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

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Fractions: The Amsterdam School Perspective Reconsidered (co-edited with Henk Overbeek, Routledge, 2018) and The Pedagogy of Economic, Political and Social Crises: Dynamics, Construals, and Lessons (co-edited with Karim Knio, Routledge, 2019). Other work is cited in the References.

      Writing this book was triggered by my participation in 2016–19 as a part-time research fellow in the Economic and Social Research Council’s Civil Society programme hosted by the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) (Grant Number: ES/L009099/1). I was based at Lancaster University and occasionally visited Cardiff, Llandridnod Wells, Aberystwyth, Bangor and Swansea to participate in WISERD-funded events to learn from colleagues and deliver lectures on my account of civil society. I chose to interpret civil society as a shifting horizon of action rather than a fixed reality with a definite substance and became convinced, following the example of Michel Foucault, that it should be studied as a pluralistic ensemble of governance or governmental arrangements with diverse agents. Thus, the book examines civil society from a governance theoretical viewpoint, which gives it a more abstract theoretical quality than many readers might expect. It does not take civil society as its primary theoretical object but introduces governance, governance failure, metagovernance and metagovernance failure before turning to the two phases of the WISERD Civil Society programme and my own examples. In this sense, it draws on my long-established pre-WISERD studies as well as my involvement with the WISERD programme.

      In writing this book I have benefited from the support of Martin Jones, David Beel, Paul Chaney, Esther Muddiman, Ian Rees Jones and Victoria Macfarlane in the WISERD project, and from Ngai-Ling Sum and Andrew Sayer at Lancaster University. I alone am responsible for errors, omissions and theoretical inconsistencies. Laura Vickers-Rendall at Policy Press was helpful in bringing the book to completion and Millie Prekop assisted with publicity. Dawn Rushen was a superlative copyeditor.

      I dedicate this book to my younger brother, Richard John Jessop, who was born on 17 September 1947 and died on 28 December 2017.

      I have drawn on my previously published work in writing this book and have secured licences to reproduce my work in more or less modified form with the permission of the respective licensors through PLSclear. The articles and chapters concerned are:

      •Bob Jessop (1997) ‘The Governance of Complexity and the Complexity of Governance: Preliminary Remarks on Some Problems and Limits of Economic Guidance’, in A. Amin and J. Hausner (eds) Beyond Markets and Hierarchy: Interactive Governance and Social Complexity, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 111–47. PLSclear licence ref: 36147. Drawn on in Chapter 2.

      •Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (2013) Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 247–50. PLSclear licence ref: 36267. Drawn on in Chapter 3.

      •Bob Jessop (2009) ‘Governance and Metagovernance: On Reflexivity, Requisite Variety, and Requisite Irony’, in H. Bang (ed) Governance as Social and Political Communication, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 101–16. PLSclear licence ref: 36263. Drawn on in Chapter 3.

      •Bob Jessop (2015) ‘Global Social Policy and Its Governance: A Cultural Political Economy Approach’, in A. Kaasch and Merton (eds) Actors and Agency in Global Social Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 18–42, including Table 2.1. PLSclear licence ref: 36140. Drawn on in Chapter 8 to discuss global social policy.

      •Bob Jessop (2002) ‘Liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: A state-theoretical perspective’, Antipode, 34(3): 464–9 of 458–78. PLSclear licence ref: 36260. Drawn on in Chapter 8 to discuss ‘good governance’.

      •Bob Jessop (2000) ‘The Dynamics of Partnership and Governance Failure’, in G. Stoker (ed) The New Politics of British Local Governance, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 11–32. PLSclear licence ref: 36264. Drawn on in Chapter 9 to discuss regional governance strategies.

      •Bob Jessop (2015) ‘Corporatism and Beyond: Governance and Its Limits’, in E. Hartmann and P.F. Kjaer (eds) The Evolution of Intermediary Institutions in Europe: From Corporatism to Governance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 29–46. PLSclear licence 36265. Drawn on in Chapter 9 to discuss the periodization of corporatism.

      •Bob Jessop (2015) ‘The course, contradictions, and consequences of extending competition as a mode of (meta-)governance: Towards a sociology of competition and its limits’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 16(2): 167–85. Tandfonline open licence. Drawn on in Chapter 10 to discuss competition as a mode of governance.

      As a more-or-less distinctive set of political practices, governance has a long history. Nonetheless, theoretical interest in these practices under the rubric of ‘governance’ has mostly emerged in the last 40 to 50 years. This was initially prompted in the late 1960s and 1970s by growing elite concerns in liberal democracies about governmental overload, state failure, legitimacy crises and general ungovernability – concerns that triggered a search for political and social arrangements to address these problems. One response was to seek to lower expectations by informing the public of the limits to what any government could achieve faced with growing global turbulence and scarce resources. Another was neoliberal calls for ‘more market, less state’. A third response, more significant for this book, was growing theoretical and practical interest in the potential of coordination through self-organizing networks, partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration and, relatedly, in an alleged ‘shift from government to governance’ in the polity and similar shifts from hierarchical authority to networked or ‘heterarchical’ coordination in many other social fields. This amounted to a rediscovery of the potential contribution of civil society to problem-solving without representing a direct engagement in philosophical reflection.

      Relatedly, there has been growing interest from the late 1970s onwards in whether and how ‘civil society’ in one guise or another might enhance state capacity in the face of growing complexity and/or whether or how they might provide new ways to overcome old problems that postwar state intervention and the more recent (re)turn to market forces seem to have left unsolved, if not aggravated. Civil society is sometimes regarded as a flanking and supporting mechanism of neoliberalism and authoritarian statism. Involving civil society actors, organizations and partnerships raises hopes or expectations that policy-making and implementation will thereby be improved and made more accountable, either to relevant stakeholders and/or to pre-given criteria of efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and moral standards. This interest in civil society as a supplement to government occurs on all scales from the local state through metropolitan and regional governments to national states, and can also involve various intergovernmental arrangements at the international, transnational, supranational and global levels. This is reflected in the rise of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the operations of the European Union (EU) and international governance mechanisms. Likewise, new forms of partnership, negotiation and networking have been introduced or extended by state managers as they seek to address the declining legitimacy and/or effectiveness of other approaches to policy-making and implementation. Such innovations also redraw the inherited public–private divide, engender new forms of interpenetration between the political system and other functional systems, and modify relations between these systems and the lifeworld as the latter impacts on the nature and exercise of state power (on the lifeworld-vs-system distinction, see Habermas, 1987). Since that critical juncture 40 to 50 years ago, interest in governance has exploded, either explicitly or indirectly through work on parallel concepts and trends.

      In this sense, civil society is a well-worn theme in social and political theory, conceptual history and democratic theory. The

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