Network Governance TheoryA Gramscian Critique2

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2029022

Network Governance Theory: A Gramscian Critique __________________________________________________

Environment and Planning A March 2012

Jonathan S. Davies Professor of Critical Policy Studies Faculty of Business and Law De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH Tel: +44 7764 943706 E-mail: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2029022

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Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to three referees for their exacting, but generous, critique of my

initial submission. I thank Mike Geddes and Will Leggett for invaluable comments on earlier

drafts. I also thank Jane Scullion and Edward Thompson for their excellent feedback at a

Department of Politics and Public Policy Work in Progress Seminar at De Montfort

University.

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Abstract

Influential governance theories argue that we live increasingly in a world of

networks, either relegating hierarchy to the shadows or dismissing it altogether. This paper

develops a Gramscian critique of these currents, advancing two key arguments. First,

drawing on Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and passive revolution, it reinterprets the

cultivation of networks as a prominent element in the hegemonic strategies of Western

neoliberalism, exemplified by UK public policy. Second, however, governing networks

struggle to cultivate trust, relying instead on hierarchy and closure. The paper argues that

network governance can therefore be understood as a form of Gramsci’s integral state, a

concept which highlights both the continuing centrality of coercion in the governance

system and the limits of the networks project. It concludes that conceiving of urban

governing networks as micro-configurations of the integral state offers a distinctive way of

overcoming the ‘government to governance’ dualism.

Keywords: Governance, Networks, Gramsci, Neoliberalism, Hegemony, Integral State, Passive Revolution.

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Introduction

Across much of the social sciences, networks are depicted as the cornerstone of a

transformed governance system. Heralding momentous changes across state, market and

civil society, claims about the rise of networking have been incorporated into a wide range

of governance theories. This paper develops an empirically informed theoretical critique of

these currents, focusing on two common traits. First, they either relegate hierarchy to the

background (Jessop and Sum, 2005: 369), or dismiss it as a ‘zombie category’ (Beck, 2007).

The coercive modalities of governing thus tend to disappear from view. Second, they are

also prone to understating the role of hierarchy in propagating network ideologies: not as a

pragmatic response to socioeconomic changes but as the means of enacting them.

Governance studies therefore need to reconsider the relationship between hierarchies and

networks and think again about the nature and efficacy of networking in contemporary

political economy.

To address these issues, the paper proposes a Gramscian re-reading of network

governance. The first part explores how different governance theories have incorporated

claims about the rise of networks, constituting a powerful orthodoxy. It then elaborates a

Gramscian framework, drawing on three of Gramsci’s major concepts: hegemony, the

integral state and passive revolution. Hegemony refers to effective social leadership by

concrete alliances of class forces. It is accomplished to the extent that these alliances

marshal widespread assent for their goals (Gramsci, 1971: 181-2). The integral state depicts

hegemony as an on-going struggle, highlighting that although consensual technologies are

vital, coercion remains the indispensable condition of social order (Gramsci, 1971: 57).

Importantly, the paper argues that the integral state is scalable to cities and a fruitful lens

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for exploring urban governing networks. Passive revolution, thirdly, is understood as a

medium of transformation initiated by fractions of a ruling class at moments of crisis,

including significant changes within the capitalist mode of production itself (Gramsci, 1971:

310; Morton, 2010).

The second part of the paper applies this tripartite Gramscian framework in re-reading

the history and practices of network governance. It argues that early on, agents of

neoliberalism incorporated the ideology of networks into their hegemonic strategy, rolled-

out through a series of passive revolutionary interventions. To illustrate, it shows how

celebrating and cultivating networks became central to UK public policy and the New Labour

project. Hierarchy was thus always integral to the promotion of networks, conceived as a

mechanism for remaking society. The paper suggests that as part of the visionary regulative

ideal of neoliberalism, the ideology of networks has had considerable hegemonic efficacy.

However, a précis of the international literature suggests that cultivating trust in networks

has been very difficult. In practice, urban governing networks appear not to subsist

primarily on trust but rely, perhaps increasingly, on hierarchy and closure. The literatures

suggest that influential as it is, the hegemonic ideal confronts barriers in everyday urban

political economy. Governing networks can thus be understood as micro-configurations of

the integral state, ensnared in the dialectics of coercion-consent. The paper concludes that

a Gramscian approach according adequate attention to both terms of the relationship

between coercion and consent can overcome the ‘government to governance’ dualism.

Network Governance Theories

Network governance theory is a broad church with common reference points across

the social sciences. The literatures tend to embrace one or more of six claims: public

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authorities must cultivate networks to govern efficaciously (Stone, 1989); the frequency of

horizontal transactions across state, market and civil society has increased (Marsh, 2008);

this increase heralds the rise of network governance (Rhodes, 1997); networking depends

on cultivating trust and is virtuous (Thompson, 2003); the rise of networking based on trust

is emblematic of an epochal transformation, where the ‘logic of flows’ displaces the ‘logic of

structures’ (Lash, 2002: vii); and in a world of networks, governance scholarship must be

decentred, focusing on the interdependence of autonomous individuals, organizations and

institutions (Sørensen and Torfing, 2009).

The proximity of state and non-state institutions and the proliferation of collaborative

institutions have made cities a major locus of network studies. Urban Regime Theory, for

example, developed as a critique of structuralism. Stone (1989) argued that effective

governance depends on coalition-building and that public officials and other resource-rich

actors, notably downtown development elites, are well placed to forge alliances and set the

governing agenda. He was influenced by Charles Tilly (1984), arguing that the spheres of

state, market and civil society are loosely coupled with relatively low structural coherence

between them. This is why, although pro-development interests often capture power,

regime building and maintenance requires proactive networking and cannot be deduced

from structural positions alone. Stone’s seminal study explored the incorporation of the

black middle class into Atlanta’s post-war bi-racial development regime, but later regime

scholarship extended to a much wider range of urban governance institutions (e.g. Stone,

2009).

Network theories have perhaps been most influential in public administration and

policy. They include the Differentiated Polity Model (DPM) (Rhodes, 1997; 2007) and

theories of network management and democracy. Rhodes argued that with the decline of

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the hierarchic Westminster model in the UK, driven by outsourcing and agencification,

public action had increasingly to be coordinated through networks, conceived as the

dynamic or even novel element in the system. For Bevir and Rhodes (2006: 74), the DPM

described ‘a hollowed-out state, a core executive fumbling to pull rubber levers of control,

and a massive proliferation of networks’. Rhodes (2000: 60) went so far as to conflate

‘governance as networks’. Related scholarship includes Danish research on how to subject

networks to democratic norms and accountability (e.g. Sørensen and Torfing, 2009) and

Dutch research on the public management of networks (e.g. Klijn. Steijn and Edelenbos,

2010).

Urban geographers were typically more cautious about the transformative potential of

networks. Regulation-theoretical and neo-Gramscian scholarship depicted governmental

efforts to cultivate networks as part of ‘continuing attempts to forge and sustain a

“successful” political project and scalar fix’ in the aftermath of Atlantic Fordism (Macleod

and Goodwin, 1999: 716). They viewed it, like all capitalist fixes, as provisional, precarious

and prone to failure (Jessop, 2007: 24). MacLeod (2001), for example, warned against the

influence of ‘soft institutionalism’ in research on the rescaling of governance, the tendency

to take for granted ‘non-exploitative horizontal relations of networking and reciprocity’

(2001: 1153). Yet MacLeod’s ‘new era of reflexive capitalism’ (2001: 1152, original

emphasis) drew inspiration from the claim that we are indeed moving towards an age of

networks. Thus, narratives and ontologies of transformation have tended to over-determine

contingency, an inclination also reflected in Jessops’s depiction of the trend within northern

Europe from Keynesian Welfare National States (KWNS) towards Schumpeterian Workfare

Post-national Regimes (SWPR) (Jessop, 2007: 210). Networks are a hallmark of the SWPR,

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where the state has become (among other things) the organizer of self-organizing

governance mechanisms (Jessop, 2011).

These approaches also influenced the development of metagovernance theory,

another broad church distinguished by the role it accords the state in ‘collibrating’

(selectively adjusting) the mix of hierarchies, markets and networks. Sørensen and Torfing

(2009), for example, used it to grapple with the challenges of what might be called ‘the

network governance of network governance’. Marsh (2011), in contrast, emphasised the

central-but-changing role of government in metagovernance. Although command and

coercion remain part of the strategic toolbox, the metagoverning state is commonly

represented as both becoming more networked itself and fostering networks with others.

In other words, metagoverning governments cultivate the conditions for ‘reflexive self-

organization’ (Jessop, 2011: 246) throughout state and civil society. The network-theoretical

trope of ‘government at a distance’ is further rooted in the metagovernance conception of

governance occurring in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ (Jessop, 2011: 247). Thus, if

metagovernance is about ‘government + governance’ (Marsh, 2011: 41), it nevertheless

depicts both sides of the duality as having a ‘more distributed cellular form’ than before

(Laguerre, 2011: 20).

The differences between these approaches maybe summarized as follows. Whereas

European public policy research tends to see transformations occurring, according analytical

and normative priority to trust-based interactions in multi-stakeholder networks, regime

theory is dismissive of any move from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ (Stone, 2009: 266-7).

Stone sees networking as the contingent, but always-existing historical condition of political

action. Regulation-theoretical and metagovernance studies tend to discern partial and

contingent transformations, but reject any normative bias towards networks. They reassert

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a strategic role for the reflexive state and ground their understandings of ‘new institutions’

in political economy. Important areas of divergence therefore include the nature and extent

of system transformation, the degree to which the rise of networking signifies the dawn of

second or post-modernity (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994), connotes a post-hegemonic

condition (Lash, 2007), represents an attempt to manage systemic differentiation inherent

in modernity (Darbas, 2008), or even announces an emancipatory multitude capable of

swamping the empire of capital (Hardt and Negri, 2004). However, this paper is concerned

with commonalities: the expurgation of hierarchy and related claims that in complex and

fragmented societies, networking is an increasingly significant or dynamic medium of

governing based on ‘flexible structures that are inclusive, information rich, and outside the

scope of direct bureaucratic control’ (Isett et al, 2011: i159).

One way of assessing claims for the rise of networking is to focus on what purportedly

differentiates it from other modes of coordination. The conventional distinction is that

networks are based on trust (Rhodes, 2007: 1246). Thus, ‘[i]f it is price competition that is

the central co-ordinating mechanism of the market and administrative orders that of

hierarchy, then it is trust and co-operation that centrally articulates networks’ (Frances et al,

1991: 15). For Thompson (2003: 40), networks depend on ‘ethical virtues: ‘co-existent

attributes such as sympathy, customary reciprocity, moral norms, common experience,

trust, duty, obligation and similar virtues’. If networks are to thrive, he argued, ‘a

generalized trust, honesty, and solidarity must transcend any minor negotiating

infringements’ and ‘a shared common overriding objective’ must exist (2003: 47).

Consequently, the trust in any institution is a good benchmark of its efficacy for network

governance.

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The conditions for trust-based networking are the subject of literatures influenced by

Social Network Analysis (Kenis and Oerlemans, 2008), social capital theory (Webber, 2007)

and sociological (soft) institutionalism (Lowndes, 2001). Trust maybe naïve, instrumental or

affective. Informal networks tend to be ‘closed’, with high levels of ‘homophily’ connecting

actors with cultural and interest-based affinities (Isett et al, 2011: i166). However,

normative theories celebrate ‘heterophily’; the claim that networks can cultivate affective

trust (benevolence, integrity and shared values) among diverse groups of actors such as

public officials, business leaders and community activists. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005:

183) captured the essence of the networks paradigm: ‘the balance of power is no longer a

salient issue when the main objective is the creation of a sense of belonging, a feeling of

satisfaction with and trust in one another’.

Giddens (1994: 192) elaborated the conditions of heterophily in his contribution to the

theory of reflexive modernization. He argued that the goal of politics in ‘high modernity’ is

to nourish the ‘autotelic self’, the ‘inner confidence which comes from self-respect’ and

‘where a sense of ontological security, originating in basic trust, allows for the positive

appreciation of difference’. The autotelic personality translates ‘potential threats into

rewarding challenges’ and ‘entropy into a consistent flow of experience’. For Giddens, it

flourishes in relative abundance or ‘post-scarcity’, which weakens ‘the drive to continuous

accumulation’ and undermines traditional cleavages (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994: 195).

Liberating the subject from an immediate preoccupation with subsistence creates the

conditions for trust to thrive amidst diversity. The potential for networks to resolve the

challenges of de-traditionalization and dispersion by cultivating trust is therefore anchored

in the ontological security born of relative prosperity.

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Marinetto (2003) and Marsh (2011) see this complex of ideas as a new orthodoxy.

Orthodoxies operate primarily by setting aside significant questions. Kenis and Oerlemans

(2008: 299), for example, found that inter-organizational research is biased towards

networks. Lotia and Hardy (2008: 371) described this literature as ‘thoroughly functionalist’,

pre-occupied with how networks solve governance problems. In the most enthusiastic

accounts, the network has become ‘a common form that tends to define our ways of

understanding the world and acting in it’ (Hardt and Negri: 2004: 142). Moran (2010: 42)

aptly described this tendency as ‘epochalism’. The premise of this paper is that the

orthodoxy pre-supposes that which needs questioning. Why did the networks perspective

become so influential? To what extent does the apparent proliferation of networks signify

the transformation of urban governance? How far do governing networks subsist on trust,

or rely on other modes of coordination? And, might an alternative theoretical approach

reveal more about governance than network-centred theories? The following paragraphs

develop a Gramscian framework for considering these questions.

Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony-Domination

Gramsci (1971: 181-2) argued that the ideal-typical moment of hegemony occurs

when a hegemonic bloc successfully mobilises society’s material and ideational resources,

achieving both unity of economic and political goals and ‘intellectual and moral unity ... on a

“universal” plane’. A hegemonic bloc, or constellation of class forces, exercises hegemony

to the extent that it is capable of leading a social formation in its entirety, successfully

representing its interests as common interests. For Gramsci, the struggle for hegemony is

grounded in and co-constitutes the social totality or the ‘”historical bloc”, i.e. unity between

nature and spirit (structure and superstructure), unity of opposites and distincts’ (Gramsci,

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1971: 137). Sustaining the unity of opposites and distincts requires the cultivation of

hegemony ‘under the direction of a fundamental class’ (Boothman in Gramsci, 1995: xi-xiii).

The historical bloc thus constitutes a contradictory totality, the more-or-less favourable

conditions in which specific formations, or hegemonic blocs, struggle more-or-less

successfully for leadership (Jessop, 1997: 56-7).

Gramsci was concerned predominantly with hegemony in sovereign states, but

recognized spatial variations in the nature and form of hegemonic leadership, including the

pivotal role of cities discussed below. The feasibility of global hegemonic leadership remains

a source of controversy among Gramscian scholars. Some emphasize transnational

hegemonic integration and the fragmentation of counter-power (e.g. Cox with Schechter,

2002), whereas others highlight competitive asymmetries in the international states system

and the potential for reviving proletarian counter-power (e.g. Callinicos, 2007). For current

purposes it is sufficient to highlight that ‘transnationalists’ and ‘hegemonists’ tend to

confine coercion to the shadows, whereas ‘neo-imperialists’ see it as integral to enduring

geo-political rivalries (Morton, 2007: 600). There are, however, symmetries between the

debate over supra-national hegemonic integration and that about hegemony within states

and their sub-divisions.

Restating Coercion: Gramsci’s Theory of the Integral State

Gramsci defined the integral state as ‘political society + civil society’, where ‘political

society’ is code for government by force, and the struggle for hegemonic leadership in civil

society is reinforced by the ‘armour of coercion’ (Gramsci, 1971: 262-3). Simply, it is the

sum of governing institutions, practices and technologies enmeshed in the struggle for

hegemony throughout state and civil society. However, metagovernance theorists

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influenced by Gramsci interpret it in a manner that downplays coercion. According to

Jessop and Sum (2005: 369), for example (see also Marsh, 2011):

The forms of intervention associated with the state and statecraft are not confined

to imperative coordination, that is, centralized planning or top-down intervention.

Paraphrasing Gramsci, who analysed the state apparatus in its inclusive sense as

‘political society + civil society’ and saw state power as involving ‘hegemony

armoured by coercion’, we could also describe the state apparatus as based on

‘government + governance’ and as exercising ‘governance in the shadow of

hierarchy’.

Gramsci’s theory was in part a critique of contemporaries who conflated the state

with its coercive function (Gramsci, 1971: 271), focusing on the strategic challenges facing

communists trying to contest hegemony in nascent capitalist democracies. But, he never

argued that hegemonic leadership could substitute coercive power, or that coercion could

be confined to the shadows. Rather, he repeatedly stated that hegemony and domination

are dialectically related terms of the ‘contradictory and discordant’ political economy of

capitalism. Gramsci (1971: 57) argued, for example, that a ‘social group dominates

antagonistic groups, which it tends to “liquidate”, or subjugate, perhaps even by armed

force. It leads kindred and allied groups’. He restated the point forcefully and

unambiguously: ‘… two things are absolutely necessary for the life of a State: arms and

religion … force and consent; coercion and persuasion; State and Church; political society

and civil society; politics and morality; law and freedom; order and self-discipline; …

violence and fraud’ (Gramsci, 1971: 171, fn 71). In the face of subaltern struggles, and short

of implausibly comprehensive hegemony, the hegemonic bloc must rely to some extent on

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threat and outright domination. Coercion and consent are thus ‘dialectically entwined and

inseparable … violence and discipline are ubiquitous’ (Mitchell, 2003: 79).

Gramsci did not develop a theory of coercion as such. He nevertheless saw that it

takes multiple forms. For example, he defined ‘direct domination’ as ‘command exercised

through the State and “juridical” government”’ (1971: 12). Elsewhere, he referred to

hierarchy as the combination of ‘military and civil coercion’ (1971: 120). Further, ‘it is the

bureaucracy—i.e. the crystallisation of the leading personnel—which exercises coercive

power, and at a certain point it becomes a caste’ (1971: 246). Gramsci also depicted laissez

faire as a disciplinary strategy ‘introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means.

It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends … a political programme ... to change the

economic programme of the State itself’ (Gramsci, 1971: 159-60). State coercion in Gramsci

therefore encompasses violence + economic compulsion + administrative domination. This

definition helps sustain the claim developed below that coercion is ubiquitous and

distinguishes it analytically from enrolment processes, with which it may be entwined.

Why should coercion be ubiquitous? The nub of Gramsci’s explanation is found in

passages of the Prison Notebooks, which explain the dialectical relationships prone to

sundering the historical bloc. Gramsci saw Marx’s Capital as the founding statement of a

new tradition, the basis for further elaboration and empirical inquiry into ‘critical economy’

(Bieler and Morton, 2003; Krätke and Thomas, 2011: 73-4). Lacking the resources to

undertake such a programme in prison, and relying on memory, he defined Marx’s law of

the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) as the dialectical moment of ‘relative

surplus value’ and thus as the primary source of contradiction and discordancy (1995: 429).

The TRPF, Gramsci argued, is ‘the dialectical process by which the molecular progressive

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thrust leads to a tendentially catastrophic result in the social ensemble, a result from which

other individual progressive thrusts set off in a continual overhauling process which cannot

however be reckoned as infinite …’ (Gramsci, 1995: 432). The capitalist system reaches the

‘pillars of Hercules’ when finally it subsumes all space-time and counter-tendencies exhaust

themselves. Concretely, Gramsci understood the ‘law of tendency’ as ‘a dialectical term in a

vaster organic process’, the contradictory moment of a larger and expanding organic unity

(1995: 433), the central term of the dialectical totality constituting the historical bloc. His

writings naturally contain ambiguities and errors, many deriving from his confinement

(Krätke and Thomas, 2011). However, the depiction of the capitalist system as an expanding

dialectical totality represents a continuous strand in Gramsci’s thought (also Fusaro, 2010).

The theory of the integral state exemplifies his dialectical thinking.

From this vantage point, the flaw in any otherwise successful hegemonic strategy is

that because capitalism is prone to increasingly severe and contagious accumulation crises it

tends to cultivate expectations among subaltern classes as the condition of consent to it

that increasingly it cannot meet (Anderson, 1976: 29). Hegemony tends to be fragile and

consent is precarious because the hegemonic leadership is compelled to break its promises.

Thus, while subaltern good sense means that rebellions may occur with or without them,

and there are many possible triggers for counter-hegemonic mobilization, crises tend to

enlarge the asymmetry between promises and everyday experiences. Although there is no

mechanical relationship, crises are thus prone to undermining hegemonic leadership. The

continuing struggle makes the relationship between state and civil society ‘dialectical’ in the

Marxist-Gramscian sense, enacted in spatio-temporally variable configurations of the

integral state.

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Spatialities of the Integral State

According to Jessop and Sum (2005: 369), Gramsci’s approach was ‘inherently multi-

scalar because it plays down the importance of sovereign states with their monopoly of

coercion and allows more weight to other apparatuses, organizations and practices involved

in exercising political power’ (emphasis added). Jessop thus subtracts coercion from the

subnational struggle for hegemony and accords it virtually no attention in his theory of state

power either (2007). Morton (2007: 607) argued for ‘a hierarchy of scales at which different

policies might serve to anchor geopolitical priorities within specific spatial and geographical

territorial forms’. Equally, a ‘scale of hierarchies’ would contribute to understanding

different enactments of hegemony-domination-resistance throughout the socio-spatial

complex of scales, places, territories and networks (Jessop, Brenner and Jones, 2008).

Gramsci saw the city as a motor-force of historical development under capitalism

because, unlike the sclerotic relations of subjection and domination in the countryside, it is

a terrain of open class conflict (Fontana, 2010: 354). As Kipfer (2002: 133) commented,

urban capitalism produces distinct contradictions promising ‘progress’ through consumer

goods and increased leisure time, or in more recent times ‘social inclusion’ and ‘democratic

empowerment’. However, it is prone to undermining them through ‘the very regressive

forces of commodification that spread them’, such as by conflating the promise of inclusion

with the demand for personal entrepreneurship (Davies, 2007). Kipfer argued that this

urban dialectic explains ‘the continued importance of violence in sustaining a social order

without total cohesion’ (2002: 141).

The urban and other socio-spatial forms of the integral state are a matter for future

empirical inquiry, but the coercive term of the relationship is self-evidently prominent in

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cities today, not least in the face of resistance. The liberation struggles of the Arab Spring

continue as bloody conflicts over urban space. The European struggle against austerity also

takes the form of subaltern struggles for the city, albeit confronted by (mostly) sub-lethal

modalities of state coercion. Struggles oriented to national and international questions

therefore find themselves fighting simultaneously and perhaps unwittingly for the right to

the city (Harvey, 2011). As Kipfer (2002: 138) put it, ‘the urban is not only the setting of

struggle’, it is also ‘the stakes of that struggle’.

State violence and subaltern resistance are vital elements in the struggle for and

against urban hegemony. However, the role of city governments maybe distinguished by

the myriad technologies of administrative domination at their disposal. These are the

routine modalities of urban coercive power. They include the magistracy, everyday

policing, the management of space and housing (including enforcement) and the regulatory

functions of local authorities and agencies. As will be argued further below, everyday

enactments of coercion-consensus include the cultivation and management of governing

networks, where administrative domination may increasingly substitute for trust-based

relationships.

Passive Revolution

If any hegemonic formation has limited space-time utility for accumulation then it

must episodically be reinvented, a challenge addressed by Gramsci’s concept of passive

revolution. Like other Gramscian ideas, the meaning and application of passive revolution is

contested. Gramsci developed it to explain the Italian Risorgimento: unification under a

weak form of bourgeois rule without a decisive moment of rupture, like the French

Revolution. He defined passive revolution as the dialectics of ‘revolution-restoration’, the

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simultaneous fulfilment and displacement of revolutionary pressures (Gramsci, 1971: 109).

Gramsci saw the Risorgimento as antithetical to hegemony: ‘… a State replaces the local

social groups in leading a struggle of renewal. It is one of the cases in which these groups

have the function of “domination” without that of “leadership”: dictatorship without

hegemony’ (Gramsci 1971: 106).

Gramsci also pondered whether the concept might be extended to encompass

transformations within the capitalist order such as the rise of Fordism and fascism and

potentially, by extension, later transitions from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism. Accordingly

Gramscian scholars often define significant top-down changes within the capitalist order as

passive revolutions (type 2), as well as transformations from non-capitalist to capitalist

formations (type 1) (Simon, 2010). In a recent debate about the utility of passive revolution

for analysing ‘type 2’ transitions, several contributors endorsed Morton’s (2010: 604)

editorial premise that it is a useful ‘portmanteau concept that reveals continuities and

changes within the political rule of capital’. However, Callinicos (2010) argued that

stretching passive revolution to encompass transformations within capitalism risked

breaking the conceptual link with revolution-restoration. It also risks imputing excessive

discontinuity to phases of capitalist development – the sin of ‘epochalism’ revisited. It

further raises the possibility that, unlike the Risorgimento, type 2 passive revolutionary

transitions might also prove efficacious for hegemonic leadership. Of Italian fascism, for

example, Gramsci hypothesized that it created ‘a period of expectation and hope’ among

the petit-bourgeoisie, reinforcing ‘the hegemonic system and the forces of military and civil

coercion at the disposal of the traditional ruling classes’ (1971: 120). Morton’s typology of

passive-revolutionary outcomes spanning minimally, decadent (decaying) and integrally

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hegemonic regimes represents the most elaborate attempt to overcome the conceptual

tension between hegemony and passive-revolution (2011: 21-2).

The following account of neoliberalisation takes Morton’s part, depicting it as a

passive-revolutionary movement, but with due regard for the risk of fuelling epochalism.

This stance is taken partly for lack of an alternative critical vocabulary to accommodate

significant changes and partly because many cases of neoliberalism did entail ‘revolution-

restoration’, simultaneously displacing revolutionary ferment in the years after 1968 and

fostering relatively stable conditions for economic and social modernisation. In a type 2

passive revolutionary transformation that notionally succeeds in enhancing hegemonic

leadership, common-sense ways of thinking and acting must be unlearned and new habits

and norms acquired so that a new ‘second nature’ is constructed (Fontana, 2002: 163), such

as those associated with knowledge capitalism and network governance, discussed below.

The extent to which neoliberal passive revolutions revitalized capital accumulation

and cultivated integral hegemonies is a moot point. As a worldview neoliberalism has

undoubtedly been enormously successful, continuing to thrive as a governing ideology,

hitherto, amidst a major crisis of its own making (Crouch, 2011). However, alongside the

rise of new social movements and the revival of mass strikes, significant contradictions and

barriers also persist in the more mundane practices of urban governance. The paper now

discusses the development and institutionalization of the hegemonic ideology of networks

within neoliberalism, of which the UK is a prominent exponent. It then illustrates how

despite widespread commitment to the ethos of collaboration, governing networks enact

the dialectics of coercion-consent, casting doubt on their efficacy for hegemonic leadership.

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Network Governance in Neoliberal Hegemonic Strategy

Gramsci-influenced accounts tend to represent network governance either as part of

a putative alternative to neoliberalism (Showstack Sassoon, 2000), or as a compensatory

‘flanking’ mechanism (Hall, 2003). It is here interpreted as integral to neoliberal hegemonic

ideology and strategy. Incipient neoliberalism can be understood as a series of passive-

revolutionary attempts to re-invigorate capital accumulation in the face of faltering

Keynesianism and socioeconomic turmoil during the 1960s and 70s. In all its mutative and

hybrid forms, neoliberalism is distinguished by the commitment to extending markets,

refashioning welfare states and, in many variants, cultivating entrepreneurial rationalities.

Klein (2007: 18) depicted it as the ‘shock doctrine’; a ‘fundamentalist form of capitalism’

‘midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as

well as on countless individual bodies’. For Brenner and Theodore (2002: 352), it entailed

the ‘dramatic intensification of coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to

impose market rule upon all aspects of social life’. The Pinochet coup in Chile was among

the most violent moments of neoliberalisation, perhaps more counter-revolutionary than

passive-revolutionary. The fiscal crisis in New York in 1975 saw the application of passive-

revolutionary techniques by an alliance of local and extra-local forces seeking to establish a

culture of fiscal rectitude, in the first instance by choking the credit supply. Auletta (1976)

described these tactics in quasi-Gramscian terms. Britain’s bailout by the IMF in 1976 and

subsequent retrenchment was analogous to the fiscal crisis in New York at the national

scale; a decisive moment in the neoliberal turn preceding Thatcherism.

Such ‘shock-doctrine’ moments, of whose meaning and significance agents may or

may not have been conscious, were often followed by longer-term projects for economic

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and social transformation. Despite proselytizing ‘free markets’, Cammack (2004: 190)

argued that from the outset neoliberal governments intervened to ‘equip the poor for their

incorporation into and subjection to competitive labour markets … while simultaneously

seeking to legitimate the project through participation and a pro-poor agenda’. The idea

that states should actively remake political culture was always integral to the thinking of

organizations like the World Bank. Brenner and Theodore (2002: 368) argued that cities

became crucial arenas for experimentation and that neoliberal initiatives were ‘interiorized’

into urban governing regimes. Through urban policy, governments sought to recast citizens

simultaneously as entrepreneurial and reflexively sociable ‘governable subjects’ in the

image of Giddens’ autotelic personalities.

The origins of network governance theory can be traced to the political and artistic

avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 170), when the ideas of

knowledge capitalism began to incubate. In the UK, they were enrolled by Harold Wilson’s

Labour Party. Said Wilson (1963):

In all our plans for the future we're redefining and we're restating our socialism in

terms of the scientific revolution. But that revolution cannot become a reality unless

we are prepared to make far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes

which permeate our whole system of society. The Britain that is going to be forged in

the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for

outdated methods on either side of industry.

Wilson expressed the ‘white heat’ as a paradigm shift making socioeconomic

modernisation imperative, promising prosperity for all and thus transcending class

domination; a classic hegemonic vision. At the same time, the capacity to network became

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the cardinal virtue of emerging knowledge capitalism. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005)

highlighted in their study of France, business leaders appropriated the ideology of networks,

celebrating creativity, individual adaptability and connecting laterally in project-based teams

sustained through affective trust.

The promise of knowledge capitalism served as a powerful hegemonic ideology for

neoliberalism after the 1960s and continued to inspire modernization strategies during the

1990s and 2000s. Influenced by intellectuals like Giddens, many governments sought to

cultivate networks deemed ‘peculiarly appropriate to the operation of the enabling state’

(Bevir, 2005: 46). Moran (2010: 34) perceptively recognized affinities between the virtues

of ‘light touch’ regulation claimed for networks and small-state neoliberalism. The

purportedly emancipatory potential of networking was thus recuperated to the hegemonic

ideology of neoliberalism in both its economic and political forms.

The UK exemplifies the incorporation of networks into hegemonic ideology.

Collaboration is old-hat, but network governance gained ideological currency as a principle

for organising state-civil society relations after the tumultuous trade union struggles of the

mid-1980s were resolved. Ministers at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and

throughout John Major’s saw active citizenship as a way of overcoming a lack of

‘community, lawlessness and overdependence on the state’ (Douglas Hurd cited in Oliver

1991: 157). Major’s government began promoting network governance institutions,

cultivating a ‘speech genre of partnership’ (Collins, 1999: 76-7) proliferated enthusiastically

by New Labour from 1997.

The ideology of networks also appealed to thinkers on the left. For example, Hall and

Jacques (1983: 11), argued in their critique of orthodox Marxism: ‘… the world has changed,

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not just incrementally but qualitatively … Britain and other advanced capitalist societies are

increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation, and fragmentation, rather than

homogeneity, standardisation and the economics and organisations of scale which

characterised modern mass society’. The Eurocommunist movement of which they were

part drew inspiration from Poulantzas’s claim that the state is not fundamentally

subordinate to the capitalist mode of production, but rather a heterodox assemblage

reflecting the condensation of the relations of class forces. This conception allowed that a

counter-hegemonic movement might seize the apparatus of power and enact socialism by

constitutional means. At the same time, Eurocommunism downplayed Gramsci’s ‘war of

manoeuvre’ (the insurrectionary moment) in favour of the ‘war of position’ (the struggle for

hegemony among subaltern and allied groups) (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Armed with the

Poulantzian interpretation of Marxist state theory and their re-reading of Gramsci, British

Eurocommunists prepared for a long struggle on the terrain of ideology. They looked to

citizenship for a theme around which popular identities might coalesce in an anti-Tory

popular front, arguing that counter-hegemonic power required the cultivation of networks

capable of substituting for the diminishing coercive counter-power of the proletariat.

The British Labour Party was influenced to a degree by Eurocommunist thinking in the

late 1980s. However, after Labour’s fourth successive general election defeat in 1992, the

new Tony Blair-Gordon Brown leadership joined forces with another group of intellectuals,

marking a pronounced ideological shift. Instead of seeking to marshal the forces of the left

in a progressive counter-hegemonic bloc to reverse Thatcherism, Anthony Giddens (1998)

conceived the task of The Third Way as building a new communitarianism on the

foundations of the global market, heralding a turn to ‘post-hegemonic’ politics (Johnson,

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2007) and closer affinity with the Conservative view of good citizenship as the exercise of

personal responsibility and neighbourliness (Davies, 2012). Instead of organizing counter-

hegemony, networks became vehicles for hegemonic integration; a new social partnership

without unions.

The actions of New Labour cannot be read directly from the work of intellectuals.

Nevertheless, much of the centre-left accepted the parameters of Giddens’ vision and the

underlying theory of change. After 18 years of Conservative government, the battered

trade union movement, Labour Party and local Labour councils were happy to take shelter

in the ‘big tent’. Many, with painful memories of defeat, saw networks as progressive,

forming an ‘ethos of collaboration’ shared widely among public officials and citizen-activists

(Davies, 2009). In a conjuncture where counter-hegemonic politics based on the critique of

political economy could be depicted as obsolete, the promise of inclusive network

governance fostering both competitiveness and cohesion had considerable appeal.

In proselytizing network governance, Giddens and New Labour followed Harold Wilson

by mobilizing the tropes of knowledge capitalism. Another influential intellectual, Charles

Leadbeater (2000: 167), claimed that the networked knowledge economy promised a

society ‘both open and innovative, and yet inclusive and cooperative’. Tony Blair (2000)

celebrated it as the ‘greatest economic, technological and social upheaval the world has

seen since the industrial revolution began over two centuries ago’. Heralding a new epoch

is a hallmark of the ‘type 2’ passive revolution, imbuing capitalist innovations with

emancipatory potential. Talk of adapting to the challenges of ‘complexity’, ‘whole systems

thinking’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ became pervasive in Anglophone governmental

discourse. Echoing the discourse of knowledge capitalism, for example, the British National

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School of Government claimed that future civil service leaders must learn the art of ‘leading

people in non-hierarchical ways, for example, members of project or special teams’ (cited in

Davies, 2001: 114)). It elaborated:

It is crucial for those on the Fast Stream to develop their ability to lead not only

those they manage but also others with whom they work collaboratively. The

increased demands on organisations to deal effectively with ambiguity,

unpredictability, complexity and turbulence means that leaders must be proactive

and take their people with them.

City managers today continue to exhort colleagues to ‘think like Google’ and become

‘the networked council’ (e.g. Barradell, 2011). The proselytizing tone, perpetual appeals to

‘change’ and the slew of policies entreating officials and citizens collaborate for the

common good all highlight the hegemonic force in the ideology of networks.

Gramsci (1971: 133) argued that a successful hegemonic bloc must link its political

struggle with a programme of economic reform. As a visionary regulative ideal, the ideology

of networks fulfilled part of this role for neoliberalism, as the object of both economic

development and political sociability. It has had significant hegemonic utility mobilising, in

some cases even inspiring, fractions of capital, the state and civil society. Boltanski and

Chiapello rightly argued that ‘the metaphor of the network has progressively taken

responsibility for a new general representation of societies’ (2005: 138). As the

reconstructive element of a passive-revolutionary movement, it contributed to the

successful displacement of antagonistic forces in the UK, their recuperation and

consequently to reinforcing hegemony.

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Geddes (2006, 2008) argued that it has fulfilled a similar role throughout the cities

of Europe and beyond. For Peck and Tickell (2002: 397-8), cases of neoliberalisation also

created opportunity structures for ‘fast policy transfer’, where importing ‘off the shelf policy

fixes’ enabled short-cuts in domestic policy development (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 397-8).

Others copied ideas from avant-garde nations, like Britain, curtailing domestic policy

scrutiny and ‘leading to a deepening and intensification’ of neoliberalism. Policy emulation

became common sense and neoliberalization part of a positive feedback loop. In Gramscian

terms, more-or-less coercive policy transfer has transmitted neoliberal currents, such as

network governance, from the ‘core’ to the ‘periphery’, reinforcing geo-political power

asymmetries in the process (Morton, 2007: 604).

As was noted earlier, the extent to which neoliberalism operates as an integrative

hegemonic force globally is contested within the Gramscian tradition. The city has

undoubtedly been an important arena for the roll-out of neoliberal programmes, as Brenner

and Theodore (2002) argued, but there remain few detailed comparisons revealing

subtleties and variations in the modalities of the networks project and more comparative

research would help establish its cross-national efficacy. However, there is ample evidence

that the attempt to forge a neoliberal fix encounters barriers, manifesting in struggles over

urban space and crucially, for current purposes, the everyday politics of governing networks.

Governing Networks and the Integral State

It was argued earlier that network governance theory focuses disproportionately on

the technologies of enrolment and consensus-building. However, there is an enormous body

of literature suggesting that governing networks maybe ensnared in the dialectics of

hegemony-domination and resistance. The examples discussed below are selective, but

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represent prominent themes in the governance literature. First, state-civil society networks

seem unlikely to subsist on trust. Without trust, secondly, some other coordinating

mechanism, such as administrative domination, is required - and indeed is pervasive. Third,

supporting Isett et al’s (2011) intuition that homophilous networks are most likely to

cultivate trust, network closure is a common tactical solution for distrust. Fourth, therefore,

as the theory of the integral state anticipates, urban governing networks are prone to

replicating the hierarchical and homophilous practices they are supposed to transcend in

neoliberal ideology. These micro-enactments of the integral state highlight barriers to

hegemonic leadership under neoliberalism and the limited potential of networks for

remaking urban politics.

Networks based on Distrust

The barriers to cultivating networks based on trust are a prominent theme in

international urban studies. Bockmeyer (2000: p. 2437), for example, observed in a study of

the Empowerment Zone programme in Detroit that ‘external enforcement is the counter-

balance for distrust’ in state-civil society networks. Guarneros-Meza (2008) explored the

spread of network governance ideologies in Mexico. Her study in the cities of San Luis

Potosi and Querétaro discovered that the cultivation of regeneration partnerships was

influenced directly by network governance theory. However, she found, like Bockmeyer,

that they generated ‘no trust’ (2008: 1029). Davies (2007) discovered that in British

governing networks, the contrasting political meanings accorded to nominally shared goals,

such as ‘social inclusion’ and ‘partnership’ were a significant source of mutual

incomprehension and distrust between public officials and citizen-activists. Ansell and

Gash’s (2008) systematic review of the international literature on collaborative governance

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suggested that distrust maybe widespread, finding that networks often thrive on low trust.

As Geddes (2008: 217) argued in a cross-European review of urban partnerships, networks

based on distrust may function perfectly well provided there is another bond, such as

resource interdependency.

These literatures support Cook, Hardin and Levy’s (2007: 1) contention that although

trust is an important bond it ‘cannot carry the weight of making complex societies function

productively and effectively’. They suggest rather, as Cook, Hardin and Levy conclude

(2007: 196), that ‘societies are essentially evolving away from trust relationships towards

externally regulated behaviour’. Trust is therefore not only ‘an endemic problem for the

reproduction of networks’ (Thompson, 2003: 9), but also seems to be in increasingly short

supply. Where governing networks subsist on low trust, they must rely on other

coordinating mechanisms, among which administrative domination is prominent.

Administrative Domination

Morgan, Rees and Garmise (1999: 196) concluded their study of local economic

development networks in Wales arguing that the notion of ‘governing without government’

was a ‘fatal conceit’. Coruscating criticisms of governmental ‘control-freakery’ in UK

networks became the norm thereafter. Chandler (2001: 10) observed of early New Labour

that every ‘paean to local involvement and active communities ends with a rider that brings

the state back in and institutionalises government regulation at an even greater level than

before’. The flagship community governance programme, New Deal for Communities (NDC),

attracted particularly vociferous criticism. NDC governing boards were unusual in that many

held elections and were nominally the most democratic of governing networks. However, in

the face of internal conflicts and slow project delivery, they were quickly subjected to tight

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financial and administrative control by regional officials. Wright et al (2006: 347) later

observed: ‘if NDC is a community-led programme, it is community led in the sense that

government decides how the community will be involved, why they will be involved, what

they will do and how they will do it’. Marinetto (2003: 600) concluded his critique of the

DPM arguing that the evidence demonstrated ‘further centralization rather than the

haemorrhaging of power and authority’.

Despite variations in state form, culture and political ideology international studies

suggest that administrative domination maybe ubiquitous in governing networks. In a study

of networks in the Dutch city of Breda, for example, Kokx and van Kempen (2009) found that

they operated as vehicles for achieving national government objectives. The leading state

and market alliance worked to exclude other partners. Reviewing the Scandinavian

governance literature, Hall et al (2009: 527) found that Swedish ‘governance networks seem

to perpetuate, rather than replace, older political and social power structures’. Magnette

(2003: 144) argued that across the European Union, these ‘new’ modes of governance are

‘extensions of existing practices, and underpinned by the same elitist and functionalist

philosophy’. In Mexico, Guarneros-Meza (2008: 1032) found that in addition to generating

no trust, governance networks also institutionalized elite governance, making the ‘premise

of self-governing irrelevant’. Her findings were echoed at the national scale in Morton’s

claim that passive-revolutionary state development in Mexico engendered only minimal

hegemony (2011: 216). Case studies of a similar flavour abound across the globe.

Network closure is an alternative form of administrative domination. As was argued

earlier, the distinctiveness of networks depends on diverse actors developing affective trust.

Embracing difference in democratic governing institutions means welcoming political

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pluralism too because, as Stone (2004: 3) observed, ‘political differences enlarge as one

moves from general proposition to the handling of a concrete course of action’.

Consequently, action-focused institutions require agreements ruling some goods in and

others out. However, this has been very difficult to accomplish (Geddes, Davies and Fuller,

2007). Instead, alliances of powerful actors are prone to marginalising or even ousting

dissident activists. For example, Davies and Pill (2012) found that elite networks have

progressively undermined citizen engagement in the neighbourhood governance of

Baltimore and Bristol. As anticipated by Isett et al and Stone, these networks seek

homophily to function efficiently. As regime theory further anticipated, corporate and

governmental actors in Baltimore and Bristol possessed the combination of resources and

congruent interests required to accomplish the exclusion of citizen-activists. In the

vernacular of an earlier generation of network theorists, open ‘issue networks’ appear

prone to morphing into closed ‘policy communities’ (Marsh and Rhodes, 1992). The

modalities of administrative domination are therefore common, if not ubiquitous, in

governing networks subsisting on low trust. These patterns appear to transcend other

cultural and political variations.

The specific socio-spatial configurations of hegemony, the integral state and their

trajectories will only be elicited through further comparative research. However, the

preceding paragraphs suggest a possible trend away from hegemonic leadership in urban

governance towards domination (e.g. Arrighi, 2005). The ethos of network governance

remains strong and undoubtedly retains its efficacy among public officials and some

activists. Yet, as the earlier reading of the integral state anticipated, tensions with

quarrelsome civil society activists are commonly resolved not through trust-based

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deliberation, but coercion and exclusion. These practices undermine the ethos of

networking and subvert the hegemonic goal of cultivating heterophilous associations. To

extrapolate, the synthesis of neoliberal political economy and network governance maybe

prone to failure because, as Gramscian theory anticipates, the relationship is more

dialectical than constructive. Either way, the theory of the integral state can stimulate new

insights into urban political economy by focusing attention on the coercive term of the

governance repertoire and its relationship with consensus and resistance.

Conclusion

Frederickson (2005: 290) argued that despite the pervasive influence of network

discourses, the underlying narrative of contemporary governance theory and practice is the

search for order. Lurking beneath the postmodernist ontology of networks, we find the

modernist telos of hegemony in the neoliberal project and its contradictions. The pursuit of

hegemony through networks has been very influential across state, market and civil society.

However, if true hegemony is ‘‘intellectual and moral unity ... on a “universal” plane’, then

low trust, hierarchical network management and network closure represent significant

barriers. The re-reading of the integral state as multi-modal, multi-scalar configurations of

coercion and consent enacted and resisted in an unstable political economy, casts light on

why trust-based networks struggle to thrive and hierarchy is always prone to coming back in

(Thomas, 2009: 452). Administrative domination is only one moment of a larger dialectic

comprising state violence, dispossessions, enrolment, consensus and increasingly trenchant

resistance (Harvey, 2011). Yet, it is ubiquitous in urban governing networks.

Beyond governance studies, wherever claims for the novelty or redemptive potential

of networks are made a counter-literature has arisen suggesting that they exaggerate or

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misrepresent social trends; even that we live in times of ‘hyper-bureaucracy’ (Lawler and

Bilson, 2010: 82). In a conjuncture marked by crisis, dislocation, upward redistribution and

burgeoning struggles, heterophily seems utopian, lacking the ‘ontological purchase to grasp

realities of power or guide transformative practices’ (Johnson, 2007: 105). Hobsbawm

(1989: 46) formulated the problem pithily: ‘The state must henceforth, in the interests of

withering away, give ever more precise directions about how its funds should and should

not be spent … central power and command are not diminishing but growing, since

“freedom” cannot be achieved but by bureaucratic decision’. Hierarchy and homophily in

governance networks are manifestations of this contradiction in everyday urban politics.

A final conclusion is that defining governing institutions as ‘hierarchies’, ‘markets’ or

‘networks’ is a form of reification. The theory of the integral state highlights that they

simultaneously embody coercive, trust-based and contract relations, becoming hybrid

configurations of hierarchy, market and network; neither one thing nor the other but all

three. Networks are indicted with behaving like hierarchies and subsisting on low levels of

trust, but conversely it is hard to see how even extreme hierarchies, such as North Korea,

could survive without a modicum of networking and trust. Fear, contract, coercion,

selective incentives, resource interdependencies and trust are all important connecting (and

disconnecting) variables.

Consequently, the challenge for governance theory may be less categorising

institutions as ‘hierarchies’, ‘markets’ or ‘networks’ than explaining how, why and where

they embody particular mixes, how configurations change in space-time and what the

direction of travel might be. Metagovernance theory suggests this approach, conceiving

‘government + governance’ as a dialectical relationship (Marsh, 2011: 41). But, it does not

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take the coercive term of the governance repertoire seriously. The perspective of the

integral state is an alternative strategy for exploring the mix and overcoming the

‘government to governance’ dualism, positing the relationship between coercion and

consent as dialectical and enduring in the struggle for hegemony. Studying this relationship

from a Marxist-Gramscian perspective could lead to new and insightful governance

research.

___________________________

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