Hans Krause Hansen

Governmentality, globalization and local practice: Transformations of a hegemonic discourse

Since the 1980s, local governments in many parts of the world have undergone major institutional reforms. Shaped by a wide range of economic, political, and social trends, these changes have been driven by a particular blend of global and local dynamics. On the one hand, they have been contingent upon a globally dominant discourse that has tirelessly pointed out the devastating consequences of public-sector growth. On the other hand, the particular tracks that this discourse has followed, as well as the modes of local appropriation of its core messages, have varied and we believe will continue to vary from case to case. This article sets out to explore the correlation between governmentality, globalization, and local practice from the vantage point of the institution of local government as it is being reshaped by the global discourse known as New Public Management (NPM). Evolved from modest beginnings among international administrative experts working for the United Nations, taken up by the Carter administration, and then processed and refined by the OECD, NPM has arguably acquired the status of a hegemonic discourse: since the 1980s, most contemporary discourses in the field of public administration and management have positioned themselves in relation to elements of NPM. Though not a coherent set of values and notions and therefore not readily definable, NPM can nevertheless be distinguished despite its multiple guises and applications by (1) its clear emphasis on business-management practices, and (2) its reliance on individual rationalities and market

The politics of transparency and the calibration of knowledge in the digital age

This article analyses the complex work of human actors and technologies that goes into producing that which appears to us as ‘transparent’. Drawing on studies of governance and surveillance, affordance theory, actor-network theory and sociological work on numbers, we analyse the role played by mediating technologies in the production of transparency and relate it to the question of how knowledge is created, recycled and modified in organizational settings. This perspective is largely absent from existing research on transparency, which construes transparency as unmediated or fails to investigate the organizing properties of specific mediating technologies. We argue that mediating technologies, conceptualized here as disclosure devices, have distinctive organizing properties that are important to scrutinize. They play a central role in attempts to shed light on objects, subjects and practices, and to help build or break up relationships within and across sites and organizations. We focus on three disclosure devices and their respective knowledge creation processes: (a) due diligence, whose emphasis is on qualitative knowledge production; (b) rankings, which is about quantitative knowledge production; (c) big data analysis, which underscores algorithmic knowledge production. We conceptualize the distinct features of these disclosure devices, indicate ways in which they shape organizational processes and discuss some of the ethical and political challenges they pose.

Managing corruption risks

ABSTRACT This article investigates the emerging engagement of private actors and specifically Western corporations in international anti-corruption, drawing on Foucauldian studies of governmentality. It explores this engagement as governing practices that have emanated quite independently from the inter-state system commonly understood to be at the core of the anti-corruption regime. It demonstrates how corporate anti-corruption ties in with a relatively new way of perceiving corruption. In this framing, anti-corruption comes out as risk management, which is latched on to notions of corporate social responsibility and business ethics. Moreover, the constitution of corruption risk relates to the rise of new actors and networks engaged in a wider business of anti-corruption, including commercial and hybrid actors that supply corporations with managerial instruments, benchmarks for best practice, rankings, and information and surveillance systems. This facilitates the enrollment of corporations into the anti-corruption cause while cultivating their competitiveness aspirations. The article offers a novel perspective on international anti-corruption and the position of business herein, and in a wider sense, it also contributes discussions about the role of private actors and their micro practices in global governance.

The Global Diffusion of Managerialism: Transnational Discourse Communities at Work

This article sets out to disentangle some of the organisational forms and links through which particular visions and meanings of (local) statecraft are being diffused. While ultimately concerned with the globalisation of governance, the ensuing account seizes on a very particular instantiation of this diffusion, namely the knowledge and networks provided by the myriad of transnational discourse communities (TDCs) operating with a claim to authority and expertise in the ® eld of governance. Alternative ways of conceptualising this phenomenon abound: global policy networks, policy communities, transnational advocacy networks, epistemic communities, discourse communities, communities of practice. Not really synonyms, these terms capture different aspects of the knowledge peddlers and their trade. We have chosen a term that enables us to ground our analysis in a social constructivist perspective, highlighting the correlation between knowledge, power and discourse in the ® eld of global governance. The introductory section attempts an in medias res illustration of the forces at play, as evidenced in two very dissimilar localities and the community that connects them. Not a case study proper, this sketch of globalisation at work paves the way for a more general discussion in the second section of how managerialisation, marketisation and entrepreneurialisation of governance are insinuated, across borders and policy areas, into the rationalities and governmental technologies or speci® c institutions. In the present study, we focus on the local level of government where recent developments in governmental discourse developments suggest increased interconnectedness between the local and the global. Interestingly, the growing consumption of discourses promoted by the TDCs discussed in this paper tends to be unmediated by and largely bypasses the level of national government.

Numerical operations, transparency illusions and the datafication of governance

Building on conceptual insights from the history and sociology of numbers, media and surveillance studies, and theories of governance and risk, this article analyzes the forms of transparency produced by the use of numbers in social life. It examines what it is about numbers that often makes their ‘truth claims’ so powerful, investigates the role that numerical operations play in the production of retrospective, real-time and anticipatory forms of transparency in contemporary politics and economic transactions, and discusses some of the implications resulting from the increasingly abstract and machine-driven use of numbers. It argues that the forms of transparency generated by machine-driven numerical operations open up for individual and collective practices in ways that are intimately linked to precautionary and pre-emptive aspirations and interventions characteristic of contemporary governance. As such, these numerical operations raise important political and ethical questions that deserve further conceptual and empirical scrutiny.

Introduction: Logics of transparency in late modernity Paradoxes, mediation and governance

This special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory investigates the phenomenon of transparency, including the spectacle that accompanies transparency projects launched by contemporary organizations and institutions, be they public, private or inbetweens. The title ‘Logics of transparency in late modernity: paradoxes, mediation and governance’ alludes to the historicity of the transparency ideal, its paradoxes, forms of mediation and governing potentials. Within and across the five articles included in this volume we address questions such as the following: What is the historical and epistemological background to contemporary preoccupations with transparency? What is the role of the media and knowledge processes in the production of transparency? What kinds of politics are involved in the concerted focus on transparency? And, more generally, how can we theorize the current manifestations, potentialities and limits of transparency? Our endeavor is largely conceptual and comes with a normative challenge, which is important to address upfront. Many contemporary societal projects, ranging from the democratization of governments and organizations to the promotion and implementation of corporate social responsibility initiatives, generally assume that transparency can effectively steer individual and collective behavior towards desirable objectives. These objectives include holding elected or appointed public officers accountable, and making

The Transparency–Power Nexus Observational and Regularizing Control

Although transparency is often believed to mitigate the negative effects of power by providing access to the hidden sides of organizational and political life, extant research fails to specify how transparency more fundamentally relates to power. To make sense of this relationship, this article develops an analytical language along two dimensions: “observational control” and “regularizing control.” Within this framework, we look at (a) attempts to carry out control through observation, (b) identity-oriented forms of normative control, (c) strategically ambiguous articulations of transparency, and (d) attempts to normalize and institutionalize behavior across organizational settings through the use of reporting and ranking systems. In the concluding section, we discuss how our conceptualization might nuance and enrich future studies of the transparency–power nexus and we point to some important implications for management practitioners.

Cosmopolitan Aspirations: New Media, Citizenship Education and Youth in Latin America

A wide variety of supranational organizations and networks are currently promoting educational initiatives aimed at disseminating particular values and notions of citizenship in Latin America via new media and in particular the Internet. These organizations exercise a growing influence on educational objectives and techniques in the region. Despite the fact that access is still modest among many sectors in Latin America, the hope is that these new media will contribute to the eradication among young people of undesirable behaviour such as delinquency and political apathy, and instead foster a stronger sense of civic responsibility. That sense might underpin a more constructive, entrepreneurial global youth culture espousing universal, multicultural values rather than particularistic, parochial ones. The Internet is presented in such initiatives as possessing intrinsically educational, entrepreneurial and democratizing properties. The article explores the activities of supranational organizations and networks operating in Latin America, and seeks to provide a glimpse of the idealised youth identities that they envision. It is argued that the new roles assigned to education are shaped by new media optimism, cosmopolitan aspirations and a post-national rather than nationally anchored conception of citizenship. Theories of governance and governability are used to understand how these developments can be seen in terms of the globalization of politics and the ensuing changes in the forms, rationalities and techniques of governance in a wide range of issue areas, including education.

Governmental Mismanagement and Symbolic Violence: Discourses on Corruption in the Yucatán of the 1990s☆

Abstract Departing from a conceptualisation of corruption as a form of symbolic violence, this article analyses the character and impact of the discourses about corruption which were produced in Yucatan in the beginning of the 1990s. The discourses produced by official and oppositional forces are scrutinised against the background of the federal government’s neoliberal policies and the sociopolitical situation in the region during 1992 and 1993. The analysis gives some insights into the character of Mexican’s and Yucatecan’s experiences with corruption in their own setting. It explores some of the conflictual processes involved when social forces turn this form of symbolic violence into the object of moral critique in public discourses, drawing in this way also attention to how the state is imagined by those who exercise state power and those who are subject to it.

Managerialised patterns of political authority: partners, peddlers and entrepreneurial people

The language and viewpoint of management has entered and influenced the world of government.Managerialized patterns of political authority are seen in various social fields, and have occurred as a result of three important trends: globalization and transnationalization of political and government life; spread of transnational organizations that set the stage for new political and corporate governance by engaging in educating people about how to govern and manage, without being accountable to any political authority; and reframing of both political subjects and public sector employees in a way that is empowering so as to enable them to resume responsibility for their lives and jobs in times of generalized uncertainty. The dynamics of these trends are captured in the ideology of two different transnational organizations - - the Bertelsmann Network for Better Local Government and the Global Knowledge Partnership. Their key components include partnerships, access to knowledge to effect social change, and empowering people to act as innovators and entrepreneurs rather than customers or consumers of government services. The entrepreneurial management discourse focuses on initiative, risk-taking, self-reliance and personal responsibility. These new organizational forms and ideological approaches can provide for the change necessary to deal with the uncertainties of the future. (VRS)