Culture Governance: Governing Self‐Reflexive Modernity

Abstract

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self-reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self-transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for selfand co-governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003;Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top-down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self-disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined-up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non-strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.

The role of formal and informal networks in supporting older people’s care during extreme weather events

“…We received feedback that not all service providers had talked collectively about the research issue before the meetings, so for them, the meetings were useful exercises in bringing together local knowledge. Such exchanges are important in planning for risks associated with extreme weather in complex systems supporting older people's care, especially given the fragmentation of local governance arrangements (see for example, Bang, 2004;Bevir and Rhodes, 2003;Fenwick et al, 2012;Kooiman, 2003;Painter and Pierre, 2005;Scharpf, 1999) and the increasing specialisation of knowledge in 'expert systems' (see for example, Bauman, 1987;and Beck, 1992).…”

Governance and public involvement in the British National Health Service: Understanding difficulties and developments

“…This is reflected in the co-existence of both a hierarchical model of modernisation (Harrison, 2002) and the increasingly individualised basis of organisation founded in consumer choice (6 and Peck, 2004) The changing role of the state and its relationships with the public as citizen/consumer at this systemic level necessarily underpins expectations about the proper role of stakeholders in governance. Bang (2004) has introduced the notion of "culture governance" to identify the divergence between the straightforward translation of neo-8 liberalism into New Public Management and the repoliticisation of the "connections between the public institutions and everyday life" (p171). The implication of Bang"s argument is that we need to disentangle these grounds of legitimacy that have been elided in many discussions of involvement.…”

“…To operationalise a social model of health, the public and patients must be included as stakeholders in these inter-organizational networks. At this interorganisational level, however, Bang (2004) suggests that the primary motivation to involve the public lies in its ability to facilitate efficient service delivery rather than to extend public influence over new policy or service design.…”

‘We nicked stuff from all over the place’: policy transfer or muddling through?

“…Despite Lindblom's (1959Lindblom's ( , 1979 classic insights about the 'muddled' nature of policymaking, policy transfer analysts too often underplay the complexity of the issues at stake. Too much weight is placed on the capacity for rational decision making about what policies to transfer, when and how, at a time when welfare systems are becoming more porous and governance more 'recursive' (Bang, 2003;Crozier, 2008). These ideas will be considered in the concluding sections of the paper.…”