Putting Civil Society in Its Place. Jessop, Bob
into multicompany local networks. Across these networks, a system of constantly evolving power relationships governs both the dynamics of innovation and the capacity of partners to capture returns. The network firm is attracted towards diversified mass production and a single firm’s competitiveness is its control of complementary assets in the hands of its potential partners (Capello, 1996: 490).
Governance failure
The early interest in governance and the later interest in metagovernance indicate that markets, states, governance and solidarity all fail as modes of coordinating relations of complex reciprocal interdependence. This is not surprising because failure is a central feature of all social relations, for ‘there is no such thing as complete or total control of an object or set of objects – governance is necessarily incomplete and as a necessary consequence must always fail’ (Malpas and Wickham, 1995: 40). Indeed, given the growing structural complexity and opacity of the social world, failure becomes the most likely outcome of most attempts to govern it with reference to multiple objectives over extended spatial and temporal horizons – whether through markets, states, partnerships or another mechanism.
This is often recognized. However, while failure in other modes of coordination is regarded as inevitable, in the preferred mode of coordination it is typically seen as exceptional and corrigible. For example, for liberals, although the state is prone to failure, a turn to the market will solve the problem. If the market fails, however, it can be improved. Conversely, for statists, the response to market failure is government. If government fails, however, it should be improved. This polarization is reflected both in the succession of governments and in policy cycles within governments in which different modes of policy-making succeed each other as the difficulties of each become more evident. These issues are further explored in Part I.
Overall, then, this book explores:
•The implications of complexity theory for the inevitability of failure. This is a new approach in terms of critical policy studies and critical governance studies (Chapter 2).
•A taxonomy of modes of governance and their hybrid forms. This typology is more comprehensive than others, grounded theoretically and historically as well as in a survey of empirical analyses (Chapters 2, 3 and 4).
•An analysis of governance and governance failure in terms of the limits, contradictions and dilemmas of different modes of governance (Chapter 4).
•A theory of metagovernance, metagovernance failure and responses to failure (Chapters 2, 3 and 4).
•Locating civil society in terms of the theory of governance (and governance failure) as a potential point of intersection of networks and solidarity as modes of governance and resources for other modes of governance (Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4).
•Locating civil society as a point of intersection between competing strategic responses to market and state failure: top-down self-responsibilization and bottom-up self-emancipation. This represents a major challenge to current policy, practice and thinking in the field of government and governance practice (this holds for the following bullet points too) (Chapters 1, 2 and 7).
•An analysis of the struggles to integrate self-responsibilization and self-emancipation into broader strategies for governance and metagovernance (Chapter 7).
•A series of case studies to illustrate some of the points at issue above. These case studies will include, but are not confined to, research conducted within the WISERD Civil Society programme (Chapters 5, 8, 9 and 10).
Complexity, contingency and governance
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