Sociology of Governance

If sociology is the study of society, and governance is the activity of managing or ruling human affairs, then the sociology of governance is the study of the societal dimensions of managing human affairs. No established subfield named the “sociology of governance” exists within the discipline of sociology, as does for example the “sociology of religion.” Nevertheless, this entry argues that classical and contemporary sociology has much to say about the theory and practice of governance.

Sociology has three classical concerns directly relevant to the study of governance. One concern is domination—the capacity or opportunity for some people to exercise power over others. Sociologists seek to understand the sources of power in society and how it is wielded to produce both desirable and undesirable outcomes. They have been fundamentally concerned about the legitimacy of this power and about the capacity of individuals and groups to resist domination. A second concern is social order—how is it that society coheres? Why doesn't society break down into what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes referred to as a war of everyone against everyone? Sociology tries to understand the bases of human solidarity—how does society exist in the first place? The third concern is for what is distinctively social, as opposed to biological or cognitive, in human behavior. What aspects of behavior arise as the result of domination and social order? Although sociology would grant that meaning, morality, and social norms have some basis in biology, it focuses on how these achievements arise from human interaction.

It is perhaps obvious that these core concerns are deeply interconnected. The work of one of the founding figures of sociology, Émile Durkheim, for instance, was a response to the view that social order could only be achieved by relinquishing power to a leviathan, a powerful state that would achieve social control through domination. He was also reacting against the classical economists' view that self-interested exchange is the basis of social order. Durkheim argued, by contrast, that it was the distinctly social bases of human life—morality and social norms—that made social order possible. Morality comes prior to social control or market exchange.

At least three different perspectives on the relationship between society and governance are possible. First, a societal perspective treats the social dimension of human collectivities as an all-encompassing system and thus explains outcomes based on the archetypal characteristics of those systems. This perspective is typically civilizational or cultural. A societal approach to the governance of new enterprises in Shanghai, for example, might appeal to fundamental characteristics of Chinese civilization or culture—say, the tendency to use personal connections—guanxi—to influence the behavior of others. Second, a differentiation perspective, typically associated with modernization theories, assumes that the state and the economy have become differentiated from society. Such an approach typically singles out society as a distinctive arena of [Page 902]governance. Contemporary discussions about civil society or the public sphere provide a good example. Third, an embeddedness perspective sees the social as one dimension of all spheres of activity, but does not interpret society as an all-encompassing system. Instead, this perspective suggests that even the most instrumental activities—like economic exchange or political lobbying—have a social dimension. The state or the economy are hence embedded in society.

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