Du Gay_Paul_ a Common Power to Keep Them All in Awe_a Comment on Gobernance

7/24/2019 Du Gay_Paul_ a Common Power to Keep Them All in Awe_a Comment on Gobernance

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Cultural Values, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2002, 1127

A Common Power to Keep Them All InAwe: A Comment on Governance

Paul du Gay

AbstractThis article will consider some notions of governance and explore some of the issues of

political ordering, particularly those relating to sovereignty and authority, that they tendto challenge, sideline, or seek to transcend. It does so primarily through an examinationof the ways in which these notions have been employed to explain and/or endorse reformsin the organization and role of the public administration in certain liberal democraticstates, most notably Britain. It concludes that Hobbesian conceptions of `state`sovereignty and `authority still matter and have by no means been eclipsed by thedevelopment of governance.

Governance is a fashionable, if rather polyvalent, term. It has come toprominence over the last decade or so most frequently at the expense of theconcept of government. Indeed, governance is generally perceived as an

alternative to government, that is to a particular form of political ordering by thestate under the rule of law. As one analyst has argued, Current use does not treatgovernance as a synonym for government. Rather governance signifies a changein the meaning of government, referring to a new process of governing; or achanged condition of ordered rule; or the new method by which society isgoverned (Rhodes 1996: 653).1 While governance is to be distinguished fromgovernment in most usage of the term, this is normally where agreement aboutthe concepts meaning begins to falter. Governance has multiple meaningsdepending on context of use and preferred project, and there is a remarkableambiguity in its differential deployment. Nonetheless, as Paul Hirst (2000: 13), has

indicated, most usages of the term either signal a problematization of conven-tional forms of political government by the state under the rule of law or theyactively propose to sidestep those forms of ordering.

This article will consider certain notions of governance and explore some of theissues of political ordering, particularly those relating to sovereignty andauthority, that they tend to challenge, sideline, or attempt to transcend. It will doso primarily through a brief examination of the way these notions have beendeployed to explain and/or endorse reforms in the organization and role of thepublic administration in certain liberal democratic states, most notably the UK. AsJon Pierre (2000: 7) has noted, public administration has been the governmentallife-order where experiments in governance have been most frequently

attempted. The article will conclude with a few observations on the relationshipbetween centralized bureaucratic public administrative capacities, sovereign

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Governance and anti-statism

Most analysts of governance are keen to indicate that they are not seeking tooffer a normative theory but merely an organizing framework for under-

standing changes in contemporary forms of political ordering (Stoker 1998: 18;Rhodes 1996; 1997). Yet discussions of governance are continually dogged by aconflation of analysis and normative evaluation. Analysts of governance in thearea of public administration are no exception. According to Rhodes (2000a: 60),for example, networks are at the heart of the notion of governance in the studyof Public Administration. Networks are represented here as a form of socialcoordination involving the management of interorganizational linkages andpartnerships. In this sense they are viewed as a mechanism for coordinatingand allocating resourcesa governing structurein the same way as hier-archies and markets. For Rhodes (2000a: 61) networks are an alternative to, nota hybrid of bureaucracies and markets. They are characterized by high levelsof trust between their participants and are regulated by rules of the gamenegotiated and agreed by those same participants (61). Networks are thereforecharacterized by autonomy and self-governance. They are not only largelyautonomous of, and unaccountable to, the state, but also highly resistant togovernment steering, developing their own policies and molding theirenvironments. Network governance, Rhodes (1996: 666) argues, can blur,even dissolve, the distinction between state and civil society. The state becomesnothing more than a loose collection of interorganizational networks made upof governmental and societal actors with no sovereign actor able to steer orregulate. It has to be acknowledged that analysts of governance in the field of

public administration are very confusing on this latter point. Sometimesnetworks are represented as unamenable to any form of external control orregulation, at other times to imperfect, indirect or light-touch steering by thestate, and at yet other times as constituted by the state as part of a rationalityof rule often described as government at a distance (Rose 1999). Frequentlyall three assertions are to be found in the same article, sometimes on the samepage (see, for example, Rhodes 2000a: 61; 72). While all analysts agree thatgovernance refers to what we might call the mobilization of society(Donzelot 1991), they are not always entirely clear about who or what ismotivating the mobilizationthe state, network participants or other actants.

This makes it very difficult to pin down the nature of the theoretical andsubstantive claims being made, as well as assessing their explanatory reach.Quite obviously, government at a distance is to a very large extent a state-instituted rationality of rule wherein the objects of governancenetworks,associationsare mobilized and regulated by state institutions more or lesstightly. The attribution of an innate capacity for autonomous self-realization tonetworks of groups and individuals, making them largely if not totallyunamenable to external control or regulation, is another matter entirely. I havechosen to focus mostly on this latter aspect of governance, the better tohighlight some of the political romantic, anti-statist normative values attachedto this notion by its analysts/advocates.

So, for instance, while Rhodes (1996; 1997; 2000a) argues that network forms ofpolitical ordering are not cost free, being, inter alia, closed to outsiders and

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A Comment on Governance 13

activities, and liable to serve private interests over and above the public interest, henonetheless appears attracted to governance as a narrative of rule (1999: xxiv;2000a: 54, 66; 2000b: 163). According to John Clarke (1998: 13), for example, Rhodesanalysis of network forms of governance is in fact endowed with a strong

normative value. In this model, `self-governing seems to denote a condition to beprized above being directed by other authorities or processes. Rhodes is not alonein this regard. Stoker (1998: 19; 2000: 14) and Hirst (2000: 1819), for example, whileboth conscious of some of the obvious political costs of network governance,appear to regard it as a potential source of value, whether in challenging the unitarynature of the sovereign state and instigating a more differentiated polity, or instimulating experiments in associational democracy.

Scratch the surface of governance in the study of public administration, then,and it is not long before the figure of the self-governing community appears togreet you. This notion has been a central feature of anti-statist discourse for aslong as the state under the rule of law has existed, as Blandine Kriegel (1995), forexample, has argued. In tandem with the figure of civil society, it has regularlyfunctioned as a vehicle of critique for intellectuals of all persuasionsleft, right,liberal, unalignedkeen to unmask the state under the rule of law as a mediumof modern forms of moral vacuity, or, worse, catastrophe. For advocates ofgovernance it appears in two particular guises. First, in the strongassumption, common to many governance models, that somehow citizens knowbetter what they want and need than does government, and therefore are entirelyjustified in finding ways to avoid unwarranted incursions of state authority andbureaucracy into their lives. The currently popular and influential communitarianand deliberative democratic critiques of political government, for example, are

frequently infused with claims about the capacity of people and communities toidentify their own needs and govern themselves autonomously (Bohman 1996;Etizioni 1997). Second, in those analyses of governance as self-organizingnetworks, there reside less vehement but nonetheless clearly normativeassumptions, as we saw earlier. Here, the normative element is that civil societytoday is capable of managing its own affairs without need for intervention by thestate. Now, the focus on today is important as there are those who argue thatstate bureaux are made redundant by self-organizing networks precisely becauseof the formers historic success in equipping the latter with the capacities for self-governance. Their mission accomplished, they can now wither away, victims of

their own success. For others, however, civil society is always already equippedwith the capacities for self-governance and today is only important in that it isnow, at last or once again (depending on your point of view) that these capacitiesare being recognized by government and allowed/encouraged to flourish(Hargreaves 1998; Botsman and Latham 2001).

Both versionswhether more communitarian or more liberal (its not alwayseasy to distinguish between them when exploring governance)appear proneto what Charles Larmore (1987: 75) calls political expressivism. They require apolitical order to express certain moral idealssuch as an all-pervading spirit ofcommunity or an inalienable right to personal autonomy. In other words, theyboth assume that the political domain should express the highest ideals of its

members, and thus refuse to envision the possibility that the political realm andother areas of life may heed different priorities (Larmore 1987: 93) For themb th lik t diti l b ti f f liti l t


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is capable of constructing forms of political order which enable these ideal humancapacities to flourish.2

Questions of authority

It would be foolish to argue that so-called self-organizing networks areincapable of improvising a kind of orderquite obviously they are. However,as David Runciman (1999: 264) has indicated, what that order is will only beknown after the event, as an historical fact; there will be no prior, logisticalguarantees. The best governance is not always the least government. It is morethan possible, for instance, that a structure of minimal constraint that leavesindividuals and groups equally free to pursue their equally authorized orunauthorized moral ideals would result in a fatal antagonistic pluralismrather than the more cosy interdependencies assumed by some analysts of

governance. The only guarantees come, as Thomas Hobbes knew only too well,when someone or something is prepared to assume the role of sovereign.3

Hobbes (1991: II; 94), like all liberals, accepts the fact of pluralism. All men,he writes, are by nature provided by notable multiplying glasses, (that is theirPassions and Selfe-Love). Moreover, because Nature hath made men so equallin both ability and right, from this ariseth equality of hope in the attainmentof our Ends (1991: I; 61). However, these ends may not be the same; or even ifthey are, they may be such that they cannot be attained equally by both parties,and so, in the absence of an arbiter to keep them quiet, they become enemies(1991: I; 612). For Hobbes, then, pluralism and equality, rather than being

conditions that argue for our freedom from government, are, in fact, conditionsdemanding absolute government. If society is to endure, and perpetual conflict becurtailed, there arises the need for a common Power to keep them all in awe(1991: I; 62).

Famously, Hobbes (1991: II; 87) argues that the only way to erect such aCommon Power

is to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one assemblyof men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will:which is as much as to say, to appoint one one Man, or Assembly of men, to

beare their Person: and every one to owne, and acknowledge himself to be

Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act, or cause to beActed, in those things that concern the Common Peace and Safetie; and thereinto submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his

Judgement . . . And he that carryeth this Person, is called SOVERAIGNE, andsaid to have soveraigne Power.

Because the plurality of voices, if left to its own devices, can result in discord,and because there is simply no mechanism in nature to harmonize it, an artificialmechanisma pacifying reason of statemust be established and fastidiouslymaintained. For Hobbes (1991: I; 64), the generall rule is that every man oughtto endeavour Peace. If peace cannot be obtained so long as masterlesse men

enjoy a full and absolute Libertie, then that liberty must be constrained. Moreimportantly, the proper liberty of Subjects only exists in relation to theA tifi i ll Ch i t i l b th S i d th Ci il L It i th


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presence of Artificiall chains that secures liberty for subjects, not their absence(1991: II; 1089). For so long as every man is encouraged to do anything he liketh. . . so long are all men in the condition of Warre. In the truly autonomous realm,beyond government, there can be no a priori guarantees. Therefore, it is very

absurd for men to clamor as they doe, for such absolute Libertie, Hobbes(1991: II; 109) argues, because the proper Liberty of a Subject depends on thepresence, not absence, of an absolute authority. Thus, the idea that every manhas an absolute Propriety in his Goods, Hobbes (1991: II; 169) continues,tendeth to the Dissolution of a Commonwealth.

Every man has indeed a Propriety that excludes the Right of every other Subject:And he has it onely from the Soveraign Power; without the protection whereof,every man should have equall Right to the same. But if the Right of the Sovereignalso be excluded, he cannot perform the office they have put him into; which is,to defend them both from forraign enemies, and from the injuries of one another;

and consequently there is no longer a commonwealth.4

It is hardly surprising that Hobbes modus-vivendi authoritarian liberalism appearsilliberal when benchmarked against the standards of contemporary expressivistliberal (and communitarian) thought. Hobbes is negatively coded in the eyes ofcontemporary expressivist liberals, for example, because he refuses to affirm fromthe doctrine of equality the positive valuesautonomy, free choice, freeassociation, individual self-realizationthat inform modern liberal thought. AsFish (1999: 180) has argued:

For Locke, Kant, Mills and Rawls (in their different ways), the equality of menand the values they invariably espouse points to the rejection of any form ofabsolutism: if no ones view can be demonstrated to be absolutely right, no oneshould occupy the position of absolute authority. For Hobbes the same insightinto the pluralism of values and the unavailability of a mechanism for sortingthem out implies exactly the reverse: because no ones view can be demonstratedto be absolutely right (and also because every one prefers his own view and

believes it to be true), someone must occupy the position of absolute authority.

To counterpose Hobbes absolutism, then, with something truly liberal is tomisunderstand the historical emergence of liberalism as a form of political

ordering (Holmes 1994; Hunter 1998). Liberal freedomssuch as religioustolerationwere not, as is so often inferred in modern liberal thought, theproduct of a social delimitation of the state. Rather, they were the contingentoutcome of attempts in early modern Europe to deconfessionalize politics andpolitically pacify rival moral communities engaged in Warre (Hunter 1998:260). In this sense, the standard tropes of modern liberal thoughtindividualrights, for exampledo not function as transcendental limits on state action butare rather the product of action by sovereign states. As Holmes (1994: 605) putsit, statelessness means rightlessness. Stateless people, in practice, have norights. Inhabitants of weak or poor states tend to have few or laxly enforcedrights. Without centralized and bureaucratic state capacities, there is no

possibility of forging a single and impartial legal systemthe rule of lawonthe population of a large nation. Without a well-organized political and legal

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605). It is not easy, then, to hitch liberalism to anti-statism, without doingconsiderable damage to the historical emergence of liberalism as a form ofpolitical ordering.

And yet this is precisely what happens on a regular basis in what Holmes

(1994: 599) calls storybook accounts of liberalism and, as we shall see shortly,in story-book accounts of the emergence of governancewhere self-organiza-tion, free association, limited government and so on are seen to emerge froma critique of state reason and function as elements of a moral ideal. Here, aswe saw earlier, liberalism (and governance) is a form of political expressiv-ism. In expressivist accounts, a particular practicereligious toleration, sayis tied to a profound moral principlea Kantian respect for the autonomy offree agents, for example. As we have seen, though, not all liberalism isexpressivist. Under Hobbesian authoritarian liberalism, toleration is enactedfrom fear of civil chaos and as a means to peaceful coexistence: it does notfunction as a moral ideal. As John Gray (2000: 3), for example, has indicated,nothing in Hobbes suggests he favoured toleration as a pathway to the truefaith. For him, toleration was a strategy of peace.

Hobbes saw that, in its capacity to guarantee social peace, the sovereign statehad no need for higher religious or philosophical justifications. The statesindifference to the transcendent beliefs of the rival communities over which itruled was based neither on an ideal of individual liberty or free agency nor on acommitment to a shared moral consensus amongst its citizens.

The emergent ethical autonomy of the state meant that the citizen (whosepublic obedience to the law was a condition of social peace) could no longer be

thought of as identical with the man (who might freely follow the light of hisconscience as long as this did not interfere with his public duty to the law)(Hunter 1994: 41).

The states indifference to the personal beliefs of those it ruled was thereforegrounded in an art of separation of social life into different spherespoliticaland religious, public and private, and so forth. This art of separation was opposedto the idea of society as an organic whole and the associated conception of thehuman being as a unified moral personality. A pacified civil society required aconception of the human being as the bearer of a differentiated set ofpersonae, of

which homme et citoyen were two of the most obvious. The persona of the citizenas inhabitant of the sovereign state, and the persona of the practititioner ofreligious (or other forms of communal) self-governance, now represented twodistinct and autonomous modes of comportment, housed in two distinct realms,of public and private conduct (Hunter 1999). For Hobbes, religious toleration,or the states indifference to moral identities and transcendent truth claims, is acrucial element in the states elevation to sovereignty in the political arena, whichin turn is the precondition for social pacification.5

The expressivist or sacralizing tenets of contemporary governancethe desirefor a state capable of realizing the self-governing moral community from which allgood things will come, and hence one capable of making itself redundantand the

profound gulf separating them from Hobbesdesacralized liberal state, are hardto miss.6 In the following section, I focus attention on this gulf by exploring in

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in the area of public administration to account for the latters emergence as adistinctive rationality of rule. I suggest that this schemaand the epochalarrangement of governmental rationalities underpinning itoffers little morethan a set of theoretical distinctions aimed at contrasting perfectly antithetical

forms of political ordering. As such, it has little to say about contemporaryadministrative reform, forcing institutional arrangements into a fit with the schemaeven where it strains the explanatory reach of the schemas typology.

The tyranny of the epoch

The emergence of governance in the field of public administration is frequentlyrepresented in terms of a series of caesural shifts which, when taken together, areheld to pose a tremendous challenge to the states ability to maintain some degreeof control over its external environment and to impose its will on society (Pierre

2000: 2). So, for example, economic globalization is depriving the sovereign stateunder the rule of law of many of its traditional capacities of economic management;subnational governing bodies are becoming more assertive in their demands forself-determination vis-`a-vis the state; and regions and citiesfrequently propelledby ethnic and other cultural identificationsare themselves represented as activeplayers in the international arena, apparently by-passing state institutions alongthe way. These and other imperatives of the real are challenging the veryfoundations of traditional state-based forms of political orderingincluding, mostimportantly, elements of state sovereigntyand are giving rise to new forms ofgoverning without government (Rosenau 1992).

Alongside these ostensibly powerful changes in the external environment, stateinstitutions are also represented as the subjects of ongoing radical reforms to theirinternal environments. These have been inaugurated most frequently by thosecharged with running them and have, whether consciously or unconsciously, it isargued, stripped those institutions of many of their traditional sources ofauthority and their capacity to exert control over society. The 1980s and 1990s aresaid to have witnessed the emergence of a new rationality of rule within many ofthe advanced liberal democraciesneo-liberalism. Here, political governmenthas been restructured in the name of an economizing logic. To govern better, thestate is to govern less but more entrepreneurially. It is to mobilize society sothat society can play an enhanced role in solving problems that have come to beseen as the sole province of the state to manage. This requires the responsibiliza-tion and autonomization of a host of actantsindividual and collectiveascondition of its effectiveness. As two influential advocates of this reinvention ofgovernment put it, the state should steer more but row less.

Entrepreneurial governments promote competition between service providers.They empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy into thecommunity. They measure the performance of their agencies, focusing not oninputs but on outcomes. They are driven by their goalstheir missionsnot bytheir rules and regulations. They redefine their clients as customers, and offer themchoicesbetween schools, between training programs, between housing options.They prevent problems before they emerge, rather than simply offering servicesafterwards. They put their energies into earning money, not simply spending it.Th d li h i b i i i Th f


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market mechanisms to bureaucratic mechanisms. And they focus not simply onproviding public services but on catalyzing all sectorspublic, private andvoluntaryinto action to solve their communitys problems (Osborne andGaebler 1992: 1920).

If this entrepreneurial government had one over-arching targetthatwhich it has most explicitly defined itself againstthen it was the impersonal,procedural, hierarchical and technical organization of the traditional, unifiedstate bureaucracy. Put simply, bureaucracy was represented as the paradigmthat failed, in large part because the forms of organizational and personalconduct it gave rise to and fosteredadherence to procedure, abnegation ofpersonal moral enthusiasms and so forthwere regarded as fundamentallyunsuited to the demands of contemporary economic, social, political andcultural reality (du Gay 2000). In an era of constant and profound change,it was argued, a new paradigm was required for the public administration if itwas to survive at all. Entrepreneurial government was represented as justsuch a paradigm.

Quite obviously, a key feature of entrepreneurial government was the crucialrole it allocated to a particular conception of the commercial enterprise as thepreferred model for the institutional organization of public services. However, ofequal importance has been the way the term was deployed to refer to particularenterprising qualities on the part of persons; characteristics such as responsive-ness to users needs and desires, keener individual ownership of ones work andthe wider goals and objectives it contributes to and the ability to accept greaterindividual responsibility for securing outcomes efficiently (Keat 1990; du Gay and

Salaman 1992).Refracted through the gaze of entrepreneurial governance bureaucratic public

administration appeared inimical to the development of these capacities andcomportments and hence to the production of enterprising persons. Thebureaucratic commitment to (local and specific) norms of impersonality, partypolitical neutrality, snag-hunting and so forth was regarded as antithetical tothe cultivation of those entrepreneurial competences which alone were held toguarantee a manageable and hence sustainable future for the public services.Thus entrepreneurial government not only provided a critique of bureaucraticpublic administration, it also offered a set of solutions to the problems posed by

an assumed process of continuous and unrelenting change. It did so throughdelineating certain principles which, when taken together, constituted a newmethod of governing organizational and personal conduct in the publicservices.

Entrepreneurial reforms, such as the introduction of market type mecha-nisms (MTMs)contracting out, purchaser/provider quasi-market relations,private finance initiatives and so forthto all manner of public service businessin health care, education, social welfare and the machinery of government, aretherefore represented as key processes in what has been termed the hollowingout of the state (Peters 1993; Rhodes 1994). The upshot of this hollowing outis an institutional landscape marked by tremendous diversity and fragmentation,

where the state has effectively been deprived of capacity to exert control (Pierre2000: 2; Rhodes 1997: 48). So, not only has the state shed its rowing role, itsbilit t t h b i l d i d ll


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While these external and internal environmental changes may have createdinstitutional fragmentation and undermined the conditions of possibility oftraditional political government by the state, they are also held to havesomewhat dialecticallyprovided the conditions of possibility for the emergence

of a new narrative of rulenamely, governance. As Rhodes (1997: 48), forexample, argues, network governance in the field of public administration is anunintended consequence of marketization. Institutional differentiationwhetherby contracting out, publicprivate partnerships or bypassing local governmentfor special-purpose bodiescreates imperatives for interdependent actors towork together and multiply networks.

This epochal narrative represents the dynamics of public administrative reformin terms of a simple succession whereby one form of ordering or governing issuperceded and effaced by its predecessor. Thus, bureaucracy (an integral, unifiedgoverning style) is replaced by marketization (both within and beyondgovernment) which is then displaced or superseded by governance (networks,partnerships and alliances) which promises to overcome the limitations of bothbureaucracies and markets. Albeit as an unintended consequence of theproliferation of of MTMs, governance appears as a much anticipated third way,arriving on cue to help return government to society, where, advocates ofgovernance argue, it should belong (Botsman and Latham 2001).

Despite foregrounding a set of transitions in the organization of the publicadministration that have a certain intuitive plausibility, this narrative is less anhistorical and sociological analysis than an abstracted theoretical account. Blocks ofabstract governing styles are allotted a clear and unambiguous identity as theyovertake and supersede one another in an onward march towards their dominant

contemporary manifestationgovernance. Once again, though, empirical,analytical and normative dimensions appear to be elided in this account of thedynamics of public administrative reform. First, it is clear that elements of eachhistorically and conceptually distinctive block are to be found within each of theothers. So, for example, market type mechanisms do not do away with butpresuppose the presence of elements of bureaucratic conduct to make them operateas intended. In the case of internal markets, for example, the flow of bureaucraticcommand is replaced by the workings of the markets hidden hand, or so it wouldappear. On closer inspection, however, it is clear that the power of command is notnecessarily superseded but actually, perhaps, enhanced by the introduction of

internal markets. As Alan Scott (1996: 101), for example, has indicated:The power of bureaucratic hierarchy (whether at the local level of a particularorganization or at the level of the nation state) is maintained through themobilization of the remaining regulative authority which is deployed tomanipulate opportunity structures by shifting resources and centrally determinedpricing. This induces uncertainty and instability into the environment of thosereleased from the kinds of direct bureaucratic domination Weber described. Thenew autonomy is real but its beneficiaries find themselves in shifting opportunitystructures within which they must operate and over which they do not directcontrol.

The crucial point here is that these shifting opportunity structures or external-ities are not those of the workings of the market alone but are to a very

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The environment within which organizational actors find themselves is govern-mentally constituted. Those at the centre do not relinquish their bureaucraticcapacities by constituting newly autonomous subjects as long as they retaincontrol over the environment within which actors act autonomously (Scott, 1966:

100101).What we have here, then, is neither traditional Weberian bureaucracy nor a free

market but a governmentally constituted quasi-market. It is the formation ofopportunity structures and environmental parameters rather than routine dailydecisions that is the object of organizational manipulation. In the public servicesthere is nothing at all subtle about this form of government at a distance. Forexample, in all those many areas where the state is still paymaster, the price ofunits of resource is set centrally. By altering those nominal prices the state retainsenormous power over those agencies to which it has also granted a degree of realautonomy (Scott 1996: 101).

Similarly, there are conceptual and empirical problems with presumeddistinctions between entrepreneurial governance and network governance,with the former belonging exclusively to the marketization block while thelatter moves beyond competition, customers and contracting out to a governingstyle characterized by high levels of trust and cooperation (Rhodes 1996; 2000a).The problem here is that most entrepreneurial models are not exclusivelyconcerned with markets but with many of the processes that networkgovernance would claim as its ownOsborne and Gaebler (1992) highlight theimportance of participatory management, decentralization and on catalyzingpublic, private and voluntary sectors in community partnerships, for example. Atthe empirical level, the contemporary concern with partnerships and collabora-

tive working in British public administration has not resulted in any simpledecline in the use of MTMs. As Pollitt and Bouckaert (2000: 274) note, BritainsNew Labour Government has reversed little of its Conservative predecessorsadministrative reforms but has instead built on them in pursuit of bettergovernance. Chancellor Gordon Browns self-styled entrepreneurial welfarepolicies, for instance, emphasize the moral demand for civic responsibilitycharacteristic of governance, but utilize a range of strategies, including market-based responsibilization techniques, forms of commercial and moral contracting,risk assessment procedures and so forth, to achieve their objectives (Stoker2000b). Attempting to divide out the market-based from the governance-

based elements of these policies would be a somewhat thankless task.Second, as these examples suggest, the state does not disappear from view inany of the models: it merely shifts its parameters and relocates elements of itsauthority. So, for example, in the governance model, the greater the emphasisplaced on voluntary associations, such as the family as a source of social capital(Wilkinson 1998), the greater the constraints that come to be placed on the waysthose associations can operate. This should come as no surprise, as Clarke andNewman (1997: 29) indicate, because an emphasis on the transfer of tasks, rolesand responsibilities away from the state risks neglecting the ways in which thedispersal of power in these processes engages . . . other agents in the states fieldof relationships. So, for instance, the dispersal of roles, responsibilities and

powers for the provision of public services away from the state to differentagentscommercial enterprises, trusts, voluntary associations and so onplaces

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assessment, contract specification and performance evaluation. The capacities ofthe agents in question are not their intrinsic propertyas the governancenarrative would have itbut an effect of their relationship with the state.

The partnership as an organizational form provides a useful example of just

such a relation. Partnershipsorganizational arrangements bringing togethertwo or more actants in pursuit of a policy objectiveare frequently regarded asa form of network governance, characterized by high levels of independencefrom the state. However, as Lowndes and Skelcher (1998) have argued,partnerships may be a form of network, but contrary to Rhodes analysis, they areclosely linked to and regulated by central government. Their analysis ofpartnerships in urban regeneration, training, health and other fields suggests thatgovernment plays the central role in the formation and structuring of such bodies.It may do so through statutory direction or by inducement through financialincentives. Its leverage is apparent in the program approval and monitoringprocedures with which partnerships must comply in order to gain access tocentral resources. These create a form of infrastructure which enables theregulation of such collaborative endeavors.

What we see here, then, is not a simple diminution in the states authority but areconfiguration of that authority. A different image of the state and its role inrelation to society is emerging: the state as enabler or animator (Donzelot 1991;Rose, 1999). While the practices of political ordering related to this image are notwithout their own particular problems, as we will shortly see, it is nonetheless thecase that if this is governance, then it is not a simple expressivist variant. Certainly,it appears as a form of rule designed to mobilize society, and to do so on theassumption that the state cannot answer all of societys needs without endangering

its own long-term vitality. This conception of an enabling state certainly dependsupon a view of what humans are or should beactive not passive, responsible notdependent, and so forthand in this sense expresses an ideal. But governance inthis form does not involve the wholesale supercession of the state and the dispersalof political power to self-governing communities envisaged in some of itscommunitarian and radical democratic versions. Rather, as Jessop (1998: 39), forexample, has argued, governance, in this sense, is not only a state-sponsoredrationality of rule, the state will typically continue to monitor the effects ofgovernance mechanisms on its own capacity to secure social cohesion individed societies. The state reserves to itself the right to open, close, juggle, and re-

articulate governance arrangments not only in terms of particular functions butalso from the viewpoint of partisan and global political advantage.

Re-sacralizing government?

Despite the lack of fit between expressivist conceptions of governance beyondthe state and the state-centered nature of most existing governance initiatives,expressivist ideals show no sign of losing their appeal. As Blandine Kriegel (1995:3) has argued, reasons of state seem always now to be bad reasons, especiallyamong those who do or would govern us. The enabling state may be a state,but for many expressivists it is or is on the way to being something very different

from a sovereign state under the rule of law. In principle, the enabling state mightwell be capable of opening, closing and juggling governance arrangements to suitit H th it i bj t t d d t l lik


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state and more like a community (Latham, 2001b: 260), to become the servantnot the master of the people (Mulgan and Wilkinson 1992: 354), and to engagein the dispersal of power to communities and the wiping out of hierarchies atevery opportunity (Latham 2001a: 34), then the less will it be able to act as a

sovereign state in the manner articulated by Hobbes.7

For expressivists, the morethe state becomes part of society, in a sociological and political sense, notsomething above or beyond it, then the freer people will be to exert personalagency and the more creative, innovative and dynamic all sectors of society willbe (Davis 2001; Latham 2001).

According to Peters (2000: 49), the demand that governance begins withsociety and not with government itself, even when not formulated in an overtlyexpressivist way, is a standard trope of contemporary political discourse. AsStoker (1998: 19) puts it, the governance perspective challenges conventionalassumptions which focus on government as if it were a `stand alone institutiondivorced from wider societal forces. It is an assumption that frames manycontemporary experiments in the field of public administration, from PrivateFinance Initiatives and e-government projects to the renewed interest in the roleof religious or faith-based organizations in the provision of education and socialwelfare.8 There is a significant problem, here, though: in making the state simplypart of society, the state becomes something different from what it is in its ownterms. It stops being a state.

After all, it is a perfectly simple academic move to indicate how the state is a(social) constructsociologists, political scientists and critical legal scholars havebeen doing so for yearsbut that is not something a state itself can be expectedto take cognisance of, act upon and still remain operative as a state. The

achievements of sovereign statenesssocial pacification, individual rights,religious toleration and so forthflow from the assumption and performance ofindependence from society and ultimate authority over it. To take an academicinsight into the states reliance on some otherextra-statiststructure of concernin its own self-constitution and then try to make the operations of the statetransparently accord with this insight is a recipe for confusion, if not disaster. Forexample, were the state to deploy its procedures in the company of an analysis oftheir roots in extra-state discourses and techniques, it would not be exercising, butrather dismantling its authority; in short, it would no longer be acting like a statebut rather engaging in some sort of academic enterprise. Rather than producing

the authority it retroactively invokes, the state would be in the business ofcontinually calling into question the basis of its authority and hence producinguncertainty, one of the very things it was instituted to prevent.

It is a profound mistake, therefore, to assume that the state should bereinvented or modernized to accord with the nitty-gritty facts of social andmoral life as conceptualized either in social constructionist academic analysesor in expressivist liberal and communitarian conceptions of governance. Bothstrive to prove that the independence and autonomy of the sovereign state is afiction. But the fiction with which the sovereign state sustains its role is in fact theassumption (no more or less vulnerable than any other) that constitutes that role;take it away and you remove the role and all the advantages it brings to bear. The

reasoning that academic and visionary analyses deploy seems simple; indeed, itis too simple: since the sovereign state is manifestly dependent upon, makes usef d i k t i l d i d f b f i l l ti it t


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itself be part of society and not autonomous of it. But the fact that an institutionand set of practices incorporates material, concepts and modus operandi from othercontexts does not challenge its autonomy. The reasoning that if the state is notreally beyond society then it is not a sovereign but simply another part of society,

only holds if state autonomy is conceptualized as a once-and-for-all condition ofhermetic self-sufficiency, rather than as a condition continually achieved andreachieved as the state takes unto itself and makes it own materials that will helpit achieve its purposes (Fish 1994: 14177). To actively attempt to de-autonomizethe state under the aegis of its status as a social construct, or the imperatives ofmoral expressivism, is effectively to re-theologize it (Hunter 1998). One need onlypoint to the rise of democratic and nationalist movements in the nineteenthcentury armed with similar expressivist concerns to indicate the dangers such re-theologization poses to social pacification, the rule of law and the practice ofreligious toleration.

The big question is whether incessant critique of the states fictitiousautonomy, neutrality, sovereignty and so forth made in the name of governanceis helping to foster an atmosphere in which the states capacity to secure itsauthority, in the field of public administration, for instance, is effectivelyundermined. There is certainly a wealth of evidence, anecdotal as well as moreempirically substantiated, that current enthusiasms in the field in the UKsuch asthe PFI, or partnership structuresare tinged with expressivist ideals and thatthese have caused and are likely to continue to cause serious problems of politicalauthority. With regard to PFI projects in the National Health Service, for instance,ministerial accountability is proving a blunt instrument. Once the PFI contract hasbeen signed, the public administration is not in a position to renegotiate it if

Parliament considers that the contract does not meet present or future clinicalneeds. This reveals the dangers of politicians and state administrators assuming aclear identity of interest between public and private government (Freedland 1998;Pollock and Dunnigan 1998; Elsenaar 1999). Similarly, in relation to partnershipstructures: these have been stimulated by central government in line with certaintenets of contemporary governance and appear amenable in principle, as we sawearlier, to the opening, closing and juggling that Jessop refers to. However, such isthe complexity of many existing organizational and financial arrangements thatnot only central government but many of the constituent members of thepartnership boards have little idea as to who is in fact accountable to whom and for

what. Government attempts to steer such partnerships have been represented interms of pulling rubber levers. Similarly, the complexity of organizationalarrangements have been likened to byzantium (Skelcher 2000: 1618).

As David Runciman (1999: 264) argues in his analysis of the work of the Englishpluralists, finding reliable authors and convincing settings for the exercise ofpolitical authority is the very stuff of politics. Runciman indicates how thepluralists, in seeking to move away from Hobbesian conceptions of state andsovereignty, found themselves having to face a familiar problemthe problemof authority outlined by Hobbes. Expressivist advocates of governance findthemselves in a similar position. In seeking to move away from Hobbesianconceptions of state and sovereignty they have yet to find reliable authors and

settings for the exercise of political authority.As we saw earlier, despite proclaiming themselves as the protectors of

i di id l i ht d it f d ti t ti t d t f


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24 P. du Gay

cannot be consistent defenders of these rights and freedoms because rights andfreedoms are an enforced uniformity, enforced that is by sovereign states. Notonly this, they are rarely guaranteed without the presence of effective, centralizedstate bureaucracies capable of creating and regulating them. This is a tough lesson

for anti-statists to learn, but a vital one. The contemporary love affair withdecentralized and privatized forms of governance in public administrationraises serious and far-reaching questions of political authority. It should be clearby now that the analysis I am offering is unconvinced of the redundancy of eitherHobbesian conceptions of state, sovereignty and authority or of the vices ofcentralized, bureaucratic forms of public administration. It is, however, far fromconfident about the alternatives offered by expressivist governance.

Notes

Thanks to Jessica Evans, Stuart Hall and Tony Bennett for comments on an earlier draft ofthe paper. The editors provided some extremely thoughtful and thought-provokingcommentary which, unfortunately, arrived with me too late to be of much practical usewhen revising the piece.

1. Or, as Stoker (1998: 17) puts it, [T]he essence of governance is its focus on governingmechanisms that do not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions ofgovernment.

2. Larmore (1987) distinguishes between two types of exepressivism: those involvingsubstantial ideals of the good life and those involving the ideals of autonomy andexperimentalism. The former, which he attributes to communitarians, are those idealsembodying a specific structure of purposes, significances and activities: a life devoted to

art, a life centered on work, etc. The latter, which he attributes to liberals, concerns theway in which we ought to assume and pursue such ideals. They themselves are not somuch ways of life as attitudes in which we are to understand our commitment to waysof life (1987: 74). He refers to autonomy and experimentalism as ideals that demand wesubject all our ways of life to critical evaluation concerning their relative strengths andweaknesses in relation to other conceivable ways of being. I have to admit to beingsomewhat less than convinced that such a separation holds in the manner Larmoresuggests. Autonomy and experimentalism, every bit as much as more substantive idealsof the good life, involve particular practices of comporting the person based uponcertain strongly held values. The radically self-questioning life may be different fromthe radically embedded one but they are simply optional or equivalent in terms of

being value-based practices of self-formation.3. Hirst (2000), for example, is more than aware that an associational society that is not

riven by fatal factionalism is inconceivable in the absence of a Rechsstaat equipped withthe sovereign authority and means necessary to construct and coordinate theinterrelations of associations and regulate their activities. I draw here, in particular, onthe perspective developed in Fish (1999)

4. At common law, only the sovereign is said to have an absolute interest in land, forexample: ordinary landowners hold of the sovereign. As Holmes and Sunstein (1999:63) argue, this quaint legalism expresses a deep truth. An autonomous individual in aliberal society, cannot create the conditions of his own autonomy autonomously.

5. As Ian Hunter (1999: 1415) has argued, the formation of the authoritarian liberal stateis incompatible with all notions of popular sovereignty; for here supremacy of poweris forged solely from the functional end of civil peace, to the exclusion of all concernwith will-representation. Consequently, even when a democratic government is the

f i i h ld hi f i l d h h h ill f h


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people.6. As one leading Australian proponent, has argued, the aim is to lay the moral

foundations of governance in a new politics which:

d recognizes the role of civil society in creating trust and moral obligation;

d follows the communitarian practice of engaging the public in a civic conversation;d builds a new citizenship, based on the big tent of multiple identities;d above all else, trusts its people.

Without trust there can be no shared morality or, for that matter, shared humanity(Latham 2001: 242).

7. That these demands are made by members of parliament (Latham is a Member of theAustralian Federal Parliament) and senior civil servants (Mulgan, unbelievably givenhis background and enthusiasms, is a Senior Civil Servant and Head of the Performanceand Innovation Unit in the British Cabinet Office) as well as the normal proponents ofpolitical expressivism, suggests that Kriegels comments are uncomfortably close to the

bone.

8. In Britain, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), or Public Private Partnerships (PPP) asNew Labour prefers, is a perfect example of a policy driven by the assumption that themobilization of society reaps benefits for all. The PFI was launched in 1992 by the UKTreasury. The basic idea was that the private sector should raise the capital investmentrequired for public sector works (including roads, bridges, schools, prisons andhospitals) in return for owning, designing, building and operating the facilities. Thefacilities would then be rented by the public sector or paid for through user charges (intraditional government procurement the public sector retains control of the asset and isnot tied into a contract for the provision of services). This idea was linked to the populargovernance theme that it no longer mattered who owned or delivered services as longas they continued to be free at the point of delivery. In the Foreword to Partnerships for

Prosperitythe Private Finance Initiative (Treasury Taskforce on Private Finance, 1997),the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, highlighted the redundancy of what he termed the oldbattles between public and private, state and free market, and indicated that the PFIwas a means to mobilizing and incentivizing the private sector to act in the publicinterest. The document goes on to assert that

Public Private Partnerships are all about negotiating deals that are good forboth sides. The private sector wants to earn a return on its ability to invest andperform. The public sector wants contracts where incentives exist for the privatesector supplier to deliver services on time to specified standards year after year.In that, the public sector shares an absolute identity of interest with privatefinanciers whose return on investment will depend on those services being

delivered to those standards (1997: 1).The notion of a common or even absolute identity of interest between public and

private or the effective meaninglessness of the distinction between them, pervades PFI/PPP policy documentation (HM Treasury, 1993; HM Treasury, Private Finance Panel,1995).

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Paul du Gay is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University, UK. Hisbooks include: Consumption and Identity at Work; Identity (with Jessica Evans andPeter Redman); In Praise of Bureaucracy; The Production of Culture: Cultures ofProduction. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (with Stuart Hallet al.); and, Questions of Cultural Identity (with Stuart Hall).


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