ABSTRACT
In chapter 2 we discussed influential social theories of a putative ‘second’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity. Our claim was not that all contemporary analysis has been directly influenced by theories of the second modernity – though much has – but rather that this approach is indicative of a pervasive style of analysis; one that is highly dichotomous and asserts an epochal break. In this sense theorists of the second modernity articulated at a high level of abstraction the, sometimes implicit, assumptions of much contemporary social-scientific analysis. Our aim in this chapter is to offer a counternarrative to that proposed by the weak postmodernist programme. Specifically, we offer an account that challenges two key, and complementary, claims to the effect that: (i) state capacities are in decline; (ii) there is a loosening of the hold of institutions generally and a decentralization of power within formal organizations in particular. At the first level a partial decline of command-and-control and its increasing displacement by ‘soft law’, ‘light-touch’ regulation, partnership governance, and negotiated, consensual agreement is commonly asserted; all captured in the phrase ‘from government to governance’. At the second – meso, organizational – level analogous claims are made by emphasizing quasi-voluntary compliance (in place of obedience), flatter hierarchy, decentralized decision-making, and the increasing diffusion of responsibility; all captured in terms such as ‘heterarchy’ and ‘post-bureaucracy’. Claims at both levels rely heavily on the network metaphor discussed in the previous chapter (e.g. ‘policy network’ ‘organizational network’), and are weakly postmodernist in our sense. The aim of this chapter is to show that these claims are unwarranted; that what we see is a further concentration of power in which new instruments (e.g. soft law, flexible regulation) refine and supplement, but do not displace, command-and-control. In other words, complementary changes in the nature of state and organizational hierarchy follow a modernist logic of increasing rationalization and instrumentalization.
