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Governance: An “Empty Signifier”?
Abstract
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... Empty signifiers are loosely signified frames that, thanks to their emptiness and ambiguity, allow multiple interpretations to co-exist and in so doing, permit unity within diversity (Laclau, 1986). Empty signifiers have long been used in political communication (Offe, 2009). For instance, the famous Obama 2008 campaign slogan #Change represents a powerful empty signifier. ...
... The meaning of "Weare99" was different for these different groups, but it was a powerful way of connecting their opinions, judgements, or frustrations around the financial crisis. In short, the flexibility of empty signifiers allows them to be constantly repurposed in the personal networks of the protesters, making social movements inclusive of multiple identities and views (Colleoni et al., 2021;MacKillop, 2018;Jones & Spicer, 2005, 2009O'Doherty, 2015). ...
Have stakeholders increased their influence over firms’ behavior in the digital age? In a recent article in this journal, Barnett, Henriques, and Husted (2020) suggest that contrary to expectations, digital media are limiting the influence of stakeholders on firms as information overload and heterogeneous demands make it difficult for stakeholders to synchronize their interests and achieve one coherent and persistent voice. In this exchange, we contend that, while the evolution of digital media has made it harder for stakeholders to achieve synchronicity, it has made it easier for them to achieve what we refer to as heterogeneous convergence. Heterogeneous convergence entails the progressive coming together of heterogeneous stakeholders around a broader demand for change while maintaining different identities and views. We argue that, through heterogeneous convergence, secondary stakeholders can exert strong pressure over firms.
... 4-5). Given that the EU, by its own account, relies on expertise as a basis for its actions (Offe 2009;Tsakatika 2007), it would be key to study the extent to which academic work was consulted at the time by European Commission employees and European Parliament research assistants. As highlighted above, there is also room to explore whether the contemporary impetus to produce 'impactful' research and obtain external funding encourages academics to mirror the logic of the institutions they study (Wilsdon et al. 2015). ...
Democratic erosion in the EU’s Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states has confounded EU policy-makers. In this paper, we investigate the assumptions behind the climate of optimism about CEE democratization that prevailed in EU decision-making before and after the 5th and 6th enlargements, and the extent to which political science participated in this intellectual climate. Based on a qualitative analysis of EU decision-making in the early twenty-first century and a quantitative analysis of 500 randomly sampled papers published between 2000 and 2015, we find that both policy makers and the most influential research in political science shared a bias towards optimism structured by common assumptions: A procedural understanding of democracy, a rational institutionalist belief in the EU’s capacity to bring these procedures about with the use of incentives and the related assumption that sociocultural dimensions of democracy would eventually follow institutions. We argue that these common assumptions help to explain both the EU’s failure to pre-empt and respond proportionately to democratic erosion, and the failure of our discipline to check that optimism.
... Governance has been applied to various activities involving steering or regulating social behavior. Still, the widespread application has led to some term vagueness (Offe 2009). ...
Community-based sanitation (CBS) is a sanitation service option with technical and institutional assistance for poor urban communities to develop sanitation infrastructure in urban areas and treat domestic wastewater in small-scale sanitation systems. The Indonesian government has implemented critical policy interventions and investments to upgrade sanitation access nationwide since the early 2000s. This research will answer how policy monitoring and governance affect community-based sanitation program delivery through cost-effectiveness analysis. Building upon a qualitative paradigm, this paper contributes insights into community-based sanitation program effectiveness in local government. We adopted a descriptive case study-based research project in several urban villages in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia. We performed a qualitative content analysis of data with a conventional content analysis approach.
O estudo teve como objetivo analisar o conceito de governança e governança pública relacionando na produção científica brasileira no período de 1988 a 2019. Para isso, utilizamos a pesquisa pelo termo governança em duas bases de dados digitais: Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) e Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD). De natureza qualitativa, a pesquisa se caracteriza como bibliográfica e documental. Ao todo, foram selecionados 179 trabalhos entre teses, dissertações e artigos com critério da participação social relacionada a governança pública. Os resultados evidenciam que as pesquisas sobre o fenômeno são recentes e que há uma diversificação de conceitos de governança e governança pública, o que é ilustrado pela diversidade de áreas que problematizam o fenômeno em questão.
This essay discusses participative governance mechanisms in the public sector grounded on theories of civil liberties, dialogical democracies, patterns of state bureaucracies, and public governance reforms. We aimed to analyze the effects of these issues on political agendas and public and participative governance alternatives in Brazil, emphasizing conflicts among rulers, politicians, civil servants, interest groups, and advocacy coalitions in dispute in decision-making processes. The article signals a hybrid nature of the Brazilian democracy in which Weberian universalism and rules of Welfare State institutions inscribed in the 1988 constitutional matrix operate through competition between two other logic streams – strata inheritance of state bureaucracy on the one hand and initiatives in favor of horizontal and participative governance on the other. The dynamic contradictions among these four issues will define the pattern of current competition for State apparatus.
KEYWORDS
Governance; State bureaucracy; Societal institutions
This essay discusses participative governance mechanisms in the public sector grounded on theories of civil liberties, dialogical democracies, patterns of state bureaucracies, and public governance reforms. We aimed to analyze the effects of these issues on political agendas and public and participative governance alternatives in Brazil, emphasizing conflicts among rulers, politicians, civil servants, interest groups, and advocacy coalitions in dispute in decision-making processes. The article signals a hybrid nature of the Brazilian democracy in which Weberian universalism and rules of Welfare State institutions inscribed in the 1988 constitutional matrix operate through competition between two other logic streams – strata inheritance of state bureaucracy on the one hand and initiatives in favor of horizontal and participative governance on the other. The dynamic contradictions among these four issues will define the pattern of current competition for State apparatus.
KEYWORDS
Governance; State bureaucracy; Societal institutions
This article explores the growing interest in 'governance' in relation to the changing roles of markets. states, and partnerships in economic co-ordination. It also comments on the respective tendencies to failure of markets, states and governance. The article first addresses the interest in governance and explains this in terms of recent theoretical developments as well as of fundamental shifts in economic, political, and social life. These latter changes suggest that issues of governance will remain a key issue for a long time and therefore merit careful consideration The logic of 'heterarchic governance' is then contrasted with the respective logics of anarchic. ex post co-ordination through market exchange and of imperative ex ante co-ordination through hierarchical forms of organization. Some preliminary reflections are offered on the nature. forms, and logic of 'governance failure: with special reference to the constraints imposed by global capitalism, the insertion of governance arrangements into the wider political system, and specific dilemmas of governance arrangements themselves. These tendencies to failure are then related to the state's increasing role in 'meta-governance'. namely in managing the respective roles of these different modes of co-ordination. The article concludes with a call for a repertoire of modes of co-ordination.
Recently, political science has seen an intense debate about the phenomenon of ‘governance’. The aim of this paper is to clarify the basic concepts that are at the heart of this debate, notably ‘governance’ and ‘modes of governance’. We argue that most contributions share a common concern for the relationship between state intervention and societal autonomy, but different strands of the literature highlight different facets of this continuum. Existing understandings may be classified according to whether they emphasize the politics, polity or policy dimensions of governance. We use these categories to present a structured overview of different dimensions of modes of governance as they may be found in the literature. In this context, we argue that the classification of modes of governance as ‘old’ or ‘new’ is of little analytical value. Moving from single dimensions to systematic classification schemes and typologies of modes of governance, we highlight a number of shortcomings of existing schemes and suggest an approach that could avoid these weaknesses. As a first step in this approach, we take a closer look at different policy properties of governance and develop a systematic typology of four modes of governance in the policy dimension: coercion, voluntarism, targeting and framework regulation.
Der anglo-amerikanische Begriff Governance wurde etwa seit Beginn der 90er Jahre des vorigen Jahrhunderts verbreitet in politikwissenschaftlichen Analysen benutzt und ersetzte schrittweise den bis dahin geläufigen Begriff der politischen Steuerung. Dieser Wandel der Semantik spiegelt eine tief greifende Veränderung des steuerungstheoretischen Paradigmas seit den 70er Jahren des vorigen Jahrhundert wider (Mayntz 1996, 1998), eine Veränderung, die zumindest teilweise Ausdruck realer Veränderungen von Institutionen und Prozessen der Politikentwicklung und gesellschaftlichen Regelung im modernen westlichen Nationalstaat war. Governance ist auch im Englischen kein alltagssprachlicher Begriff. Lange Zeit wurde er lediglich zur Bezeichnung des Prozessaspekts von government (Regierung) benutzt, also gewissermaßen als Synonym zum deutschen Begriff der politischen Steuerung, der ebenfalls auf einen Prozess verweist. In den letzten zwei Dekaden des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde der Begriff Governance dann jedoch zunehmend in zwei verschiedenen theoretischen Kontexten benutzt: im allgemein gesellschaftstheoretischen Kontext als Oberbegriff für die verschiedenen Formen sozialer Handlungskoordination (Hierarchie, Markt, Gemeinschaft, Organisationen), im Kontext internationaler und bald auch nationaler Politik zur Bezeichnung nicht-hierarchischer und nicht lediglich staatlicher Regelung.
Governance – eine kritische Zwischenbilanz Zeitschrift fü Politikwis-senschaft 15
- Julia Blumenthal
Julia Blumenthal, " Governance – eine kritische Zwischenbilanz, " Zeitschrift fü Politikwis-senschaft 15, no. 4 (2005): 1149–1180, 1157.
New Governance in European Social Policy, provides comparative analysis of the " Open Method of Coordination " (OMC) and its implementation in Germany
- Bü
Bü, New Governance in European Social Policy, provides comparative analysis of the " Open Method of Coordination " (OMC) and its implementation in Germany and England.