Suchergebnisse

This paper examines how discursive mechanisms of governance provide the means for the maintenance of power of elite groups in a democratic society. Through a discourse-empirical analysis of urban revitalisation in Newark, New Jersey, I argue that elites discursively structure deliberative spaces to marginalise alternatives to their developmental orientation. Using the conceptual-analytical framework of Fischer's logic of policy deliberation (1995) and Hoppe, Pranger, and Besseling's (1990) belief systems approach I show bow policy outcomes are contingent upon the dynamic interaction between dominant and competing discourses. In Newark, an elite discourse not only structured the space for formulating policy strategies for economic and social development, but also superficially integrated oppositional elements of competing discourses in order to weaken and marginalise their distinctive core values and meanings. Adapted from the source document.

Network governance can enhance democratic practice by furnishing new routes for actors to deliberate, make, and execute public policy. But it is hindered by a lack of political oversight, limited democratic competence of new organizational forms, and informality of operation. Little research has been conducted on the democratic performance of governance networks, and the methodology is poorly developed. Quality‐of‐democracy studies of national governmental and political systems offer a starting point. Their criteria‐based method is useful in accessing the democratic "hardware" of formal entities, such as partnerships and hybrids, but it does not enable data to be gathered on democratic "software"—the informal day‐to‐day practices of actors in networks. Interpretive approaches offer a way forward. Narrative analysis, qualitative interviews using a criteria‐based instrument, and Q‐methodology provide routes into democratic software. They enable the researcher to move beyond the analysis of institutional nodes and to understand the democratic performance of the wider governance network.

Smart city (SC) experts in India often center-stage citizens as an alternative to a technology-led transformation. A substantial body of literature on smart cities sustains this resultant binary between techno-centrism and citizen-centrism. Mobilizing ANT sensibilities, we generate an ethnographic narrative on how the smart city discourse has translated into everyday processes of city administration and urban governance in India. Our account unmutes more-and-other-than-human actants—event-stage, glossy publications, ceremonial awards, conference producers, and decision-makers—in the translation of SC discourse, with following effects: the uncertainties in the translation process are foregrounded which potentially destabilize center-staged actor identities; and the work of heterogeneous actants in articulating the citizen as the center of their efforts is revealed, thereby de-naturalizing the binarized reality. Furthermore, when unmuted, more-and-other-than-humans spell out their ongoing collaborations and negotiations and generate a nuanced reading of the clashes and accommodations made in the process of translating SC discourse in everyday settings of city administrations. These effects lead us to emphasize the translation of SC discourse as an uncertain socio-material process proceeding through episodic clashes and tentative accommodations. They also invite a conceptual expansion of translation as constitutive of the ontological politics of organizing, which insists on attending to ongoing collaborations and negotiations among more-and-other-than-humans that compose organizational realities. Thus, we address critical organization and management studies' concerns regarding ANT's alignment with its objectives by locating politics in the performance of, and interference into, the multiple realities that are being enacted through practices that assemble experts, decision-makers and non-humans.