Why this special issue on governance in transition?

Abstract

In 2004, the guest editors of this special issue, along with some other colleagues at Cardiff Business School, launched an international agendasetting conference on ‘Governance without Government? New Forms of Governance in the Knowledge Economy and Society’, held in Cardiff in May 2005. It was felt that the rise of the knowledge economy and society from the 1980s onwards has radically destabilized seemingly ordered and stable ‘governance systems’ that emerged in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries after the Second World War. The cumulative effect of the complex interaction between ‘globalization’, ‘informationalization’, ‘individualization’, and ‘marketization’ seems to undermine and erode the ideological foundations and political viability of governance strategies and structures dominated by the logic of rational bureaucratic organization and control. A deepening ‘legitimation crisis’ in ‘state-centred’ forms of political representation and administrative coordination has been paralleled by a ‘managerial crisis’ in ‘corporate-centred’ forms of economic organization and control. The success of the Cardiff conference prompted the guest editors to approach the editors of Human Relations about putting together a special issue on ‘Governance in transition? Emerging paradigms and practices in the 21st century’. Our aim was to bring together a number of articles that would explore the diversity and richness of conceptualizations of governance and the shifts, if any, in governance conceptions and structures over recent times. Some commentators have argued that purported changes in governance do not represent a radical transformation in governance logics and forms based on authority and hierarchy to ones founded on autonomy and knowledge. Rather, they are interpreted and explained as providing the ideological,