Governance as social and political communication

Abstract

Governance and governmentality are among the most popular new ideas in the political sciences, most notably in the fields of social and political theory, public administration, politics and sociology. As ever, debates within disciplines rarely transcend disciplinary boundaries but this volume gathers contributors from all these fields to discuss the transition to governance in both theory and practice. It seeks not only to identify, describe and evaluate the contribution of each discipline but also to bring them together by examining their respective contributions to polity, politics and policies. The book is comparative, drawing on authors and research in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the US. It adopts an anti-foundational approach to deconstruct the essentialist discourses endemic to each discipline and the disciplinary traditions of each country. Notions such as steering and control in public administration, identities and domination in sociology, and the community and the self in social and political theory are analysed in depth. The text demonstrates clearly how the distinctive traditions of each discipline lead them to construct overlapping but distinct ideas about the institutions, politics and policies of governance. This title should be of particular benefit to advanced undergraduate and graduate students of politics, especially political theory.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 510 citations exist upstream.