CRITICAL GOVERNANCE

Interview with Dr Jonathan Davies, Warwick Business School

This December, academics from a wide range of disciplines will gather at a conference to debate 'Challenging Orthodoxies: Developing Critical Governance Studies'. The aim is to bring together academics across the social sciences to better understand how ‘orthodoxy’ varies from discipline to discipline, as well as to analyse the process by which critical ideas infiltrate, and are absorbed into, the orthodoxy over time. Dr Jonathan Davies, WBS, explains why the conference is so timely. You can also listen below to Dr Davies' interview with Amy McLeod.

“It is interesting to question why the stratospheric crisis of the market we witnessed in 2008 has been seamlessly re-narrated as a crisis of public spending,” said Dr Jonathan Davies, Reader in Public Policy at Warwick Business School. “We have moved from a position that assumed the neoliberal orthodoxy - the market provides the best solution to our problems – via the market crash - to a situation where once again, we are told the road to redemption is to unleash the vitality of the private sector.” His colleague, Colin Crouch, has recently written a book entitled The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism that looks at this question in detail, but part of the answer must be the lack of credible and established opposition politics. Traditionally the Labour Party occupied the critical ground but as New Labour also fetishized the free market, a void was created that has not yet been adequately filled.

That is not to say there are no opposing voices. Dr Davies held a series of workshops in 2007/8 that facilitated interdisciplinary discussion of critical positions on governance within the Social Sciences and Humanities. “I had been aware for sometime that there had been a revival in social critique. This was instigated by the Anti-Capitalist Movement Against Corporate Globalisation, which got going in Seattle in the 1990s, and the rise of a new generation of critical theorists, like Slavoj, who were asking questions anew about capitalism and communism.” Following the success of this initiative a conference has been organised for December 2010, centred on the subject of ‘Challenging Orthodoxies: Developing Critical Governance Studies’. The aim is to bring together academics across the social sciences to better understand how ‘orthodoxy’ varies from discipline to discipline, as well as to analyse the process by which critical ideas infiltrate, and are absorbed into, the orthodoxy over time.

“Nancy Fraser is the key note speaker - she was our first choice and we are delighted she is able to come. Her work encapsulates some of the debates we will have at the conference. She is concerned with recognition, distributive justice and the way in which different groups achieve representation. Her work spans a wide range of critical positions - from Marxism and the transformation of political economy, to the post-structuralist concern with identity, diversity and voice. She is trying to find a way through the morass."

I am arguing that you need to understand the post-modern discourse and neoliberalism as two sides of the same coin...

Dr Davies’ interest in this area was sparked by an investigation into the disjunction between modern governance theory and the ways these ideas were put into practice: “There has been a spread of post-modernist views in public policy, suggesting a move from structure and ‘fixity’ to processes and ‘flows’.” Deceived by the apparent antithesis between post-modernist ideals and neoliberalism, we have been fooled into thinking resulting policy would ensure an empowered citizenry who are engaged and connected via real and online networks, and emancipated automatically as a direct result.

“I am arguing that you need to understand the post-modern discourse and neoliberalism as two sides of the same coin. While they look like they are diametrically opposed - one a fanatical pursuit of profit and the other a liberated ontology, a world of reflexive human beings who can subvert the structures surrounding them - they are intimately connected.” The prominence of post-modernist ideas has been facilitated by the development of informational capitalism: “Flux and flow is embedded in this type of capitalism - it’s all about networks, connectivity and horizontality. This is the ideology of modernisation; the promise of the market in the 21st century.”

But, when you come to look at what actually happens, the transformative promise is not realised. If we take social networks as an obvious example, while they promise an open, connected world they seem to replicate the very modernist practices they were meant to transcend. Dr Davies has studied, more specifically, state-organised interactions between the government and the citizenry. In the UK, New Labour established numerous participatory mechanisms to involve ‘the people’ in politics - deliberative forums, public meetings, consultations sessions which brought together local activists with businessmen and civil servants. Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) headed up this set of initiatives: “The idea was that every town should have one; they were the institutional result of the network ideology. They embodied the ideal that there should be a constructive dialogue between the state, the market and the civil society, all coming together in pursuit of a common interest.”

The vital question remains how the organisation of a round-table discussion between unequal protagonists transforms the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state: “I found that this process replicated the kind of practices they were meant to stop - top down, elitist, bureaucratic. Participation acted as a form of discipline, creating a de-politicized discourse that obscured underlying value conflicts. Dr Davies will be publishing this research in the New Year in a monograph titled 'Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony'. There is obviously much discussion to be had about what the partnerships did achieve, despite falling short of the ideal outcomes and whether it was, at least, a useful exercise to begin the journey of learning how power can usefully be devolved to local people. The Big Society project, for example, is aiming to ensure that community action is not regulated and organised by nationwide initiates but given the "freedom” to solve certain problems themselves, using means specific to the locality however "disorganised" and "messy" this turns out to be.

Dr Davies argues, in contrast, that what is missing from all of these initiatives is an upfront acknowledgement that the economy remains the fundamental limiting factor. Regardless of individual successes, inequality is systemic: “You cannot have empowered reflexivity for all in a economic system that is brutally competitive. Hierarchy cannot diminish or disappear because it is essential to any capitalist economy. I think that the authors of network governance are sincere in their ambitions, but that that instrumental rationality, or authoritarian high modernism, is trumping any move towards empowerment. Post-modernists sought to to transform modernism without transforming modernity.”

You cannot have empowered reflexivity for all in a economic system that is brutally competitive. Hierarchy cannot diminish or disappear because it is essential to any capitalist economy.

This particular investigation was just a starting point for Dr Davies - it sparked an interest in a much broader question of whether post-modernist ideas had infiltrated other disciplines' orthodoxies in the same way as they had in the public policy arena. For example, it seems to have been ineffective in challenging big science. According to Dr Davies, "this is what Professor Hugh Willmott, [who is speaking at the conference] found and he is asking why this is the case”. This area of academic study, loosely organised under the title ‘Critical Governance Studies’, is still formulating itself. There are specific questions being asked - ‘What is the orthodox position in the various disciplines?’ ‘What is the critical position, at the moment?’ - as well as conceptual ones - ‘How do we understand the term ‘orthodoxy’? 'By what process do we move from orthodoxy to critique?'

But is this more than an academic exercise? Nancy Fraser has recently published an article called 'Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History' where she explores the "disturbing possibility" that “…the cultural changes jump started by the second wave, salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to the feminist vision of a just society”. She asks whether it is mere accident that feminism prospered just as neoliberalism did or whether the former inadvertently assisted the later: the call for the end to the family wage for example, necessary for women to be thought deserving of equal pay, was also part of the process by which wages have been depressed and worker’s rights diminished. She contends that feminists have an opportunity at this time when neoliberalism is being questioned, to "think big" once again, "seize this moment" as one in which our path can be redirected towards justice.

If second wave’s course was so altered, however, why will the movement’s efforts not be co-opted again? Part of Nancy’s response is to argue that there is a need to be more historically self-aware. It might be over-ambitious to hope that a small conference can galvanize anti-capitalist activism but the work being done on better understanding the way in which ideological ideas are co-opted by the mainstream might help. Thinking about how government’s agendas compare with the impacts of policy (unintended consequences included) may provide some traction for those who are looking to think critically about the latest swell of policy initiatives affecting their lives and communities.

Reading List
Margaret Archer (1995), Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge University Press.
Alex Callinicos (2006), The Resources of Critique, Polity Press.
Colin Crouch (April 2011), The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Polity Press.
Jonathan S. Davies (Forthcoming), Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony, Bristol: Policy Press.
David Harvery (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Polity Press.

Listen to Amy McLeod's interview with Dr Jonathan Davies.