ABSTRACT
This chapter applies Foucault’s concept of governmentality to show how the design of China’s emergency management organizational field and its accompanying framework converged in ways that would not have been possible without the efforts of academic experts well embedded in the establishment. Their role went beyond that of “establishment intellectuals” who produced and populated the institutional vocabulary of the field. I coin the term “institutional evangelists” to describe their expanded role in propagating the risk governance framework and developing the field. This highlights the material and nondiscursive nature of efforts in institutionalization-governmentalization. In seeing the design of the organizational field as acts of governmentalization, my analyses also show that the subjects the establishment was corralling into its cage of governance were neither members of the public, nongovernmental organizations, nor business firms, but rather the governing elites who inhabited the field.
