Putting Civil Society in Its Place - Jessop, Bob Civil Society and Social Change

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interpersonal trust often helps to maintain markets and hierarchies (cf Granovetter, 1985). It can facilitate interorganizational negotiation and/or help build less personalized, more ‘generalized trust’ as organizations and other collective actors (including interorganizational partnerships) are seen to sacrifice short-term interests and reject opportunism (cf Luhmann, 1979: 120–2; Marin, 1990).

Primacy of profitability Primacy of command Primacy of dialogue Primacy of solidarity
Secondary role of exchange n/a Mafias, new public management Benchmarking, good governance Trade unions, syndicalism
Secondary role of command Firms, mixed economy n/a Public–private partnerships, deliberative democracy Bund, commune, associational democracy
Secondary role of dialogue Guanxi, network economy Parties, soft law, cooperative state n/a Community, communitarianism
Secondary role of solidarity Social enterprises, cooperatives, social economy Commune, subsidiarity Social movements, civil society n/a

      Source: Jessop (2017)

      In turn, interorganizational dialogue across systems eases intersystemic communication by reducing the ‘noise’ that can arise from major differences between systems in their respective institutional logics, operational codes and modes of calculation. If organizations representing different systems can formulate and communicate these contrasting desiderata and legitimate them in terms of their respective functional requirements, this may promote mutual understanding and the search for mutually beneficial trade-offs. It thereby permits ‘systemic trust’ (in the integrity of other systems’ codes and operations) by promoting mutual understanding and stabilizing reciprocal expectations around a wider ‘societal project’ as the basis for future self-binding and self-limiting actions. In turn, the resulting noise reduction can promote interpersonal trust by enhancing mutual understanding and by stabilizing expectations. In negotiated economies, for example, a few formal organizations and forums are entrusted to formulate and represent the identities and interests of different subsystems at the same time as they contribute to the definition and promotion of a wider ‘societal project’.

       The rise of governance practices

      The rise of governance is partly due to secular shifts in political economy that have made heterarchy and solidarity more significant than markets or hierarchies for economic, political and social coordination. I now consider the reasons for this by undertaking two tasks: first, identifying the logic of governance as a distinctive coordination mechanism in contradistinction to markets and imperative coordination; and second, considering more fully what societal (or macro-social) changes might have made heterarchy more appropriate as an economic coordination mechanism.

      First, the most general case for the shift from government hierarchy and pure market exchange to heterarchic governance can be made in terms of the evolutionary advantage (the relative capacities to innovate and learn in a changing environment) that it offers in certain circumstances. Self-organization is especially useful in cases of loose coupling or operational autonomy, relations where a plurality of interdependent but autonomous organizations, each controlling important resources, need to coordinate their actions in the face of complex reciprocal interdependence, complex spatio-temporal horizons and shared interests or projects to produce a joint outcome that is deemed mutually beneficial. Mayntz (1993) has discussed networks as a form of heterarchic governance in these terms. She suggests that their typical logic is that of negotiation directed to the realization of a joint product, such as ‘a specific technical innovation, a city plan, a strategy of collective action, or a problem solution in public policy’ (Mayntz, 1993: 11). In this way, common short-term objectives can be identified, and their self-interested realization used to promote generalized compliance with interorganizational expectations and rules (Marin, 1990: 15; Scharpf, 1994). Crucial to the success of such arrangements is the building of interorganizational capacities that synergetically 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

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