reinforce those of individual organizational members. These arguments can be illustrated from the emergence and dynamics of the so-called ‘negotiated economy’ that was realized in Scandinavia (cf Nielsen and Pedersen, 1988, 1993; Andersen et al, 1996).
I would add that such negotiation typically occurs in the context of more or less complex forms of interpersonal and interorganizational networking that bring and keep together those involved in negotiation; that the key to successful negotiation is noise reduction, that is, reducing mutual incomprehension in the communication between different institutional orders in and through attempts to enhance understanding and sensitivity to their distinctive rationalities, identities and interests; and that, once agreements are reached, they form the basis for negative and positive coordination of activities. In short, if reliance on heterarchy has increased, it is because increasing interdependencies are no longer so easily managed through markets and hierarchies.
Second, turning to the macro-social changes that might explain the growth of heterarchy, I focus on the interdependencies in and across the economy and polity. The world economy is being reshaped by a complex dialectic of globalization-regionalization. This has allegedly made it more difficult for (national) states to control economic activities within their borders let alone global capitalist dynamics. Once the relative coincidence of coherent economic spaces and national territories typical of postwar Atlantic Fordism (in the US, Northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was undermined by internationalization of the economy (especially among the advanced capitalist economies), faith in the national state’s capacities to govern the economy was undermined. A corresponding increase in the ‘unstructured complexity’ of the economy on a world scale has triggered attempts on various spatial scales (from local to global) to reimpose some structure and order through resort to heterarchic coordination.
These changes also make public–private partnerships and other forms of heterarchy more relevant than conventional legislative, bureaucratic and administrative techniques. This is seen in a turn from the ‘Keynesian welfare national state’ to a more complex, negotiated system oriented to international competitiveness, innovation, flexibility and an ‘enterprise culture’. The primary coordination instruments in the Keynesian welfare system were the market and the state. They were articulated in a ‘mixed economy’ in which big business, big labour and the big state often engaged in tripartite concertation at the national or regional level. In the emerging Schumpeterian workfare regime (Jessop, 1993, 2002b), the market, the national state and the mixed economy have lost significance to interfirm networks, public–private partnerships and a multilateral and heterarchic ‘negotiated economy’. Moreover, in contrast to the primarily national focus of the mixed economy, these new forms of negotiated economy also involve ‘key’ economic players from local and regional as well as national and increasingly, international, economic spaces. This is linked to the partial ‘hollowing out’ of national states through the expansion of supranational government, local governance regimes and transnationalized local policy networks in an attempt to enhance the ‘decentred context-mediated steering’ of capitalist economies. And this latter shift poses further coordination problems concerning the management of the interscalar as well as intersystemic dependencies.
Likewise, the traditional models of the large, vertically integrated firm of the 1960s, and of the small autonomous, single-phase firm of the 1970s and part of the 1980s are replaced by a new type of large networked firm, with strongly centralized strategic functions extending in several directions, and by new types of small enterprise, integrated 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).
