Suchergebnisse

This article discusses the interpretive approach to governance. The interpretive approach comes from a hermeneutic philosophy, emphasizing intentionality, historicism, and reflexivity. These philosophical ideas decentre governance. The first wave of governance studies relied on a lukewarm positivism, extending the literature on policy networks to cover neoliberal reforms. This account of governance faced challenges from rational choice theory and from the idea of metagovernance. The interpretive approach responds to these challenges. The interpretive approach to governance responds to rational choice by decentring governance; patterns of governance arise as the products of meaning in action. The interpretive approach responds to metagovernance by decentring the state; the state is stateless. The article illustrates this interpretive approach, with its emphasis on intentionality and historicism, using stories of network governance. It then concludes by discussing the implications of the interpretive approach to governance for policy analysis. Interpretive theory encourages: a more eclectic approach to data, a suspicion of formal models and frameworks, and a greater role for storytelling. Adapted from the source document.

This paper explores synergies between governance and governmentality, especially on neoliberalism. Governance and governmentality diffuse power and ruling. Scholars of governance offer a compelling account of changes in the state, but they might learn from governmentality to pay more attention to interpretation and discourses. Scholars of governmentality provide insights into modern power, but they might learn from governance to pay more attention to agency and heterogeneity. Scholars of governance might recognise the role of technologies of power in neoliberalism. Scholars of governmentality might grasp the way neoliberal marketisation has given way to networks and service integration.

I'll tell you a storyAbout Jack a Nory,And now my story's begun;I'll tell you anotherOf Jack and his brother,And now my story is done.[Anon]

A great writer of fiction both creates a new, unique, individual world – through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through commanding forms – and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but that is unknown or miss‐known by still more people, confined in their worlds. Call that history, society, what you will. The writers who matter most to us are those who enlarge our consciences and our sympathies and our knowledge.[Susan Sontag]
This paper elucidates the interpretive approach to public administration that Professor Rhodes and I have developed over the last ten years. It defends the importance of storytelling in governance. The early studies of governance often drew on modernist empiricism and policy network theory to argue that public sector reforms had created a differentiated polity. While this governance literature offered a compelling account of contemporary public administration, it rested on a modernist empiricism that proved vulnerable to questions such as those raised by rational choice theorists about its micro foundations. Professor Rhodes and I thus rejected modernist empiricism in favour of an emphasis on meanings and storytelling. Our interpretive approach rests on 'meaning holism'. It replaces naÏve empiricism with an anthropological epistemology based on comparing rival accounts. It rejects reified ontologies for recognition of the constructed nature of social reality. It moves away from formal explanations towards historicism. It provides a defence of public administration as storytelling.