- Summary
- Contents
- Subject index
The concept of `governance' has become a central catchword across the social and political sciences. In Governing and Governance, Jan Kooiman revisits and develops his seminal work in the field to map and demonstrate the utility of a sociopolitical perspective to our understanding of contemporary forms of governing, governance and governability. A central underlying theme of the book is the notion of governance as a process of interaction between different societal and political actors and the growing interdependencies between the two as modern societies become ever more complex, dynamic and diverse. Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary insights, the book advances a comprehensive conceptual framework that seeks to capture the different elements, modes and orders of governing and governance. A series of useful distinctions ...
Chapter 5: Governing Action
Governing Action
In order for a social-political instrument, regardless of design or application, to work, the action element of governing interactions relies upon convincing and socially penetrating images and sufficient social-political will or support. Scharpf calls this Durchsetzung,1 and I phrased this earlier as ‘will power’.2 A minister, a mayor, a trade union leader, a hospital superintendent, an industrial manager or a citizen as a social activist will try to influence a governing interaction in a specific direction. However, action is also a societal quality. The image of an ‘active society’ is a strong one, and well documented by Etzioni in his seminal book of that title. The active self is as a rule not an individual, but instead a number of persons who ...
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