MA Social Theory Lecture

1. CITIZENS AND THE STATE:
FROM GOVERNMENT TO
GOVERNANCE
Dr. Andrew Wilkins
Email: andrew.wilkins@roehampton.ac.uk
Twitter: @andewilkins

2. STRUCTURE
What is government?
What is governance?
What is governmentality?
Group discussion. Think about the ideas and
perspectives explored and their (non-)application
to your area of research interest.

3. FROM ABSTRACT TO CONCRETE
 The term governance risks becoming a ‘stipulative
definition’ (Rhodes 1997), giving new meaning to old
jargon
 Concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘governmentality’ often
appear too abstract (e.g. grounded in a lot of theorizing,
‘epochal’ analysis) to the point of becoming analytically
redundant for the purpose of studying really existing
‘reality’
 To compensate concrete examples from education policy
history will be provided.

4. GOVERNMENT
• ‘The practice of politics, policy and administration within
the state-form’ (Clarke and Ozga 2012, p.1)
Powers include:
Legislative
Executive
Statutory

5. GOVERNMENT
...however
Government power is LIMITED
HM Judges, Local Authorities and the Charity Commission:
all legally independent (subject to law) of the government.
…therefore
Power is not concentred but dispersed, ‘rhizomatic’

6. GOVERNMENT
 Functional view of government
 Equating power (only) with the executive, statutory and
legislative core of government echoes a ‘modernist liberal
democratic narrative of government’ (Colebatch 2009, p.
62)
 We have still not cut off the king’s head (Foucault 1986)

7. GOVERNANCE
The shift from government to governance – governing
without government
Governance signifies the co-
production of services by a
plurality of actors and
organizations (government
and non-government).

8. GOVERNANCE
Key concepts:
 ‘cooperation’ or ‘co-governance’: the delivery of services
based on the interorganizational structure of relations
between institutions and actors, including public-private
partnerships, networks, regimes and co-management.
• Example: Schools permitted to ‘opt out’ of the locally
controlled system and become grant-maintained (1988
ERA), that is, administratively self-governing.
Encouraged to raise money from industry and/or charity.

9. GOVERNANCE
Competition AND cooperation
‘They [neoliberal reforms] fragmented the systems for
delivering public services and created pressures for
organizations to cooperate with one another to deliver
services’ (Rhodes 2007, p. 1245).
…hence ‘coopetition’: a neologism coined by
Brandenburger and Nalebuff to describe competition +
cooperation

10. GOVERNANCE
Key concepts
 ‘Policy networks’: ‘refers to sets of formal and informal
institutional linkages between governmental and other
actors shared around interests in public policy making and
implementation’ (Rhodes 2007, p. 1244)
 Example 1: EducationInvestor Summit
http://www.educationinvestor.co.uk/summit.aspx
 Example 2: Academies Show, London
http://www.academiesshow.co.uk/

11. GOVERNANCE

12. GOVERNANCE

13. GOVERNANCE
Key examples of ‘governance’ in British education reform
1988 onwards – ‘governing at a distance’
 Greater parental involvement in schools, statutory rights
for parents to be elected as school governors
 Increased emphasis on parental choice, parents as
consumers of education provision, schools as providers
 Introduction of league tables and Ofsted in 1990s, e.g.
performance indicators, audit, target setting, inspection
 Creation of academies and free schools, e.g. independent
state-funded schools

14. GOVERNANCE: SUMMARY
 Government and non-government actors and institutions
 Intersecting and blurring of roles and responsibilities
 Power interdependence in relationships between actors and
institutions
 Governing through self-organizing networks
 ‘steer and guide’ rather than command as a tool for governing
(Stoker 1998)

15. GOVERNANCE: DECENTRALISATION
‘hollowing out’ of the state
International interdependence (EU, globalisation)
Agencies Para-statal bodies
Marketisation and networks
STATE

16. GOVERNANCE: RECENTRALISATION?
‘Roll back’ AND ‘roll out’ (Peck 2012)
…e.g. steering and framing governing at a distance through
inspection, audit, performance indicators, league tables,
target setting, public-private accountabilities, etc.
Underestimated power of government?
…e.g. ‘the centre can unilaterally change the rules of the
game’ (Rhodes 2007, p. 1253),

17. GOVERNANCE: PROBLEMS
 ‘Institutionalist’ view of governance particular to political
science perspectives - operates with a ‘‘thin’ conception of
the social’ (Clarke and Ozga 2012, p. 2)
 ‘Governance’ risks becoming a ‘stipulative definition’
(Rhodes 1997)…so case study and ethnographic
approaches are necessary/desirable
 How ‘new’ is governance?

18. GOVERNMENTALITY
 The ‘art of government’ (Foucault), developed through his
lectures on biopolitics (circa 1978-79)
 Neoliberal governmentalities
…not to be confused with laissez-faire (e.g. anti-statism)
but are characterized by ‘permanent vigilance, activity, and
intervention’ (Foucault 2008, p. 132), e.g. ‘roll out’

19. GOVERNMENTALITY
Foucault’s early writings on discipline and punishment:
 Punishment as public spectacle: method for reaffirming
the power of the sovereign
 1830-48: physical spectacle of torture and punishment
was replaced by the birth of the prison
 Panoptic effect of prison structures created self-
disciplining, self-governing subjects (‘Visibility is a trap’,
Foucault 1977, p. 200)

20. GOVERNMENTALITY
 Self-governance
…the capacity and willingness of subjects (citizens, consumers,
workers) to be self-governing and practice self-care outside the
purview of the government.
 Hence the neologism ‘governmentalisation’ (Foucault)
…‘the function of producing, breathing life into, and increasing
freedom, of introducing additional freedom through additional
control and intervention’ (Foucault 2008, p. 67)

21. GOVERNMENTALITY
 Neoliberalism ‘runs from the market to the state, and
which plays out through new practices of regulatory
intervention and surveillance’ (Gane 2012, p. 614)
 Reversal of the Panopticon
 The market does not seek legitimacy from the state to
exist. Rather the reverse is true. The state must justify
itself to the market.

22. GOVERNMENTALITY: PROBLEMS
 ‘the difficulty of combining the heterogeneity of micro-political
analyses with a tendency towards ‘epochal’ analysis of liberal
governmentality and its phases/forms’
 ‘the separation of liberal governmentality from its constitutive
colonial conditions’
 ‘assuming the ‘success’ of governmental projects in practice’
(Clarke and Ozga 2012, p. 2)

23. CONTROL SOCIETIES
 ‘ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control’
(Deleuze 1995, p. 178)
 control operates through a modulation or modality, and
NOT a mould, a fixed space or institution
 Consider social media, communication and entertainment
networks: digital, responsive means of ‘capturing’ people
through the medium of capitalism, ‘communicative
capitalism’ (Dean 2009)

24. PANOPTICON TO SYNOPTICON
 Synopticon
…new fluid and transient forms of sociality or
individualisation through which freedoms and
responsibilities are devolved from the state to individuals
(Bauman 2000)

25. END