Human Relations

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of some of the major theoretical perspectives on governance developed within the field of business and management. We critically review conceptualizations of governance in the mainstream literature, and contrast this with the relevant literature from the governmentality and institutionalist perspectives. This article emphasizes the diversity of conceptions of governance promoted by these different theories, and argues that this rich multiplicity offers genuine scope for gaining a more rounded understanding of the inherent complexities of contemporary governance forms and practices.

This article suggests that the central problems of examining governance change in the National Health Service (NHS) are located in the changing relations between the state and the professionals it relies upon for the delivery of health services on the one hand, and its positioning of the users of public services on the other. These relations are explored in depth in terms of the question as to whether market-based governance can be adequately implemented in the NHS, examining the implications of this analysis for welfare governance reform more generally.

How are markets developed and governed? The article reviews four perspectives on the formation and development of markets and market governance — the political perspective (Fligstein), the network perspective (White), the framing perspective (Callon) and the soft law/expert power perspective (Slaughter). It then utilizes these perspectives in order to understand the development of the market for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. It finds that this market was stabilized and governed through the operation of all of these features — power, networks, framing and expert power. The International Swaps and Dealers Association (ISDA) to which all market participants belong has played a central role in this process. It has created a Master Agreement that is the common basis to all OTC derivative contracts across the world and seeks to overcome potentially problematic areas such as netting and collateral. It brings together all market participants and uses their expertise within its committees to develop new rules. However, the article shows that ISDA as a private international association cannot sustain governance by itself. It has to influence national governments in order to ensure that its Master Agreement is enforceable even though the agreement favours ISDA members above other actors. This has the potential for political controversy though mainly governments deal with it as an issue of technical expertise. At the public, international level, the central bankers forum in Basle is also concerned with the oversight of the sector and have issued a number of warnings about potential sources of instability arising from the derivatives market. The article illustrates that the market formation process is highly complex and that the governance of the market is multi-levelled and precarious. The research raises questions about how other complex markets are being created and how their governance structures are determined.

Over the last two decades, managerialism (Enteman, 1993) has become consolidated on multiple fronts. As a formula of governance, it has elaborated various vocabularies: the `audit society' (Power, 1997, 2007) has become entrenched in all types of organizations; surveillance methods (Lyon, 2001) have become increasingly dispersed and insidious; and — alongside —`new' concepts of subjectivity and the`self' are used to frame more intense regimes of self-discipline or what Tipton (1984) called `self-work'. These moves have been captured by Heelas (2002), Thrift (1997) and others in the term `soft capitalism'. In this article, we reflect upon this phenomenon by analysing some examples: `culture', `performativity', `knowledge' and `wellness'. Although they belong to a group often described as `fads' and `fashions' and dismissed as managerial `mumbo-jumbo', we suggest that their proliferation indicates a more stable cultural tendency of management discourses to capture subjectivity in its general agenda. We attempt to offer an historical-cultural interpretation from which this range of managerial concepts might be viewed. Our argument suggests that they have a certain cultural coherence that can be perhaps better glimpsed within a wider historical context. As a particular way in which managerialism frames its logic, analysing `soft capitalism' historically offers a reasonable basis for understanding the strength of its hard disciplinary edge as a regime of governance.

This article identifies two, nation-wide, forms of governance or organizing capital,`shareholder' capitalism and `managerial' capitalism, epitomized by the USA and Japan respectively. Furthermore, it identifies the implications for managers in these systems. The article argues that both varieties of capitalism have been forced to modify, due to pressures from globalization. Shareholder capitalism in the USA has been intensified with an even greater emphasis on `shareholder value'. In Japan, meanwhile, poor national economic performance has led to pressures upon managerial capitalism to take on features more akin to the shareholder variety. Such pressures have been transmitted to managers with a more intensified work regime. However, many of the HRM features of the Japanese model remain, despite these pressures.

This article draws on case studies from five of the UK privatized water plcs in order to examine how Remuneration Committees operationalized and justified their executive long-term incentive pay (LTIP) schemes. The article uses these as `revelatory' examples to illuminate how problematic decisions about executive pay can be. The water plc Remuneration Committees, concerned about potential stakeholder criticism, devoted considerable time and resources to ensure that their choice of LTIP comparators and performance metrics would be regarded as legitimate. The difficulties they encountered in pursuing this illustrate the underlying indeterminacy and incoherence of normative guidelines for implementing good governance in these substantive areas of executive remuneration. The article analyses this in terms of institutional incompleteness and argues that the resulting uncertainty creates theoretical as well as practical issues for resolving debates about what constitutes good governance.

Comment on the organizational consequences of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs) is pervaded by the idea that `virtual' forms of production are synonymous with disaggregation and the `end' of bureaucracy. This article takes issue with this view, drawing on case study analysis of the British Library (BL) to show the ways in which bureaucratic modes of governance are shaping scholarly access to information resources. This research produces two main findings, each of which has a strong bearing on virtualization and the theme of `governance in transition'. First, radically decentralized `virtual' forms of service delivery are dependent on heavily`managed' forms of capacity-building and information aggregation. Second, the digitization initiatives explored in the case study are embedded in an inherently contested and contradictory context of institutional change. Current developments in the management and control of digital rights are consistent with the commodification of the public sphere. However, the evidence also suggests that scholarly access to information resources is being significantly influenced by the `information society' objectives of the BL and other institutional players within the network of UK research libraries.