Decentered Theory

To “decenter” is to analyze knowledge and practices as fragmented and complex products of individual activity. Decentered theory rejects the notion that there is a single, natural, or incontestable reading of a text, institution, or series of events. The theory asserts that we do not hold a mirror up to the world but, rather, employ a kaleidoscope of sometimes contrary, sometimes harmonious, but always contingent, individual viewpoints to construct our worlds. Hence, it implies that we cannot reduce beliefs and actions to social facts about people, but instead need to craft aggregate concepts out of the contingent beliefs, desires, and actions of individuals. Instead of seeking one core explanation or the facts of a matter, a decentered approach garners people's interpretations of events from multiple standpoints, and then offers an interpretation of these interpretations.

Decentered theory, like other interpretive approaches, lends itself to bottom-up studies. Governance is the contingent product of politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens—all formulating, implementing, and responding to policies in accord with their multiple, clashing beliefs. Indeed, a decentered theory of governance does not define governance as some kind of social fact apart from these clashing beliefs and actions. Theorists seek, instead, to reveal how governance is socially constructed both as a concept and a practice. Forms of governance can be unraveled by interpretations of the diverse beliefs of the policymakers, bureaucrats, service providers, or citizens who variously construct the meaning of policy language and events from their respective individual standpoints, and so encounter and react differently to the demands of these events. The course of governance, in practice, is the ungovernable outcome of the interactions of these various actors with their diverse beliefs.

According to decentered theory, there are no objective social facts because actions are based on contingent subjective beliefs. We understand forms of governance not as natural or inevitable with a fixed content but, rather, as the historical products of such actions. We explain these actions through interpretations of the relevant beliefs, which we can access by various strategies, most notably ethnographic ones. We then explain these beliefs by means of historical narratives that locate them against the background of relevant traditions and dilemmas. Decentered theory suggests, therefore, that political science is an interpretative discipline underpinned by hermeneutic philosophy rather than positivism. Indeed, a decentered approach disputes that there is a “science” of politics; it suggests, to the contrary, that all explanations, including those that deploy statistics and models, are best conceived as narratives.

Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes provide a detailed philosophical foundation for a decentered theory of governance. They argue that decentered theory pivots around the idea of situated agency: Institutions, practices, or socialization cannot determine how people behave, so any course of action is a contingent individual choice. People's actions are explained by their beliefs (or meanings or desires); any one belief is interpreted in the context of the wider web of a person's beliefs, and these beliefs are explained by traditions and modified by dilemmas. A tradition (or episteme or paradigm) is the set of theories against the background of which a person comes to hold beliefs and perform actions. A tradition is a first influence upon people—a set of beliefs that they inherit and [Page 195]then transform in response to encounters with “dilemmas” (or problems or anomalies). A dilemma arises whenever novel circumstances generate a new belief that forces people to question their previously held beliefs. Change occurs through encountering such dilemmas: Although individual responses to dilemmas are grounded in traditions, they then modify just those traditions.

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