The Market as Statecraft: A Polanyian Reading

How can markets help the state boost its sovereign power? The answer we derive from Polanyi’s account of change is that markets have the ability to undermine the cooperative relations underpinning communal life by making various subgroups compete against each other. As such, markets represent a soft-power alternative to military and repressive force.

Beyond the post-war Schumpeterian consensus: Governance, legitimacy and post-democracy

Two distinct visions of democratic politics, both of which are in sharp contrast to Schumpeter's competitive leadership model, are to be found at the heart of governance theory. The first advocates anti-democratic solutions, aiming to depoliticize public policy, while the second supports ultra-democratic reforms promoting the involvement of citizens in policy-making. The article pursues three main aims. First, it proposes a reading of the weaknesses attributed to Schumpeter's competitive leadership model. Second, it clarifies the nature of the innovations advocated by the anti-democratic camp in its attempt to build a regulatory state, and by the ultra-democratic camp in its struggle to eng…

Stato, Globalizzazione e Governance: Retorica, Contraddizioni, Paradossi

Bureaucracy, Open Access and Social Pluralism: Returning the Common to the Goose

Bureaucracy has long been the object of fierce intellectual critique and political polemic. We argue that the defense of bureaucracy must be a qualified one. First, we recognise that many of grounds for bureaucracy critique are rational, and, secondly, identify more carefully those areas in which bureaucracy is the only possible bulwark against marketisation; against, ‘commodification’ and ‘colonisation of the lifeworld.’ To make the argument we use the notion of ‘commons’ and connect any defense of bureaucracy to the support, preservation and protection that the latter offers to commons. Within public choice theory (e.g. Hardin 1968), commons are identified with inherently inefficient publ…

Lo stato dello Stato tra globalizzazione e governance

Principled Governance: Politics to the People

An influential narrative claims that the erosion of the modern nation state is causing a historical shift from «government» to «governance». Society-centred new modes of governance are displacing state-centric tools of government. Shaped by bottom-up pressures, these changes are in the process of engendering a more democratic and functionally differentiated type of agency – the Networked Polity. The paper challenges this narrative. It claims that extant governance networks are merely means for co-opting specific societal actors. For, the societal actors operating within those networks are given much reduced powers than the ones conceded to them in the past by declining neo-corporate arrange…

Governance e post-democrazia

The Reform and Innovation as Rhetoric and Method

We start from an observation from a well-known Swedish organisational analyst, Nils Brunsson, which reads like irony but feels like reality: the only guaranteed outcome of (organisational) reform is the next reform. What Brunsson calls ‘the reform of reform’ will be – all too – familiar to many readers, particularly those working in the public sector. Given repeated exposure to permanent reorganization – brought in under the mantel of reform and innovation – it is tempting to ascribe this permanent revolution to one or both of two causes: the failure of previous reform attempts and/or the need of senior managers to demonstrate their ‘transformative’ effects upon their organization in order …

Introduction: A Topographical Approach to Deliberative Democracy

Started as an attempt to move beyond the models of democracy which dominated public and academic discourses during les trente glorieuses (i.e. procedural, aggregative and participatory models of democracy), the deliberative turn seems to have be the opening of several other inner turnings which have help build up a complex theoretical spaghetti junction. Following the main deliberative turn we can also count an 'epistemic turn' (Jörke 2010), and 'empirical turn' (Thompson 2008), a 'systemic turn' (Mansbridge et. al. 2012) and even a 'democratic turn' (Barker et. al. 2012). The end result of these twists and turns is a plurality of models of deliberative democracy (DD) embodying many of the …

Diritti di gruppo e autonomia politica. Una prospettiva Arendtiana sulla crisi del multiculturalismo liberale

Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: a Polanyian reading of the 'digital economy'

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the attempts to use Karl Polanyi's framework to make sense of current developments have multiplied, producing a noticeable and lively debate. This debate centres on the notion of double movement put forward by the Hungarian thinker in his masterpiece – The Great Transformation. The paper is a contribution to this debate. The first part addresses a series of questions that make the interpretations of the double movement advanced so far not very compelling. To this end, a close reading of Polanyi's text, with the aim of dismantling and rearticulating its analytical structure, is carried out. The upshot is a dynamic and multistage picture of the double process …

GOVERNANCE E GOVERNAMENTALITA'

Patriotism and pluralism: identification and compliance in the post-national polity

The paper discusses the identity-building power and motivational force of patriotism. The basic idea underlying the discussion is that far from being a mere irrational and destructive force, patriotism is an expression of ‘existing human social identity.’ Thus, it argues that rather than dismissing patriotism altogether as an undesirable and/or irrational phenomenon, we need to understand how to discriminate between alternative forms of patriotism while investigating what constitutional reforms might be required to support those forms of patriotic identification that are morally desirable. I argue that to flourish, desirable forms of patriotism (what I call Ethical Patriotism) r…

Administration, civil service and bureaucracy

La Polity Reticolare. Analisi e critica della governance come teoria

From Thatcherism to Blairism. Britain's Long March to the Market

From 1979 to 1997 the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major tried to refashion British society along the managerial lines suggested by the New Right. Since 1997, New Labour has attempted to consolidate those reforms by offering a kind of ‘compassionate Thatcherism’. The article offers an overview and a critical assessment of the social and political reforms that characterize this neo-liberal consensus. The main thesis is that at the core of those reforms there is a double policy of administrative decentralization cum political centralization the goal of which is to shift the costs of social change upon middle and lower level managers while freeing the government from …

Classical Social Theory I: Marx and Durkheim

La governance come nuovo paradigma per le scienze sociali

IL DEFICIT DEMOCRATICO DELL’UNIONE EUROPEA

Le critiche riguardanti il deficit democratico dell'UE si sono concentrate sull'assenza di un demos europeo e sui limiti intrinseci degli assetti istituzionali comunitari. Recentemente il dibattito è stato rinvigorito da due approcci al problema che sfidano le basi su cui poggiano queste argomentazioni convenzionali. Quello che io chiamo la versione 'orientata ai diritti' suggerisce che sebbene un modello di democrazia a livello europeo può funzionare, richiede comunque come fondamento una qualche forma di identità europea. All'opposto abbiamo la versione che io chiamo 'orientata all'interesse pubblico' la quale ritiene che nell'operare di molti stati la responsabilità democratica riveste u…

La democrazia deliberativa dalla svolta epistemica all'inversione democratica

Governance dello stato e stato della governance: una panoramica

"Corporate governance": approcci manageriali ed etici a confronto

La crisi di fiducia che colpì il sistema delle imprese statunitense nei primi anni '70 ha promosso l'elaborazione di due distinte concezioni della corporate governance. La prima ha come referente privilegiato azionisti ed investitori ed elegge il mercato (azionario) come lo strumento principale per il governo dell'impresa. L'obiettivo di tale concezione è quello di riportare il management aziendale sotto il controllo degli azionisti. La seconda cerca invece di identificare una prospettiva che tiene nella dovuta considerazione preferenze, bisogni e diritti di tutti gli stakeholders coinvolti nel processo produttivo. Riprendendo la distinzione proposta da Hirschman, possiamo dire che mentre l…

The Regulatory State vs. the Networked Polity: confronting narratives of change

The aim of the article is to summarize and reassess the innovations brought about by governance theory. It is argued that the notion of governance is a conceptual device that could help rationalise and articulate the changes undertaken by liberal democracies since the late 1970s. The article suggests the need to distinguish between two distinct research programmes composing governance studies, which are influenced by alternative epistemic traditions—political economy and economic sociology. Rationalizations of change influenced by political economy support the idea that the outcome of recent political change is a market-oriented “Regulatory State”, while those influence by economic sociolog…

Epistemic Turn or Democratic U-Turn? On the Tension between Philosophical Reasoning and Political Action in Deliberative Democracy

Polanyi's double movement and the making of the ‘knowledge economy'

In this chapter, we want to re-evaluate the heuristic role of Polanyi’s double movement by suggesting an alternative reading that could answer several criticisms that have been levelled against it. Moreover, we believe that this reading can give us greater insight into both the nature of the current crisis and its failure to unravel the neoliberal consensus.1 According to our reading, since the Speenhamland measures introduced in 1795 in Britain, faulty welfarist solutions have had the ability to undermine the political force of countermovements calling for protective measures while helping pro-market coalitions to periodically regenerate themselves. For us, this means that the future resol…

Il multiculturalismo e le accuse di essenzialismo: teorie, politiche, ethos

Per diversi critici il multiculturalismo liberale implica l'essenzializzazione delle identità e delle pratiche delle minoranze. Si tratta di una obiezione diffusa anche tra coloro i quali in precedenza hanno espresso simpatia per il multiculturalismo. La questione è senza dubbio importante. Ma la mia tesi è che il dibattito attorno all'essenzialismo non colpisce nel segno. In primo luogo perché le accuse di essenzialismo rivolte al multiculturalismo finiscono per confondere diversi obiettivi potenziali, saltando dalla critica di teorie del multiculturalismo liberale, alla critica di politiche governative multiculturali, alla critica di argomenti e attitudini correnti riguardanti le differen…

Governance e democrazia: prospettive sistemiche e prospettive radicali

Review of H. Radder (ed.), The Commodification of Academic Research

recensione del libro a cura di H. Radder sulla mercificazione della ricerca scientifica

Governance e anarchie organizzate