechanisms that go beyond issues of
sequencing to affect the viability of any given mode of coordination.
Although governance mechanisms may acquire specific techno-economic,
political, and/or ideological functions, governance is always conducted under
the primacy of the political, i.e., the state's concern with managing the tension
between economic and political advantages and its ultimate responsibility forsocial cohesion (cf. Poulantzas 1973). This holds both for the political
character of any specific process of problem definition and for the states
monitoring of the effects of specific forms of governance on its institutional
integration and ability to pursue the hegemonic or dominant state project
whilst maintaining social cohesion in divided societies. This fact plagues the
liberal prescription of an arms-length relationship between the market and the
night-watchman state since states (or, at least, state managers) are rarely
strong enough to resist pressures to intervene when political advantage
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maximizing total revenues and the conflict over their allocation; (3) the need
for consultation among operationally and organizationally distinct but
functionally interdependent forces about the economic impact of state policies
and the political repercussions of private economic decision-making; and (4)
the problems generated by the nature of civil society as a sphere of particular
interests. Each of these features provides major incentives to adopt functional
representation to address the resulting problems for economic policy and
political stability. Nonetheless corporatism cannot suspend the contradictions
of capitalism or eliminate other conflicts in political regimes and these cause
instabilities in the very corporatist tendencies that these features help to
generate. This is an important part of the explanation for the recurrent cycles
of the rise of corporatism, its fall, and its return in a new guise (Jessop 2002).
While this might explain the recurrence of corporatism (and governance), it
does not, however, explain the failure of this approach to the coordination of
complex reciprocal interdependence in capitalist social formations. To explain
this we must look beyond the division of labour, the division of knowledge, the
sphere of exchange relations, and the nature of civil society as a sphere of
possessive individualism and particular interests. We must examine the
fundamental aspects of the capital relation itself and its implications for the
nature and dynamic of social formations dominated by profit-oriented, market-
mediated accumulation. In particular, against the explicit arguments of
modern systems theory, we must ask about the conditions in which the logic
of one so-called functional system (the economy) can come to dominate the
overall organization of world society. I develop this argument in two steps. In
this section, I explore some basic contradictions of the capital relation and the
problems that they pose for the premature harmonization of contradictions
(Bloch 1959: 178) through corporatism and/or efforts to govern the capital
relation. Section VII then considers the extent to which, and the conditions
under which, these problems could come to dominate not just the organization
of the capitalist market economy but also world society as a whole.
Marx (1967) identified an essential contradiction in the cell -form of thecapitalist mode of production, namely, the commodity, between its exchange-
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and use-value aspects. On this basis he unfolded the complex dynamic of this
mode of production including the necessity of periodic crises and their
creatively destructive role in renewing accumulation. I suggest that all forms of
the capital relation (insofar as revenues derive from free trade and the rational
organization of production, thereby excluding profits from different forms of
political capitalism, such as predatory capitalism, force and domination, or
unusual deals with political authority), embody different but interconnected
versions of this basic contradiction (on political capitalism, see Weber 2009).
These impact differentially on (different fractions of) capital and on (different
categories and strata of) labour at different times and places (Jessop 2002).
Thus, productive capital is both abstract value in motion (notably in the form of
realized profits available for reinvestment) and a concrete stock of already
invested time- and place-specific assets in the course of being valorized; the
worker is both an abstract unit of labour-power substitutable by other such
units (or, indeed, other factors of production) and a concrete individual (or,
indeed, collective workforce) with specific skills, knowledge and creativity; the
wage is a cost of production and a source of demand; money functions as an
international currency exchangeable against other currencies (ideally in
stateless space) and as national money circulating within national or pluri-
national spaces subject to state control; land functions both as rent-generating
property (based on the private appropriation of nature) and as a more or less
renewable and recyclable natural resource (modified by past actions);
knowledge is the basis of intellectual property rights and a collective resource
(the intellectual commons). Likewise, the state is not only responsible for
securing key conditions for the valorization of capital and the reproduction of
labour-power as a fictitious commodity but also has overall political
responsibility for maintaining social cohesion in a socially divided, pluralistic
society. Taxation is an unproductive deduction from private revenues (profits
of enterprise, wages, interest, and rents) and a means to finance collective
investment and consumption. And so on (see Jessop 2002).
The tension between the two co-existing poles, each of which is a naturally
necessary or inherent feature of a given contradiction and, indeed, which
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together define it in their opposition, generates strategic dilemmas on how to
handle the contradiction. For example, does or should the state treat the
(social) wage mainly as a source of demand, a cost of production, or attempt
to reconcile these aspects? The first case is illustrated in the Keynesian
welfare national state (or KWNS), the second in neo-liberal austerity politics or
export-led growth, and the third in welfare regimes based on flexicurity.
Analogous arguments hold for other contradictions and dilemmas. The
plurality of contradictions and their interconnections, the possibilities of
handling them at different sites, scales, and time horizons, etc., creates
significant scope for agency, strategies and tactics to affect economic
trajectories. How they are handled also shapes the form of subsequent crises
but does notdetermine the nature of subsequent regimes, which also depend
on the formal and material adequacy outcome of path-shaping initiatives.
Each contradiction has its own aspects and is actualized in its own ways in
particular institutional and spatio-temporal contexts, giving rise to a complex,
overdetermined, contradictory and multiply dilemmatic ensemble of social
relations. While many institutions are related to fundamental categories of the
capital relation, their specific forms and logics are irreducible to these basic
categories. They modify the forms of appearance of contradictions and
dilemmas but cannot abolish the underlying structural and strategic problems.
Partial resolutions can be achieved through institutional fixes and spatio-
temporal fixes. These fixes both emerge, to the extent that they do, in a
contested, trial-and-error process, involving different economic, political, and
social forces and diverse strategies and projects; and they typically rest on an
institutionalized, unstable equilibrium of compromise. An institutional fix is a
complementary set of institutions that, via institutional design, imitation,
imposition, or chance evolution, helps to provide a temporary, partial, and
relatively stable solution to the rgulation-cum-governance problems involved
in constituting and securing a social order. It can also be examined as a
spatio-temporal fix (or STF), and vice versa. STFs establish spatial and
temporal boundaries within which the always relative, incomplete, provisional,
and institutionally-mediated structural coherence of a given order (here, a
mode of growth) are secured to the extent that this occurs. Issues of
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institutional design apart, this also involves building support in and across
many conflictual and contested fields for the respective accumulation
strategies, associated state projects and, where it is relevant, hegemonic
visions. STFs help to displace and defer the material (stofflich) and social
costs of securing such coherence beyond the spatial, temporal, and social
boundaries of the institutional fix. Thus zones of relative stability depend on
zones of instability elsewhere and/or at the cost of future problems.
These distinctions are useful in exploring how institutional and spatio-temporal
fixes contribute to the overall rgulation-cum-governance of the capital
relation. Specifically, contradictions and their associated dilemmas may be
handled through:
hierarchization (treating some contradictions as more important than
others);
prioritizationof one aspect of a contradiction or dilemma over the other
aspect;
spatialization (relying on different scales and sites of action to address
one or another contradiction or aspect or displacing the problems
associated with the neglected aspect to a marginal or liminal space,
place, or scale); and
temporalization (alternating regularly between treatment of different
aspects or focusing one-sidedly on a subset of contradictions, dilemmas,
or aspects until it becomes urgent to address what had hitherto been
neglected).
The prevailing strategies modify each contradiction, with the result that they
are mutually presupposed, interiorizing and reproducing in different ways the
overall configuration of contradictions. Different configurations can be
stabilized based on the weights attached to 1) different contradictions and
dilemmas and their dual aspects; 2) the counter-balancing or offsetting of
different solutions to different contradictions and dilemmas; 3) different
patterns of social conflict and institutionalized compromise; 4) differences in
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the leading places and spaces for accumulation; and 5) the changing
prospects of displacing and/or deferring problems and crisis-tendencies. The
complex structural configuration of a given accumulation regime depends on
institutional and spatio-temporal fixes that establish the primacy of one or
more contradictions and assign a primacy for governance to one rather than
another of its aspects. Other contradictions are regularized/governed
according to how they complement the current dominant contradiction(s).
Nonetheless, these fixes are not magic bullets: they cannot eliminate
contradictions and dilemmas and, whatever their capacity to temporarily
harmonize or reconcile them, they create the conditions for the next crisis. In
terms of corporatism and governance, these crises take the form of crises in
corporatism arrangements and governance crises.
Three further sets of remarks are relevant here. First, in addition to any
problems, failure-tendencies, and dilemmas inherent in specific modes of
coordination, the success of governance is also affected by the dependence
of capital accumulation on maintaining a contradictory balance between
marketized and non-marketized organizational forms. Although this was
previously understood mainly in terms of the balance between market and
state, governance does not introduce a neutral third term but adds another
site upon which the balance can be contested. For new forms of governance
provide a new meeting ground for the conflicting logics of accumulation and
political mobilization. A key aspect of this problem in capitalist social
formations is the capacity to develop and consolidate specific spatio-temporal
fixes. Strategically, as capitalism's contradictions and dilemmas are insoluble
in the abstract, they are resolved partially and provisionally, if at all
through the formulation-realization of specific accumulation strategies at
various economic and political scales in specific spatio-temporal contexts.
Such spatio-temporal fixes delimit the main spatial and temporal boundaries
within which structural coherence is secured, and externalize certain costs of
securing this coherence beyond these boundaries. The primary scales and
temporal horizons around which such fixes are built and the extent of their
coherence vary considerably over time. This is reflected in the variable
coincidence of different boundaries, borders or frontiers of action and the
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changing primacy of different scales. Political boundaries, for example, have
seen medieval polymorphy, Westphalian exclusivity, and post-Westphalian
complexity. Likewise, the consolidation of capitalism witnessed the national
eclipse of the urban scale as cities were integrated into national economic
systems and subordinated to the political power of national territorial states.
And the national scale has since been challenged by the rise of global city
networks more oriented to other global cities than to national hinterlands.
As part of a given spatio-temporal fix, different institutions, apparatuses or
agencies may specialize primarily in one or other horn of a dilemma, deal with
it over different temporal horizons, or address different aspects at different
times. The state may also alter the balance between institutions, apparatuses
and agencies by reallocating responsibilities and resources, allowing them to
compete for political support and legitimacy as circumstances change, etc.
Such strategies may be pursued entirely within the state or extend to the
division between state and non-state modes of governance. Another way to
manage potential problems arising from the limits of different modes of policy-
making or crisis-management is through variable policy emphases across
different scales of action and temporal horizons. For example, in Atlantic
Fordism, the national state set the macroeconomic framework, the local state
acted as its relay for many nationally-determined policies, and
intergovernmental cooperation in various international regimes maintained the
conditions for national economic growth. Likewise, in contemporary neoliberal
accumulation regimes, a relative neglect of substantive (as opposed to formal)
supply-side conditions at the international and national levels in favour of
capital flows in and through space is partly compensated by more
interventionist policies at the regional, urban and local levels, where many
material interdependencies among specific productive capitals are located
(Gough and Eisenschitz 1996).
There can also be a temporal division of labour with different institutions,
apparatuses or agencies responding to contradictions, dilemmas and
paradoxes over different time horizons. This is reflected in the conventional
distinction between planning and execution within organizations and in the
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primacy of different temporal horizons across organizations (for example,
banks and central banks, computer-programmed arbitrage funds and long-
term venture capital funds). Similarly, corporatist arrangements have often
been introduced to address long-term economic and social issues where
complex, reciprocal interdependence requires long-term cooperation
thereby taking the relevant policy areas outside the short-term time horizons
of electoral cycles and parliamentary in-fighting. In both cases there is scope
for activities to rebalance relations among these institutions, apparatuses or
agencies through differential allocation of resources; allowing them to
compete for legitimacy in changing circumstances.
VII. Ecological Dominance
Any claim that different functional systems may be more or less important
faces two challenges that arise from the assumption in modern systems
theory that functionally differentiated systems perform essential functions in
society and are non-substitutable. The first challenge is structural. For modern
systems theory implies that no single functional (autopoietic) system could
determine societal development in the first or even last instance. All such
systems have absolute (not relative) operational autonomy. For example, the
modern economy is a self-perpetuating system of payments; the modern legal
system is a self-contained and self-modifying system of legally-binding legal
decisions; the science system is a self-perpetuating system of scientific
communications coded in terms of true/false; and the political system
produces collectively binding decisions that generate further political
decisions. Nonetheless this operational autonomy is limited by a given
systems relation to its external environment and, more specifically, by its
material dependence on the performance of other systems that operate
according to their own codes and programmes. These constraints can be read
as sources of relativization of autopoiesis and encourage the relevant system
to construct simplified, selective models of these constraints and integrate
these models into its operations. Each system models these constraints
differently, reflecting their observed relevance to its own reproduction. Despite
such constraints, however, each system can maintain its operational
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autonomy insofar as it has its own operating codes and has sufficient time to
implement them, faces competing demands so that it can choose which to
process, and has the general legitimacy or societal trust needed to operate
without having constantly to justify its specific activities on each occasion.
Without such conditions, a functional system can lose its operational
autonomy. This poses an interesting question, pursued below, about the
conditions under which other functional systems might lose some operational
autonomy to the economy (or, indeed, vice versa).
The second challenge is strategic. For, according to systems theory, modern
societies are so highly differentiated and polycentric that no single system,
central decision-making body, or ruling class could ever coordinate their
diverse interactions, organizations, and institutions and ensure their
harmonious cooperation toward a common end. Once systems reach
'autopoietic take-off', they only respond to problems defined in their own
terms. External demands stated in other codes and/or in terms of more
general noise from the everyday life-world will be dismissed as irrelevant or
else handled as an irritation to be avoided or overcome in whatever way the
perturbed system itself thinks fit. If we accept that modern societies are
characterized by functional differentiation, it is likely that there are competing
societalization principles, processes, and projects, associated with efforts to
extend the code and programme of one functional system at the expense of
others. For example, in addition to marketization, which, in one of its possible
meanings, extends the logic of profit-oriented, market-mediated economic
action to sets of social relations where it is absent, one could explore rival
principles linked to other functional systems such as juridification,
medicalization, militarization, sacralization, politicization, or scientization or,
indeed, with identities and values anchored in civil society (or the lifeworld
rather than system-world) such as ethnicity or race (apartheid), gender
(patriarchy), generation (gerontocracy), or nationality (nation-statehood).
To address these challenges, I want to build on a concept mentioned once in
Niklas Luhmanns systems theory but later implicitly (and incompletely) onseveral occasions and in different contexts in his later work. This is the
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concept of ecological dominance. In general terms, in the context of the
synchronic and diachronic system interdependencies, this exists to the extent
that one system in a self-organising ecology of self-organising systems that
are formally equal and non-substitutable imprints its developmental logic on
other systems' operations more than any of the latter can impose their
respective logics on that system. In short, even if all functional systems are
equal, some may be more equal than others. It has more influence on the
development of other systems, positive or negative, than they have on it. The
concept can also be fruitfully applied, as the field of organizational ecology
indicates, to inter-organizational relations.
Ecological dominance is a contingent emergent relationship between two or
more systems rather than a naturally necessary property of a single system. It
is always differential, relational, and contingent. Thus, a given system can be
more or less ecologically dominant; its dominance may vary across systems
and in different spheres or aspects of the lifeworld; and/or with changing
circumstances; and the continuation of any dominance will depend on the
development of the entire social ecosystem as a whole.5This does not mean
that the ecologically dominant system is unaffected by the operation of other
systems or that specific social forces will not attempt to reverse, brake or
guide that dominance. Rather, as its name implies, ecological dominance
involves an ecological relation where one system becomes dominant in a
complex, co-evolving situation; it does not involve a one-sided relation of
dominationwhere one system unilaterally imposes its logic or will on others
(cf. Morin 1980: 44). This capacity is always mediated in and through the
operational logics of other systems and the communicative rationalities of the
lifeworld. There is no 'last instance' in relations of ecological dominancethey
are always differential, relational, and contingent. The relative ecologicaldominance of a system will differ across systems, depends on specific social
relations, and is always doubly tendential.
I now argue that the profit-oriented, market-mediated capitalist economy, with
its distinctive, self-valorizing logic, tends to have just those properties that
favour its ecological dominance over other types of social relations. Drawing
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on a diverse literature, I present seven properties associated with ecological
dominance in Table 3. The following paragraphs indicate how they relate to
the logic of capital accumulation in an increasingly integrated world market.
First, regarding the first of the three factors internal to a given system or
institutional order that contribute to ecological dominance, the capitalist
economy gets increasingly disembedded from other systems, internal
competition to reduce socially necessary labour-time, socially necessary
turnover time,6and naturally necessary reproduction time becomes an ever
more powerful driving force in capital accumulation. Extra-economic
pressures on the economy are thereby translated into competition among
capitals to find new opportunities for profit in these pressures and/or to exit
from particular markets in order to preserve capital by investing elsewhere
(including in liquid assets). Different degrees of liquidity, flexibility, and
fungibility mean that capitals vary in their ability to respond to such pressures
and competition. Interest-bearing capital controls the most liquid, abstract,
and generalized resource and therefore has the most capacity to respond
opportunities for profit and external perturbations. Derivatives have developed
as the most generalized form of this capacity and, indeed, have an increasing
role in the commensuration of all investment opportunities in the world market,
serving thereby as a self-generating, self-referential expression of capital in
general on a world scale (cf. Bryan and Rafferty 2006, 2007).
Second, the capitalist economy is internally complex and flexible because of
the decentralized, anarchic nature of market forces and the dual role of price
formation as a flexible mechanism for allocating capital to different economicactivities and as a stimulus to second-order observation, learning and self-
reflection. A contributing factor to ecological dominance in the natural world is
a given species superior capacity to tolerate environmental disturbances
(Keddy 1989: 18-19). By analogy, this capacity is well-developed in the
capitalist economy because of its greater internal complexity (multiplicity and
heterogeneity of elements), the looser coupling among these elements, and
the high degree of reflexive capacity (self-monitoring) (Baraldi et al., 1998:151). Further, as capitalism develops, different organizations, institutions and
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Table 3: Seven Factors Relevant to Ecological Dominance
in the relation among Functional Systems
Internal
Scope for continuous self-transformation because internalcompetitive pressures are more important than external
adaptive pressures in the dynamic of a given system
Extent of internal structural and operational complexity and
the resulting scope for spontaneous self-adaptation in the
face of perturbation or disruption (regardless of the external
or internal origin of adaptive pressures)
Capacity to engage in time-space distantiation and/or time-space compression) to exploit the widest possible range of
opportunities for self-reproduction
Trans-
versal
Capacity to displace internal contradictions and dilemmas
onto other systems, into the environment, or defer them into
the future
Capacity to redesign other systems and shape their
evolution via context-steering (especially throughorganizations that have a primary functional orientation and
also offer a meeting space for other functional systems)
and/or constitutional (re)design
External
Extent to which other actors accept its operations as central
to the wider systems reproduction and orient their actions toits reproduction needs (e.g., through their naturalizationwithin system programmes or decision premises as
naturalized constrains or imperatives). Organizations also
have a key role here through their capacity to respond to
irritations and expectations of several functional systems
Extent to which a given system is the biggest source of
external adaptive pressure on other systems (perhaps
through the implications of recurrent system failures,
worsening social exclusion, and positive feedback effects)
and/or is more important than their respective internal
pressures for system development.
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apparatuses tend to emerge to express different moments of its
contradictions, dilemmas and paradoxes and these may then interact to
compensate for market failures in the context of specific spatio-temporal fixes.
Third, capital has developed strong capacities to extend its operations in time
and space (time-space distantiation) and/or compress them in these regards
(time-space compression). The mutual reinforcement of such distantiation and
compression facilitates real-time integration in the world market and makes it
easier to maintain its self-expansionary logic in the face of perturbations.
These capacities are related to the anarchic, formal, procedural rationality of
the market, its reliance on the symbolic medium of money to facilitate
economic transactions despite disjunctions in time and place, its highly
developed abstract and technical codes (with well-developed mechanisms of
capitalist accounting and monetary returns as its easily calculable formal
maximand), and the requisite variety of its internal operations. This increases
capitals resonance capacity to react to internal and external conditions
(Luhmann 1988a: 37-41). The greater this capacity relative to other systems,
the greater is the scope for capitals ecological dominance.
Fourth, through these and other mechanisms, capital develops its chances of
avoiding the emergent structural constraints of other systems and their efforts
at control, thereby increasing its indifference to the environment (cf.
Lohmann 1991; Luhmann 1988a, b). This holds especially for the only
economic subsystem that has become more or less fully integrated on a
global scale: international finance (Luhmann 1996). This does not mean that
finance (let alone the economy more generally) can escape its overall
dependence on the diverse contributions of other functional systems to its
operations or, of course, from crisis-tendencies rooted in its own
contradictions and dilemmas. Efforts to escape particular constraints and
attempts at control can nonetheless occur through its own internal operations in
time (discounting, insurance, risk management, futures, derivatives, hedge
funds, etc.) or space (capital flight, relocation, outsourcing abroad, claims to
extra-territoriality, etc.), through the subversion of the logic of other systems
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owing to the colonization of organizations central to the latters operation by
the logic of exchange value, or through simple personal corruption.
Fifth, in contrast to natural evolution, where species must adapt to or exit from
their environment, social evolution may involve reflexive self-organization and
efforts to redesign the environment. This may extend to efforts to shape the
co-evolution of organizations, systems, and, eventually, world society and to
change the mode of social evolution (e.g., through extending market relations
into ever more spheres of social life). Where different organizations and
systems seek to adapt to and/or to change their environment, the logic of
evolutionary progress is toward ecosystems that sustain only the dominant,
environment-controlling species, and its symbionts and parasites (Bateson
1972: 451). This poses the question of the relative capacity of different
organizations and systems to change their environment rather than adapt to it
and the general limits of societal steering.
Sixth, the primacy of accumulation over other principles of societalization
(e.g., national security, racial supremacy, religious fundamentalism, social
solidarity) depends on the relative influence of the self-descriptions and social
values of functional systems, especially as these are articulated and
represented in the mass media and public sphere and in struggles for political,
intellectual, and moral leadership. The importance of such self-descriptions
and values may vary within generalized societal communication (everyday
language and the mass media) in relation to: (a) alternative logics of societal
organization; (b) secondary coding in each functional system such that
economic considerations are decisive in the choice among alternatives that fit
its primary function, e.g., choosing research topics, deciding what is
newsworthy, calculating quality of life years in the medical system; (c) the
decision premises of organizations; (d) the weight of different interests in
negative coordination among organizations with different functional primacies
(where such coordination aims to avoid mutual blockages in the application of
their respective codes), and (e) changing public opinion. The struggle for
hegemony will also be easier where social forces cross-cut functional systemsand seek to harmonize their operations through positive or negative
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coordination. Parallel power networks are a key mechanism of system and
social integration in this regard (Poulantzas 1978; Baecker 2001, 2006). This
does not mean that a hegemonic vision represents the singular identity of
[world] society. Its task is not to represent an entire society but a particular set
of particular interests as the illusory interests of society (cf. Marx/Engels 1976;
Gramsci 1971).
Seventh, the ecologically dominant system is the most important source of
external adaptive pressure on other systems. In general, any increase in the
complexity of one functional system increases the complexity of the
environment of other systems and forces them to increase their own internal
complexity in order to maintain their capacity for autopoiesis (Baraldi et al.,
1998: 96). For the first four factors above, increasing internal complexity with
repercussions for other systems in an emerging world society is most likely to
characterize the world market. Indeed, for Wagner (2006), it is the system
with the highest tendency to fail with the most significant consequences for
other systems that will gain Primat or, in my terms, ecological dominance.
This is likely because the organizations vital for the realization of other