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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2029022
Network Governance Theory: A Gramscian Critique __________________________________________________
Environment and Planning A March 2012
Jonathan S. Davies Professor of Critical Policy Studies Faculty of Business and Law De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH Tel: +44 7764 943706 E-mail: [email protected]
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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2029022
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Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to three referees for their exacting, but generous, critique of my
initial submission. I thank Mike Geddes and Will Leggett for invaluable comments on earlier
drafts. I also thank Jane Scullion and Edward Thompson for their excellent feedback at a
Department of Politics and Public Policy Work in Progress Seminar at De Montfort
University.
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Abstract
Influential governance theories argue that we live increasingly in a world of
networks, either relegating hierarchy to the shadows or dismissing it altogether. This paper
develops a Gramscian critique of these currents, advancing two key arguments. First,
drawing on Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and passive revolution, it reinterprets the
cultivation of networks as a prominent element in the hegemonic strategies of Western
neoliberalism, exemplified by UK public policy. Second, however, governing networks
struggle to cultivate trust, relying instead on hierarchy and closure. The paper argues that
network governance can therefore be understood as a form of Gramsci’s integral state, a
concept which highlights both the continuing centrality of coercion in the governance
system and the limits of the networks project. It concludes that conceiving of urban
governing networks as micro-configurations of the integral state offers a distinctive way of
overcoming the ‘government to governance’ dualism.
Keywords: Governance, Networks, Gramsci, Neoliberalism, Hegemony, Integral State, Passive Revolution.
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Introduction
Across much of the social sciences, networks are depicted as the cornerstone of a
transformed governance system. Heralding momentous changes across state, market and
civil society, claims about the rise of networking have been incorporated into a wide range
of governance theories. This paper develops an empirically informed theoretical critique of
these currents, focusing on two common traits. First, they either relegate hierarchy to the
background (Jessop and Sum, 2005: 369), or dismiss it as a ‘zombie category’ (Beck, 2007).
The coercive modalities of governing thus tend to disappear from view. Second, they are
also prone to understating the role of hierarchy in propagating network ideologies: not as a
pragmatic response to socioeconomic changes but as the means of enacting them.
Governance studies therefore need to reconsider the relationship between hierarchies and
networks and think again about the nature and efficacy of networking in contemporary
political economy.
To address these issues, the paper proposes a Gramscian re-reading of network
governance. The first part explores how different governance theories have incorporated
claims about the rise of networks, constituting a powerful orthodoxy. It then elaborates a
Gramscian framework, drawing on three of Gramsci’s major concepts: hegemony, the
integral state and passive revolution. Hegemony refers to effective social leadership by
concrete alliances of class forces. It is accomplished to the extent that these alliances
marshal widespread assent for their goals (Gramsci, 1971: 181-2). The integral state depicts
hegemony as an on-going struggle, highlighting that although consensual technologies are
vital, coercion remains the indispensable condition of social order (Gramsci, 1971: 57).
Importantly, the paper argues that the integral state is scalable to cities and a fruitful lens
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for exploring urban governing networks. Passive revolution, thirdly, is understood as a
medium of transformation initiated by fractions of a ruling class at moments of crisis,
including significant changes within the capitalist mode of production itself (Gramsci, 1971:
310; Morton, 2010).
The second part of the paper applies this tripartite Gramscian framework in re-reading
the history and practices of network governance. It argues that early on, agents of
neoliberalism incorporated the ideology of networks into their hegemonic strategy, rolled-
out through a series of passive revolutionary interventions. To illustrate, it shows how
celebrating and cultivating networks became central to UK public policy and the New Labour
project. Hierarchy was thus always integral to the promotion of networks, conceived as a
mechanism for remaking society. The paper suggests that as part of the visionary regulative
ideal of neoliberalism, the ideology of networks has had considerable hegemonic efficacy.
However, a précis of the international literature suggests that cultivating trust in networks
has been very difficult. In practice, urban governing networks appear not to subsist
primarily on trust but rely, perhaps increasingly, on hierarchy and closure. The literatures
suggest that influential as it is, the hegemonic ideal confronts barriers in everyday urban
political economy. Governing networks can thus be understood as micro-configurations of
the integral state, ensnared in the dialectics of coercion-consent. The paper concludes that
a Gramscian approach according adequate attention to both terms of the relationship
between coercion and consent can overcome the ‘government to governance’ dualism.
Network Governance Theories
Network governance theory is a broad church with common reference points across
the social sciences. The literatures tend to embrace one or more of six claims: public
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authorities must cultivate networks to govern efficaciously (Stone, 1989); the frequency of
horizontal transactions across state, market and civil society has increased (Marsh, 2008);
this increase heralds the rise of network governance (Rhodes, 1997); networking depends
on cultivating trust and is virtuous (Thompson, 2003); the rise of networking based on trust
is emblematic of an epochal transformation, where the ‘logic of flows’ displaces the ‘logic of
structures’ (Lash, 2002: vii); and in a world of networks, governance scholarship must be
decentred, focusing on the interdependence of autonomous individuals, organizations and
institutions (Sørensen and Torfing, 2009).
The proximity of state and non-state institutions and the proliferation of collaborative
institutions have made cities a major locus of network studies. Urban Regime Theory, for
example, developed as a critique of structuralism. Stone (1989) argued that effective
governance depends on coalition-building and that public officials and other resource-rich
actors, notably downtown development elites, are well placed to forge alliances and set the
governing agenda. He was influenced by Charles Tilly (1984), arguing that the spheres of
state, market and civil society are loosely coupled with relatively low structural coherence
between them. This is why, although pro-development interests often capture power,
regime building and maintenance requires proactive networking and cannot be deduced
from structural positions alone. Stone’s seminal study explored the incorporation of the
black middle class into Atlanta’s post-war bi-racial development regime, but later regime
scholarship extended to a much wider range of urban governance institutions (e.g. Stone,
2009).
Network theories have perhaps been most influential in public administration and
policy. They include the Differentiated Polity Model (DPM) (Rhodes, 1997; 2007) and
theories of network management and democracy. Rhodes argued that with the decline of
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the hierarchic Westminster model in the UK, driven by outsourcing and agencification,
public action had increasingly to be coordinated through networks, conceived as the
dynamic or even novel element in the system. For Bevir and Rhodes (2006: 74), the DPM
described ‘a hollowed-out state, a core executive fumbling to pull rubber levers of control,
and a massive proliferation of networks’. Rhodes (2000: 60) went so far as to conflate
‘governance as networks’. Related scholarship includes Danish research on how to subject
networks to democratic norms and accountability (e.g. Sørensen and Torfing, 2009) and
Dutch research on the public management of networks (e.g. Klijn. Steijn and Edelenbos,
2010).
Urban geographers were typically more cautious about the transformative potential of
networks. Regulation-theoretical and neo-Gramscian scholarship depicted governmental
efforts to cultivate networks as part of ‘continuing attempts to forge and sustain a
“successful” political project and scalar fix’ in the aftermath of Atlantic Fordism (Macleod
and Goodwin, 1999: 716). They viewed it, like all capitalist fixes, as provisional, precarious
and prone to failure (Jessop, 2007: 24). MacLeod (2001), for example, warned against the
influence of ‘soft institutionalism’ in research on the rescaling of governance, the tendency
to take for granted ‘non-exploitative horizontal relations of networking and reciprocity’
(2001: 1153). Yet MacLeod’s ‘new era of reflexive capitalism’ (2001: 1152, original
emphasis) drew inspiration from the claim that we are indeed moving towards an age of
networks. Thus, narratives and ontologies of transformation have tended to over-determine
contingency, an inclination also reflected in Jessops’s depiction of the trend within northern
Europe from Keynesian Welfare National States (KWNS) towards Schumpeterian Workfare
Post-national Regimes (SWPR) (Jessop, 2007: 210). Networks are a hallmark of the SWPR,
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where the state has become (among other things) the organizer of self-organizing
governance mechanisms (Jessop, 2011).
These approaches also influenced the development of metagovernance theory,
another broad church distinguished by the role it accords the state in ‘collibrating’
(selectively adjusting) the mix of hierarchies, markets and networks. Sørensen and Torfing
(2009), for example, used it to grapple with the challenges of what might be called ‘the
network governance of network governance’. Marsh (2011), in contrast, emphasised the
central-but-changing role of government in metagovernance. Although command and
coercion remain part of the strategic toolbox, the metagoverning state is commonly
represented as both becoming more networked itself and fostering networks with others.
In other words, metagoverning governments cultivate the conditions for ‘reflexive self-
organization’ (Jessop, 2011: 246) throughout state and civil society. The network-theoretical
trope of ‘government at a distance’ is further rooted in the metagovernance conception of
governance occurring in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ (Jessop, 2011: 247). Thus, if
metagovernance is about ‘government + governance’ (Marsh, 2011: 41), it nevertheless
depicts both sides of the duality as having a ‘more distributed cellular form’ than before
(Laguerre, 2011: 20).
The differences between these approaches maybe summarized as follows. Whereas
European public policy research tends to see transformations occurring, according analytical
and normative priority to trust-based interactions in multi-stakeholder networks, regime
theory is dismissive of any move from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ (Stone, 2009: 266-7).
Stone sees networking as the contingent, but always-existing historical condition of political
action. Regulation-theoretical and metagovernance studies tend to discern partial and
contingent transformations, but reject any normative bias towards networks. They reassert
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a strategic role for the reflexive state and ground their understandings of ‘new institutions’
in political economy. Important areas of divergence therefore include the nature and extent
of system transformation, the degree to which the rise of networking signifies the dawn of
second or post-modernity (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994), connotes a post-hegemonic
condition (Lash, 2007), represents an attempt to manage systemic differentiation inherent
in modernity (Darbas, 2008), or even announces an emancipatory multitude capable of
swamping the empire of capital (Hardt and Negri, 2004). However, this paper is concerned
with commonalities: the expurgation of hierarchy and related claims that in complex and
fragmented societies, networking is an increasingly significant or dynamic medium of
governing based on ‘flexible structures that are inclusive, information rich, and outside the
scope of direct bureaucratic control’ (Isett et al, 2011: i159).
One way of assessing claims for the rise of networking is to focus on what purportedly
differentiates it from other modes of coordination. The conventional distinction is that
networks are based on trust (Rhodes, 2007: 1246). Thus, ‘[i]f it is price competition that is
the central co-ordinating mechanism of the market and administrative orders that of
hierarchy, then it is trust and co-operation that centrally articulates networks’ (Frances et al,
1991: 15). For Thompson (2003: 40), networks depend on ‘ethical virtues: ‘co-existent
attributes such as sympathy, customary reciprocity, moral norms, common experience,
trust, duty, obligation and similar virtues’. If networks are to thrive, he argued, ‘a
generalized trust, honesty, and solidarity must transcend any minor negotiating
infringements’ and ‘a shared common overriding objective’ must exist (2003: 47).
Consequently, the trust in any institution is a good benchmark of its efficacy for network
governance.
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The conditions for trust-based networking are the subject of literatures influenced by
Social Network Analysis (Kenis and Oerlemans, 2008), social capital theory (Webber, 2007)
and sociological (soft) institutionalism (Lowndes, 2001). Trust maybe naïve, instrumental or
affective. Informal networks tend to be ‘closed’, with high levels of ‘homophily’ connecting
actors with cultural and interest-based affinities (Isett et al, 2011: i166). However,
normative theories celebrate ‘heterophily’; the claim that networks can cultivate affective
trust (benevolence, integrity and shared values) among diverse groups of actors such as
public officials, business leaders and community activists. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005:
183) captured the essence of the networks paradigm: ‘the balance of power is no longer a
salient issue when the main objective is the creation of a sense of belonging, a feeling of
satisfaction with and trust in one another’.
Giddens (1994: 192) elaborated the conditions of heterophily in his contribution to the
theory of reflexive modernization. He argued that the goal of politics in ‘high modernity’ is
to nourish the ‘autotelic self’, the ‘inner confidence which comes from self-respect’ and
‘where a sense of ontological security, originating in basic trust, allows for the positive
appreciation of difference’. The autotelic personality translates ‘potential threats into
rewarding challenges’ and ‘entropy into a consistent flow of experience’. For Giddens, it
flourishes in relative abundance or ‘post-scarcity’, which weakens ‘the drive to continuous
accumulation’ and undermines traditional cleavages (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994: 195).
Liberating the subject from an immediate preoccupation with subsistence creates the
conditions for trust to thrive amidst diversity. The potential for networks to resolve the
challenges of de-traditionalization and dispersion by cultivating trust is therefore anchored
in the ontological security born of relative prosperity.
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Marinetto (2003) and Marsh (2011) see this complex of ideas as a new orthodoxy.
Orthodoxies operate primarily by setting aside significant questions. Kenis and Oerlemans
(2008: 299), for example, found that inter-organizational research is biased towards
networks. Lotia and Hardy (2008: 371) described this literature as ‘thoroughly functionalist’,
pre-occupied with how networks solve governance problems. In the most enthusiastic
accounts, the network has become ‘a common form that tends to define our ways of
understanding the world and acting in it’ (Hardt and Negri: 2004: 142). Moran (2010: 42)
aptly described this tendency as ‘epochalism’. The premise of this paper is that the
orthodoxy pre-supposes that which needs questioning. Why did the networks perspective
become so influential? To what extent does the apparent proliferation of networks signify
the transformation of urban governance? How far do governing networks subsist on trust,
or rely on other modes of coordination? And, might an alternative theoretical approach
reveal more about governance than network-centred theories? The following paragraphs
develop a Gramscian framework for considering these questions.
Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony-Domination
Gramsci (1971: 181-2) argued that the ideal-typical moment of hegemony occurs
when a hegemonic bloc successfully mobilises society’s material and ideational resources,
achieving both unity of economic and political goals and ‘intellectual and moral unity ... on a
“universal” plane’. A hegemonic bloc, or constellation of class forces, exercises hegemony
to the extent that it is capable of leading a social formation in its entirety, successfully
representing its interests as common interests. For Gramsci, the struggle for hegemony is
grounded in and co-constitutes the social totality or the ‘”historical bloc”, i.e. unity between
nature and spirit (structure and superstructure), unity of opposites and distincts’ (Gramsci,
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1971: 137). Sustaining the unity of opposites and distincts requires the cultivation of
hegemony ‘under the direction of a fundamental class’ (Boothman in Gramsci, 1995: xi-xiii).
The historical bloc thus constitutes a contradictory totality, the more-or-less favourable
conditions in which specific formations, or hegemonic blocs, struggle more-or-less
successfully for leadership (Jessop, 1997: 56-7).
Gramsci was concerned predominantly with hegemony in sovereign states, but
recognized spatial variations in the nature and form of hegemonic leadership, including the
pivotal role of cities discussed below. The feasibility of global hegemonic leadership remains
a source of controversy among Gramscian scholars. Some emphasize transnational
hegemonic integration and the fragmentation of counter-power (e.g. Cox with Schechter,
2002), whereas others highlight competitive asymmetries in the international states system
and the potential for reviving proletarian counter-power (e.g. Callinicos, 2007). For current
purposes it is sufficient to highlight that ‘transnationalists’ and ‘hegemonists’ tend to
confine coercion to the shadows, whereas ‘neo-imperialists’ see it as integral to enduring
geo-political rivalries (Morton, 2007: 600). There are, however, symmetries between the
debate over supra-national hegemonic integration and that about hegemony within states
and their sub-divisions.
Restating Coercion: Gramsci’s Theory of the Integral State
Gramsci defined the integral state as ‘political society + civil society’, where ‘political
society’ is code for government by force, and the struggle for hegemonic leadership in civil
society is reinforced by the ‘armour of coercion’ (Gramsci, 1971: 262-3). Simply, it is the
sum of governing institutions, practices and technologies enmeshed in the struggle for
hegemony throughout state and civil society. However, metagovernance theorists
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influenced by Gramsci interpret it in a manner that downplays coercion. According to
Jessop and Sum (2005: 369), for example (see also Marsh, 2011):
The forms of intervention associated with the state and statecraft are not confined
to imperative coordination, that is, centralized planning or top-down intervention.
Paraphrasing Gramsci, who analysed the state apparatus in its inclusive sense as
‘political society + civil society’ and saw state power as involving ‘hegemony
armoured by coercion’, we could also describe the state apparatus as based on
‘government + governance’ and as exercising ‘governance in the shadow of
hierarchy’.
Gramsci’s theory was in part a critique of contemporaries who conflated the state
with its coercive function (Gramsci, 1971: 271), focusing on the strategic challenges facing
communists trying to contest hegemony in nascent capitalist democracies. But, he never
argued that hegemonic leadership could substitute coercive power, or that coercion could
be confined to the shadows. Rather, he repeatedly stated that hegemony and domination
are dialectically related terms of the ‘contradictory and discordant’ political economy of
capitalism. Gramsci (1971: 57) argued, for example, that a ‘social group dominates
antagonistic groups, which it tends to “liquidate”, or subjugate, perhaps even by armed
force. It leads kindred and allied groups’. He restated the point forcefully and
unambiguously: ‘… two things are absolutely necessary for the life of a State: arms and
religion … force and consent; coercion and persuasion; State and Church; political society
and civil society; politics and morality; law and freedom; order and self-discipline; …
violence and fraud’ (Gramsci, 1971: 171, fn 71). In the face of subaltern struggles, and short
of implausibly comprehensive hegemony, the hegemonic bloc must rely to some extent on
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threat and outright domination. Coercion and consent are thus ‘dialectically entwined and
inseparable … violence and discipline are ubiquitous’ (Mitchell, 2003: 79).
Gramsci did not develop a theory of coercion as such. He nevertheless saw that it
takes multiple forms. For example, he defined ‘direct domination’ as ‘command exercised
through the State and “juridical” government”’ (1971: 12). Elsewhere, he referred to
hierarchy as the combination of ‘military and civil coercion’ (1971: 120). Further, ‘it is the
bureaucracy—i.e. the crystallisation of the leading personnel—which exercises coercive
power, and at a certain point it becomes a caste’ (1971: 246). Gramsci also depicted laissez
faire as a disciplinary strategy ‘introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means.
It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends … a political programme ... to change the
economic programme of the State itself’ (Gramsci, 1971: 159-60). State coercion in Gramsci
therefore encompasses violence + economic compulsion + administrative domination. This
definition helps sustain the claim developed below that coercion is ubiquitous and
distinguishes it analytically from enrolment processes, with which it may be entwined.
Why should coercion be ubiquitous? The nub of Gramsci’s explanation is found in
passages of the Prison Notebooks, which explain the dialectical relationships prone to
sundering the historical bloc. Gramsci saw Marx’s Capital as the founding statement of a
new tradition, the basis for further elaboration and empirical inquiry into ‘critical economy’
(Bieler and Morton, 2003; Krätke and Thomas, 2011: 73-4). Lacking the resources to
undertake such a programme in prison, and relying on memory, he defined Marx’s law of
the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) as the dialectical moment of ‘relative
surplus value’ and thus as the primary source of contradiction and discordancy (1995: 429).
The TRPF, Gramsci argued, is ‘the dialectical process by which the molecular progressive
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thrust leads to a tendentially catastrophic result in the social ensemble, a result from which
other individual progressive thrusts set off in a continual overhauling process which cannot
however be reckoned as infinite …’ (Gramsci, 1995: 432). The capitalist system reaches the
‘pillars of Hercules’ when finally it subsumes all space-time and counter-tendencies exhaust
themselves. Concretely, Gramsci understood the ‘law of tendency’ as ‘a dialectical term in a
vaster organic process’, the contradictory moment of a larger and expanding organic unity
(1995: 433), the central term of the dialectical totality constituting the historical bloc. His
writings naturally contain ambiguities and errors, many deriving from his confinement
(Krätke and Thomas, 2011). However, the depiction of the capitalist system as an expanding
dialectical totality represents a continuous strand in Gramsci’s thought (also Fusaro, 2010).
The theory of the integral state exemplifies his dialectical thinking.
From this vantage point, the flaw in any otherwise successful hegemonic strategy is
that because capitalism is prone to increasingly severe and contagious accumulation crises it
tends to cultivate expectations among subaltern classes as the condition of consent to it
that increasingly it cannot meet (Anderson, 1976: 29). Hegemony tends to be fragile and
consent is precarious because the hegemonic leadership is compelled to break its promises.
Thus, while subaltern good sense means that rebellions may occur with or without them,
and there are many possible triggers for counter-hegemonic mobilization, crises tend to
enlarge the asymmetry between promises and everyday experiences. Although there is no
mechanical relationship, crises are thus prone to undermining hegemonic leadership. The
continuing struggle makes the relationship between state and civil society ‘dialectical’ in the
Marxist-Gramscian sense, enacted in spatio-temporally variable configurations of the
integral state.
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Spatialities of the Integral State
According to Jessop and Sum (2005: 369), Gramsci’s approach was ‘inherently multi-
scalar because it plays down the importance of sovereign states with their monopoly of
coercion and allows more weight to other apparatuses, organizations and practices involved
in exercising political power’ (emphasis added). Jessop thus subtracts coercion from the
subnational struggle for hegemony and accords it virtually no attention in his theory of state
power either (2007). Morton (2007: 607) argued for ‘a hierarchy of scales at which different
policies might serve to anchor geopolitical priorities within specific spatial and geographical
territorial forms’. Equally, a ‘scale of hierarchies’ would contribute to understanding
different enactments of hegemony-domination-resistance throughout the socio-spatial
complex of scales, places, territories and networks (Jessop, Brenner and Jones, 2008).
Gramsci saw the city as a motor-force of historical development under capitalism
because, unlike the sclerotic relations of subjection and domination in the countryside, it is
a terrain of open class conflict (Fontana, 2010: 354). As Kipfer (2002: 133) commented,
urban capitalism produces distinct contradictions promising ‘progress’ through consumer
goods and increased leisure time, or in more recent times ‘social inclusion’ and ‘democratic
empowerment’. However, it is prone to undermining them through ‘the very regressive
forces of commodification that spread them’, such as by conflating the promise of inclusion
with the demand for personal entrepreneurship (Davies, 2007). Kipfer argued that this
urban dialectic explains ‘the continued importance of violence in sustaining a social order
without total cohesion’ (2002: 141).
The urban and other socio-spatial forms of the integral state are a matter for future
empirical inquiry, but the coercive term of the relationship is self-evidently prominent in
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cities today, not least in the face of resistance. The liberation struggles of the Arab Spring
continue as bloody conflicts over urban space. The European struggle against austerity also
takes the form of subaltern struggles for the city, albeit confronted by (mostly) sub-lethal
modalities of state coercion. Struggles oriented to national and international questions
therefore find themselves fighting simultaneously and perhaps unwittingly for the right to
the city (Harvey, 2011). As Kipfer (2002: 138) put it, ‘the urban is not only the setting of
struggle’, it is also ‘the stakes of that struggle’.
State violence and subaltern resistance are vital elements in the struggle for and
against urban hegemony. However, the role of city governments maybe distinguished by
the myriad technologies of administrative domination at their disposal. These are the
routine modalities of urban coercive power. They include the magistracy, everyday
policing, the management of space and housing (including enforcement) and the regulatory
functions of local authorities and agencies. As will be argued further below, everyday
enactments of coercion-consensus include the cultivation and management of governing
networks, where administrative domination may increasingly substitute for trust-based
relationships.
Passive Revolution
If any hegemonic formation has limited space-time utility for accumulation then it
must episodically be reinvented, a challenge addressed by Gramsci’s concept of passive
revolution. Like other Gramscian ideas, the meaning and application of passive revolution is
contested. Gramsci developed it to explain the Italian Risorgimento: unification under a
weak form of bourgeois rule without a decisive moment of rupture, like the French
Revolution. He defined passive revolution as the dialectics of ‘revolution-restoration’, the
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simultaneous fulfilment and displacement of revolutionary pressures (Gramsci, 1971: 109).
Gramsci saw the Risorgimento as antithetical to hegemony: ‘… a State replaces the local
social groups in leading a struggle of renewal. It is one of the cases in which these groups
have the function of “domination” without that of “leadership”: dictatorship without
hegemony’ (Gramsci 1971: 106).
Gramsci also pondered whether the concept might be extended to encompass
transformations within the capitalist order such as the rise of Fordism and fascism and
potentially, by extension, later transitions from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism. Accordingly
Gramscian scholars often define significant top-down changes within the capitalist order as
passive revolutions (type 2), as well as transformations from non-capitalist to capitalist
formations (type 1) (Simon, 2010). In a recent debate about the utility of passive revolution
for analysing ‘type 2’ transitions, several contributors endorsed Morton’s (2010: 604)
editorial premise that it is a useful ‘portmanteau concept that reveals continuities and
changes within the political rule of capital’. However, Callinicos (2010) argued that
stretching passive revolution to encompass transformations within capitalism risked
breaking the conceptual link with revolution-restoration. It also risks imputing excessive
discontinuity to phases of capitalist development – the sin of ‘epochalism’ revisited. It
further raises the possibility that, unlike the Risorgimento, type 2 passive revolutionary
transitions might also prove efficacious for hegemonic leadership. Of Italian fascism, for
example, Gramsci hypothesized that it created ‘a period of expectation and hope’ among
the petit-bourgeoisie, reinforcing ‘the hegemonic system and the forces of military and civil
coercion at the disposal of the traditional ruling classes’ (1971: 120). Morton’s typology of
passive-revolutionary outcomes spanning minimally, decadent (decaying) and integrally
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hegemonic regimes represents the most elaborate attempt to overcome the conceptual
tension between hegemony and passive-revolution (2011: 21-2).
The following account of neoliberalisation takes Morton’s part, depicting it as a
passive-revolutionary movement, but with due regard for the risk of fuelling epochalism.
This stance is taken partly for lack of an alternative critical vocabulary to accommodate
significant changes and partly because many cases of neoliberalism did entail ‘revolution-
restoration’, simultaneously displacing revolutionary ferment in the years after 1968 and
fostering relatively stable conditions for economic and social modernisation. In a type 2
passive revolutionary transformation that notionally succeeds in enhancing hegemonic
leadership, common-sense ways of thinking and acting must be unlearned and new habits
and norms acquired so that a new ‘second nature’ is constructed (Fontana, 2002: 163), such
as those associated with knowledge capitalism and network governance, discussed below.
The extent to which neoliberal passive revolutions revitalized capital accumulation
and cultivated integral hegemonies is a moot point. As a worldview neoliberalism has
undoubtedly been enormously successful, continuing to thrive as a governing ideology,
hitherto, amidst a major crisis of its own making (Crouch, 2011). However, alongside the
rise of new social movements and the revival of mass strikes, significant contradictions and
barriers also persist in the more mundane practices of urban governance. The paper now
discusses the development and institutionalization of the hegemonic ideology of networks
within neoliberalism, of which the UK is a prominent exponent. It then illustrates how
despite widespread commitment to the ethos of collaboration, governing networks enact
the dialectics of coercion-consent, casting doubt on their efficacy for hegemonic leadership.
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Network Governance in Neoliberal Hegemonic Strategy
Gramsci-influenced accounts tend to represent network governance either as part of
a putative alternative to neoliberalism (Showstack Sassoon, 2000), or as a compensatory
‘flanking’ mechanism (Hall, 2003). It is here interpreted as integral to neoliberal hegemonic
ideology and strategy. Incipient neoliberalism can be understood as a series of passive-
revolutionary attempts to re-invigorate capital accumulation in the face of faltering
Keynesianism and socioeconomic turmoil during the 1960s and 70s. In all its mutative and
hybrid forms, neoliberalism is distinguished by the commitment to extending markets,
refashioning welfare states and, in many variants, cultivating entrepreneurial rationalities.
Klein (2007: 18) depicted it as the ‘shock doctrine’; a ‘fundamentalist form of capitalism’
‘midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as
well as on countless individual bodies’. For Brenner and Theodore (2002: 352), it entailed
the ‘dramatic intensification of coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to
impose market rule upon all aspects of social life’. The Pinochet coup in Chile was among
the most violent moments of neoliberalisation, perhaps more counter-revolutionary than
passive-revolutionary. The fiscal crisis in New York in 1975 saw the application of passive-
revolutionary techniques by an alliance of local and extra-local forces seeking to establish a
culture of fiscal rectitude, in the first instance by choking the credit supply. Auletta (1976)
described these tactics in quasi-Gramscian terms. Britain’s bailout by the IMF in 1976 and
subsequent retrenchment was analogous to the fiscal crisis in New York at the national
scale; a decisive moment in the neoliberal turn preceding Thatcherism.
Such ‘shock-doctrine’ moments, of whose meaning and significance agents may or
may not have been conscious, were often followed by longer-term projects for economic
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and social transformation. Despite proselytizing ‘free markets’, Cammack (2004: 190)
argued that from the outset neoliberal governments intervened to ‘equip the poor for their
incorporation into and subjection to competitive labour markets … while simultaneously
seeking to legitimate the project through participation and a pro-poor agenda’. The idea
that states should actively remake political culture was always integral to the thinking of
organizations like the World Bank. Brenner and Theodore (2002: 368) argued that cities
became crucial arenas for experimentation and that neoliberal initiatives were ‘interiorized’
into urban governing regimes. Through urban policy, governments sought to recast citizens
simultaneously as entrepreneurial and reflexively sociable ‘governable subjects’ in the
image of Giddens’ autotelic personalities.
The origins of network governance theory can be traced to the political and artistic
avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 170), when the ideas of
knowledge capitalism began to incubate. In the UK, they were enrolled by Harold Wilson’s
Labour Party. Said Wilson (1963):
In all our plans for the future we're redefining and we're restating our socialism in
terms of the scientific revolution. But that revolution cannot become a reality unless
we are prepared to make far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes
which permeate our whole system of society. The Britain that is going to be forged in
the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for
outdated methods on either side of industry.
Wilson expressed the ‘white heat’ as a paradigm shift making socioeconomic
modernisation imperative, promising prosperity for all and thus transcending class
domination; a classic hegemonic vision. At the same time, the capacity to network became
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the cardinal virtue of emerging knowledge capitalism. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005)
highlighted in their study of France, business leaders appropriated the ideology of networks,
celebrating creativity, individual adaptability and connecting laterally in project-based teams
sustained through affective trust.
The promise of knowledge capitalism served as a powerful hegemonic ideology for
neoliberalism after the 1960s and continued to inspire modernization strategies during the
1990s and 2000s. Influenced by intellectuals like Giddens, many governments sought to
cultivate networks deemed ‘peculiarly appropriate to the operation of the enabling state’
(Bevir, 2005: 46). Moran (2010: 34) perceptively recognized affinities between the virtues
of ‘light touch’ regulation claimed for networks and small-state neoliberalism. The
purportedly emancipatory potential of networking was thus recuperated to the hegemonic
ideology of neoliberalism in both its economic and political forms.
The UK exemplifies the incorporation of networks into hegemonic ideology.
Collaboration is old-hat, but network governance gained ideological currency as a principle
for organising state-civil society relations after the tumultuous trade union struggles of the
mid-1980s were resolved. Ministers at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and
throughout John Major’s saw active citizenship as a way of overcoming a lack of
‘community, lawlessness and overdependence on the state’ (Douglas Hurd cited in Oliver
1991: 157). Major’s government began promoting network governance institutions,
cultivating a ‘speech genre of partnership’ (Collins, 1999: 76-7) proliferated enthusiastically
by New Labour from 1997.
The ideology of networks also appealed to thinkers on the left. For example, Hall and
Jacques (1983: 11), argued in their critique of orthodox Marxism: ‘… the world has changed,
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not just incrementally but qualitatively … Britain and other advanced capitalist societies are
increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation, and fragmentation, rather than
homogeneity, standardisation and the economics and organisations of scale which
characterised modern mass society’. The Eurocommunist movement of which they were
part drew inspiration from Poulantzas’s claim that the state is not fundamentally
subordinate to the capitalist mode of production, but rather a heterodox assemblage
reflecting the condensation of the relations of class forces. This conception allowed that a
counter-hegemonic movement might seize the apparatus of power and enact socialism by
constitutional means. At the same time, Eurocommunism downplayed Gramsci’s ‘war of
manoeuvre’ (the insurrectionary moment) in favour of the ‘war of position’ (the struggle for
hegemony among subaltern and allied groups) (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Armed with the
Poulantzian interpretation of Marxist state theory and their re-reading of Gramsci, British
Eurocommunists prepared for a long struggle on the terrain of ideology. They looked to
citizenship for a theme around which popular identities might coalesce in an anti-Tory
popular front, arguing that counter-hegemonic power required the cultivation of networks
capable of substituting for the diminishing coercive counter-power of the proletariat.
The British Labour Party was influenced to a degree by Eurocommunist thinking in the
late 1980s. However, after Labour’s fourth successive general election defeat in 1992, the
new Tony Blair-Gordon Brown leadership joined forces with another group of intellectuals,
marking a pronounced ideological shift. Instead of seeking to marshal the forces of the left
in a progressive counter-hegemonic bloc to reverse Thatcherism, Anthony Giddens (1998)
conceived the task of The Third Way as building a new communitarianism on the
foundations of the global market, heralding a turn to ‘post-hegemonic’ politics (Johnson,
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2007) and closer affinity with the Conservative view of good citizenship as the exercise of
personal responsibility and neighbourliness (Davies, 2012). Instead of organizing counter-
hegemony, networks became vehicles for hegemonic integration; a new social partnership
without unions.
The actions of New Labour cannot be read directly from the work of intellectuals.
Nevertheless, much of the centre-left accepted the parameters of Giddens’ vision and the
underlying theory of change. After 18 years of Conservative government, the battered
trade union movement, Labour Party and local Labour councils were happy to take shelter
in the ‘big tent’. Many, with painful memories of defeat, saw networks as progressive,
forming an ‘ethos of collaboration’ shared widely among public officials and citizen-activists
(Davies, 2009). In a conjuncture where counter-hegemonic politics based on the critique of
political economy could be depicted as obsolete, the promise of inclusive network
governance fostering both competitiveness and cohesion had considerable appeal.
In proselytizing network governance, Giddens and New Labour followed Harold Wilson
by mobilizing the tropes of knowledge capitalism. Another influential intellectual, Charles
Leadbeater (2000: 167), claimed that the networked knowledge economy promised a
society ‘both open and innovative, and yet inclusive and cooperative’. Tony Blair (2000)
celebrated it as the ‘greatest economic, technological and social upheaval the world has
seen since the industrial revolution began over two centuries ago’. Heralding a new epoch
is a hallmark of the ‘type 2’ passive revolution, imbuing capitalist innovations with
emancipatory potential. Talk of adapting to the challenges of ‘complexity’, ‘whole systems
thinking’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ became pervasive in Anglophone governmental
discourse. Echoing the discourse of knowledge capitalism, for example, the British National
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School of Government claimed that future civil service leaders must learn the art of ‘leading
people in non-hierarchical ways, for example, members of project or special teams’ (cited in
Davies, 2001: 114)). It elaborated:
It is crucial for those on the Fast Stream to develop their ability to lead not only
those they manage but also others with whom they work collaboratively. The
increased demands on organisations to deal effectively with ambiguity,
unpredictability, complexity and turbulence means that leaders must be proactive
and take their people with them.
City managers today continue to exhort colleagues to ‘think like Google’ and become
‘the networked council’ (e.g. Barradell, 2011). The proselytizing tone, perpetual appeals to
‘change’ and the slew of policies entreating officials and citizens collaborate for the
common good all highlight the hegemonic force in the ideology of networks.
Gramsci (1971: 133) argued that a successful hegemonic bloc must link its political
struggle with a programme of economic reform. As a visionary regulative ideal, the ideology
of networks fulfilled part of this role for neoliberalism, as the object of both economic
development and political sociability. It has had significant hegemonic utility mobilising, in
some cases even inspiring, fractions of capital, the state and civil society. Boltanski and
Chiapello rightly argued that ‘the metaphor of the network has progressively taken
responsibility for a new general representation of societies’ (2005: 138). As the
reconstructive element of a passive-revolutionary movement, it contributed to the
successful displacement of antagonistic forces in the UK, their recuperation and
consequently to reinforcing hegemony.
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Geddes (2006, 2008) argued that it has fulfilled a similar role throughout the cities
of Europe and beyond. For Peck and Tickell (2002: 397-8), cases of neoliberalisation also
created opportunity structures for ‘fast policy transfer’, where importing ‘off the shelf policy
fixes’ enabled short-cuts in domestic policy development (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 397-8).
Others copied ideas from avant-garde nations, like Britain, curtailing domestic policy
scrutiny and ‘leading to a deepening and intensification’ of neoliberalism. Policy emulation
became common sense and neoliberalization part of a positive feedback loop. In Gramscian
terms, more-or-less coercive policy transfer has transmitted neoliberal currents, such as
network governance, from the ‘core’ to the ‘periphery’, reinforcing geo-political power
asymmetries in the process (Morton, 2007: 604).
As was noted earlier, the extent to which neoliberalism operates as an integrative
hegemonic force globally is contested within the Gramscian tradition. The city has
undoubtedly been an important arena for the roll-out of neoliberal programmes, as Brenner
and Theodore (2002) argued, but there remain few detailed comparisons revealing
subtleties and variations in the modalities of the networks project and more comparative
research would help establish its cross-national efficacy. However, there is ample evidence
that the attempt to forge a neoliberal fix encounters barriers, manifesting in struggles over
urban space and crucially, for current purposes, the everyday politics of governing networks.
Governing Networks and the Integral State
It was argued earlier that network governance theory focuses disproportionately on
the technologies of enrolment and consensus-building. However, there is an enormous body
of literature suggesting that governing networks maybe ensnared in the dialectics of
hegemony-domination and resistance. The examples discussed below are selective, but
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represent prominent themes in the governance literature. First, state-civil society networks
seem unlikely to subsist on trust. Without trust, secondly, some other coordinating
mechanism, such as administrative domination, is required - and indeed is pervasive. Third,
supporting Isett et al’s (2011) intuition that homophilous networks are most likely to
cultivate trust, network closure is a common tactical solution for distrust. Fourth, therefore,
as the theory of the integral state anticipates, urban governing networks are prone to
replicating the hierarchical and homophilous practices they are supposed to transcend in
neoliberal ideology. These micro-enactments of the integral state highlight barriers to
hegemonic leadership under neoliberalism and the limited potential of networks for
remaking urban politics.
Networks based on Distrust
The barriers to cultivating networks based on trust are a prominent theme in
international urban studies. Bockmeyer (2000: p. 2437), for example, observed in a study of
the Empowerment Zone programme in Detroit that ‘external enforcement is the counter-
balance for distrust’ in state-civil society networks. Guarneros-Meza (2008) explored the
spread of network governance ideologies in Mexico. Her study in the cities of San Luis
Potosi and Querétaro discovered that the cultivation of regeneration partnerships was
influenced directly by network governance theory. However, she found, like Bockmeyer,
that they generated ‘no trust’ (2008: 1029). Davies (2007) discovered that in British
governing networks, the contrasting political meanings accorded to nominally shared goals,
such as ‘social inclusion’ and ‘partnership’ were a significant source of mutual
incomprehension and distrust between public officials and citizen-activists. Ansell and
Gash’s (2008) systematic review of the international literature on collaborative governance
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suggested that distrust maybe widespread, finding that networks often thrive on low trust.
As Geddes (2008: 217) argued in a cross-European review of urban partnerships, networks
based on distrust may function perfectly well provided there is another bond, such as
resource interdependency.
These literatures support Cook, Hardin and Levy’s (2007: 1) contention that although
trust is an important bond it ‘cannot carry the weight of making complex societies function
productively and effectively’. They suggest rather, as Cook, Hardin and Levy conclude
(2007: 196), that ‘societies are essentially evolving away from trust relationships towards
externally regulated behaviour’. Trust is therefore not only ‘an endemic problem for the
reproduction of networks’ (Thompson, 2003: 9), but also seems to be in increasingly short
supply. Where governing networks subsist on low trust, they must rely on other
coordinating mechanisms, among which administrative domination is prominent.
Administrative Domination
Morgan, Rees and Garmise (1999: 196) concluded their study of local economic
development networks in Wales arguing that the notion of ‘governing without government’
was a ‘fatal conceit’. Coruscating criticisms of governmental ‘control-freakery’ in UK
networks became the norm thereafter. Chandler (2001: 10) observed of early New Labour
that every ‘paean to local involvement and active communities ends with a rider that brings
the state back in and institutionalises government regulation at an even greater level than
before’. The flagship community governance programme, New Deal for Communities (NDC),
attracted particularly vociferous criticism. NDC governing boards were unusual in that many
held elections and were nominally the most democratic of governing networks. However, in
the face of internal conflicts and slow project delivery, they were quickly subjected to tight
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financial and administrative control by regional officials. Wright et al (2006: 347) later
observed: ‘if NDC is a community-led programme, it is community led in the sense that
government decides how the community will be involved, why they will be involved, what
they will do and how they will do it’. Marinetto (2003: 600) concluded his critique of the
DPM arguing that the evidence demonstrated ‘further centralization rather than the
haemorrhaging of power and authority’.
Despite variations in state form, culture and political ideology international studies
suggest that administrative domination maybe ubiquitous in governing networks. In a study
of networks in the Dutch city of Breda, for example, Kokx and van Kempen (2009) found that
they operated as vehicles for achieving national government objectives. The leading state
and market alliance worked to exclude other partners. Reviewing the Scandinavian
governance literature, Hall et al (2009: 527) found that Swedish ‘governance networks seem
to perpetuate, rather than replace, older political and social power structures’. Magnette
(2003: 144) argued that across the European Union, these ‘new’ modes of governance are
‘extensions of existing practices, and underpinned by the same elitist and functionalist
philosophy’. In Mexico, Guarneros-Meza (2008: 1032) found that in addition to generating
no trust, governance networks also institutionalized elite governance, making the ‘premise
of self-governing irrelevant’. Her findings were echoed at the national scale in Morton’s
claim that passive-revolutionary state development in Mexico engendered only minimal
hegemony (2011: 216). Case studies of a similar flavour abound across the globe.
Network closure is an alternative form of administrative domination. As was argued
earlier, the distinctiveness of networks depends on diverse actors developing affective trust.
Embracing difference in democratic governing institutions means welcoming political
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pluralism too because, as Stone (2004: 3) observed, ‘political differences enlarge as one
moves from general proposition to the handling of a concrete course of action’.
Consequently, action-focused institutions require agreements ruling some goods in and
others out. However, this has been very difficult to accomplish (Geddes, Davies and Fuller,
2007). Instead, alliances of powerful actors are prone to marginalising or even ousting
dissident activists. For example, Davies and Pill (2012) found that elite networks have
progressively undermined citizen engagement in the neighbourhood governance of
Baltimore and Bristol. As anticipated by Isett et al and Stone, these networks seek
homophily to function efficiently. As regime theory further anticipated, corporate and
governmental actors in Baltimore and Bristol possessed the combination of resources and
congruent interests required to accomplish the exclusion of citizen-activists. In the
vernacular of an earlier generation of network theorists, open ‘issue networks’ appear
prone to morphing into closed ‘policy communities’ (Marsh and Rhodes, 1992). The
modalities of administrative domination are therefore common, if not ubiquitous, in
governing networks subsisting on low trust. These patterns appear to transcend other
cultural and political variations.
The specific socio-spatial configurations of hegemony, the integral state and their
trajectories will only be elicited through further comparative research. However, the
preceding paragraphs suggest a possible trend away from hegemonic leadership in urban
governance towards domination (e.g. Arrighi, 2005). The ethos of network governance
remains strong and undoubtedly retains its efficacy among public officials and some
activists. Yet, as the earlier reading of the integral state anticipated, tensions with
quarrelsome civil society activists are commonly resolved not through trust-based
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deliberation, but coercion and exclusion. These practices undermine the ethos of
networking and subvert the hegemonic goal of cultivating heterophilous associations. To
extrapolate, the synthesis of neoliberal political economy and network governance maybe
prone to failure because, as Gramscian theory anticipates, the relationship is more
dialectical than constructive. Either way, the theory of the integral state can stimulate new
insights into urban political economy by focusing attention on the coercive term of the
governance repertoire and its relationship with consensus and resistance.
Conclusion
Frederickson (2005: 290) argued that despite the pervasive influence of network
discourses, the underlying narrative of contemporary governance theory and practice is the
search for order. Lurking beneath the postmodernist ontology of networks, we find the
modernist telos of hegemony in the neoliberal project and its contradictions. The pursuit of
hegemony through networks has been very influential across state, market and civil society.
However, if true hegemony is ‘‘intellectual and moral unity ... on a “universal” plane’, then
low trust, hierarchical network management and network closure represent significant
barriers. The re-reading of the integral state as multi-modal, multi-scalar configurations of
coercion and consent enacted and resisted in an unstable political economy, casts light on
why trust-based networks struggle to thrive and hierarchy is always prone to coming back in
(Thomas, 2009: 452). Administrative domination is only one moment of a larger dialectic
comprising state violence, dispossessions, enrolment, consensus and increasingly trenchant
resistance (Harvey, 2011). Yet, it is ubiquitous in urban governing networks.
Beyond governance studies, wherever claims for the novelty or redemptive potential
of networks are made a counter-literature has arisen suggesting that they exaggerate or
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misrepresent social trends; even that we live in times of ‘hyper-bureaucracy’ (Lawler and
Bilson, 2010: 82). In a conjuncture marked by crisis, dislocation, upward redistribution and
burgeoning struggles, heterophily seems utopian, lacking the ‘ontological purchase to grasp
realities of power or guide transformative practices’ (Johnson, 2007: 105). Hobsbawm
(1989: 46) formulated the problem pithily: ‘The state must henceforth, in the interests of
withering away, give ever more precise directions about how its funds should and should
not be spent … central power and command are not diminishing but growing, since
“freedom” cannot be achieved but by bureaucratic decision’. Hierarchy and homophily in
governance networks are manifestations of this contradiction in everyday urban politics.
A final conclusion is that defining governing institutions as ‘hierarchies’, ‘markets’ or
‘networks’ is a form of reification. The theory of the integral state highlights that they
simultaneously embody coercive, trust-based and contract relations, becoming hybrid
configurations of hierarchy, market and network; neither one thing nor the other but all
three. Networks are indicted with behaving like hierarchies and subsisting on low levels of
trust, but conversely it is hard to see how even extreme hierarchies, such as North Korea,
could survive without a modicum of networking and trust. Fear, contract, coercion,
selective incentives, resource interdependencies and trust are all important connecting (and
disconnecting) variables.
Consequently, the challenge for governance theory may be less categorising
institutions as ‘hierarchies’, ‘markets’ or ‘networks’ than explaining how, why and where
they embody particular mixes, how configurations change in space-time and what the
direction of travel might be. Metagovernance theory suggests this approach, conceiving
‘government + governance’ as a dialectical relationship (Marsh, 2011: 41). But, it does not
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take the coercive term of the governance repertoire seriously. The perspective of the
integral state is an alternative strategy for exploring the mix and overcoming the
‘government to governance’ dualism, positing the relationship between coercion and
consent as dialectical and enduring in the struggle for hegemony. Studying this relationship
from a Marxist-Gramscian perspective could lead to new and insightful governance
research.
___________________________
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