Epistemic Governance: Social Change In The Modern World 3030191494, 9783030191498, 3030191508, 9783030191504

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
1 Introduction......Page 10
The Epistemic Governance Approach......Page 13
Scope of the Epistemic Governance Approach......Page 18
But, Is Governance “Just” Epistemic?......Page 20
Structure of the Book......Page 23
References......Page 25
2 Epistemic Work......Page 30
Objects of Epistemic Work......Page 31
Ontology of the Environment......Page 33
Actors and Identifications......Page 35
Norms and Ideals......Page 37
Objects of Epistemic Work … at Work......Page 39
References......Page 43
3 Imageries of the Social World......Page 45
Metaphors to Imageries: A Cultural Approach to Social Change in World Society......Page 48
Root Metaphors: Words We See With......Page 49
Imageries......Page 50
Social-Scientific Origin and Contemporary Pervasiveness......Page 52
Political Usage and Implications......Page 53
Social-Scientific Origin and Prevalence......Page 54
Competing Blocs: Competition and Community-Building......Page 56
Political Usage and Implications......Page 57
Imageries and Governance......Page 59
References......Page 61
4 Authority as Epistemic Capital......Page 66
Four Types of Authority......Page 68
Capacity-Based Authority......Page 69
Ontological Authority......Page 70
Moral Authority......Page 72
Charismatic Authority......Page 74
Amassing and Institutionalizing Authority......Page 78
Discussion......Page 80
References......Page 82
5 International Organizations......Page 85
Previous Research on the Role of IGOs in Global Governance......Page 87
States as Principals......Page 89
Culture in the Driver’s Seat......Page 91
The Epistemic Governance Approach to IGOs......Page 92
IGOs Defining the World for Us......Page 94
Norms, Ideals and Identifications......Page 97
Impression Management......Page 98
Accumulation of Authority......Page 100
Conclusion......Page 103
References......Page 106
6 Parliaments......Page 111
“Us”-Talk: Building the Nation......Page 115
Constructing the National Interest......Page 118
The Nation in Its Reference Group......Page 119
The Civilized Community of Nations......Page 121
Race to the Top......Page 123
Identifying with Values......Page 124
Identifying Through Facts......Page 126
Conclusion......Page 127
References......Page 128
The Occupation of Wall Street......Page 130
So … Nothing Happened?......Page 132
Social Change and Cycles of Protest......Page 134
Norms and Ideals in Social Movements: An Epistemic Governance Perspective......Page 138
Imagery of the Social World as a Spatio-Form Hierarchy......Page 142
Norming Nodes: Morality-Based Movements Framing Reality and Reaching Out......Page 144
Social Movements as Moral Authorities......Page 148
References......Page 150
8 Epistemic Governance as a Methodological Tool Kit......Page 153
Situating Epistemic Governance Methodology in Foucauldian Discourse Analysis......Page 155
Sites of Change......Page 158
Methods and Data......Page 162
Objects of Epistemic Work and Imageries......Page 165
What Next?......Page 168
References......Page 170
References......Page 173
Index......Page 192

Citation preview

Epistemic Governance SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE MODERN WORLD

Pertti Alasuutari and Ali Qadir

Epistemic Governance

Pertti Alasuutari · Ali Qadir

Epistemic Governance Social Change in the Modern World

Pertti Alasuutari Tampere University Tampere, Finland

Ali Qadir Tampere University Tampere, Finland

ISBN 978-3-030-19149-8 ISBN 978-3-030-19150-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © greyj/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book is based on our research over more than ten years on governance and social change. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s work and later by the world society theory tradition, our theorizing first focused on the domestication of global trends but went much further in proposing a way to understand change processes more broadly. Related to that, we started using the term “epistemic governance” in 2012 when working on a research project application. A theory paper on the concept was eventually published in two separate articles, the first one laying out the foundations for the framework and discussing objects of epistemic work (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014) and the second one focusing on imageries of the social world in epistemic governance (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2018). This groundwork then led to a view of authority as epistemic capital, elaborated in a theory article (Alasuutari, 2018). The first chapters of this book draw from these three articles, but readers who are interested in a more elaborate discussion of the theoretical framework introduced here are asked to consult the original texts. The basic point of the epistemic governance framework is that all governance functions by taking into account the way in which people think about the world, and then acting upon it. It turns out to be a remarkably effective point in opening up the dynamics of social change and governance. In the course of empirical applications, we quickly realized that the framework does not just lay out a theory of social change; it is also a methodological guide to designing unique and revealing social research. Rooted in our shared inspiration from Michel Foucault’s studies into power and knowledge, the methodology is based on discourse analysis to open up processes of change. The formulation, application, and methodological evolution have been greatly enriched by our work over the past decade in the Tampere Research Group for Cultural and Political Sociology (TCuPS). Members of that research group have used epistemic governance in a dizzying range of cases and have contributed to v

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the theoretical rigor as well as research design tips. Doctoral research supervised in the group has, likewise, been very important in making the framework robust. The group also runs a Master’s Degree Program in Global and Transnational Studies at Tampere University, where students have been applying epistemic governance in an array of theses. Pulling all of these developments together and reflecting on them, we realized that we had more than enough reason to share our excitement about this framework with colleagues in the research community. Our intention in this book is to present the theory of epistemic governance to the community in one, consolidated version for the first time. Drawing together the theoretical architecture and illustrating it with new analyses, this book also spells out the methodological pathways for guiding future research using the framework. We have accumulated a number of intellectual debts over the past four plus years since epistemic governance first appeared as a provisional theory of social change. Of course, our research group, TCuPS, is very much a part of refining the theory and methodology. In addition, the group’s members have given generously of their time and commitment to reviewing the chapters of this book. It is no exaggeration to say that this book would not have been possible without the generosity and insightful contribution of all TCuPS members. Additionally, we are grateful for input from a number of engaged scholars, including Lisa Adkins, Ricca Edmondson, Selina Gallo-Cruz, Gili Drori, Mark Haugaard, Risto Heiskala, Ann Hironaka, Risto Kunelius, John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, Isaac Reed, Evan Schofer, and George Thomas. Institutionally, our university—Tampere University—has provided all the facilities, space, and encouragement we could have hoped for when writing this book. Our work specifically on this book has been enabled by an Academy of Finland Professorship and a research project grant to Pertti Alasuutari, as well as an Academy of Finland research grant to Ali Qadir: We gratefully acknowledge this support. Tampere, Finland

Pertti Alasuutari Ali Qadir

References 1. Alasuutari, P. (2018). Authority as Epistemic Capital. Journal of Political Power, 11(2), 165–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2018.1468151. 2. Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014a). Epistemic Governance: An Approach to the Politics of Policy-making. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 67–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.887986.

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3. Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014b). Introduction. In P. Alasuutari & A. Qadir (Eds.), National Policy-Making: Domestication of Global Trends (pp. 1–22). London: Routledge. 4. Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (Eds.). (2014c). National Policy-Making: Domestication of Global Trends. London: Routledge.

Contents

1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Epistemic Governance Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Scope of the Epistemic Governance Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 But, Is Governance “Just” Epistemic? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2 Epistemic Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Objects of Epistemic Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Objects of Epistemic Work … at Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3 Imageries of the Social World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Metaphors to Imageries: A Cultural Approach to Social Change in World Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Imageries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Imageries and Governance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4 Authority as Epistemic Capital. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Four Types of Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Amassing and Institutionalizing Authority. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 5 International Organizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Previous Research on the Role of IGOs in Global Governance. . . . . . . . . 81 The Epistemic Governance Approach to IGOs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 ix

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Accumulation of Authority. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 6 Parliaments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 “Us”-Talk: Building the Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Identifications, Knowledge Production, and Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 7 Social Movements and NGOs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 The Occupation of Wall Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 So … Nothing Happened? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Social Change and Cycles of Protest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Norms and Ideals in Social Movements: An Epistemic Governance Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Social Movements as Moral Authorities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 8 Epistemic Governance as a Methodological Tool Kit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Situating Epistemic Governance Methodology in Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Sites of Change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Methods and Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Objects of Epistemic Work and Imageries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 What Next?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

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Introduction

In the months leading up to the invasion of Normandy, a turning point in World War II, the Allies conducted a substantial military deception. In the carefully planned Operation Bodyguard, the Allied forces deceived the Germans into thinking Normandy is a diversion and that the Pas de Calais is the main invasion target. To create this illusion, a fictitious First US Army Group was invented, supposedly located in Kent and Sussex. The Allies constructed dummy tanks, trucks, and landing craft, and positioned them near the coast. Several real military units also moved into the area. In addition to the broadcast of fake radio traffic, genuine radio messages were first routed to Kent via landline and then broadcast, to give the Germans the impression that most of the Allied troops were stationed there. The deception suggesting that the Normandy landings were a diversion led Hitler to delay sending reinforcements from the Pas de Calais region for nearly seven weeks. The story of Operation Bodyguard (see, e.g., Barbier, 2007; Holt, 2010) is a good example of the role of deception in warfare. To affect the enemy’s expectations, moves, and counterstrategies, military leaders try to hide their real aims and tactics: They produce fake objects and information and camouflage real material to appear fake or decoy. But such signaling games are not just about deception. Acts of violence are also a means to send a signal in several ways. A military operation or a military exercise is a way to demonstrate an army’s strength and capability and to issue a warning. Before a combat, soldiers also paint their faces to look frightening, and armies employ many tactics to cause panic among the objects of an attack. The reason for the importance of signaling in all manner of battles and ­struggles is that actors’ expectations of and responses to the other party’s moves depend on their conception of the situation at hand. Consider the i­nteraction

© The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_1

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1 Introduction

between A and B. Regarding the next move, it is B’s understanding that counts—not the intentions or real capabilities of A—which leads to the centrality of impression management. To work upon the other party’s conceptions, at times it is advantageous to demonstrate one’s strength, while at other times hiding one’s resources is a better tactic. The management of others’ conceptions of reality is not only central in struggles against an enemy. The same applies to governance and leadership within social movements and organizations. Movements, parties, and organizations seek to resonate with, speak to, and work upon common conceptions of the world within a target population. The potential followers need to recognize themselves as belonging to the same community, sharing the same values and goals. In addition, the group needs to have an animating mission: How it will solve problems and pave the way for a better future. The better a leader is able to motivate people behind a program, the more concerted will be the efforts by which the members work toward the set goals, and the stronger is the support of the leader. Because of its reliance on people’s conceptions of the world and the situation at hand, in this book we stress that governance works through epistemic means. Those who seek to influence others’ behavior and steer it in the desired direction work on, utilize, and manipulate common conceptions of the world and the situation at hand. To use Foucault’s concept, actors work upon and utilize the episteme of the culture and moment: the tacit premises on which people’s understandings are based (Foucault, 1970, p. 168).1 Thus, in this book epistemic governance does not depict a particular type of governance in distinction from other types, although our main focus in the empirical chapters is on institutions whose activities rely heavily on the use of evidence. But by bringing to the fore the epistemic nature of governance we do not only refer to the role of scientific or “alternative” facts or knowledge production in politics and policymaking. Rather, when politicians and social movements seek to make an impact on people’s behavior, they also appeal to the target population’s negative or positive emotions; for instance, anthems and songs are an important part of political campaigns and community building. Working on others’ conceptions and sentiments often entails constructions of “us” and “them.” Consider populist political programs. They seek to disrupt the existing social order by solidifying and mobilizing the animosity of “the people”

1The word epistemic stems from the ancient Greek word ἐπιστήμη, which can refer to knowledge, science, or understanding, and which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, meaning “to know, to understand, or to be acquainted with.”

1 Introduction

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against “privileged elites” and the “establishment.” Another common feature in populist demagogy is to exclude some people from the definition of “us.” For instance, white supremacists build their ideology on their claim that white people are superior to people of other colors and to those representing other ethnic or religious groups. The established international order based on regional states is, of course, also premised on exclusion in that nations construct feelings of solidarity only among the compatriots, often also by drawing on the idea that nations compete with each other. By saying that governance works through affecting others’ perceptions we do not imply that it is sheer manipulation and distortion of facts. On the contrary, most decision-makers genuinely believe that rational policymaking can only be based on an accurate conception of reality. That is why data collection, analysis, and interpretation have become a routine part of governance and administration in all public and private organizations. Decisions are often based on rigorous calculations of their estimated effects on, say, the future sales of a company’s product or the tax revenue of a national state. It is precisely because of this reliance on research, however, that conceptions of reality cannot be treated as totally distinct from politics. Typically, stakeholders who want to influence political decision-making establish research institutes and think tanks that are engaged in policy-related knowledge production (Medvetz, 2012; Stone, 2000, 2001, 2002). Reports and facts produced by research institutes are useful in the persuasion work, because they appeal to the authority of science. But in this instance, too, it is the impression that counts: If the majority of the population resists a policy choice, it is tricky for a government to simply overrule public opinion without constructing a conflicting account of its eventual effects. In that sense, evidence-based policy may also mean policy-based evidence (Heinrich, 2007; Hughes, 2007; Pawson, 2006). In this book, governance is defined as efforts to bring about change (or maintain status quo) in a given social system. Such systems may range from a family to an organization—such as corporations and nation-states—all the way to the world system. Hence, politics and policymaking are only part of governance. Governance refers to anyone’s acts that seek to influence the conduct of others and hence the polity or organization as a whole. Management of consumers by marketing and advertising is one example, the elderly’s governance of an extended family another one. Of course, everything that individuals do may affect others’ behavior—for instance, parents steer their children’s acts also unintentionally—but here we refer to governance as intentional efforts to change others’ conduct. By talking about governance as intentional measures we do not mean, however, that people are necessarily self-conscious about the particular ways they

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bring about change. Rather, this book essentially consists in unpacking the often semi-conscious, intuitive ways in which governance is practiced. By defining governance as efforts to bring about change, we stress that it is practiced also by others than those who have formal authority over others. In an organization, also the subjects and the opposition seek to bring about change by putting pressure on leaders in different ways. When talking about global issues such as environmental policy, it is particularly questionable to conceive of governance in hierarchical terms, as something practiced by a few decision-making bodies. Rather, global governance is a deliberative process that involves a great number of actors of all sorts who seek to bring about change on a global scale. Because of the complexity of the way governance is accomplished, one also talks about network governance (Avant, Finnemore, & Sell, 2010; Elson, 2015; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005; Hudson, Lowe, Oscroft, & Snell, 2007; Rhodes, 1996). This means that social movements that challenge the status quo and the political elite are equally involved in epistemic governance, aiming to question the given truths on which current policies are premised. Consider the Occupy Wall Street (OWS), a protest movement that began in New York city in 2011. The OWS slogan, “We are the 99%,” refers to income inequality and wealth distribution in the USA between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. In that sense, the movement is a good example of the way actors seeking to change the current state of affairs work: They construct an alternative picture of reality, pointing out a violation of a moral principle—in this case equality—that needs to be solved, and appeal to the potential followers as a community whose members share the same predicament.

The Epistemic Governance Approach The book at hand contributes to a better grasp of the actual means by which actors seeking change convince others about the best course of action.2 Although action aimed at affecting social change can take place in different arenas, we

2By

actors, we refer to both individuals and collective actors, such as organizations. Naturally, an organization, for instance a nation-state, can be considered a single actor only in institutional contexts in which individuals or larger entities like the government act as its agents. As pointed out in sociological institutionalism (J. W. Meyer, 2010; J. W. Meyer & Jepperson, 2000), much of individual behavior is in fact “agentic” in that we represent the interests of, say, our work organization and the nonprofit we volunteer for.

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argue that all such instances of governance can be termed epistemic. We suggest that there is analytical unity in these tactics of epistemic governance and that is what we will unpack in this book. Based on evidence from our research and theorizing, we find that this conceptualization of tactics of epistemic work is applicable across a range of different cases. In that sense, it is a useful analytical and methodological tool for those who want to study social change from the viewpoint of knowledge claims and rhetoric. Regarding social change as a phenomenon, many theories approach it from a macro-structural perspective, seeking to describe a causal mechanism that determines social development.3 The epistemic governance framework approaches change from an opposite perspective by emphasizing action. It is not a macrotheory of social change in that we do not attempt to formulate a universal mechanism that change obeys due to acts of governance. Rather, social change is the sum total of all individuals leading their lives and pursuing their objectives. In most cases, people going about their business are not self-consciously changing society in a political sense; they just aim to control their environment or achieve something through affecting others’ behavior. Our point is to probe the way in which they go about doing so, whether to bring about a change in circumstances or to keep things more or less the way they are. In that sense, say, advertising a product is an example of epistemic governance.4 Considering all these activities that comprise social transformation, it is important to study the different ways in which actors try to steer others’ thoughts and conduct.

3For

instance, according to historical materialism, first formulated by Karl Marx, a society’s material conditions—i.e., the union of its productive capacity and social relations of production—determine its organization and development (see, e.g., Marx, 1993). In his modernization theory, Talcott Parsons suggested that social change is driven by certain “evolutionary universals” necessary for the further development of any society. Accordingly, Parsons predicted that developing countries will follow the path of “adaptive upgrading,” including industrialization, democratization through law, and secularization and scientification with the means of education (Parsons, 1951, 1964, 1966). More recently, Inglehart and Welzel (2005) have expressed similar views. 4For instance, in Foucault-inspired governmentality studies scholars have investigated the role of different professions in managing people’s behavior. As a case in point, Miller and Rose (1997) studied how the expertise of psychologists and other social scientists working at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was used in product branding and advertising, and how “the therapeutic machine” as a new species of authority achieved a peculiar salience in the period after World War II (P. Miller & Rose, 1994).

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By proposing an epistemic perspective on governance, our point is to say that seeking change is always premised on actors’ understanding of the world and the situation at hand. Actors themselves are, likewise, constituted by such understandings. From that viewpoint, similarities in decisions reached at by governments in different countries or organizations in a corporate field can often be viewed as indicating likenesses in their epistemic assumptions, in other words about what can or must be done and what is virtuous or ethically acceptable (although there may be other reasons for such isomorphism as well). The epistemic governance approach is a general theory of how people seek to bring about change. Hence, it does not refer to a particular form or resource of power, for instance “soft power” (Nye, 2004) in contrast to coercion, and neither do we argue that the contemporary world is witnessing the “end of power” as we used to know it (Naím, 2013), although trying to influence common views has probably become an important aspect of governance in the present-day world (Hajer, 2009). Rather, the epistemic governance approach depicts a perspective on studying tactics of change, however rough, violent and easily discernible or “dislocational” (Foucault, 1977) and subtle they are. This means that we approach governance as more or less unself-conscious ways by which actors work on people’s conceptions of reality. This entails strategies that affect people’s wishes and aspirations, but a threat or use of military force and economic constraints are also means to affect people’s conceptions of the situation and hence make them adopt a particular line of action. As Castells (2011, p. 779) puts it, “violence and the threat of violence always combine with the construction of meaning in the production and reproduction of power relationships in all domains of social life.” One can of course argue that when a country resorts to pure violence, for instance removes or kills a population to take over an area, that does not require any persuasion work on those individuals. However, conflicts like that typically result in involving third parties who need to be persuaded not to interfere by, say, signaling the country’s military capacity and somehow justifying the operation; hence, violence indeed combines with epistemic aspects of governance. Besides, open violence is a risky tool because it tests the actor’s capacity in that front. It is like a reset button: A successful operation can convince others of an army’s strength, which can then be capitalized without its actual use, but the test can also fail, in which case the actor loses its prior position. In this sense, most social relations can be viewed from the perspective of epistemic governance. The epistemic aspect is better visible when governance relies less on overt military force (when objectives are clearly and coercively spelled out) and more on opinions and sentiments of the general public. Recent scholarship has correctly emphasized the use of subtle techniques of governance

The Epistemic Governance Approach

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in democratic nation-states (see, e.g., Castells, 2009, 2011; Foucault, 2007; Hajer, 2009; Mann, 1986, 1993, 2012; Rose & Miller, 1992), and even authoritarian regimes are increasingly subject to global public opinion in the compression of global political processes. However, this scholarship has not paid much attention to what this persuasion consists in and how it mobilizes popular notions. We argue that the tactics of change (whether in speech or through other acts) involve taking into account other people’s understanding of three aspects of reality, and then working on them. The first such “object of epistemic work” is an ontology of the social environment. Affecting the shared view of what is a truthful and accurate picture of the situation at hand is an essential element of epistemic work in most cases. Whether or not individuals believe in assumptions about the ontology of the environment, what is crucial here is their action based on the belief that those assumptions are socially established: They know that this is the way people think of things. Another object of epistemic work is people’s understanding of themselves and others as actors: who they are, what community they belong to, and what other actors there are in the social world. Constructing and appealing to actors’ identities functions as a tool of governance. Epistemic work is, lastly, focused on people’s norms and ideals and the way they are applied to particular cases. If and when an actor is able to convince others about the right thing to do by appealing to a general ideal or principle and what it obliges or allows people to do in a given situation, it is a persuasive way to steer their behavior. What we argue, in fact, is that all of governance—as defined earlier— can be reduced to these three objects of epistemic work, and no others. Yet, it is hardly, if ever, the case that speakers and actors refer directly to these objects of epistemic work. Rather, their persuasion work is woven into narratives (including action as “text”). From the epistemic governance perspective, we argue that such narratives rely, in turn, on “imageries”: configurations of metaphors articulated with a policy rationale, typically easily captured in images. Actors work off the notion that others see the world in a similar way to them, and so base their argument for or against a particular issue on those terms. Such imageries constitute more or less consistent premises about how people see society, and each imagery includes assumptions about the objects of epistemic work. We identify three such imageries: that of development or “modernization” following a universal trajectory, that of society divided up into competing blocs in a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” and that of society organized as a hierarchy. These imageries are common in contemporary world culture and constitute a symbolic set that both constitutes rational actors and is available for use by them, especially those seeking to affect social change. Furthermore, an imagery is not just a tool in political rhetoric; it is intimately related to social scientific theorizing as well

8

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as the very constitution of the actor. By contrast with the rather strict definition of three objects of epistemic work, we suggest that a number of imageries of the social world may be found empirically. The three we identify here are quite common, but they are cultural and historical formations. Moreover, we should think about not just imageries of the social world, but also of other entities in social action, such as imageries of the individual. Yet another take on the tactics of epistemic governance is to pay attention to the ways the actors aiming to steer others’ conduct appeal to authority. In argumentation, an argument from authority is considered as a fallacy (e.g., Ciurria & Altamimi, 2014; Walton, 1997), but as Edmondson (1984, p. 26) notes, it is a routine part of the use and construction of scientific authority. And the same goes for persuasion more generally: In trying to convince others of what needs to be done, speakers cannot only resort to pure logic (which does not provide the underlying premises needed to propose what measures to take); they also appeal to authoritative accounts of facts, acceptable principles, and to all manner of things that they assume others to respect or fear. In that sense, threatening with or referring to an alleged wrath of God or revenge of an enemy can be considered as appeals to authority. In more detail, we suggest that actors make use of four different types of authority (Alasuutari, 2018). One strategy is to create and utilize the assumption that an actor is capable of accomplishing things, such as using incentives, punishments, or physical force. This can be called capacity-based authority. Another strategy is to construct or appeal to renowned actors and their accounts of reality, for instance to expert knowledge. This can be called ontological authority. The third strategy is to employ prevalent conceptions of important persons, organizations, texts, or principles that allegedly define individual rights and duties. For instance, the law and local regulations define individuals’ positions within an organization. Let us call this moral authority. Finally, actors may create or utilize extraordinary awe attached to an organization or individual, for instance a famous political or religious leader. This can be called charismatic authority. These four types of authority are not mutually exclusive but rather, they appear in different combinations. For instance when thinking about the alleged power and authority of international organizations, they may rely particularly on one reason for their respect but complement it with other strengths. For example, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) respect rests on the credibility of its military capacity, but the NATO also likes to appear as an expert organization. The same appears to apply to many other international governmental and non-governmental organizations: While also branding themselves as moral authorities, upholding universal ethical principles, they have invested heavily of scientific knowledge production (Zapp, 2017a, 2017b) and hence like to be seen as ontological authorities.

Scope of the Epistemic Governance Approach

9

Scope of the Epistemic Governance Approach Scrutinizing the way governance is both dependent on people’s beliefs and ­constitutes them as subjects has received increased attention in recent decades. Foucault’s neologism of governmentality has perhaps been most influential in this respect; it captures the point that government guides the comportment of others by acting upon their hopes, desires, or milieu (Foucault, 1991; Inda, 2005). According to Foucault, this kind of governance became increasingly crucial for the political elite when the sovereign power of monarchy was gradually replaced by a constellation in which the art of government consists in managing public opinion and the support of several factions of society (Foucault, 2007, 2008). The same has been said about governance at a global scale: National states adopt global standards and policy models not because they are coerced to do so but primarily because governments are convinced that it is good for them, and hence, global governance works particularly through knowledge production and consultancy (Alasuutari, 2011; Buduru & Pal, 2010; Radcliffe, 2010). While there is growing interest in considering governance as a field in which actors work upon each other’s conceptions, aspirations, and motivations, there isn’t a satisfactory approach of what we call epistemic governance as a set of ­processes describing how this happens. Several research traditions touch on governance and policymaking from this perspective, but the crux of the matter needs to be better unpacked, which is the task of this book. When thinking about relevant previous scholarship, framing theory captures part of the problematique by focusing on how “opinions can be arbitrarily manipulated by how issues are framed” (Chong & Druckman, 2007, p. 104) so that “different meanings compete for support” (Fiss & Hirsch, 2005, p. 30). Building on the seminal work by Goffman (1974), this tradition emphasizes the use of “schemata of interpretation” by individuals to understand and act in the world around them. The concept of framing has become a mainstay in media research to emphasize how journalists select from a mass of information to design content that suits a particular audience. The theory has also become popular in political and sociological research, for instance on social movements (Benford & Snow, 2000; Kubal, 1998; Snow & Benford, 1992). Here, it explains how collective action is organized in one way rather than another through the contested “core framing tasks” of diagnosis, prognosis, and mobilization. This research ­tradition also stresses the effect of the mass media on public opinion (Entman, 1993; Scheufele, 2006). What has become crucial in such research is that frames used in a particular issue are embedded in larger institutional contexts and practices,

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1 Introduction

entwined with and reflected in actors’ tacit presuppositions of the world, which also constitute actors themselves (cf. Glaeser, 2011). Consequently, governance that acts upon people’s understandings not only consists in daily framing contests of meaning; epistemic governance speaks to and evokes actors’ deep-seated values and beliefs, and we argue that success in epistemic governance is based on those paradigmatic assumptions.5 The importance of the institutional context in understanding power and governance that functions through actors’ epistemic premises has also been addressed in some other approaches to governance. For instance, the epistemic communities’ approach has stressed the role of scientists and policy experts whom policymakers in different states turn to for advice: When a network of professionals, with recognized expertise and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within a particular domain, shares a set of normative and principled beliefs, they influence the coordination of state policies (Dunlop, 2009; Haas, 1992a, 1992b; H. T. Miller & Fox, 2001). Likewise, attending to the global shaping of national policies, policy diffusion (Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996, 2000) and policy transfer (Simmons & Elkins, 2004) research shows that the same global models are enacted in different national states, drawing on and enhancing a global epistemic community. The neoinstitutionalist world society theory tradition makes a similar point by maintaining that in fact national states function as a kind of epistemic community, sharing norms and knowledge that comprise a rationalized world culture (J. W. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). Consequently, states voluntarily enact the same global models. In a similar manner, building on Gramsci’s famous idea of hegemony as “intellectual and moral leadership,” critical policy studies examine domination by way of inclusion and exclusion in political agendas (Howarth, 2010). Furthermore, following in the footsteps of Foucault, the governmentality research tradition (Dean, 1999; Dean & Hindess, 1998; Rose, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2007) has studied the effects of public policies on people’s mentalities, which shape individuals as willing and docile subjects. Scholarship in this tradition has analyzed the rationales and effects of public policies on individuals’ mentalities (see, e.g., Dean, 1998; Rose, 2000). They show that the self-regulating

5A

similar observation is made by Fiss and Hirsch (2005), who argue that success in changing the framing of an issue is based on actors’ ability to utilize people’s sense-making, which they link to the structural contexts in which framing activities occur. We disagree that the larger context should be equated with “objective” structural facts such as economic factors, but we do sympathize with the need to move ontologically beyond meaning contests.

Scope of the Epistemic Governance Approach

11

capacities of subjects, created by different indirect “technologies of government,” are important for governing in liberal democratic societies, even extending to controlling populations beyond the state’s purview (Rose & Miller, 1992). Such lines of previous scholarship give us a good general picture of the complexities of governance in current global conditions. Yet, while scholars generally agree that a simple conception of power as a property held by one actor does not work in the global system, each school of thought seems to have its own subtext that claims who, or which more or less abstract actor, pulls the strings behind the scenes. For example, the epistemic communities approach stresses the influence of scientists and experts, and in much of governmentality scholarship power is attributed to neoliberalism and its veiled technologies of government, whereas many studies using framing theory ascribe key agency to the media. Similarly, policy diffusion research emphasizes knowledge innovators while critical policy studies stress the nodes of capital. In world society theory, the power holder is more abstract, since power is ascribed to “world culture,” with “world models” as its embodiments and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) as its agents (Boli & Thomas, 1999) but, symptomatically, world society theory has been criticized for ignoring the question of power (Beckfield, 2008). These theories all make valid points about actors or factors that impact social change, but they tend to brush aside the question about the particular ways in which actors influence the comportment of others by working on their beliefs and aspirations. The epistemic governance approach can be combined with such perspectives to gain more insight into the processes by which people become convinced in the first place of what courses of action to follow, or how to steer an organization or society.

But, Is Governance “Just” Epistemic? Since we propose that governance has an epistemic aspect you might ask, what about sheer violence and force? Consider the government authorities using police force to evict villagers from their homes and seize the land from them. What is epistemic in such use of force, or does it fall outside the scope of the epistemic governance approach? For the direct target population, such an operation does not represent epistemic governance in that its aim is not to influence the villagers’ conception of the situation at hand; it only guarantees that the land becomes available for other uses. But we stress that all acts that aim to change the existing conditions in society are intertwined with people’s perceptions and beliefs. For instance, violence

12

1 Introduction

used against the protesters also sends a signal to the rest of the villagers that resisting the authorities is futile. The use of force is also normally legitimated. For example, in China land grabbing from the farmers is possible because under Chinese property law, rural land is collectively owned, and village leaders, developers, and local governments conspire to end the farmers’ 30-year lease contract, take the land, and change it into what is characterized as “urban land,” which the local government can then sell (Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 2010). Furthermore, force and violence are normally used to change the situation in society, the rules of the game so to speak. When a growing proportion of the local population becomes urban dwellers, this has tremendous effects on people’s conceptions and habits. We can say that the epistemic governance approach is relevant for the analysis of all kinds of operations and struggles by which different actors aspire to affect the direction social change takes locally or globally. It is most directly relevant when we study the ways actors try to influence others’ conceptions and beliefs, but that does not mean that the acts in case need to comprise speeches or written statements. People’s views, sensibilities, and behavior are also affected by direct action, such as demonstrations or, indeed, by the use of force. And even if force is used only to remove an obstacle and end resistance, the epistemic governance approach can be applied to analyzing the effects policies have on people’s mentality—which has been the core object of governmentality studies (see, e.g., M. Dean, 1999, 2002; P. Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1996, 1999b; Rose, O’Malley, & Valverde, 2006). From this example, it is clear that epistemic governance is not a theory to replace others that identify who wields power and to what end. Irrespective of where such theories may place those calling the shots (boardrooms, courtrooms, or war rooms), epistemic governance is a framework to make sense of how that power is wielded, what makes it work, and how it is embedded in the social reality around us. It is, of course, evident that many other factors change people’s behavior than intentional acts aimed at influencing them. The economy is a prime example: Myriad choices by businesses and individual consumers pursuing their own interest comprise the market, the fluctuations, and trends of which affect people’s living conditions on a global scale. The choices individuals make in the market are mostly adaptive rather than meant to influence others. The same could be suggested about cultural trends and fashions: new styles in clothing or popular music pop up somewhere, to be picked up and followed by large crowds. However, even if a phenomenon or state of affairs has come about unintentionally, actors can utilize it in convincing others about a proper or necessary way to respond to it. Therefore, scrutinizing all processes and phenomena that affect

But, Is Governance “Just” Epistemic?

13

change is important for the study of governance because actors utilize them to influence others. For instance, consumers’ decisions can be politicized, and consequently, consumer movements and corporate social responsibility have become part of the field of politics and governance. Besides, as Foucault emphasized, the art of government he called governmentality has the economy as a specific domain of reality and the population as the given field of intervention (Foucault, 2007, p. 108), which is evident for instance in the centrality of taxation and other economic incentives in steering people’s choices. Epistemic governance also works by speaking to and affecting people’s emotions. For instance, commitment to a leader and to the idea that we belong to a community with shared interests are typically reinforced through emotions, built and worked on in public rituals. The tacit logic of rites is that participants sanctify sacred persons or things by observing formalized rules in approaching them (Durkheim, 1995). As Bell (1997, pp. 155–159) notes, since rituals aim to convey an air of sacredness, they often borrow elements that have been sanctified by older rituals. Actors also borrow it from other charismatic figures and emotionally touching, symbolically powerful performances and artefacts. For example, signifying youthfulness, reform and even revolt, campaign songs have become a carefully picked, important part of US presidential election campaigns, and strategists invite support from a host of film and music stars (Waldman, 2003). The epistemic governance approach fits well to analyzing how rituals and ritualism and, related to it, for instance heroic narratives are employed in affecting people. The creation and utilization of nonhuman objects can also be a deliberate tactic of epistemic governance. Consider speed bumps: to make drivers’ behavior safer for pedestrians, through concrete from which the bumps are built engineers “speak to” the drivers’ self-interest in avoiding damage to their cars (Latour, 1994). The natural environment—and the unintended consequences of human action on it—is equally intertwined in people’s conduct; it is a constant backdrop in the social world. For instance, because of global warming, parts of the globe can become practically uninhabitable, which forces people to adapt to the changing conditions. However, the study of epistemic governance focuses on the ways people use the natural environment and discourses on it in their efforts to change common conceptions, practices, and public policies. To reiterate, the epistemic governance approach is designed to capture the ways in which actors work upon others’ thinking and conduct. Many other factors than just deliberate attempts to influence others cause changes in society, but any change—or a constant feature of reality for that matter—can be ­harnessed in the service of epistemic governance and hence taken up as a topic in studying it. From this perspective, it should be apparent that we do not use

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1 Introduction

“epistemic” as an adjective to governance, or as a way of specifying a type of governance, but rather we consider epistemic governance almost as a single, hyphenated term.

Structure of the Book The point that governance functions by taking into account people’s notions of the social world is a powerful one. In this book, we develop a detailed description of what this interactive process consists in and how it can be applied in social research. That is, when those seeking to influence social change try to convince others, that persuasion work is generally treated as a black box. Here, we unpack that box with the framework of epistemic governance. We show that people take into account what they feel others believe (a) the social world to comprise, (b) who we as actors are in that world, and (c) what is desirable or acceptable to do in a given situation. These “objects of epistemic work” are woven into narrative “imageries” of the social world, which we describe in detail. In this sense, the book does not seek to identify who governs the world but rather how, or by what means, that governance takes place. We do so by focusing on three important arenas of social change in the modern world: (1) parliaments, which debate laws that constitute the bulk of reforms; (2) international organizations that circulate global norms, like human rights, worldwide; and (3) social movements that mobilize street action for change as well as NGOs. The book is organized as follows. In Chapter 2, we describe the epistemic governance approach in further detail. Starting from the perspective of an actor in a social situation, the chapter describes the three objects of epistemic work that she takes into account and seeks to influence for change. It also underlines two theoretical aspects to these objects: a paradigmatic (background, or ontological) component and a practical (or measured) one. In the following chapter, we discuss how actors work upon the conceptions of others by relying on certain imageries that they feel their audience thinks with. Building on the sociology of knowledge perspective of root metaphors (Brown, 1989), the chapter describes three fundamental narrative imageries that those seeking social change rely on to build a case for what to do in any given situation. These imageries are of (a) national societies modernizing on a path of development, (b) power organized as a hierarchy, and (c) the world as divided into competing, or warring, tribes. The chapter also shows how social theorizing is deeply integrated with social action: Both sets of discourses are deeply interlinked and grounded in the same narrative imageries. It then highlights, with examples,

Structure of the Book

15

how these narrative imageries are deployed in justifications of social changes at multiple levels. To conclude the theoretical discussion of the book, in Chapter 4 we show how the epistemic governance approach challenges common conceptions of power and leads to a reformulation of the concept of authority. We point out that theorists and political actors tend to think of authority in terms of Weber’s definition, which brushes aside authority as a discursive tool used to convince others of a course of action. We identify four types of such authority that are referred to by those seeking social change: capacity-based, ontological, moral, and charismatic. In each case, we show how agents of change expect that those they are trying to convince will accept these authorities. Chapter 5 begins the “empirical” core of this book, unpacking how the epistemic governance approach brings new insight into important realms of social change. This chapter analyzes the role of international organizations in social change. Most scholars generally agree that international organizations set the norms on which nations assess their change or plan reforms. Yet, by taking a “global” view, such approaches brush aside how these organizations are utilized at the local level to justify particular courses of social change. We show how local actors convince others of a course of action by describing international organizations as somehow “above” national or local agencies. The chapter also discusses how international organizations themselves generate authority by portraying the state of the world in “unbiased” and knowledge-based reports. We illustrate our analysis with the case of OECD and its impact on education policymaking in member and non-member countries. In Chapter 6, we turn to another crucial site of social change in the world: national parliaments that deliberate on new laws to reform societies. For politicians promoting or opposing new legislation, the primary challenge is to convince the majority of the legislature, and citizens at large, that what they propose is in the interest of the whole nation. We use epistemic governance to explain how parliamentarians around the world take into account others’ assumptions and work on them, and we show how the naturalized imagery of modernization is often assumed and played upon to move an agenda. The discussion is illustrated by ongoing research, including on the worldwide spread of bioethics committees, children’s ombudsmen institutions, higher education, and parliamentary declarations of religious heresy. In Chapter 7, we focus on social movements and non-governmental organizations as an arena for social change. From an epistemic governance perspective, activists in movements or NGOs also face the same challenge that those in other arenas of social change do: how to convince others of a particular course of

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1 Introduction

action. In fact, even the activist herself must appeal to the epistemic assumptions others hold about the world and what is right to do. The chapter discusses how epistemic governance can shed light on understanding how social movements and NGOs build a case for change, and when they are particularly successful, illustrating this by examples from ongoing research on the climate movement. Finally, in Chapter 8, we collect the insights from the cases discussed earlier to outline the types of research designs that epistemic governance opens up. We emphasize the point that epistemic governance is both a theoretical framework and a methodological toolbox rooted in Foucauldian discourse analysis. We show how epistemic governance builds on Foucault’s insights into power/knowledge to design research that can unpack processes of social change in a variety of social change settings.

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Miller, H. T., & Fox, C. J. (2001). The Epistemic Community. Administration & Society, 32(6), 668–685. Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing Economic Life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31. Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1994). On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise Under Advanced Liberalism. History of the Human Sciences, 7(3), 29–64. https://doi. org/10.1177/095269519400700302. Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1997). Mobilizing the Consumer: Assembling the Subject of Consumption. Theory, Culture & Society, 14(1), 1–36. https://doi. ­ org/10.1177/026327697014001001. Naím, M. (2013). The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be. New York: Basic Books. Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (1st ed.). New York: Public Affairs. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Parsons, T. (1964). Evolutionary Universals in Society. American Sociological Review, 29(3), 339–357. Parsons, T. (1966). Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Pawson, R. (2006). Evidence-Based Policy: A Realist Perspective. London: Sage. Radcliffe, S. (2010). Non-rational Aspects of the Competition State—The Case of Policy Consultancy in Australia. Policy Studies, 31(1), 117–128. Rhodes, R. A. W. (1996). The New Governance: Governing Without Government. Political Studies, 44(4), 652–667. Rose, N. (1996). Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1999a). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Free ­Association Press. Rose, N. (1999b). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (2000). Community, Citizenship, and the Third Way. American Behavioral ­Scientist, 43(9), 1395–1411. Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rose, N., & Miller, P. (1992). Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of ­Government. The British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 173–205. Rose, N., O’Malley, P., & Valverde, M. (2006). Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2(1), 83. Scheufele, B. (2006). Frames, Schemata and News Reporting. Communications: The ­European Journal of Communication Research, 31, 65–83. Simmons, B. A., & Elkins, Z. (2004). The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy. The American Political Science Review, 98(1), 171–189. Snow, D. A., & Benford, R. D. (1992). Master Frames and Cycles of Protest. In A. Morris & C. McClurg Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (pp. 133–155). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Stone, D. (2000). Non-Governmental Policy Transfer: The Strategies of Independent Policy Institutes. Governance, 13(1), 45–70. Stone, D. (2001). Think Tanks, Global Lesson-Drawing and Networking Social Policy Ideas. Global Social Policy, 1(3), 338–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/14680 1810100100304. Stone, D. (2002). Introduction: Global Knowledge and Advocacy Networks. Global ­Networks, 2(1), 1–12. Waldman, T. (2003). We All Want to Change the World: Rock and Politics from Elvis to Eminem (1st ed.). Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing. Walton, D. N. (1997). Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Zapp, M. (2017a). The Scientization of the World Polity: International Organizations and the Production of Scientific Knowledge, 1950–2015. International Sociology, 33(1), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580917742003. Zapp, M. (2017b). The World Bank and Education: Governing (Through) Knowledge. International Journal of Educational Development, 53, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ijedudev.2016.11.007.

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Epistemic Work

• This chapter introduces the framework of epistemic governance that builds on the point that actors who aim to be influential in politics attempt to gauge and affect others’ views of reality. • The chapter shows that all actors influential in affecting social change operate by utilizing a limited number of discursive strategies, in broad paradigmatic as well as in focused practical dimensions. • It argues that such agents of change engage in epistemic work actors focused on three aspects of the social world: (a) ontology of the environment, (b) actor identifications, and (c) norms and ideals; in other words, these are constructions of what the world is, who we are, and what is good or desirable.

The examples in Chapter 1 showed the importance of perceptions in decisionmaking. As we discussed, it is of course feasible, and indeed common, to think that actors’ ability to influence others’ behavior is based on structural sources of power such as money or military force (see, e.g., Mann, 2012). Yet, from the actors’ perspective, it all boils down to their conceptions about the facts and about themselves as actors: What they are able or forced to do, and what their desires and obligations are. Therefore, it is apparent that—whether they are self-conscious of it or not—actors who aim to be influential in politics attempt This chapter draws on previously published work by the authors: Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014). Epistemic governance: An approach to the politics of policymaking. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 67–84. © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_2

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to affect others’ views of reality. In the previous chapter, we discussed how some strands of previous research on governance have approached such an insight but, in the attempt to point out who is governing the globe, have rarely described in any detail how this happens. In this chapter, we set out a framework to make sense of how people’s perceptions are taken into account and worked upon in decision-making processes at multiple levels. Our claim is that this is a more or less invariant framework that grasps the epistemic nature of governance, to the extent that there is a situation that may be classified as governance. That is, we argue that an epistemic understanding of how decision-making takes place can be applied to any situation in any historical period that can be analyzed as governance. In that sense, the framework is both a theoretical description and a methodological guide to designing research. Again, the epistemic approach to studying governance is not another, competing theory about the sources of social power, but rather an analytic layer that helps unpack how power is exercised. Here, we describe the invariant framework, while in the next chapter we set out the ways in which it can be used to understand governance in modern world society.

Objects of Epistemic Work So how does epistemic governance work? To illustrate it, consider a politician arguing for a reform, say a new law. In any given country, the politician would provide sources of authority aimed at convincing the citizens that the current state of affairs is unsatisfactory and that the proposed measures to improve the situation will be effective. Depending on the case and the country in question, the politician would appeal to reliable sources of evidence, experts’ or other authorities’ views, to what she assumes are widely acknowledged values and principles and based on all that she would argue that passing the law will be in the best interest of the nation. The opponents would naturally challenge the politician’s case by shaking different elements of the line of argument (see, e.g., Alasuutari, 2013; Kurz, Augoustinos, & Crabb, 2010; Perelman, 1968; Van Der Valk, 2003). This kind of discourse about political issues, the pros and cons of the policies being debated, is part and parcel of epistemic governance in the sense that to pass a new law, policymakers need to win sufficient support for it within their constituency and among stakeholders. Similarly, those seeking a large following through the media, or wanting to mobilize activists in a social movement, likewise need to appeal to people’s support. Such support is sought for by what we call epistemic work as a reference to the particular techniques used by actors engaged in affecting views and hegemonic definitions of the situation at hand.

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By talking about work and techniques, we do not necessarily denote selfconsciousness. An actor in the context here, any agent engaged in attempt to effect or comment on social change, does not always or even often try to work on epistemic premises. Rather, we suggest that in most cases, discourse is aimed at concrete issues and targets, and the actors promoting a particular policy or course of action believe that the epistemic premises on which it is grounded are well accepted and hence solid grounds for the proposal. Indeed, epistemic governance is most effective when its mechanisms and premises are left unnoticed. What are these premises? When considering the above example, most existing research would pinpoint the way in which arguments are grounded on facts. If, however, we pay more careful attention to such discourses, we can notice that epistemic work does not consist only in ontological claims. Speakers also appeal to commonly shared values, and they address their audience as a community with shared interests, such as the nation. Indeed, based on existing empirical research of national policymaking, we find that there is analytical unity in the techniques by which decision-makers generally get convinced of, and in turn try to convince others of, solutions. Epistemic work can be targeted on three different aspects of the social world: What is the environment, who are the actors, and what is virtuous or acceptable. In actual practice, these three objects of epistemic work—ontology of the environment, actors and identifications, and norms and ideals—appear in combination so that a single argument by proponents, opponents, or analysts of a particular policy or political event deals with more than one aspect simultaneously. In fact, we propose a strong claim here: There is no epistemic work that does not entail all three objects. This is obviously the case with ontology: It is inconceivable to think of epistemic work on actors or norms that are not embedded in some claims about reality. But it is also true of the other two objects of epistemic work. To argue what needs to be done on the basis of the current state of affairs always includes a normative element, an idea about good or decent. And to say anything about what must be done implies actors and what they identify with. As to how actors employ these three dimensions of epistemic work, we suggest a distinction can be made between paradigmatic and practical dimensions. By the paradigmatic dimension, we refer to basic ontological premises. The fact that we think of “society” or “economy” as objects of governance indicates an initial grasp, or assumption, of what these categories mean. This ontological aspect of what Charles Taylor (2002) calls the “background understanding” is a pre-conceptual basis on which our further understanding of facts and measurements about a particular policy is founded. Particular actions make sense only in relation to this broader, deeper grasp on our reality, just as that grasp can only be

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realized in specific actions. Of course, in our account the paradigmatic-practical distinction is an analytical one rather than an ontological “fact.” Another way of putting this is to relate to sense-making: The paradigmatic dimension is akin to institutional conditions within which the routinized practices make sense, while the conditions themselves can only make sense in relation to the specific practices that institute and reproduce them.

Ontology of the Environment Affecting the shared view of what is a truthful and accurate picture of the situation at hand is an essential element of epistemic work in most cases. If, for instance, a politician is able to show that her nation is not functioning well in a policy area, it is a strong argument for a reform or change of government. In such a case, the government may either try to prove that reform measures are already underway or present evidence that challenges the bleak picture of the situation, in either case reinforcing the ontology of the environment. For instance, Zeev Rosenhek (2013) has pointed out how diagnoses and explanations of the ongoing global financial crisis by the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank built their epistemic authority and reinforced ideas of the nature of the global financial system, which led to particular policy prescriptions. Considering ontology of the social world as the object of epistemic work, we propose that there are two aspects to, or dimensions in, it: paradigmatic and practical. Arguments used to justify or criticize a proposal relying on ontological claims often entail elements along both these dimensions. To take an example of paradigmatic premises used in political argumentation, one of the ways to justify a reform in a national context is to resort to the idea of modernization as a natural process that steers national trajectories in the right direction. This understanding of societies following a law-governed trajectory is coupled with a Darwinian evolutionary idea, according to which the direction of social change is determined by the acts with which states and other actors adapt to changing external conditions (Alasuutari, 2011). Presuming an a-cultural view of societies “evolving” through a universal developmental process, this view relies heavily on the authority of science and Enlightenment notions of progress (Taylor, 1999). This cultural model implies that a reform is tangential (on this concept, see Qadir, 2011) with development by referring to it as an act that “modernizes” the area in question. As a culturally ingrained background understanding it feeds off and reinforces how, in a number of tacit ways, our popular concepts promote reforms and newness that are presented as better than the old or existing state of affairs. Thus, for instance,

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social change is routinely called development, differences between different countries are placed within an evolutionary continuum by talking about developing and developed countries, and existing practices may be deemed as “outdated.” It is also common to refer to different countries as “leaders” or “laggards” in their policies, thus implying that the direction of change is already known and that different countries and cultures can be placed in a quasi-temporal order regarding their developmental stage. Actors may, of course, take part in political argumentation by challenging such paradigmatic premises of the social world and appealing to other ones. But considering the tacit character of background understanding, it is probably more common that the basic premises are not questioned and, instead, participants are engaged in epistemic work in the practical dimension while reproducing the epistemic regime. That is, they produce knowledge based on the established paradigmatic foundation and utilize existing facts and measurements of society. In other words, actors typically try to appeal to authoritative accounts of reality, which is why science and research-based institutions play a significant role. It is not only that science has an authoritative position in definitions of reality. In addition, knowledge production that takes place in an institution that is independent from direct government or other political control is considered more credible than other knowledge claims, facts, and figures. For the same reason, government research institutes or intergovernmental organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) pay so much explicit attention to ascertaining that their knowledge production is unbiased by a particular political agenda and that the facts they provide are based on transparent scientific procedures. This does not of course mean that “evidence-based policies” justified by such knowledge claims are removed from the sphere of politics; it is rather that political actors try to justify their views by science both in defining a problem and in ending up with what can be called policy-based evidence (Black, 2001; Hughes, 2007; Naughton, 2005). The way in which OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is used to justify reforms in national contexts is a case in point (Pons, 2012; Rautalin & Alasuutari, 2009; Takayama, 2010). Influencing actors’ conceptions of reality and utilizing them in decision-making does not mean that participants need to accept the definition of a situation that outlines political decisions. What is at stake here is the belief of political actors (leaders and popular activists or commentators) that a particular definition of a situation is accepted broadly enough to be used when influencing others. Whether or not individuals believe in assumptions about the ontology of the environment, what is crucial here is their action based on the belief that those assumptions are socially established: They know that this is the way people think of things.

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Affecting the view of decision-makers is important, but the public view creates resources or constraints for political actors (Adut, 2012; Hajer, 2009) particularly in liberal democracies, which is why the media and the public sphere are important in epistemic work.

Actors and Identifications Another key aspect of epistemic governance is to work upon people’s understandings of themselves and others as actors: Who they are, what community they belong to, and what other actors there are in the social world. Both national and international politics and governance are commonly seen as activities in which different entities or stakeholder groups seek their own interests and in which future policies depend on the relative strengths of the entities in question. But such a view ignores the identity politics by which actors try to influence each ­other’s identifications with and definitions of the groups in question. When a collective actor such as a nation-state or a political party is well established, it appears to be a given entity, but such groups’ existence is conditioned on p­ eople’s identification with and commitment to them, which entails epistemic work focused on actors and identifications. In this case, too, we can identify a paradigmatic dimension of background understanding on the one hand and a practical dimension of knowledge ­production or other practices based on the paradigmatic face, on the other. The paradigmatic dimension concerns established conceptions about actors and agency in the social world and in contemporary societies, particularly assumptions concerning the constellation of forces involved in politics and policymaking. These background assumptions entail ideas about agency, such as an individual as homo economicus rationally pursuing her individual or group interests, and concepts that are used in conceiving of groups and stakeholders such as gender, class, nation, ethnicity, or religion. The paradigmatic aspect of this epistemic work may invoke a particular discourse by which to describe the situation, whereas work in the practical dimension will build arguments based on the tacit assumptions about actors and their identifications. In addition to such ontological claims, epistemic work upon actors and identifications focuses on making people identify with a proposed group or ­ strengthening their association with it, thus affecting people’s activity. Such epistemic work on actors and their identifications is not restricted to language and speech. It may also include ritualistic aspects, which function through individuals’ bodily experiences and through the emotions they arouse. That is, creating a team

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spirit and identification with the group in question is strengthened with the means of rituals, comprising sacred symbols and highly formalized modes of talk and behavior, often coupled with music (Alasuutari, 2004; C. Bell, 1997; Bloch, 1989). Strengthening and appealing to the nation and national interest is a prime example of epistemic work on actors and identifications. It is so prevalent in everyday life and national political discourse that it easily goes unnoticed as a self-evident framework within which to view the world and to debate social change. Deemed banal nationalism by Michael Billig (1995), its core aspect is identification with the nation, which is something that nation-states reproduce by invented traditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983) or commemorative rituals (Spillman, 1997). According to Billig, banal nationalism is also and most successfully reproduced through mundane “flaggings” of the nation in routine everyday communication that policymakers then draw on when promoting their views. This kind of rhetoric about the nation as an imagined community (Anderson, 1991) with shared interests is endemic throughout the world, for instance, in environmental policy discourse. Subscribing to “ecological modernization” theory and rhetoric (Spaargaren & Mol, 1992; York & Rosa, 2003), all countries and economic areas such as the European Union seem to aim at becoming world leaders in clean energy technology, thus benefiting from “green growth.” A similar identification of actors with an even more imagined community is evident in the way conceptions of the world as divided into competing civilizational blocs shaped the effect of the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005 (Eide, Kunelius, & Phillips, 2008; Lindekilde, Mouritsen, & Zapata-Barrero, 2009). Informing national politics as well as international diplomacy, the event was used by actors to discursively construct a new institutionalized player, the ummah or “Muslim world,” to which actors related themselves in various ways (Powers, 2008; Saunders, 2008). Such examples illustrate well how constructing and appealing to actors’ identities functions as a tool of politics and governance. There is, of course, a long-noted political strategy of labeling certain actors as illegitimate (communist, capitalist, terrorist, etc.). However, we wish to draw attention here to, so to speak, the “positive” aspect of appealing to actor identifications in order to motivate legitimate action. So speakers may appeal to a seemingly self-evident community such as the nation, within which members are supposed to have the same interests. Building and strengthening such patriotism is in itself a powerful means of epistemic governance. On the other hand, appealing to the shared interest is a strategy by which different parties and stakeholder groups advance their own interests while also defining themselves as collective actors in such a way that a large number of citizens supports and identifies with them. The aim is to present partial group interests

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as the common interest and hence to be a major player in epistemic governance. The way in which the new terminology of “war on terror” was domesticated across the world as “our” issue, relevant to the survival of each nation, almost independently, is another good example of this (Qadir & Alasuutari, 2013).

Norms and Ideals Epistemic work is, lastly, focused on people’s norms and ideals and the way they are applied to particular cases. If and when an actor is able to convince others about the right thing to do by appealing to a general ideal or principle and what it obliges or allows people to do in a given situation, it is a persuasive way to steer their behavior. This is similar to the point Foucault was approaching in his later work regarding the construction of ethics and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1980). Commonly held values and principles, such as rationality, equality, freedom, and fraternity or loyalty toward fellow citizens, are also part of world culture, which is one further reason for global isomorphism, although naturally norms do not diffuse in isolation but as part of ontological and epistemological packages. On top of such general values, actors engaged in this form of epistemic work create ever-new ideals such as “child-centeredness” or “sustainability,” which often quickly circulate across the world when they become popular and actors justify their political goals by applying them. Again, we can identify a paradigmatic aspect of background understanding of norms and ideals. Any particular notion of what is good or desirable in a given situation presupposes a broader sense of what “good” and “desirable” mean and a sense that actions can be classified as such. This typically includes a notion of morality based on natural rights, in which people have mutual rights and obligations to one another, as well as a sense of a moral hierarchy of those rights and obligations and also whether they apply reciprocally or vary by social position. Furthermore, as Charles Taylor (2002) points out about the moral background, this paradigmatic dimension comprises a grasp on what makes particular ideals realizable and not just utopic. Rhetoric used to convince others of virtuous and desirable actions reinforces this paradigmatic background understanding, which is materialized in practical arguments for or against a particular action. In this second, practical dimension of argumentation, too, assumptions about particular norms and ideals may be explicit or implicit. Norms and ideals used in justifying a course of action often derive their rhetorical force from their apparent self-evidence, hence setting the agenda for political struggles. To take an example, the noble objective of providing all children

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with the opportunity to fulfill their potential is prevalently used in promoting early childhood education policies, despite huge variations in actual policy objectives (Alasuutari & Alasuutari, 2012; Mahon, 2010). Epistemic work focusing on norms and ideals may also utilize understandings about sacred, highly emotional or religious principles, of which the Danish cartoon controversy is a good example. Many Western participants in that conflict articulated the protests as an outrage against freedom of speech as a highly valued principle, whereas most Muslims interpreted the publication of the cartoons as baiting and blasphemous. Epistemic work drawing on norms and ideals is not detached, however, from claims on rationality and scientific evidence. For instance, universal principles such as freedom of speech or other human rights are often considered as ­self-evident starting points and functional requirements of social and economic development in any society, backed up not only by United Nations’ declarations but also by scientific authorities. The same is true of new ideals such as individually tailored education or support. In particular, the catchwords that “fly” and spread throughout the world are not considered as norms honored only by a group of believers but rather as upshots of rational, evidence-based development toward a better world. They appear to be self-evident values, which is why they function so well in promoting reforms articulated with them. Appealing to commonly valued ideals and articulating a reform with them is an effective way to promote the reform in question, but it is not, of course, the only mode of epistemic work upon norms and ideals. Policymakers may for instance point out that the current state of affairs is in contradiction with an international treaty or declaration, which is why a reform is needed to avoid sanctions or to maintain the international reputation of the country in question. Another aspect to norms and ideals is affect or emotion. In many cases, affect is a target of rhetorical strategies employed by people to convince them of the need or desire for a particular step. That is, politicians or social movement leaders will often seek to impact the emotional sentiments of their colleagues or the public by offering horrifying statistics or stories or appealing to common emotions such as care of children. However, there is also a paradigmatic aspect to emotion. Whatever the argument being made, and however it is being made, the appeal to take a certain step is in any case based on people’s desires and sense of what is virtuous. Naturally, a particular incident may involve a more or less rhetorically o­ bvious emotional appeal. Yet, in any case, those seeking social change assume that ­certain calls for actions will evoke desires or positive emotions like elevation, while others will evoke distaste or negative emotions like sorrow. In this sense, as we discussed in the first chapter, the seemingly sharp distinction between emotion

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and cognition is ill conceived when it comes to analyzing governance. That is, in the real world of governance there is no separate appeal to emotions that is not coupled with a policy rationale, nor are there reasoned policy arguments that do not also entail an affective component. The emotional aspect of appeals is closely related to normative ideals, such as when arguing for taking care of unaccompanied refugee children or for the sanctity of the liberal democratic principle of free speech.

Objects of Epistemic Work … at Work We have shown in this chapter that governance works by way of influencing other actors’ beliefs and views of the way in which the social world is organized, the role and subject positions of actors, and the nature of ethical or valued goals of social change. In other words, epistemic work revolves around constructions of what the world is, who we are, and what is good or desirable. When anybody attempts to affect change, including by way of commentary, they resort to challenging or influencing these three conceptions. As we claimed earlier, there is no epistemic work that does not operate on all these three objects. We also distinguished between paradigmatic and practical dimensions in each object of epistemic work: a broader, more amorphous background understanding, distinguished from elements of narrower, more focused actions in which that understanding is realized. This approach to epistemic governance, again, does not posit a new theory of power but rather pushes existing theories to include a thicker description of the politics of decision-making, a processual layer of epistemic work that most theories tend to brush aside. For example, from an epistemic governance perspective we would argue that even rational actors depicted by realist theories will attempt to influence the definition of the situation, what actors should identify with, and what is virtuous or acceptable. That is, we urge realist actor-centered theories to acknowledge contexts, webs of meaning, and epistemic assumptions. At the same time, we argue that structural theories need to acknowledge interpersonal meaning construction and actors’ agency when describing the processes of policy reform. We see that the ways actors attempt to convince each other about a course of action are based on globally shared epistemic assumptions about the social world. But this does not mean that world leaders are unthinking conformists ­hypocritically enacting foreign models that they know won’t fit their local context. Rather, world cultural ideas and ideals form the premises that actors appeal

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to in various combinations when articulating their goals and aspirations. In that sense, world culture forms the global field of politics and its various national and local subfields, within which actors struggle for their views, benefits, and influence. This field is most evident in policymaking, for instance, in parliaments debating new legislation, but the same framework applies to other arenas where social change is wrought most forcefully, such as in social movements or in the media. This consideration of epistemic governance is also not yet another refined theory about some people “high up” or behind the screens pulling strings. ­ Rather, our purpose has been to indicate how conceptions of the social world are utilized as tools of governance in the normal course of events, not necessarily with the aim of oppressing or controlling another group but as part of routine decision-making. This means that we consider epistemic governance not as something “done” by particular actors but rather as something that is analyzable in processes of decision-making. Also in line with Foucault’s broad conception of power, it is clear that ­epistemic governance does not necessarily work from a single center and is not necessarily controlled by an identifiable, elite group. Rather, actors involved in contesting definitions of situation and appropriate solutions to evolving problems end up synchronizing social change on a global scale through knowledge production, circulation, and opinion formation by institutions such as science, its c­ ultural mediators, and the media. The micrological channels that help construct and naturalize such epistemes include the mass media, educational institutions and transnational professional associations. However, much more empirical research is needed to better understand how specific institutions, and constellations of institutions, contribute to epistemic governance in a particular case. We discuss such applications in four key sites of social change in the coming chapters. Contrary to some approaches, we therefore argue that the actors who make decisions are important. Likewise, we acknowledge that some actors have access to more resources by which to influence others, and such resources may well be classified different ways, for instance, into ideological, economic, military, and political (Hall & Schroeder, 2006; Mann, 1986). Yet whether actors use, say, science, money, or tanks as their consultants, the objective in utilizing those resources is to convince others of what they want, or what they should or must do in a given situation, and such convincing is epistemic in nature in the sense that its target is people’s conceptions of reality, of themselves and others as actors and of norms and ideals. And even though actors and their resources make a difference, that is not to say that actors are a pre-given reality and hence un-constituted. Rather, we emphasize that although actors and actorhood may be constituted

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institutionally, there are no inevitable mechanisms or trends of social change that all societies must follow and that we as social scientists can discern as hiding “behind” evident social change. Change is a result of actors making decisions, or attempting to influence society, by way of the three objects of epistemic work. Of course, the way people behave in a particular situation and what repertoire of rhetoric gets used can only be said after close scrutiny. When analyzing power from this viewpoint, we need to bear in mind that affecting or maintaining hegemonic views of society is part of epistemic governance. As Foucault famously pointed out, power is particularly successful when it is able to hide its own mechanisms, and so the simple view of power as external coercion, as a pure limit set on freedom, is part of its acceptability (Foucault, 1980, p. 86). Hence, decisions are often successfully justified by picturing a “must” and a loss of sovereignty around the corner if the proposed measures are not taken. Similarly, the conclusion that a particular policy is a necessity is an outcome of a negotiation concerning the situation at hand. Affecting actors’ wishes and aspirations is perhaps most effective because the decisions that ensue appear to be untouched by relations of dominance. In other words, epistemic governance does not depict a particular form of power but rather an ever-present aspect of governance: The point is that strategies of power work on people’s conceptions of the situation. We have not examined in any detail here the kinds of notions of society that actors work on, and how they relate social-scientific conceptions and institutions to popular imageries, but this is an important part of epistemic work. Crucial to such investigations, and this way of viewing governance as ­epistemic work, is special attention to the use of particular language to create discourses that reflect the construction of epistemes wherein the view of the world and desirable actions are shaped. Understanding the discourse that generates and sustains such epistemic work becomes crucial to the analytical process of understanding how governance actually works across the world. It should be clear that, rather than attempting to attach some metaphysical “meaning” to such terms, we call for paying closer attention to the grammar of their use. It is by such examinations of epistemic work that we can move forward from more or less structuralist explanations of sources and forms of power to reveal the strategies of power at play in specific attempts to influence change in the contemporary world. In this regard, the objects of epistemic work we identify are relatively abstract categories evident in political rhetoric. That is, it is rarely the case that an ­argument or action for social change will be precisely organized along these three axes. Rather, deliberation and rhetoric in decision-making weave a narrative that works on these three objects. The narrative itself, however, combines metaphors

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and tropes that appeal to people’s senses of reality, of their place in the world, and of desirable actions. We refer to these metaphors, coupled with policy or social goals, as imageries of the social world. Indeed, we use the term “imagery” to underline precisely that these are imaged representations of the world. Philosophers from Kant on have, of course, pointed out that the ability to represent the world is at the core of human perception, interpretation, and memory and that such representations are most typically in the form of images (see, e.g., Warnock, 1976). By employing the term “imageries,” our emphasis here is that images of the social world guide what people accept as plausible accounts and actions. Furthermore, efforts to influence people or create social change work on such imageries. There need not be any strategic or sly tactic involved in invoking a particular imagery of the world when arguing for a particular course of social change. Rather, those making such arguments are themselves also culturally constituted to see the social world by way of these imageries. Yet, whatever they may “truly” believe, the point is that all governance rhetoric is founded on some such imagery. Arguments for social change are founded on a relatively limited repertoire of imageries in every epoch. In the following chapter, we discuss the three imageries that are clearly evident in decision-making in the modern world. However, our point here is that the use of imageries is an inevitable aspect of governance. That is, there is an invariant element in persuasion that we can call imageries of the social world. In the past, we may well conceive of an imagery of the social world among early Arab Muslims as an Emanation of Divine Breath or among the ancient Greeks regarding the human realm as the playing field of intemperate Gods. People would then have drawn upon such imageries quite naturally to think about the correct course of action or to feel a need to move in a certain direction. Those seeking to move their society would have also constructed their arguments or actions in line with these imageries and worked through them to convince others. Foucault’s term of episteme captures a similar notion (especially in Foucault, 1970), although he famously wavered between singular and multiple epistemes in any epoch. The point here is that the conditions of possibility for discourse to be acceptable are (1) organized as specific images, (2) woven into narrative arguments by those seeking to affect social change, and (3) targeted at the three objects of epistemic work. Such imageries may change, but the change, like that of Foucault’s epistemic regime, is epochal. Our modern world is characterized to a greater extent than ever before by a more or less shared epoch and conditions of possibility in governance. We turn next to a discussion on imageries of the social world and of the particular imageries that scaffold our epoch of social change.

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References Adut, A. (2012). A Theory of the Public Sphere. Sociological Theory, 30(4), 238–262. Alasuutari, P. (2004). Social Theory and Human Reality. London: Sage. Alasuutari, P. (2011). Modernization as a Tacit Concept Used in Governance. Journal of Political Power, 4(2), 217–235. Alasuutari, P. (2013). Interdependent Decision-Making in Practice: Justification of New Legislation in Six Nation-States. In P. Alasuutari & A. Qadir (Eds.), National ­Policy-Making: Domestication of Global Trends (pp. 25–43). London: Routledge. Alasuutari, P., & Alasuutari, M. (2012). The Domestication of Early Childhood Education Plans in Finland. Global Social Policy, 12(2), 109–128. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Rev. ed.). London: Verso. Bell, C. (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Black, N. (2001). Evidence Based Policy: Proceed with Care. British Medical Journal, 323(7307), 275–279. Bloch, M. (1989). Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology. London: Athlone Press. Eide, E., Kunelius, R., & Phillips, A. (Eds.). (2008). Transnational Media Events: The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Cilivizations. Göterborg: Nordicom. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Hajer, M. A. (2009). Authoritative Governance: Policy-Making in the Age of Mediatization. New York: Oxford University Press. Hall, J. A., & Schroeder, R. (2006). An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J., & Ranger, T. O. (Eds.). (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, C. E. (2007). Evidence-Based Policy or Policy-Based Evidence? The Role of Evidence in the Development and Implementation of the Illicit Drug Diversion ­Initiative. Drug and Alcohol Review, 26(4), 363–368. Kurz, T., Augoustinos, M., & Crabb, S. (2010). Contesting the ‘National Interest’ and Maintaining ‘Our Lifestyle’: A Discursive Analysis of Political Rhetoric Around ­Climate Change. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 601–625. Lindekilde, L., Mouritsen, P., & Zapata-Barrero, R. (2009). The Muhammad Cartoons Controversy in Comparative Perspective. Ethnicities, 9(3), 291–313. Mahon, R. (2010). After Neo-Liberalism? The OECD, the World Bank and the Child. Global Social Policy, 10(2), 172–192. Mann, M. (1986). The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, M. (2012). The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945–2011. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Naughton, M. (2005). ‘Evidence-Based Policy’ and the Government of the Criminal Justice System—Only if the Evidence Fits! Critical Social Policy, 25(1), 47–69. Perelman, C. (1968). What Is Legal Logic? Israel Law Review, 3(1), 1–6. Pons, X. (2012). Going Beyond the ‘PISA Shock’ Discourse: An Analysis of the C ­ ognitive Reception of PISA in Six European Countries, 2001–2008. European Educational Research Journal, 11(2), 206–226. Powers, S. (2008). Examining the Danish Cartoon Affair: Mediatized Cross-Cultural ­Tensions? Media, War & Conflict, 1(3), 339–359. Qadir, A. (2011). Tangential Modernity: Culture of Higher Education Reform in Pakistan. Tampere: University of Tampere. Qadir, A., & Alasuutari, P. (2013). Taming Terror: Domestication of the War on Terror in the Pakistan Media. Asian Journal of Communication, 23(6), 575–589. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/01292986.2013.764905. Rautalin, M., & Alasuutari, P. (2009). The Uses of the National PISA Results by Finnish Officials in Central Government. Journal of Education Policy, 24(5), 2009–2556. Rosenhek, Z. (2013). Diagnosing and Explaining the Global Financial Crisis: Central Banks, Epistemic Authority, and Sense Making. International Journal of Politics, ­Culture, and Society, 26(3), 255–272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9144-9. Saunders, R. A. (2008). The Ummah as Nation: A Reappraisal in the Wake of the Cartoons Affair. Nations and Nationalism, 14(2), 303–321. Spaargaren, G., & Mol, A. P. J. (1992). Sociology, Environment, and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of Social Change. Society & Natural Resources, 5(4), 323–344. Spillman, L. (1997). Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Takayama, K. (2010). Politics of Externalization in Reflexive Times: Reinventing Japanese Education Reform Discourses Through ‘Finnish PISA Success’. Comparative Education Review, 54(1), 51–75. Taylor, C. (1999). Two Theories of Modernity. Public Culture, 11, 153–174. Taylor, C. (2002). Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Culture, 14(1), 91–124. Van Der Valk, I. (2003). Right-Wing Parliamentary Discourse on Immigration in France. Discourse and Society, 14(3), 309–348. Warnock, M. (1976). Imagination. London: Faber and Faber. York, R., & Rosa, E. A. (2003). Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory: Institutional Efficacy, Case Study Evidence, Units of Analysis, and the Pace of ­Eco-efficiency. Organization and Environment, 16(3), 273–288.

3

Imageries of the Social World

• This chapter discusses imageries of the social world as a key component in the epistemic aspect of governance. • It presents imageries as pictures. • Grounded in a constructionist view on language, the chapter argues that popular and political rhetoric is bound to social-scientific conceptions of reality through uses of root metaphors that are, in turn, woven into convincing imageries of social reality. • In addition to the well-known, culturally constructed imagery of social change as driven by functional requirements of modernization, two other imageries are identified: society as a hierarchy and the social world as comprising competing blocs.

In the previous chapter, we unpacked how those seeking social change take into account their audiences’ picture of reality in three dimensions—objects of epistemic work—and then build their arguments on those objects. In this chapter, we unbox the important notion of “picture of reality,” on which this discursive view relies. Recall that the theory of epistemic governance underscores the link between people’s conceptions and decision-making, meaning that if an actor aims to influence social change through policymaking, she needs to

This chapter draws on previously published work by the authors: Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2016). Imageries of the Social World in Epistemic Governance. International Sociology, 31(6), 633–652. © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_3

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take into account and make use of prevalent ideas and metaphors or other tropes (H. V. White, 1978) that inform them. Yet the point about this reliance of decision-making and social change on discursive tropes and culture does not mean that political decision-making is necessarily irrational. Although it is obvious that all the ability of the human race to conceive of and make models of the external reality is based on language and the conceptual resources it provides us, we must bear in mind that the human race has been fairly successful in making sense of the universe. Of course, the social world is complex in that even “false” representations may become real in their consequences, if enough people believe in them and act accordingly. But it is important to stress that when making sense of society and arguing for a definition of the situation and a reform needed, actors may propose and apply several complementary metaphors that guide people’s understanding. One relatively common such metaphor is that of functionalism. Building on the seminal work by DiMaggio and Powell (1983), J. W. Meyer and Rowan (1977), and J. W. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez (1997) offer a comprehensive description of how the institutionalization of world models constitutes actorhood among nation-states and how such a perspective explains similarities in world society. The key to their landmark analysis is a critique of the prevalent realist view that societies change according to functional requirements. Neoinstitutionalists take distance from the apparent obviousness of functionalism to show how it is in fact a world cultural “script” shaping actors and operating as “framing assumptions” that end up “producing consequences that in no way can be seen as ‘functional’ for the societies that implement them” (J. W. Meyer et al., 1997, p. 149). In other words, functionalist requirements are a popular “imagery,” or unarticulated mental image, to describe society. According to it, any society goes through certain developmental stages that require states to enact the same policies. Since this imagery of society as a functionalist system is widely shared, policymakers in national states make the same reforms because they are convinced that “development” requires them. The result is isomorphism: “a world whose societies, organized as nation-states, are structurally similar in many unexpected dimensions and change in unexpectedly similar ways” (J. W. Meyer et al., 1997, p. 145). Numerous empirical analyses have followed this line of thinking to show how the idea of functional requirements is considered a self-evident justification even when policies have no obvious local relevance (e.g., Frank, Hironaka, & Schofer, 2000; Koenig, 2008; J. W. Meyer, 2004; J. W. Meyer & Bromley, 2013; J. W. Meyer, Ramirez, Frank, & Schofer, 2007). Similarly, explanations based purely on coercion do not explain why many policies, such as “massified” education (Ramirez, 2003; Schofer & Meyer, 2005), are enacted that go against

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entrenched elite interests. We find this neoinstitutionalist perspective, and the many empirical accounts building on it, to be persuasive and useful in explaining otherwise puzzling similarities in policy moves made across the world. The neoinstitutionalist account rests on critical distance from the assumption that societies evolve on more or less universal functionalist requirements and the related assumption of bounded, homogenous, national states pursuing their interests. By challenging these assumptions, they find considerable evidence for the importance of wider institutional environments that constitute actors as agents, particularly nation-states in a larger, stateless world polity. Yet this perspective is too readily operationalized as more or less straightforward diffusion of policy principles or “hypocritical conformism” by national leaders acting as “Babbitts” in the pursuit of apparent functional efficiency (J. W. Meyer, 2004). In fact, from the actors’ own point of view a particular policy problem comes down to their conception of the situation and what can, should, or must be done. The fundamental point here is that policymakers and those seeking to affect social change need to convince others of this reading of the situation and the natural solution. They rely on others’ conception of the world and then work with that, what we termed “epistemic governance” in the previous chapter. Such conceptions are, indeed, built on scripts shared in modern world culture, as neoinstitutionalists argue. But there is no reason to consider functionalism the only such script shaping world culture. Recent comparative research into parliamentary justifications for new legislation (e.g., Alasuutari, 2014, 2016; Qadir & ­Alasuutari, 2013; Rautalin & Alasuutari, 2009) shows that some policies in contemporary world society are not justified or opposed by reference to universal functional requirements. It is not that other arguments go against a functionalist imagery of society, but rather that they are not subjected to that form of justification or contest. Other rationales than functional requirements are socially constructed in order to justify or oppose a particular policy, and these are also shared by politicians and others worldwide. Furthermore, cultural “scripts” are not narrative texts that actors on the world stage can read from and act out. As powerful as this metaphor is to counter common assumptions about realist agents, it overlooks the insight that people rely on mostly unarticulated mental images to make sense of the world and, moreover, work with a notion that others also think in similar images. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, such imageries are invariably at the core of arguments or actions for social change. Indeed, some imageries have always been present in any society and are evident in any instance that may be analyzed as comprising governance. Moreover, we argued that while such imageries do vary across cultures and change over time, such changes are largely epochal. Modern times are marked by a remarkable similarity in ­ epistemic

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assumptions across cultures, and so we find evidence of the same imageries spread around the world. This doesn’t exclude the possibilities of relatively more isolated cultures relying on alternative imageries, but these are difficult to locate and are less and less evident in global discussions of social change. In this chapter, we examine the range of imageries of the social world that are employed in contemporary decision-making and offer an explanation of why they are so prevalent. We propose that what makes functionalism so popular and widespread an explanation, thereby leading to isomorphism, is that it is deeply rooted in modern selves as an imagery of society as an organism driven by inherent laws of evolutionary progress. Arguments based on this imagery are particularly successful and, indeed, quite common in contemporary policymaking. Yet this imagery of progress stands on a logical par with other imageries that are also used to justify policy solutions, sometimes within the same discourse.

Metaphors to Imageries: A Cultural Approach to Social Change in World Society Following Foucault (1980), popular conceptions of the global order may be viewed “nominalistically,” not just as competing social-scientific theories but as part of our modern culture. Social scientists, just like currency traders, create their own “epistemic communities” (Haas, 1992) or “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina, 1999) that trade in objects of knowledge. What is crucial to the success and longevity of these communities is that they are sustained primarily by narratives (e.g., Brown, 1989a; Czarniawska, 2010). Although social scientists tend to develop theories of the social world as if in isolation from “real-world” application, their narratives are deeply rooted in popular discourse. Far from being exclusive to the “scientific community,” their accounts unselfconsciously cross the boundary between science and society. A remarkably sharp and widespread distinction is often assumed between these two spheres of reasoning: popular and social scientific (for which one reason is doubtless the conflating of social and natural scientific discourses). The linguistic turn in the social sciences, from the 1980s on, was crucial in highlighting that this boundary is ill-conceived. In the prominent literature, exposing this blurring is the work of Richard Harvey Brown (1989a, 1993). He summarizes this ambiguity thus: “… the process of constructing sociological knowledge—from whatever theoretical perspective—has much in common with the processes by which ordinary people patch together reality and meaning in their everyday lives” (Brown, 1983, p. 129).

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Root Metaphors: Words We See With Brown’s basic idea is that a limited number of established, age-old, “root ­metaphors” drive so-called new discoveries in the human sciences. What Brown means by a root metaphor is “a fundamental image of the world from which models and illustrative metaphors may be derived” (Brown, 1989a, p. 78). Far from being exclusive to scientists, he suggests that these fundamental metaphors are deeply rooted in popular discourse. Brown argues that social-scientific theorization is founded on popular root metaphors of society as either an organism or a machine and of social conduct seen as language, the drama, or a game. For Brown, these root metaphors are ways for people to naturalize the world around them, to explain that world to themselves and others, and to work within that world to change it. Such interpretive model building relies naturally on ­language, and metaphor is the linguistic key to that: In the broadest sense, metaphor is seeing something from the viewpoint of something else, which means … that all knowledge is metaphoric … In the narrowest sense, metaphor can be understood as an illustrative device whereby a term from one level or frame of reference is used within a different level or frame … Metaphor also is the key to model-building; indeed a model may be thought of as a metaphor whose implications have been spelled out. (Brown, 1989a, pp. 77–78)

The idea of popular root metaphors propping up social-scientific discourse is cogent. However, in his work Brown has focused exclusively on pointing out how social science is trapped in metaphors that delimit the potential of empowering civic discourse (Brown, 1983, 1989b, 1992). The same concentration on tropes of social science writing applies to other work inspired by the linguistic and narrative turn in human sciences (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Kornprobst, Pouliot, Shah, & Zaiotti, 2008; Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Marks, 2011). This field of research is in itself fascinating, but for the most part, scholars have tended to either aspire for scientific writing freed from the distortion of the tropes of language or, after concluding that scientific writing is inevitably entangled with culture, sought for new, more artistic and openly political genres of science as literature (e.g., Denzin, 2001; Stewart, 1989). There is much less research that focuses on the use of metaphors in political argumentation (see, however, Beer & Landtsheer, 2004; Cienki & Yanow, 2013; A. D. Meyer, 1984; Sawhney, 1996; Yanow, 1992). One reason for that is that a metaphor by itself carries little weight as justification for social or political action. It is not complex enough to convince others or to encompass the social world. Metaphors may provide a basis for our under-

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standing of who we are (say, actors in a staged drama), but not of what the world consists in nor what should be done in such and such a conundrum. That is why multiple (often mixed) metaphors are deployed in any justification for social change. Rather than identifying separate metaphors, we suggest we need to identify how they are combined into a full map of the social world that suggests who the actors are and what can be done in the current situation. This map of reality is a backdrop to actions and is not entirely articulated by the actors.

Imageries To understand how political argumentation relies on modern cultural conceptions of the social world, we suggest that instead of root metaphors, it is better to talk about imageries. Earlier, we referred to a commonsense notion of an imagery as an unarticulated mental image of what the world is and how it changes. We can now define an imagery more precisely as a configuration of metaphors articulated with a policy rationale. Actors work off the notion that others see the world in a similar way to them and so base their argument for or against a particular issue on those terms. We find considerable evidence for the use of these imageries in the rhetoric of politicians arguing for or against a particular reform or new legislation in parliaments. Moreover, we suggest that these imageries are prevalent worldwide and are not culture-bound, similar to the symbols circulated globally by contemporary media that act as “unspoken backdrop to our thoughts, actions, and messages” (Schudson, 1989, p. 155). That is, unlike situation-specific metaphors or narrative scripts, these imageries are common to modern world culture and constitute a symbolic set that both constitutes rational actors and is available for use by them, especially those seeking to affect social change. Furthermore, an imagery is not just a tool in political rhetoric; it is intimately related to social-scientific theorizing as well as the very constitution of the actor, which is why concepts like “master frames” (Benford & Snow, 2000) do not work here.1 Each of the three imageries we discuss below correlates with an established theoretical approach to world society (J. W. Meyer et al., 1997). These correspondences

1We

do not enter here the philosophical debate between pictorial and descriptive imageries. Either view of what an image in the mind actually consists in works with this application. Our point is to emphasize that an imagery of the social world comprises not just a picture or a description, but also a sense of how the world changes and how to influence the direction of that change by working on people’s similar imageries.

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underline how essential narrative is to both popular and scientific discourse. To avoid misunderstanding on this, we emphasize that these imageries are inscribed in popular as well as social-scientific theories of social reality. Our point is that these imageries are constituted as combinations of different root metaphors along with a sense of what type of action is possible or necessary. Of course, it might be possible to update Brown’s list of root metaphors to include contemporary metaphors that cannot be reduced to the ones he identified (say, society as a network). Besides, as Brown stresses, in specific instances the root metaphors of social science are often complemented by sub-metaphors and have points of connection with other metaphors. However, whatever metaphors are used and in whatever combination, they are rhetorically woven into persuasive narratives by way of these three imageries. We are not as interested here in whether a particular argument succeeds in persuading others, and what the patterns of more successful argumentation are. There has been considerable scholarship on that such as the influential idea of a “cultural diamond” (Griswold, 2013). Yet, irrespective of whether a case for social change succeeds in winning the day or not, it is still founded on these imageries of the social world, each implying a certain action and obscuring others from view. Another closely related concept is the social imaginary: “the ways in which [people] imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2002, p. 106). Taylor also attends to how people “imagine” their world rather than think about it in a detached manner and notes that, “This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice.” This suitably describes our own approach, yet Taylor does not break down what the social imaginary consists of, making it hard to operationalize in a research design. More importantly, he does not consider that people rely (more or less self-unconsciously) on these imaginaries in their rhetoric to convince others of what to do. He does not include any element of “work” in his concept, which is central to our unpacking how epistemic governance functions and for which we develop the idea of imageries. In the next sections, we discuss three imageries: (1) the social world changing by naturally modernizing according to functional requirements; (2) the world governed by hierarchically positioned power players; and (3) the world divided into competing blocs or civilizations. In each case, we give examples of social scientific and political usage.

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Progress and Functional Requirements The prevalent imagery of society, also the primary subject of critique in sociological neoinstitutionalist literature, is characterized by methodological nationalism or “the all-prevalent assumption that the nation-state is the natural and necessary form of society in modernity; the nation-state is taken as the organizing principle of modernity” (Chernilo, 2006, p. 6). Coupled with this perspective is the sense of national states “modernizing” or progressing on a more or less fixed t­rajectory determined by the functional requirements of a “stage of development.” In a global framework, this translates into the popular conception of independently converging national trajectories. The imagery of functionalism draws on the root metaphor of society seen as an organism identified by Brown.

Social-Scientific Origin and Contemporary Pervasiveness Underlying this conception of societies following a law-governed trajectory is a Darwinian evolutionary idea, according to which the direction of social change is determined by the acts with which states and other actors adapt to changing external conditions. This view, which presumes an a-cultural view of societies (Taylor, 1999) “evolving” through a universal developmental process, largely calls upon the authority of science. We call this conception a tacit concept to emphasize that it is a naturalized line of thought, deeply ingrained in what is succinctly called “modern” culture (for more on “tacit” reliance on modernization in governance, see Alasuutari, 2011). As a narrative, it is closely related to the common “micro-phenomenological” perspective that views the world as divided into tightly bounded nation-states that each “evolve” in line with the universally valid functional requirements. Talcott Parsons is a classic figure in this respect. In his modernization theory, Parsons proposed that the development of societies is led by particular “evolutionary universals” (Parsons, 1964, 1966). Drawing from the classical sociological tradition, he argued that differentiation is a necessary requirement of socioeconomic development: Along with modernization, the division of labor becomes increasingly complex, and different aspects of social life are handled in separate institutions that specialize in them. Thus, from this viewpoint, if different governments make similar reforms, for instance, establish a new institution, that is because it has become a functional requirement related to those societies’ developmental stage. Despite continuing criticism of modernization as explanation, it remains popular (see, e.g., Inglehart & Welzel, 2005), although a growing number of variations emphasize multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2002; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004;

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Qadir, 2011; Taylor, 1999, 2002). Very often, social change is also explained by referring to national functional requirements in a particular stage of global capitalism (e.g., Berger, 1991; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004, p. 2; Wood, 1997).

Political Usage and Implications This conception of social change feeds off and reinforces popular concepts that present reforms and newness as self-evidently better than the old or existing state of affairs (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Urban, 2001). Thus, several concepts and figures of speech naturalize the idea of progress: We talk about developing and developed countries, deem existing practices “outdated,” and call countries “leaders” or “laggards” in their policies, thus placing them in a quasi-temporal order regarding their developmental stage. These forms of talk are commonly used in justifying new legislation. The idea of modernization provides a ­proposed policy with a strong incentive or presents it as a necessity: A nation “has to” stay on the path that other nations have chosen to ensure its success and to be viewed as a modern country, and politicians use this to convince their audiences of reform (Alasuutari & Rasimus, 2009). For instance, when supporting a bill for Australian tax reforms, a member of parliament commented on the existing system by saying that “it was an example of outlandish, irresponsible and quite destructive politics standing in the way of genuine national progression” (Debate on “A New Tax System: Commonwealth-State Financial Arrangements Amendment” Bill, February 19, 2004). Similarly, when introducing a bill, the Canadian Minister for Health argued: “Sadly, we have fallen behind most of the modern world with the current legislation” (Debate on “Canada Consumer Product Safety Act” Bill, October 7, 2010). The same ideas are also utilized in justifying large-scale ideas such as “ecological modernization,” which is both an analytical approach in the social sciences and a policy strategy that argues that the economy benefits from moves toward environment-friendly policies and technologies (Spaargaren & Mol, 1992; York & Rosa, 2003). Once a policy is criticized as needing “modernization” or “meeting national needs,” that is usually enough to point to a need to better diagnose functional requirements and address them, without looking into alternatives that might build on a different imagery. The way the imagery of progress is utilized in epistemic work illustrates well one particular aspect of epistemic work: constructing and appealing to actors’ identifications. Typically, politicians and political commentators appeal to the nation as a self-evident community within which compatriots are assumed to share interests. However, it is also common for politicians to appeal to a “shared national interest” while advancing their own stakeholder group interests, thereby

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defining themselves as collective actors. The aim is to present partial group interests as the common, national interest, and hence to be a legitimate “player” in governance, as, for instance, in clean energy technology and green growth. So-called developing countries buy into the same green discourse, for instance, objecting to environmental restrictions on their exports due to their “stage of economic development,” indicating a sort of environmental Kuznets Curve that would bring in environmental sustainability naturally after they reach a particular GDP per capita target. The argument that a particular nation-state is lagging behind others, or needs to be a leader, is powerful in many, if not most, cases to justify a policy solution. What makes it especially potent is the picture of progress guiding separate societies in the same direction.

Society as Hierarchy Another popular imagery of the social world is that of society organized as a chain of command. When applied to a single polity, it provides a framework to think of society in which the government or the power elites call the shots. In a global context, it translates into the world system as divided up into those with more and those with less power resources. Power holders are seen to be, in some sense, “above” the subjects of power. This view connects with a spatial imagery of power: of society as divided into hierarchical levels, such as the global, national, and local. It stems from a dormant metaphor of a society or an organization as a material structure, like a house, in which the higher up one resides, the more powerful one is and hence able to rule all those stationed below. The same image is presented in organizational charts, in which the chief or the government is drawn highest up, with arrows of the line of command leading from level to level all the way to the “grassroots,” indicating who can give orders to whom and who is responsible for what in a bureaucracy.

Social-Scientific Origin and Prevalence Generally, as pointed out by Foucault, this conception can be identified in a Weberian theory of power as a zero-sum resource by which an agent can force another one to act against her will. It relates to another standard account of center-periphery struggles in the world society as exemplified by world systems theory (Chase-Dunn, 1989; Wallerstein, 1974), which is a prime macro-sociological example building on this imagery, seeing capital, competition, and force as the drivers of global social change. Building on systems theory, this “macro-realist” approach sees the nation-state as a bounded entity defined by its

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political-economic role in the world and views power and interests as the drivers of change in the world. In its emphasis on relational power, this approach relies on an imagery of the world society as driven by hierarchical power holders. This is what Foucault was referring to in his argument that although the political has been disengaged from the juridical sphere and the monarchic institution for hundreds of years, the representation of power has remained caught within this system: “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 88–89). The same applies succinctly to many views of global governance. Although it is well known and acknowledged that, despite superpowers, there is no world leader or government (Wilkinson, 1999), the bulk of scholarship on global governance is still built on the assumption that there are powers or organizations working “high up” at the “global” level, making “lower” levels like nation-states and even cities conform to hierarchical orders. When the idea of a hierarchy is scaled up from national societies to the messy global infrastructure, the global system is pictured as consisting of higher and lower “levels” of power and scales of authority. Intergovernmental organizations are often pictured as enforcing compliance directly and indirectly, thus depicted as proxies for the missing world government, for instance, “imperialism” of the World Bank (Badru, 1998; Feder, 1976; George & Sabelli, 1994), “coercive sanctions” by the World Trade Organization (Charnovitz, 2001), international “legitimization” by the United Nations (Claude, 1966), and forced “homogenization” by OECD (Grek, 2009; H.-D. Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Rinne, 2008; Rutkowski, 2007). That is, these organizations are expected to solve global problems by ordering nation-states or they are accused of maneuvering national policies, without quite spelling out how. For instance, for many political scientists, the challenges and successes of global governance are a question about the possibilities and limitations of the United Nations system and other international organizations (see, e.g., Diehl & Frederking, 2010) in affecting the member states’ behavior through establishing norms and standards, with the help of which humankind could solve global problems. From this perspective, similarity between national states’ policies depends on how well and on which conditions they comply with international norms (Cortell & Davis, 1996, 2000; Pettenger, 2007). Consider the use of the term “global level” in contemporary social science literature. All these scientific usages rely on a notion of society organized as a hierarchy; otherwise, they would make no sense. This scientific paradigm is also reflected in more recent studies of network governance, which replaces individuals or tightly knit groups of actors by more or less integrated networks (Castells, 2011; Hajer, 2009). Again, the notion of power

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as a hierarchal property is central to this approach, often with the view that this property consists of abilities to control network members and rules, as well as switches with other networks.

Political Usage and Implications Although political actors may not use the term “hierarchy,” yet the imagery of the world as being organized like a chain of command is utterly common, even common-sensical. For instance, when opposing a bill, a member of the Ugandan parliament argued: What is it that this committee is going to do at the national level? The services are going to be down at community level. So what will the committee at the national level do? If there is any necessity of higher committees, then the highest level should be the district, in my view. (Debate on ‘Community Service Bill,’ February 17, 2000)

This typical quote illustrates how naturalized the spatial imagery of national society is. When the same is applied to world society, it results in simplifications about a spatial ordering of the world. For example, when the Occupy Wall Street protests “went global,” protestors around the world generally made statements such as “At the global level, we can’t carry on any more with public debt that wasn’t created by us” (Pullella, 2011). The usefulness of this imagery in political argumentation is that it points at the person, organization, or clique responsible for or able to change things and hence who can be appealed to or blamed for in a current situation. When a social organization or system is viewed as a hierarchy, it implies that those “higher up” are capable of and hence also responsible for the state of affairs and changes in it: that those in a leadership position are able to control subordinate actors (Brunsson, 1989, pp. 131–132). Hence, by picturing themselves at the top of a hierarchy actors or organizations, such as the government, present themselves as important and powerful, which explains why actors may willingly take the responsibility. On the other hand, actors can also be blamed for the current conditions, regardless of their powers to control the situation. That is, many position holders use this imagery to claim “legitimate” authority, while others draw on the same imagery to blame them convincingly.

Competing Blocs: Competition and Community-Building A third class of assumptions relates to a view of the world divided into camps or blocs that pursue their own interests and hence fight or compete against each other. It maintains that the international system is driven by anarchy, egoism,

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groupism, and power politics (Donnelly, 2008). Higher ends are subordinated to the underlying requirements of survival and national self-interest (Waltz, 1979). Considering Brown’s categorization of root metaphors in social science, this imagery derives from the metaphor of social conduct as a game (and we could here apply another root metaphor of social activity as a marketplace). When woven into a theoretical narrative, this imagery correlates with arguably the most prevalent approach to world society: that of bounded nation-states competing in a condition of global anarchy where the most “powerful” do best.

Social-Scientific Origin and Prevalence In social science literature, this imagery was famously phrased by Thomas ­Hobbes in his analysis of Man’s state of nature as Bellum omnium contra omnes. Since there is no higher authority above nation-states, the international world is viewed as a potential war of all against all, in which all nations and groups seek and secure their own interests (Cerny, 2012). This imagery connects with the third approach to world society according to which “the nation-state is a natural, purposive, and rational actor in an essentially anarchic world” (J. W. Meyer et al., 1997, p. 147). It relies on a narrative of the world as divided into competing blocs naturally at odds against each other. This is such a naturalized and self-evident conception of the world system that it is known as the “realist” paradigm in political science and dominates the field. Many sociological theories of globalization, like in international relations, also have this realist character, picturing the world society as inevitably constituted by nation-states in competition with each other, although international organizations and transnational corporations are increasingly included in the picture. Most often, such theories subscribe to a resource view of social power as primarily a distributive property held more by some actors and less by others.

Political Usage and Implications Although this idea of the world divided into warring tribes is a bleak and skeptical view, it is nevertheless, or precisely because of it, a powerful rhetorical tool to promote a national strategy. It thus appears no less in popular political discourses than in social-scientific ones. In accordance with this imagery, during the twentieth century the so-called East-West or communist-capitalist division was a popular way to divide the world into friends and allies, and these two camps fought for their support and influence in different geographical areas. When that era ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it became popular to conceive of these divisions in more cultural or religious than political terms (Huntington, 1996). ­Huntington’s thesis provided a ready-made framework for parties involved in the

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Danish cartoons affair, sparked by publications of 12 cartoons in a newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in September 2005 (Lindekilde, Mouritsen, & Zapata-Barrero, 2009). Muslims in Denmark and soon across Europe and the rest of the world reacted strongly against what was perceived as an insult to the Islamic prophet. Protests, often violent, were held by Muslims in countries all over the globe, while the publication of cartoons was defended by some European politicians and parties. Furthermore, the idea of a clash of civilizations soon became the dominant framing of the event in the mass media (Eide, Kunelius, & Phillips, 2008; ­Hussain, 2007; Powers, 2008), contributing to reorganizing international diplomacy in the immediate and also in the medium term (Lindekilde et al., 2009, p. 296; ­Lindholm & Olsson, 2005). In the process a Muslim global ummah was recreated almost anew as a pan-Islamic coordinated community that could act nationalistically (Saunders, 2008). The clash thesis was so persuasive and so ubiquitous precisely because it closely followed the narrative of competing tribes, which is deeply ingrained in popular and scientific discourses (Qadir, 2015). In this sense, Huntington’s clash theory was “successful” for explaining the later Charlie Hebdo assassinations because it appeals to a powerful imagery of competition, not that it appeals to us because it is successful in explaining social reality very well. As to the adoption of similar policies in different countries, the warring tribes’ imagery treats them as a consequence of various forms of influence or pressure of powerful states or power blocs exerted on the weaker ones. For instance, modernization and globalization have been equated with Americanization (Beck, Sznaider, & Winter, 2003; Kelemen & Sibbitt, 2002; O’Dell, 1997; Ritzer, 2015). Other centers of power and influence have also been highlighted, such as in the argument about Asianization in Australia and the Far East (Ang & S ­ tratton, 1996; Siriyuvasak & Hyunjoon, 2007) or about Islam exerting its influence worldwide through Islamic organizations (Atasoy, 2006; Rubin, 2010). Similar discourse on competition occurs throughout policymaking debates as well. For example, a member of the UK House of Lords supported a bill by stating: We also face ever increasing competition in many areas of our economy and industry, from China and India in particular, and the levels of educational achievement among some of our young people clearly leave a great deal to be desired. We will not be competitive internationally unless we can raise our game. (Debate on ‘Child Benefit Bill,’ March 3, 2005)

The idea of competing blocs appeals to two aspects simultaneously. On the one hand, it draws on suspicion toward others and their current or future moves that will worsen “our” position, which justifies “preemptive” or “proactive” measures

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in, say, military strategy or economic policy. On the other hand, it appeals to and builds team spirit, reinforcing the idea of “us,” for instance, as a nation with shared interests. Strongly critical and radical political discourse supports and renews the idea of competitiveness. By presenting the world in this way, actors obscure policy alternatives beyond game-theoretic realism. Such notions often lead, as a next logical step, to all manner of conspiracy theories. The idea of the world as composed of competing blocs is also commonly applied to other teams than nations. In those cases, too, if enough people believe in such an account of reality, it has real consequences as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imageries and Governance We have suggested here that thinking in terms of imageries of the social world is a bridge between constructionist explanations of social-scientific theorization (Brown, 1989a) and constructionist explanations of world society (J. W. Meyer et al., 1997). In modern culture, the former cannot be dissociated from the latter, and both social theories and policymaking feed off and inform each other. Imageries of the social world, building on combinations of root metaphors, are hence a key discursive ingredient for both social-scientific and political actors seeking to understand and change the world. In the latter realm, the use of particular imageries depends on the strategic demands and political context of the policy in question. In this sense, they connect with “epistemic governance” or policymaking that works by affecting people’s shared conceptions of reality as well as desirable action. By drawing on Richard Harvey Brown’s analysis of the uses of metaphors in social science, we have sought to (a) deepen the constructionist aspect of world society theory—asking why the imagery of functional requirements appears to be so successful—as well as to (b) extend it by identifying other imageries than that of functionalism. In doing so, we found that functionalism is, indeed, a prevalent cultural theme, but that it is rooted in an imagery of social change steered by evolutionary universals, much like an evolving organism responding to the external environment. In addition, we identified two other imageries, that of society as hierarchy and that of competing blocs, that cannot be reduced to the first imagery. We have also contended that these three imageries are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are often conflated when politicians argue for, or oppose, a particular policy reform in deliberative settings endemic to modern world society. For instance, national policy discourses on educational reform in the wake of PISA results often point to a loss of national sovereignty to OECD—the imagery of world society as hierarchy—and to the nation’s need to do well in competition

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with other states—an imagery of world society as divided into competing blocs (Rautalin, 2014; Rautalin & Alasuutari, 2009). Similarly, while “developing” countries might argue for ecological modernization to industrialize sustainably (a functionalist imagery), the same discourse will often point out the need to navigate environmental restrictions by international trade bodies (society as hierarchy), as well as global inequities caused by “affluent” countries (competing blocs). An actor, therefore, becomes more agentic in strategically deploying the imagery she (often instinctively) feels better fits the situation. Of course, this does not mean that actors are pre-given entities, entirely oblivious to the institutional environment guiding their actorhood. Yet individual actorhood in social change is also not entirely explainable by a singular script of rationalized ideas of functional requirements. Individual actors draw upon these scripts strategically, depending on the local situation. Our brief examples show that both sociological theory and policy discourses utilize these imageries in various combinations. Again, imageries of the social world are an essential ingredient of all governance wherever and whenever it may be analyzed. The precise nature of imageries naturally changes, but this change is epochal. In the modern social world, we find evidence of only these three imageries, though possible patterns and variations on each do need to be mapped out in further research. The manner in which we have elaborated these imageries lends itself to a clear qualitative research design. Naturally, the methodology can be further refined and expanded to identify terms that can be associated implicitly or explicitly with each imagery. As to how these imageries are mobilized by interested actors in social change discourse, we have stressed that a particular actor does not necessarily accept or believe that society is, indeed, comprised of nations modernizing deterministically or as divided into competing blocs. It would be empirically difficult and philosophically challenging to claim to know, for instance, what a policymaker “really” has in their mind. Yet the fact that they do deploy the imagery in question is precisely what is important here. The imagery is seen as being acceptable enough to carry the argument or solution. This means that political sociologists need to pay far more attention to individual discourses of justifying or opposing specific policies or sets of policies. In effect, we argue for a thicker, ethnographic description of social change processes-in-context to pick out and examine what imageries are at work and how they translate into policy principles. With the concept of imageries of the social world, we believe that a much fuller account of global social change is possible through the lens of national decision-making. The concept of imageries of the social world helps to concretize the idea that governance functions by working on people’s conceptions of social

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reality. Since we argued for a limited range of such imageries, rooted as they are in metaphors by which people make sense of the social world, this makes a case for a focused empirical research agenda into global social change. Furthermore, as the range of imageries in popular or political discourse feed into, and in turn feed off, social-scientific conceptions of reality, there is an element of nonlinear interdependence when describing global social change that is almost daunting. Yet describing the complexity in these terms makes it more possible to develop an outline of our contemporary social world and produce empirical accounts that do justice to it. In the chapters to come, we describe how this may be turned to examining discourse in three sites of social change. First, though, we turn to a brief account of how authority and power need to be reconceptualized in this ­theory of epistemic governance.

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4

Authority as Epistemic Capital

• This chapter discusses authority as something that actors appeal or refer to as a means to steer others’ conduct. • Authority is cumulative: How much bearing actors have on others’ conduct varies from marginal to substantial? • The four types of or grounds for authority are introduced: Capacity-based, ontological, moral, and charismatic.

In the previous chapter, we opened up the discursive aspect of epistemic governance as a framework by which to make sense of those working for social change. We showed that the cases made by such actors are built around popularly held imageries of reality, which are also to be found in social scientific explanations. In this chapter, we discuss how arguments for change made on the basis of such imageries rely on referring to sources that such agents believe will convince their audiences. As was discussed in the introduction of this book, a standard aspect of warfare is to make the enemy believe that the army’s capacity—for instance, the troops and firepower located in a potential combat zone—is bigger or smaller than it actually is. Such a deception can be created for instance by inflatable tanks and airplanes that look real from a distance. Albeit seldom tested in reality because of the huge risks involved, the assumed power of an army or a military alliance is regularly used as a kind of epistemic capital. For instance, North Korea’s ability This chapter is based on previously published work: Alasuutari, P. (2018). Authority as Epistemic Capital. Journal of Political Power, 11(2), 165–190. © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_4

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to bargain in international politics depends heavily on its assumed capability to launch nuclear missiles. We could say that North Korea’s authority in world politics rests on its perceived military capacity. In this usage, the concept of authority does not imply admiration; it only means that other states take North Korea seriously in their own moves and choices, for instance, when deciding about their military budget. North Korea is an authority in the sense that its capacity is respected, as in the dictum, “respect your enemy.” An army’s anticipated military ability is an example of one reason why people respect some actors or objects in the sense that they take those entities seriously. We can call this motive for respect or fear capacity-based authority,1 and alluding to it is a means by which actors can affect others’ conduct. In addition, we suggest that authority can be based on three other grounds—that is, perceived characteristics of an actor or object. Another strategy is to construct or appeal to renowned actors and their accounts of reality, for instance, to expert knowledge. This can be called ontological authority. The third strategy is to employ prevalent conceptions of important persons, organizations, texts, or principles as reference points in arguments about what is acceptable. For instance, the law and local regulations define individuals’ rights within an organization. Let us call this moral authority. Finally, actors may create or utilize extraordinary awe attached to an organization or individual, for instance, a famous political or religious leader. This can be called charismatic authority. Here, authority is treated as something that actors utilize as a means to steer others’ conduct and thus advance their own goals, not as properties of individuals or organizations. Such utilization of authority is something done also by others than an actor which people consider being authoritative. To take an example, the high commander of a country’s armed forces can make a reference to North Korea’s military threat as justification for a raise in the defense budget. Rather than a hierarchical position that allows one to give commands (cf. Weber, 1978), we should think authority as cumulative: How much bearing actors have on others’ conduct varies from marginal to substantial. By building, utilizing, and combining different types of authority, actors aim to accumulate their influence on others. In that sense, authority can be called epistemic capital: It is an accumulation of different kinds of “assets” by which actors are

1The term capacity-based authority was originally coined by Avant, Finnemore, and Sell (2010, pp. 13–14), although they use the concept slightly differently from how it is used here.

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a­scertained about the social world and the situation at hand. When discussing actors’ attempts to influence others’ conduct, we talk about epistemic capital because it functions through knowledge and its validation. Those who are more successful in piling up epistemic capital behind their projects have more influence on others’ conduct.2

Four Types of Authority Weber’s (1978) classical typology of authority deals with different grounds for someone’s ability to give orders that are obeyed. But dictionaries give authority also other meanings. In addition to being an attribute of a superior position, authority is commonly used to describe the confident quality of someone who knows a lot about something or who is respected or obeyed by other people. Thus, an expert or an authoritative text, such as a law or a holy text, can be called an authority. If we combine these two meanings, we can broaden the meaning of authority to depict the influence or persuasion power that an actor or text has in that others take it seriously into consideration when deciding about their views or behavior. In this sense, authority is not only a property of actors: Generally, respected principles are also authorities that actors employ. But whether actors present themselves as powerful or allude to perceived authorities and authoritative principles, they struggle to impose their vision of the social world on others, hence, affecting their understandings and behavior. From this perspective, we can identify different types of reasons why someone or something is respected or feared. In the subsequent sections, we will discuss the four types of authority: capacity-based, ontological, moral, and charismatic.

2This

approach is close to Parsons’ (1963a, 1963b) theory of power as a circulating medium, analogous to money. Some other theorists have also likened the foundations of social order to money. Perhaps the most well-known scholar is Bourdieu, whose theorization of the social world builds on identifying different forms of capital. He, for instance, talks about symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1989; Bourdieu & Nice, 1977). Similarly, Putnam (2000) and Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti (1993) talk about social capital, the amount of which is a key feature of a community.

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Capacity-Based Authority As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, threat and acts of violence must also be considered as one source of authority: They contribute to making an actor worthwhile taking account of when others are considering their moves. However, to use the term coined by Avant, Finnemore, and Sell (2010, pp. 13–14), such capacitybased authority can also be based on other capabilities, such as wealth; for instance, banks who can decide about loans and investments have such authority. Violence is a risky strategy of governance in that it may weaken the effect of strategies that appeal to the subjects’ loyalty. An aggressor may also be defeated by the resistance that violence raises; in which case, their authority based on fear for their strength is lost. In that sense, an act of violence, for instance, a war, is like a reset button: The outcome is used as an indicator that shows which is the most powerful military might, and hence, it affects the future pecking order.3 Yet acts of violence are just one strategy within relations and strategies of power. Violence can be used in several ways. It can be a strategy by which an actor coerces the victims to act in a desired way. Terror, instead, is a message sent toward the rest of the target population, meant to influence its behavior. An army’s military operation abroad may serve a function in the domestic political field: It is a sign of strength and a means to direct the public attention away from domestic problems. Military groups’ capacity to warfare, nuclear weapons in particular— is normally used as a deterrent. A military operation can also be used as a demonstration of what the army is capable of and what will happen if the actor’s demands are not met. As is the case with all types of authority, the results of a use or threat of violence are dependent on others’ reactions. The targets of violence can respond to it in multiple ways: They can, for instance, choose to surrender to the violators’ demands or try to resist and fight back. In any case, an actor’s perceived capacity to accomplish violent acts affects others’ perception of that actor. In good or bad, such an actor is taken seriously when others ponder their moves. Consider a dictator or a mafia boss: They are authorities in that they are feared and that their views and moves are anticipated and taken into account by others.

3In

her historical study of great power wars over the last 150 years, Ann Hironaka (2016) shows how, again and again, military scholars have analyzed the reasons for the victorious military, and competing military powers have then drawn lessons from the winners. According to Hironaka’s study, the irony is that war technology changes quickly, and that the conclusions of wars are dependent on a number of contingent events.

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The influence of collective actors and happenings such as demonstrations, mass movements, and parties are other examples of capacity-based authority. Political systems do not formally acknowledge demonstrations as means to intervene in politics, but many examples show that a large enough crowd is taken seriously even by autocratic regimes. Such authority of masses is based on various grounds. A mass demonstration sends the signal that many people support the demands that the organizers make. It implies that the regime may not stay in power even at gunpoint, or that ordering the military to suppress the uprising would lead into bloodshed and possibly a civil war. Drastic measures against a demonstration also attract international attention and condemnation. On the other hand, mass movements indicate that their demands will collect votes in future elections, which is why political leaders take account of them. Strikes and lockouts are yet another means to accumulate capacity-based authority; people listen to a group that may endanger their livelihood or prosperity. On the other hand, capacity-based authority is not necessarily materially grounded. Such authority also includes the ability to, say, accept, or dispel members of a community or to decide about the distribution of religious benefits, such as salvation. Weber (1978, pp. 54–56) refers to the latter as hierocratic coercion, which is a basis for the authority of churches. When used in the way proposed here, authority differs from the concept’s standard usage in social theory, wherein authority refers to persons or objects that are respected and honored within a community. On the other hand, everyday use of the concept of authority also recognizes authority based on disapproved means; such cases are referred to as authoritarian. In that sense, we could say that capacity-based authority can be either approved (legitimate) or questionable (illegitimate). In any case, the rationales through which actors aim to influence the comportment of others by utilizing those actors’ perceived capacities are recognizable (for instance, the risk of confronting with violence or other means of coercion as a reaction to insubordination is perceived real).

Ontological Authority When considering debates in the contemporary world, speakers recurrently utilize respect for a text, person, or organization that presents a credible picture of reality as a means to strengthen their argument. In a similar vein, Avant et al. (2010, p. 12) talk about expert (or expertise-based) authority, by which they allude to deference based on specialized knowledge. Avant and others, however, define this kind of authority narrowly as something that inheres in an actor, whereas we

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s­ uggest that in practice, actors use ontological authority more broadly. Speakers may, for instance, refer to science or scientific facts to ground their arguments; expert opinion or research reports are referenced to argue what will happen if a decision is taken. To use Scott’s (2014) typology of the three pillars of institutions, we could say that ontological authority leans on the cultural-cognitive pillar: on “the shared conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and the frames through which meaning is made” (2014, p. 57). Similarly, Bourdieu writes that “political struggle is a (practical and theoretical) cognitive struggle for the power to impose the legitimate vision of the social world” (2000, p. 185)—a struggle in which some actors and institutions have more deference than others. From a realist perspective, counting science, truth, and reality as an authority used in the games of power may sound strange, because one could argue that facts speak for themselves. But that is precisely why ontological authority is so powerful: appealing to reality and to what is possible and feasible in the current state of affairs is influential because it appears to depoliticize decision-making by making it science-based. And of course, facts do not speak for themselves: Someone needs to define them and spell out their implications. Because people have great respect for research-based knowledge, actors aiming to advance their stakeholder interests or otherwise influence decision-making have established a plethora of national and transnational research institutes and think tanks that lay a claim on producing reliable knowledge of reality. Paradoxically, ontological authority is at its strongest when the authorities or authoritative sources appear to be impartial regarding politics. From that perspective, there is no escape for policy experts and scientists from being part of power and governance: even neutral, innocent attempts to describe social reality and explain it can construct experts as authorities that are utilized in political argumentation. This does not mean that we need to give up on trying to honestly reach for the truth rather than for views that suit us politically, but it means that we must not fail to recognize scientific and other interpretations of reality as an object of sociological study. In other words, the science of society must comprise also science in society. For Emile Durkheim, this was a central question. Accordingly, his discussion of authority comes close to what is proposed here, when he stresses that the authority of science can only rely on “opinion,” by which he refers to public opinion and faith in science and scientists: Opinion, eminently a social thing, is one source of authority. Indeed, the question arises whether authority is not the daughter of opinion. Some will object that science is often the antagonist of opinion, the errors of which it combats and

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corrects. But science can succeed in this task only if it has sufficient authority, and it can gain such authority only from opinion itself. All the scientific demonstrations in the world would have no influence if a people had no faith in science. (Durkheim, 1995, p. 210)

One corollary of science representing authoritative views of reality is that actors will attempt to utilize that authority in various ways. Scientists tend to think that this kind of utilization of science is parasitic, threatening to corrode the authority of science, and that political uses of concepts, originally stemming from scientific research, misconstrue them. But, as Durkheim (1995) stresses, social scientists cannot escape to their own conceptual system, separate from popular uses of language. In fact, when talking about social science, typically scholars take concepts from ordinary language, give them a formal definition, and use them to describe and explain society. However, ontological authority does not necessarily rely on science and empirical evidence. Instead, it is part of the authority of religious communities and leaders. As Weber points out when discussing world religions, oracles are believed to reveal the truth (1978, p. 430) and priests to have special knowledge that allows them to determine dogmatic truths (pp. 425, 463). As the Thomas’ theorem puts it, “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas & Thomas, 1928, pp. 571–572).

Moral Authority Speakers also recurrently defend their views by alluding to commonly accepted principles or to actors or organizations which are respected for serving those principles or being knowledgeable about them. The law, judges, and legal institutions are an obvious example; religious rules, priests, and the church are a parallel case. Avant and others name such authority principle-based (2010, p. 13), but we may as well talk about moral authority, in that actors appeal to norms or standards regarding acceptable or desired conduct. This usage of the concept of moral authority differs from Scott (2014), who distinguishes between regulative and normative authority. According to him, regulatory processes involve the capacity to establish rules, inspect others’ conformity to them, and manipulate sanctions to influence future behavior, whereas the normative pillar rests on rules that introduce a prescriptive, evaluative, and obligatory dimension into social life. It could be argued, however, that regulative rules,

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such as laws, are codifications of moral principles. In that sense, the distinction between regulative and normative rules is unclear and needless. It is of course true that moral authority is often mixed with other rationales. For instance, speakers may invoke international treaties because they assume that others consider those treaties as principles that guide us in the path of morally impeccable conduct. But rules and treaties can also be considered as hindrances that need to be circumvented to avoid potential sanctions imposed or other harm caused by the international community. The same goes for laws: In addition to formulating a commonly accepted practice, a law codifies a rule, the breaking of which gives legal authorities the capacity to punish the offender. In that sense, a reference to a principle or a law as a moral authority can be mixed with ­capacity-based authority that laws also have. When talking about morality in general, we can make a distinction between moral codes and their interpretation. It is not conceivable to think of morality without generally approved principles, but everyday morality requires judgments. As Walzer stresses, “moral argument is interpretive in character, closely resembling the work of a lawyer or judge who struggles to find meaning in a morass of conflicting laws and precedents” (Walzer, 1987, p. 19). Accordingly, when ­utilizing moral authority to convince others of their views, people can allude not only to authoritative principles but also to authorities regarding their application: They cite an authoritative interpretation or persons respected for their expertise. For instance, legal experts’ authority rests especially on their knowledge about how a law has been applied in earlier cases. That is because most courts follow the doctrine of stare decisis: They are bound by their own previous decisions in similar cases, especially by previous decisions of higher courts. Similarly, in many religions, the church and its clergy are respected for their expertise or monopoly in defining the correct way to act to gain salvation or to apply holy texts to different situations. In this instance, Bourdieu talks about religious capital as concentration of a corpus of secret knowledge. For instance, in Medieval Europe the Catholic Church, organized according to a complex ecclesiastical hierarchy, “utilized a language almost unknown to the people and held a monopoly over access to the tools of worship, sacred texts, and, above all, sacraments” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 26). The moral authority of an interpretation leans not only on an individual who is cited but on an entire tradition of interpreting laws, moral codes or sacred texts, comprising numerous court decisions or, say, dogmas promulgated in the Catholic Church’s magisterium meetings. An expert citing a corpus of knowledge borrows its authority, and simultaneously the judgment in question becomes

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part of the corpus. In defending their case, actors present their proposal as the only logical way to apply moral principles, but precedent cases and expert opinions always leave latitude for actors to promote their aspirations; referring to influential interpretations and texts is only a way to strengthen one’s case, making it more difficult for others to argue for another solution.4 The globally ­surprisingly uniform lawmaking process is a prime example: At each stage of the legislative process—possibly including background reports, committee hearings and reports, and sessions in different chambers of the parliament—actors ­interested in influencing the outcome are engaged in accumulating epistemic capital that contributes to narrowing down the range of what are commonly viewed as “realistic options,” eventually standardizing any issue into a format where a decision can be made whether to pass a law (Alasuutari, 2016, p. 146). It is typical of struggles on the right thing to do that the moral nature of the issue is soon turned into technical questions, for instance, disputes about the actual, measurable effects of a law or the correct way to interpret sacred texts. In this way, moral authority gets intermingled with ontological authority: “the legitimate vision of the world,” as Bourdieu (1989, p. 20) puts it when talking about symbolic power.

Charismatic Authority In addition to the three types of authority discussed above, we can distinguish charismatic authority, which is attached to a person or institution even if there does not seem to be other grounds for their influence. According to Weber’s definition, charisma rests “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him” (1978, p. 215). In practice, this means that a statement or act of a person is considered authoritative because special deference

4For

instance, Perelman (1968, 1984) stresses that a legal system must not be conceived as analogous to a mathematical or a logical system, because law cannot operate in isolation from public opinion, which changes over time. As he puts it, “concerns of an ideological, moral, religious or political order can never be extraneous to the law, for they exercise a deep influence on the effectiveness of the system and on the manner in which rules of law are interpreted and applied” (Perelman, 1984).

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is attached to the individual or organization in question. Oftentimes it is, however, hard to see the exemplary character behind charisma in the modern world. Consider celebrities, who enjoy varying amounts of fame and appreciation (Alexander, 2010). They may have special skills as artists, or they may have become famous for being born to a famous family. Yet they can influence public opinion in areas that have nothing to do with their skills or expertise, which is evidenced in that they may advertise products or promote different causes.5 Following Weber, it has been common in previous research and theorization to make a distinction between personal charisma and office charisma. As to the former, it is stressed that the attribution of charisma to a person requires exceptional times of crises, which is when followers may submit themselves to a desperately needed leader, believed to be endowed with supernatural or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities (Reed, 2013; Szelenyi, 2016; Weber, 1978, p. 241). According to Smith (2000), charisma is created by utilizing salvation narratives, the internal structure of which requires binary oppositions contrasting good and evil. Reed (2013) extends this discussion by stressing that the construction of charisma requires charismatic performances: The leader’s public acts and displays create, in followers, a deeply affective connection to the leader, associated with his or her individual characteristics. Office charisma, on the other hand, denotes the “reversal of genuine charisma into its exact opposite” (Weber, 1978, p. 1139) by associating charisma with an office, for instance, by establishing the belief that charisma is bound to blood relationship. But Weber (1978, p. 1139) also noted other instances of office charisma: “The apostolic succession secured through episcopal ordination, the indelible charismatic qualification acquired through the priest’s ordination, the king’s coronation and anointment, and innumerable similar practices among primitive and civilized peoples all derive from this mode of transmission.” Shils (1965) has extended this discussion by stressing that there is, in society, a widespread disposition to attribute charismatic properties to ordinary secular roles, institutions, symbols, and strata or aggregates of persons. “The ritual surrounding the highest office, even in republics, the awe before the place where the ruler sits (as the Presidential Office in the White House, or the Kremlin, or the Élysée) testify to the ways in which high ‘secular’ authority draws to itself from those who exercise it and from those who are its objects, the disposition to attribute charisma” (Shils, 1965, p. 205).

5By

applying Weber’s definition, Kurzman et al. (2007) treat celebrities as a new kind of status group, but seem to imply that celebrity should not be seen as a type or subcategory of charismatic domination (see also Reed, 2013, p. 256).

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Informed by Weber’s historicist narrative of a general disenchantment of the world, the distinction between personal and office charisma has stressed the difference between the two and romanticized “genuine” personal charisma as “the great revolutionary force” (Weber, 1978, p. 245). Yet, when we scrutinize the discussion on how charisma is created and how it is attached to persons or organizations, it is obvious that the methods of creating and enhancing charisma are the same: They consist in constructing sacredness by utilizing myths and ritual. To create adulation toward a person or organization, one needs a good story or a whole set of narratives that tell about the protagonist’s rise to fame, deeds, and fight against evil forces (Smith, 2000), but to anchor the followers’ respect for the hero to emotional experiences, one needs ritual plays or “charismatic performances” (Reed, 2013). Whether we are talking about the creation of a supposedly new charismatic figure or an established organization, actors draw on the same basic story lines. One story line is to construct the hero as a strong, decisive leader, and visionary or as an otherwise exceptionally talented person; Apple co-founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs is a good example (E. Bell & Taylor, 2016). On the other hand, pop stars and other figures in the entertainment industry are marketed by utilizing the “rags to riches” story: We learn that, say, Oprah Winfrey “was born on the wrong side of the tracks and made it by willpower, talent and hard work” (Rojek, 2012, p. 132). The same applies to politics; even though politicians may have a long career in policymaking, they can be branded as ordinary, “inevitably flawed individuals, which gives them an ‘authentic’ quality contrasted with distant and aloof politicians” (Wood, Corbett, & Flinders, 2016, p. 586). Similarly, a good “brand narrative” (Dean, Croft, & Pich, 2015; Timm Knudsen & Waade, 2010) is crucial for organizations, for instance, nation-states, which are branded as being modern, technologically advanced nations, combined with stories of their heroic past and depictions of their unique, “authentic” national cultures (Aronczyk, 2013; Valaskivi, 2016). These constructions of a person’s or organization’s charisma are made emotionally touching in public rituals. As Durkheim (1995) described it, the tacit logic of rites is that participants sanctify sacred persons or things by observing formalized rules in approaching them.6 The rule-governed modes of behaviour

6Accordingly,

touching a charismatic person is considered as an extraordinary experience. For instance, a US state representative was eager to talk about the moment Barack Obama held her hand for several moments. “He is just electric, absolutely electric, and the kind of person you want to stand next to,” she said excitedly (Alexander, 2010, p. 330).

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characteristic of rituals play out and construct social hierarchies (C. Bell, 1997, pp. 138–169; Bloch, 1989). Whether we are talking about a rock concert or a speech by a political or business leader, there is a strict separation of roles: Who can say what, who is in direct contact with the star, and how the audience can participate. Compared with those of a presidential candidate, the appearances of a president-elect are normally more formal and less spectacular, but in all cases, the rules observed in such rituals contribute to creating deference for the main character. In creating and utilizing charisma through symbolic and ritual means, actors are eclectic in that they make use of all possible symbols and things that are considered sacred among the participants. Hence, when the president of the USA takes the oath of office, the national flag will be flown, and the president will place his left hand on the Bible. As Bell (1997, pp. 155–159) notes, since rituals aim to convey an air of sacredness, they often borrow elements that have been sanctified by older rituals. Actors also accumulate charisma by borrowing it from other charismatic figures and emotionally touching, symbolically powerful performances and artefacts. For example, signifying youthfulness, reform and even revolt, campaign songs have become a carefully picked, important part of US presidential election campaigns, and strategists invite support from a host of film and music stars (Waldman, 2003). Sacredness is contagious (Durkheim, 1995), and hence, charismatic authority can be amassed. Utilizing charisma is evident, for instance, when speakers refer to a statement by an organization’s leader to strengthen their argument. Consider a person holding the position of a nation’s president. She has legally defined capacity-based authority to make certain decisions, but her personal charisma—which could be conceived as growing from her charismatic performances and from the trust citizens have invested in her through their vote (Coleman, 1963; Parsons, 1963a)— extends her influence much wider. On the other hand, the office of president and the national state have charisma, created through the constant ritual practices that sanctify the state and nation, and that office charisma is transmitted to the current president. Thus accumulated, charisma does not entirely fade away even when the president’s term has ended, which is one reason why former political leaders are often hired as figureheads of organizations whose influence is entirely based on the publicity and goodwill they attract. How much an actor’s ability to influence others depends on their ability to utilize charisma varies considerably. We suggest that the amount of charisma associated with an actor—a person or an organization—depends on how widely known they are, how trusted and respected they are, and how committed their fans or

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followers are. Through the publicity that they can draw to an issue, charismatic actors such as celebrities may also create public outrage that calls the attention of politicians, who want to collect political points by volunteering to act on the problem. In that sense, celebrities mobilize capacity-based authority. On the other hand, their ability to generate goodwill for a cause, such as relieving suffering in a poverty-stricken country through private donations, works through charismatic and moral authority. The influence of NGOs specialized in policy advocacy is typically built on the assumption that they represent the voice and opinion of big masses, but in fact the publicity they gain precedes their public support and serves as the means to gather masses behind their cause. Charisma is therefore the starting point and key to their influence; consider Greenpeace, whose charismatic influence is very much built on the hazardous stunts they have pulled in the seas around the world.

Amassing and Institutionalizing Authority Although the theory of authority discussed here was not built to tackle hierarchical relations, it works well not only to unpack the struggle and contest for influence but also institutionalized power relations.7 The way different types of authority are evoked and employed in concrete situations shows that they are entwined with each other. Forms of authority are also accumulated into generalized epistemic capital attached to actors, texts, and principles. They constitute the self-evidence of the social world that actors’ attempts to advance their goals put to question knowingly or intuitively. Different types of authority discussed here are entwined with each other partly because persons referred to as authorities on different grounds often know and mingle with each other. For instance, bureaucrats and experts consulted in planning and decision-making have a role in the exercise of governmental

7In

fact, it works better than, say, Weber’s famous three-pronged categorization, according to which the claims to the legitimacy of authority may be based on rational, traditional, and charismatic grounds (Weber, 1978, p. 215). Weber’s typology does capture the kind of argumentation lawyers and state employees use constantly: They refer to laws and regulations. However, it takes the law for granted in that it does not recognize the rationales— common beliefs in moral principles—behind considering law as a justification. However, it rules out someone’s capacity to act, for instance, to use force, as grounds for their authority. Besides, it does not recognize constructions of truth as a source of authority.

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authority (Bislev, Bislev, Salskov-Iversen, & Hansen, 2002; Carayannis, Pirzadeh, & Popescu, 2011; Cohen, 2013; Haas, 1992b). There are also theories of conspiracies and power elites that prepare, agree on, and manage political ­decisions hidden from the public eye. On the other hand, different types of authority are enmeshed in people’s minds because, linguistically, the word authority is a polyseme: A word with different but related senses. In different contexts, the meanings of authority could even be considered as separate homonyms: words that have the same spelling but different meanings. For instance, to refer to an office as a state authority is quite different from citing Max Weber as an authority. Yet these meanings inform and color each other. That is, why it makes sense to talk about epistemic capital as the sum of all the grounds and means by which authority is built. Epistemic capital is like money invested in different assets such as currencies, equities, and property: Different sources of authority are part of an entity’s total weight in people’s minds. And different types of epistemic capital can also be exchanged with each other. For instance, respect and credibility built on the fame of a rock star can be exchanged to moral authority, which is evident in celebrities being used as goodwill ambassadors. Furthermore, common theories of power and authority frame people’s understandings of the relations of dominance in society. Hence, theories of the power elite (Mills, 1956), technocracy (Allen, 1933; Jasanoff, 1990), and network governance (Castells, 2011) inform common conceptions, which means that actors aiming to affect decision-making need to pay attention to their public image. On the one hand, politicians may do their best to show that the political process is transparent, avoiding the impression that they prepare decisions in a small circle behind closed doors. On the other hand, many INGOs and IGOs, although they have little sanctioning power over government policies, “act as if they were authorized in the strongest possible terms” (Boli & Thomas, 1999b, p. 37), creating the image of themselves as official representatives of stakeholder groups who play a key role in governance (see also Alasuutari, Rautalin, & Syväterä, 2016). Similarly, many organizations and think tanks that are established to promote the interests of small stakeholder groups join forces with several others into meta-organizations (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008) or advocacy networks and coalitions (Stone, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2008; Weible et al., 2011) to make the claim that they represent the demands of a powerful block. Naturally, the bases for actors’ deference vary. Consider the frequencies with which international organizations are referenced in policy debates in different countries, which indicates the differences in their authority profiles (Alasuutari, 2016,

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pp. 116–129). The United Nations has a strong profile as a moral authority, although through its knowledge production it also plays a role as an ontological authority. As an expert organization, the OECD’s influence leans on ontological authority, but as a reference group for the member countries, it also serves as a moral authority. In contrast, through its task as an organization that provides concrete economic assistance, the World Bank has a distinct profile as a capacity-based authority, although in its PR activity it obviously aims to be perceived as a consultant and hence as an ontological authority. But in aiming to enhance their credibility organizations build their authority on different grounds and cite other authoritative sources and entities.

Discussion The way it is used here, authority denotes practically anything that actors use to influence others. An authority can be, for instance, a powerful person or organization, a belief, an account of reality, a principle, a text, or an object such as an atomic bomb. Extending authority from persons to material objects brings us close to Latour’s (2005) actor-network-theory and to other posthumanist theories, which blur the boundary between human and nonhuman agents (see, e.g., Barad, 2003; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001). However, nonhumans do not change the social world without humans’ interference: An object can be considered an authority only if humans can make a move that constructs it as something to take seriously—for instance, if a rock can be constructed as a potential weapon or if beliefs in a stone’s sacredness are utilized. From this perspective, the social world can be described as composed of and constituted by all the things that actors take into consideration when pursuing their projects. Depending on how important all these elements of reality are considered—that is, how much epistemic capital is attached to them, people avoid or fight obstacles and enemies, or try to bind others to pursue their projects. Thus, epistemic capital is a variable measure: Actors are assumed to have varying amounts of influence on others’ conduct. The vocabulary proposed here can also be used to account for hierarchical, zero-sum power games. People give consent to institutionalized chains of command, for instance, regarding state structures. Apart from such cases, however, it is not possible or useful to give generalized accounts of who has power or how power works, because actors constantly struggle for their positions and influence, and the end results depend on the strategic situation at hand.

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Epistemic capital is relational, based on others’ recognition, which means that nobody can claim it for themselves or for an object one-sidedly. On the other hand, the more often an actor or principle is alluded to as an authority, the more important they become. Epistemic capital increases with use and diminishes with disuse.8 Because authority is relational, image management and branding are an inherent part of power games. And in this struggle, actors employ imageries of the social world and notions of power, for instance, by strengthening the image of themselves as powerful. In this sense, we could say that this aspect of power games is the opposite of conspiracy theories: rather than hiding their use of power, actors portray themselves as powerful as they can, because their recognition among others depends on others’ beliefs.9 This is, of course, a well-known strategy for instance in warfare.10 But hiding the details of actual decision-making from the public is certainly another common strategy, typical of democracies that expect transparency of the political process. Stressing that authority is based on beliefs and trust is timely considering the developments that we have witnessed especially since the turn of the twenty-first century. From the late twentieth century onward, globalization, coupled with the breakthrough of the Internet and social media, has fundamentally changed the dynamics of civic engagement and policy-making, leaving national states vulnerable to new kinds of strategies and populist actors, who construct themselves as charismatic saviors. The new information and communication technology has enabled new ways to affect political opinion formation, mobilization, advocacy, lobbying, and influencing (see, e.g., Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). It is easier to try and win others’ hearts and minds, organize virtual mass movements and networks, and construct credible, authoritative organizations feared and respected by decision-makers. These strategies by which actors can accumulate epistemic capital can also be utilized for populist leadership, in which truth is at the core of political contestation.

8This

is also how Putnam et al. (1993, p. 170) describe the social capital of communities. thank Risto Heiskala for this observation. 10This phenomenon is also common in the animal world, in which many creatures defend themselves by pretending to be bigger or otherwise more dangerous than they are. 9We

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International Organizations

• This chapter discusses the role of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in people’s endeavors to bring about change. • We introduce different perspectives on IGOs and show how the theory of epistemic governance can be used in studying international organization. • The chapter shows that IGOs have different profiles regarding their authority: some are respected as expert organizations, others as moral authorities, and IGOs may also market themselves as entities that can use force to impose their will on their member states and other actors in the world. • IGOs are typically eclectic in amassing authority as epistemic capital: when several actors “borrow” the authority of an IGO, it increases and radiates also to the users, which is why IGOs and NGOs form advocacy coalitions and networks. With their roots in the infamous Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens III, 1972), the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) are probably the most ambitious effort of the international community to steer global change. As a common denominator of a plethora of actors aiming for a sustainable future, the SDGs also manifest a longterm expansion of international non-governmental and governmental organizations (Bromley & Meyer, 2015), particularly with those concerned with the environment (J. W. Meyer, Frank, Hironaka, Schofer, & Tuma, 1997). In this chapter we use the SDGs as an illustration of the role of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in people’s endeavors to bring about change in the world. Related to the case in point, we discuss different criticisms and theoretical perspectives on IGOs and © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_5

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then move on to showing how the theory of epistemic governance can be used in studying international organization. The history of SDGs dates back to a UN conference held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972, the topic of which was to consider the rights of the family to a healthy and productive environment. This led to the founding of the so-called Brundtland Commission, which stated that the task of sustainable development is to “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 14). The agenda of sustainable development was further developed in the first UN Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and in its follow-up meeting 20 years later (known as the Rio20 Conference). Finally, an open working group came up with 17 sustainable development goals and 169 associated targets, which were accepted in 2014. Started in 2016, implementation of the SDGs is a massive undertaking. Throughout the world, individuals, universities, governments, and organizations of all kinds work on several goals at the same time. In each country, governments have committed themselves to translating the goals into national legislation. They also need to develop a plan of action, establish budgets and at the same time be open to and actively search for partners. The forming of specific goals and targets, set in the year 2030, meant that the UN member states also agreed on engaging in systematic follow-up and review of the implementation of the agenda. To that end, an expert group came up with a list of 230 indicators. Accordingly, in 2018 the UN published its first review of progress made regarding the goals, stating that “the rate of global progress is not keeping pace with the ambitions of the Agenda, necessitating immediate and accelerated action by countries and stakeholders at all levels” (United Nations, 2018). In addition to national governments, the UN has encouraged voluntary commitments and partnerships for sustainable development. To that end, the Rio20 Conference mandated the UN Secretariat to establish and maintain a comprehensive registry of voluntary initiatives to promote sustainable development and poverty eradication. In 2013, 1382 commitments, partnerships, initiatives and networks for sustainable development had been registered (United Nations, 2013), and by October 3, 2018, the number had grown to 3937. This means that, in addition to all IGOs belonging to the UN system, a great number of NGOs and all kinds of public and private organizations have expressed commitment to sustainable development goals. To take a concrete example of how countries implement or “localize” the SDGs, in 2018 the Finnish National Commission on Sustainable Development and the Prime Minister’s Office published a document called “The Finland We

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Want by 2050 – Society’s Commitment to Sustainable Development” (Prime Minister’s Office, 2018), which lists a vision and eight objectives. This commitment was circulated through different ministries and state agencies, with the objective that various actors would join in and commit themselves to the goals. Consequently, for instance, the Academy of Finland—i.e., the Finnish Science Council—decided to commit to the goals of sustainable development in its research funding. Consequently, when applying for funding researchers must include a description of how the project will advance sustainable development (Academy of Finland, 2018). While making the ideal of sustainability increasingly pervasive, these kinds of processes further spread the risk of hypocrisy, which is a well-known topic in corporate social responsibility (Fassin & Buelens, 2011; T. Wagner, Lutz, & Weitz, 2009) and in contemporary planning discourse and practice (Vogel, 2016).

Previous Research on the Role of IGOs in Global Governance The SDGs have been praised as a great victory in that the bold global agenda to end poverty by 2030 and pursue a sustainable future was unanimously adopted by the 193 Member States of the UN (United Nations, 2015a). On the other hand, the agenda has also been criticized for various reasons. For instance, it has been argued that, due to the SDGs’ nature as a compromise that all member states can adopt, it fails to address democracy. As Jeffrey Smith (2018) puts it, the SDGs are pushing an agenda carefully calibrated to avoid upsetting the world’s dictators, kleptocrats, and this century’s worst human rights offenders. Search the 17 SDGs and you will fail to find a single mention of the word “democracy.” Out of thousands of words of text, “human rights” is mentioned merely once (and not as its own category, but as a secondary bullet point).

It has also been noted that there are too many goals (Anonymous, 2015) and that they contradict one another. For instance, seeking high levels of global GDP growth might undermine ecological objectives (Ganten & Kickbusch, 2018). As to progress made regarding the goals set in the past, significant improvement has been made in poverty reduction, primary education enrollment, gender disparity, and health care (United Nations, 2015b). On the other hand, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration has been on the rise since industrial revolution. In fact in 2013, normalized atmospheric CO2 concentration crossed the 400

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parts per million (ppm) mark for the first time since its rigorous measurements began in 1958 (NASA, 2013; Singh, 2016). But whether or not the UN has made a real difference to save the world through the SDGs, the undertaking is a prime example of international organization. A surge in the forming of the global organizational ecology took place in the immediate aftermath of World War II when the creation of the United Nations (UN) system was started. Consisting of the UN, its six principal organs, 20 specialized agencies and affiliated organizations, the UN system alone is a highly complex organizational ecology. In addition, there are thousands of other IGOs: according to the Yearbook of International Organizations (2012), there are some 5000 IGOs altogether. The same explosion of organization goes for NGOs. To take an example, in the United States the total number of not-for-profit organizations increased more than sevenfold between 1943 and 1996, from 0.59 to 4.48 not-for-profits per thousand people (J. W. Meyer & Bromley, 2013, p. 367), and similar changes took place at the international level and in other countries, developed and developing alike (see also Drori, Meyer, & Hwang, 2006). Hence, if similar organizations or institutions have been established in several places or countries, it is more than likely that they have regular contact with each other or are members of meta-organizations (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Brunsson & Ahrne, 2005), which promote the institution in places where it does not yet have a presence (Alasuutari, Rautalin, & Syväterä, 2016). The tasks and profiles of IGOs and NGOs vary, but in recent decades they have become increasingly keen to produce knowledge. According to Zapp’s (2017a) study of the evolution of scientific output from international governmental and non-governmental organizations in the period 1950–2015, a striking increase in scientific activity took place since the late 1980s and particularly since the early 2000s across organizational types, sectors, research fields, output formats (e.g. articles, books), and geographic areas. For instance the World Bank has been seen primarily as an organization that employs coercive and regulative mechanisms to have an impact on national states’ policies, but since the late 1990s it has invested heavily in research in all its units, particularly in education, and become one of the world’s most important research producers in education (Zapp, 2017b). It appears that this “knowledge turn” has not been due to increased demand for knowledge from states but rather, IGOs have “taught” states the value and utility of science policy organizations. The conviction that coordination and direction of science are necessary tasks of the modern state has become a new international norm (Finnemore, 1993). So, it is obvious that all manner of actors—national states, businesses, and individuals—aiming to change the world believe that establishing an organization

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is beneficial. Moreover, actors seem to think that scientific knowledge production is an essential part of those organizations’ activities. Why is that? Why do organizations, IGOs in particular, exist in the first place? Scholarship in this question is divided between neorealist and neoliberal theories, on one hand, and institutionalist theories, on the other. For the former, IGOs are simply epiphenomena of state interaction, helping states advance their interests where they are allowed to do that, whereas the latter argue that IGOs exercise power autonomously in ways unintended and unanticipated by states at their creation (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999). In addition, it has been suggested that scientists as an epistemic community—defined as a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area—have played a primary role in affecting global environmental policy (Haas, 1992a). In similar vein, the power over global policymaking has been attributed to international advocacy coalitions (Henry, 2011; Shanahan, Jones, & McBeth, 2011; Weible et al., 2011), or agents and networks (Stone, 2002, 2004).

States as Principals The dominant neorealist paradigm in international relations maintains that the international system is driven by anarchy, egoism, groupism and power politics (Donnelly, 2008). Since there is no higher authority above nation-states, as in Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, the international world is viewed as a potential “war of all against all,” in which all nations and groups seek for and secure their own interests (Cerny, 2012). Higher ends are subordinated to the underlying requirements of survival and national self-interest (Waltz, 1979). In a variant of the realist paradigm, neoliberals maintain that neorealists underestimate the possibilities for cooperative behavior possible within a state of anarchy. Both theories consider the state and its interests as the central subject of analysis, but neoliberalism has a wider conception of what those interests are and how states can pursue them also through the building of norms, regimes and institutions. The imagery of competing blocks underlying the neorealist paradigm leads to considering world politics as analogous to a market filled with utility-­maximizing competitors. Like most economists, realists see organizations as solutions to problems of incomplete information and high transaction costs (Vaubel & Willett, 1991). Hence, organizations are considered as solutions to contracting problems, incomplete information, and other market imperfections. Yet they are treated as instruments created to serve state interests.

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From the neorealist perspective it is difficult to explain the exponential growth in the number of IGOs and NGOs in recent decades. Why do states reason that their interests are best served by further increasing international organization? The same goes for establishing international non-governmental organizations: if states are the principal actors, why do citizens bother to organize transnationally and seek to influence the views and activities of IGOs? To tackle those questions, several scholars have resorted to more inductive research designs that treat organizations as “social facts.” The epistemic communities approach is one example. While this approach also acknowledges that IGOs serve state interests, it points out that identifying and defining those interests depends on policymakers’ understanding of the situation at hand. That is the reason why the so-called epistemic communities are able to gain influence in coordinating state policies: How states identify their interests and recognize the latitude of actions deemed appropriate in specific issue-areas of policymaking are functions of the manner in which the problems are understood by the policymakers or are represented by those to whom they turn for advice under conditions of uncertainty. Recognizing that human agency lies at the interstices between systemic conditions, knowledge, and national actions, we offer an approach that examines the role that networks of knowledge-based experts—epistemic communities—play in articulating the causeand-effect relationships of complex problems, helping states identify their interests, framing the issues for collective debate, proposing specific policies, and identifying salient points for negotiation. (Haas, 1992b, p. 2)

The proponents of this framework do not mean that experts, for instance scientists specializing in an issue area, necessarily form a unanimous community that promotes a single view to policymakers and hence play a decisive role in coordinating state policies, although that can happen (see e.g. Adler, 1992; Haas, 1992a). Rather, often there are several epistemic communities competing for hegemony (Adler & Haas, 1992). In that respect, the epistemic communities approach is related to the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), which also maintains that in policymaking coalitions of actors with different belief systems interact and compete to dominate policy subsystems. An advocacy coalition contains “people from a variety of positions (elected and agency officials, interest group leaders, researchers) who share a particular belief system—i.e. a set of basic values, causal assumptions, and problem perceptions—and who show a non-trivial degree of coordinated activity over time” (Sabatier, 1988, p. 139). Coalitions also engage in learning to adapt to the beliefs of another coali-tion, particularly when its views become “too important to ignore” (Jenkins-Smith & Sabatier, 1993, p. 43). Such learning takes place

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through the lens of deeply held beliefs, producing different interpretations of facts and events in different coalitions. In some cases different coalitions agree on ways to assess the pros and cons of different policies; in others coalitions blame each other for poor policy outcomes. Scientific evidence and technical information are often politicized and a dominant coalition can successfully challenge the data supporting policy change for years (Sabatier, 1998, p. 104).

Culture in the Driver’s Seat The ACF has been applied primarily to policymaking in national contexts, particularly in the USA, but it has also been employed in analyzing the way domestic and international levels are blurred in policymaking (Litfin, 2000) and the fact that advocacy coalitions are increasingly transnational (Clarke, 2008). For instance, because climate policies are shaped by IGOs and global norms, researchers have studied how commonly climate policy norms promoted by IGOs are evoked in different countries (Kukkonen et al., 2018; P. Wagner & Ylä-Anttila, 2018). In a similar vein, Keck and Sikkink (1998, 1999) talk about transnational advocacy networks, somewhat related to transnational social movement theory as we discuss in Chapter 6. By that term they refer to networks comprising nonstate actors that interact with each other, with states, and with IGOs. These networks also involve economic actors and firms. “Some are networks of scientists and experts whose professional ties and shared causal ideas underpin their efforts to influence policy. Others are networks of activists, distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values in motivating their formation” (Keck & Sikkink, 1999, p. 89). These approaches make it seem clear that—as Barnett and Finnemore (1999, p. 699) put it—IGOs “exercise power autonomously in ways unintended and unanticipated by states at their creation.” To make that understandable, Barnett and Finnemore develop a constructivist approach rooted in sociological institutionalism. They maintain that global organizations do more than just facilitate cooperation by helping states to overcome market failures, collective action dilemmas, and problems associated with interdependent social choice. They also create actors, specify responsibilities and authority among them, and define the work these actors should do, giving it meaning and normative value. Even when they lack material resources, IOs exercise power as they constitute and construct the social world. (1999, p. 700)

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The reason why IGOs have authority even over powerful member states, Barnett and Finnemore suggest, is because of the bureaucratic rationality in the way they function: it is because bureaucrats in IGOs “are performing ‘duties of office’ and implementing ‘rationally established norms’ that they are powerful” (1999, p. 708). Barnett and Finnemore also argue that bureaucratic culture can breed several kinds of pathologies in IGOs: dysfunctional behavior regarding the official goals. Whereas Barnett and Finnemore propose that bureaucrats within IGOs have autonomous power over member states, world society theory suggests that power resides in a broader culture of modernity, which cherishes rationality. This does not necessarily mean that the decision to establish an organization is rational in the sense that there is, for instance, empirical evidence of its efficiency in solving the problems it is expected to solve. It only means that decisions are justified by appealing to rationality and science. Since actors are constituted by world culture, world society theory maintains, they are conformists who unthinkingly follow models promoted as being rational. Even if such world-cultural models are not implemented in actual practice, states and other actors are hypocritical: they enact the models to look good in the eyes of the international community. Experts and consultants develop abstract accounts of actors, organizations and models (Strang & Meyer, 1993) and promote them as necessary for further development, often ending up in reforms that are in fact unsuitable to the states in question and enhance a decoupling of principles and actual practices (Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2005; Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, & Meyer, 2008; Koenig, 2008). Accordingly, Meyer and Bromley (2013) argue, the rapid growth of formal organization in all social sectors around the world is an upshot of rationalistic world culture. That is, in state, market, and public good arenas alike, new forms have arisen, and older social forms—traditional bureaucracies, family firms, different kinds of associations—have been transformed into formal organizations. For instance, traditional charities are now known as “nonprofit organizations,” run according to the same principles as organizations in any other sector.

The Epistemic Governance Approach to IGOs Previous research and theorizing offer intriguing and many-faceted views on IGOs in the modern world. These viewpoints are useful also when accounting for the phenomena related to SDGs. However, the total picture remains quite inconsistent and fragmentary: different schools of thought take up the pieces of the

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total picture that fit their theory while ignoring the ones that do not find a proper explanation. For instance, these schools of thought differ from each other regarding questions of power. While neorealists and neoliberals attribute power to states that have established IGOs, institutionalists and constructivists treat organizations as entities that have some autonomy over the states, attributing power to different groups of actors influencing the IGOs’ policies or to bureaucrats within the IGOs themselves. Finally, world society theory attributes power to culture, which means that actors are considered as agents who enact world-cultural scripts. Such theories exclude each other only if power is understood as a zero-sum game. However, if we assume that people’ influence on others depends on the actors and on a particular case, these disputes lose their meaning, and we must instead ask how it is that actors try to influence others’ conduct. By reframing the questions asked, the epistemic governance approach provides a framework in which all pieces of the puzzle find their place. It is not a theory that provides a ready-made explanation for everything, but it does offer a framework within which the findings of different research traditions can be accounted for and a conceptual toolbox applicable in scrutinizing the role of IGOs and INGOs from different sides. The starting point for the epistemic governance approach is that actors try to bring about change by acting upon others’ view of reality and the situation at hand. In this sense the approach assumes actors to be rational or purposeful in their activities rather than unthinking conformists (cf. J. W. Meyer, 2004). However, we stress that actors’ aspirations must be understood in their cultural and institutional context. Rationality is bounded (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001) by people’s conception of the situation, of their beliefs regarding acceptable or desirable behavior, and of themselves as actors: to what community they belong and, hence, what is in their interest. (This is a broadly Foucauldian perspective on social reality, as we discuss in detail in Chapter 7.) Therefore, quite like neorealist and neoliberal theories, the epistemic governance approach assumes that states—or policymakers in states, to be more precise—find IGOs a useful way to advance their goals. Otherwise it would be hard to understand why IGOs exist or why their number has grown during the last decades. However, siding with constructionist scholars, the epistemic governance approach stresses that “interests” are always socially constructed. For instance, politicians acting, or presenting themselves as, agents of the state advance policies that they believe to be in the interest of the state. Furthermore, from a rhetorical viewpoint, for actors to influence others’ conduct, they need to speak to beliefs and principles that they believe the others to have, regardless of their own convictions. For instance, to under-

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stand why states establish IGOs and citizens institute NGOs to affect politics in domestic and international contexts, we must study what beliefs and convictions those organizations and actors alluding to them utilize in their communication and other activities. This also means that hypocrisy is part of the business. And because it is the perceptions and conceptions that count, the epistemic governance approach underlines that affecting others is always a signaling game (Bates & Weingast, 1995; Garrett & Weingast, 1993) in which cheating is a possibility, although quite difficult since actors are conscious of it. Because governance functions through affecting others’ view of reality, quite like neoinstitutionalist scholarship has pointed out in keeping with Foucault’s insights into power, knowledge production is an important strategy. As world society theory argues, that is because science and rationality are central to rationalist world culture. The epistemic governance perspective however considers the belief in rationality as only one tactic among others: IGOs (and actors utilizing their authority) also act upon people’s imageries of the social world, including assumptions about IGOs as proxies for the non-existing world government. Assumptions of resources by which IGO can impose its will on disobedient states or other actors may also be used. Finally, the epistemic governance framework sheds light on the eclectic ways in which IGOs and INGOs increase their influence—for instance by forming coalitions and incorporating other stakeholders— by elaborating on organizations’ character as accumulations of authority.

IGOs Defining the World for Us One obvious viewpoint that can be elaborated by the epistemic governance approach is the role of knowledge production in the influence of IGOs on the global community. Whether IGOs are capable of defining the world for us is crucial for their authority. That is because using force against individual actors or IGOs’ member states is problematic and ineffective. With a few exceptions such as the World Bank and NATO, which have some resources by which to set conditions or put sanctions on target countries, IGOs cannot impose their will on the members of the international community by force. Instead, IGOs’ influence on national states and other actors is based on softer means. Rather than giving orders—for which they have little if any muscles—IGOs take the role of consultants. Appealing to rational reasons and to the actors’ own interests, IGOs recommend lines of action to their member states and other organizations. In this mode

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of activity, IGOs act upon people’s ontology of the environment: how we conceive of the world and facts regarding it. The SDGs are a good example. Throughout the process leading up to the mission of sustainable development, actors relied on research and expert knowledge. It all started with the report of the Club of Rome, and ever since, knowledge production has been an integral part of the way policies have been debated and agreed on. For instance, the indicators used to measure progress regarding the set goals represent the practical aspect of the way in which this UN agenda intending to save the world, provides a detailed list of gauges. For example, achieving or nearing the first goal, ending poverty in all its forms everywhere, is assessed by 17 indicators. These indicators range from eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day, to creating sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, to support investment in poverty eradication actions, the efficiency of which is measured by the proportion of total government spending on them (United Nations, 2016). The SDGs also define reality more fundamentally in several ways: the UN agenda constitutes reality at a paradigmatic level. For example, the 2030 Agenda document (United Nations, 2015c) states that eradicating poverty is an “indispensable requirement for sustainable development.” It also acknowledges the threat posed by climate change and environmental degradation and that to keep global warming within an agreed-on limit requires accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions. Such ontological statements are based on the work of expert groups that have compiled existing scientific knowledge. For instance, the goals and targets regarding climate change are backed up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces assessment reports that review thousands of separate studies related to various aspects of climate change, its impacts and adaptation (see, e.g. IPCC, 2014, 2018). The paradigmatic aspect of the way IGOs define reality is important in that it justifies the need to bring about change and to steer development in a particular direction. There are, of course, also opponents of basic, paradigmatic premises, so that the justification for policies founded on the ontological claims is refuted. As a case in point, global warming deniers dismiss the scientific opinion on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its impacts on nature and human society, or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions (Powell, 2011). Yet the means by which critics normally attack the fundamental definitions of reality proposed by IGOs shows the importance of the ontology of the environment in politics and governance: critics also appeal

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to and speak in the name of science. Hence, the ones who resist or criticize the UN’s policy to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions—many of whom are funded by organizations like the fossil-fuel industry that benefit from ignoring the threat of climate change—make counter-arguments that appear rational. Furthermore, the deniers have established organizations, the names of which create the impression that they represent groups of scientists; the “International Climate Science Coalition” is one example (Powell, 2011, p. 15). The centrality of research and expertise is a central feature of the entire organizational ecology that surrounds IGOs. Whether we are talking about NGOs or organizations that represent the interests of various stakeholder groups, many of them also fund and publish reports that make claims on reality and appeal to empirical evidence. The global think tank boom from the late 1970s onward, part of which has been a burgeoning of environmental policy institutes, is one example (Stone, 2001). In 2016 there were more than 7500 think tanks in the world, 55% of which are located in North America and Europe. Furthermore, 90.5% of think tanks were created since 1951, and 31% of all think tanks were created between 1981 and 1990 (McGann, 2017). Engaged in translating science to politics, think tanks vary and there are national differences in their links to policymaking. Roughly speaking, we can differentiate between academic think tanks, which rely on academics as researchers, and advocacy think tanks, which “combine a strong policy, partisan or ideological bent with aggressive salesmanship and an effort to influence current policy debates” (Weaver, 1989, p. 567). As to climate policy, in the US think tanks exercise influence in the background of the political discourse on climate change, with conservative advocacy think tanks attacking climate science, whereas in Germany academic think tanks operate mainly in the foreground of political discourses, responding to specific requests to support concrete political programs and policy actions (Ruser, 2018). Yet, as Ruser (2018, p. 53) stresses, the scientific character is central for all types of think tanks. A substantial part of the politics on the ontology of the environment deals with practical aspects. That is, actors involved acknowledge the need for changes but negotiate on how substantial the changes need to be and what are the correct indicators and measurements. When, say, partners of an international agreement on greenhouse gas emission mitigation debate on their individual targets, they negotiate not only on the numbers but on how emissions are calculated. As a case in point, within the EU climate policy, Finland has defended its own view on how to take into account its forests’ carbon sequestration capacity as a counterweight to forestry as a source of greenhouse gas emissions (Ministry of the Environment, 2017; Teivainen, 2017).

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Norms, Ideals and Identifications Acting upon others’ ontology of the environment is an intriguing feature of the way IGOs influence national policies and the views and behavior of individuals and various organizations. Yet it is self-evident that epistemic work related to IGOs also focus on the other two aspects: conceptions of what is acceptable or desirable and people’s identifications. In addition to knowledge production, IGOs base their legitimacy on widely shared principles such as equality and human rights. The SDGs are, again, a case in point. The goals and targets are concrete, and critics and opponents may argue that they are either too ambitious or not ambitious enough or that progress expected of a particular country is not fair. In other words, they negotiate on the practical aspects of realizing the principles. But it is very uncommon that the principles themselves are questioned. That is because the UN’s respect is built on its long-term work to, indeed, unite nations behind certain shared basic values. As a massive organization the UN and its agencies produce and commission research reports, but it has a strong profile as a moral authority. It is the organization in which international agreements on, for instance, human rights are drafted and accepted. And once ratified by a vast majority of the member states, those principles represent the norms and ideals of the entire humankind, reified in the United Nations as an organization. The UN’s mission to unite the nations under shared principles also acts upon people’s identifications. It wants people to feel that they all belong to a single international community: humankind. The identity construct underlying the UN’s mission is interesting in that, unlike most epistemic work focusing on people’s identifications, the one promoted by the UN does not presuppose an outside, an Other in distinction from which the “we”—i.e., humankind—is defined (Abizadeh, 2005). The UN’s only goal is to manage relations between its Member States. As it is expressed in its charter, its task is: To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace. (United Nations, 1945, p. 3)

The UN’s mission to make all people identify with humankind is challenged by other identifications, in particular with nations and their interests. The UN’s constitutional texts and international conventions drafted by it seek to negotiate the

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tensions between these competing identifications in various ways. For instance, national sovereignty is a key principle within the UN, but it may be compromised by human rights principles such as freedom of religion. One rhetorical strategy, evident also in promoting SDGs, is to say that the common and partial interests do not contradict one another: preserving the world for future generations is in everyone’s interest. President Donald Trump’s announcement in 2017 that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation is an example of how identification with the nation and with humanity are placed against each other. Following his “America first” line, Trump justified his decision by saying that the Paris accord will undermine the U.S. economy. Yet Trump also acknowledged indirectly the overall objective by arguing that the agreement is not fair for the United States: “The Paris accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States,” he said (Chakraborty, 2017).

Impression Management As said, the epistemic governance framework stresses that acting upon others’ views and behavior works through their perceptions of the world, which is why managing impressions is crucial. This means that IGOs need to appear convincing and credible in their communication. In addition, IGOs may brand themselves as organizations capable of conducting operations. If, for example, an IO is able to convey an image of itself as a powerful actor that can use force and impose sanctions on non-complying countries, its statements or other moves are taken more seriously than if it only has an image as an expert organization that produces knowledge. More generally, we can say that the image an IO or other organization conveys of itself depends on its tasks and on the context. The branding of organizations is part of their aspirations to affect other actors’ conceptions and behavior. In branding themselves IGOs resort to widely shared values and imageries of the social world. To gain an image of a body that produces reliable knowledge about reality, the impression of being well organized and behaving rationally is crucial. The organization needs to show evidence of sufficient resources for knowledge production, and the research reports need to look scientifically solid, produced by respected and independent scholars. From this perspective, the question of whether IGOs just help states advance their interests or whether they exercise power autonomously can be seen in a new light. For example, from the viewpoint of the image of an organization that produces reliable facts, it is in

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the interest of the sponsors—states in the case of IGOs—to grant the staff of the organization in question a relatively independent position. That is in fact one of the reasons why states stress the independence of public research institutes such as national statistical systems (Jeskanen-Sundström, 2007) and the sovereignty of universities. The same rationale is behind states contracting out knowledge production to IGOs such as the OECD: when information about a state’s performance and analysis of the reasons for a low ranking comes from an international body, it is considered more reliable and hence national policymakers can use it to create a “boomerang pattern of influence” (Keck & Sikkink, 1999). As producers of knowledge applicable in designing national policies, IGOs assume the role of consultants. In other instances, however, they can appear as powerful actors in the global system. In such contexts, actors involved employ the imagery of world society as a hierarchy—i.e., a global system organized as a chain of command (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2016). That is, IGOs can be presented as proxies for a world government, capable of imposing sanctions or causing harm to national states that do not comply with the international conventions or recommendations. Actors advancing their goals in national policymaking can then utilize such an understanding of IGOs in the global system. In that way a politician can imply that there is external pressure, force or a prior commitment to enact a policy promoted by an IO. The discussion about establishing children’s ombudsman’s office in Finland was a case in point (Alasuutari et al., 2016). In the public debate, discussants painted scenarios of what would happen if Finland did not take the recommendation of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child seriously and establish the office. In reality, the Convention on the Rights of the Child does not even mention a child advocate or ombudsman and ratifying it does not grant the UN jurisdictional powers over ratification states; it is a moral commitment to advance children’s rights. Rather than creating the image that an IO represents a higher power in a global organizational hierarchy, branding of an IO can also utilize the imagery of competing blocks: a view of the world divided into camps that pursue their own interests and hence fight or compete against each other (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2016). As an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a prime example. Like any military power, its influence depends on its perceived capability to perform military operations and hence guarantee security for its member states. If potential enemies believe that NATO is powerful enough, it affects their conception of reality by ruling out some options of the use of force. Military exercises serve the purpose of practicing the skills needed and demonstrating the troops’ capacity, but the same can be accomplished by a military operation.

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When talking about the use of force in world politics, it may seem strange to talk about branding and impression management. However, it is important to note that actors’ behavior can be made understandable only by relating it to their understanding of the situation at hand. In that sense it is the impression that counts in the last instance, which does not mean that people are easily fooled. As research on brand management shows, honesty and credibility are important for successful branding (Albert & Merunka, 2013; Bigné‐Alcañiz, Currás‐Pérez, & Sánchez‐García, 2009). The same need for impression management also applies to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). And as was the case with IGOs, the image an entity wants to convey of itself depends on the organization’s character and on the context. Typically, although INGOs have little sanctioning power over government policies, they want to create an impression of themselves as “authorized in the strongest possible terms” (Boli & Thomas, 1999b, p. 37). In a similar vein, Meyer and Bromley (2013, p. 377) note that, along with the worldwide expansion of organization during the last decades, organizations increasingly present themselves as “creatures whose purposive choices legitimately rule the world.” On the other hand, small, grassroots-level NGOs are not merely junior members of the same professional field. Instead, expressive dimensions of charity work are pronounced in their public image. These organizations borrow the purposes and legitimacy of professional NGOs, but “their motivating force, their destinations, their projects, their staff, and their resource base are all shaped by the personal” (Schnable, 2016, p. 5). It is through this image of giving direct aid to those in need that they appeal to individuals as donors. Because of the importance of an organization’s public image, there are businesses that offer their services to companies and other organizations regarding their environmental brand management. To take an example, GlobeScan is “an insights and strategy firm that helps companies, NGOs and governmental organizations build the trust they need to create enduring value for themselves and for society” (Globescan, 2018). In addition to all manner of business companies, NGOs such as Amnesty International and Oxfam belong to its clientele.

Accumulation of Authority To recap, IGOs’ influence on the international community depends on their ability to affect people’s conceptions of reality and the situation at hand: what are the facts, what is right or acceptable, and with whom people identify themselves. But we hasten to add that IGOs cannot be treated as separate from the views

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and interests of a great number of actors, such as member states’ governments, NGOs, and groups of scientists who have authority in explaining and defining the world for us. To understand how IGOs attempt to achieve, and at times succeed in acquiring, an authoritative position in defining the world for us, we must first ask what we mean by authority in this context. As was made obvious in the previous sections, the international system cannot be considered as a hierarchical, bureaucratic organization. National states are not subject to a world government that would have jurisdiction over them. That is because the international order is based on the idea of sovereign states. Therefore, we cannot treat any IGO, not even the UN, as an authority in the sense we talk about a state authority: a superior position from which an actor has “the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014). Here we obviously talk about authority in another meaning of the word: as “power to influence the opinions of others, esp. because of one’s recognized knowledge or scholarship” (Ibid). From this viewpoint authority is not a zero-sum game; several actors with conflicting views have authority. We can also say that actors or sources such as books are more or less authoritative. In this meaning of the concept, authority can also be accumulated: the more there are authoritative actors that agree on a view, the more authority it has. Herein lies the authority of IGOs: through being able to act as platforms and agenda-setting instances in which different views clash and converge, they are accumulations of authority. Because of the authoritative weight or “epistemic capital” (Alasuutari, 2018) an organization like the UN and its mission like the SDGs can accumulate, even opponents cannot ignore it. Rather, actors borrow the authority of IGOs to advance their own goals and to amass their own authority. IGOs function as a forum to which issues and grievances are brought, in which different views and interests clash and meet and where actors bargain on a compromise that is acceptable for all or most member states. Besides, recent decades have seen a development whereby IGOs are increasingly inclusive of different stakeholders, NGOs and activist groups. That is, international decision-making processes seek legitimacy through the involvement of civil society. For instance, at times accused of being an elite club of wealthy countries, the OECD engages with civil society through various ways: advisory committees that represent businesses and trade unions, regular consultations, as well as conferences and workshops where civil society organizations are welcome to contribute (OECD, 2018). Rather than meeting the criticism of social movements and NGOs after an international agreement has been made, IGOs seek to incorporate stakeholders beforehand. Different views are incorporated in these processes also through think tanks involved in carrying out research for IGOs. For instance the UN and the World

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Bank are contracting think tanks to conduct studies, provide “independent” analysis and to aid in sifting, synthesizing and ordering information (Stone, 2001, p. 230). Regarding the SDGs, the UN system has been decisive in orchestrating the creation of the agenda, but its significance stems from the thousands of other organizations and networks that have played a role in, first, raising general consciousness about environmental issues and, second, committing themselves to it. The UN’s policy to invite all kinds of organizations and stakeholders to take part in forming a unanimous view and releasing an online global registry of voluntary commitments and multi-stakeholder partnerships are part of the strategy by which the authority of the SDGs is increased. Consequently, the epistemic community that has formed around sustainable development has become so self-evident and authoritative that it adds onto the credibility and authority of the organizations and stakeholders that publish their voluntary commitment to the SDGs. Even if many organizations and stakeholders may have critical views and conflicts of interest regarding the SDGs, they cannot afford to ignore the worldwide mission altogether. Rather, they want to take part in negotiating the UN policies. In addition, various actors express their commitment but simultaneously state how they contribute to the goals and how they see the situation. Since critical and oppositional views and actors are in this way incorporated in the process, the goals and targets are always a compromise. On the other hand, it means that critical views add onto the authority of the SDGs; they are defined by and included in the global discourse on sustainable development. If we choose to talk about an epistemic community behind the authority of the SDGs, it can be defined as the entire discourse on sustainable development, within which stakeholders negotiate their views. The core are the paradigmatic aspects of the ontology of the environment, to which stakeholders express their commitment; discord is typically expressed in practical aspects. This UN mission is a good example of how authority is relational. No one can claim authority for themselves one-sidedly; it is dependent on others’ recognition. This case also illustrates that authority is cumulative. In that sense authority is like money: as an accumulation of different kinds of “assets” by which actors ascertain the social world and the situation at hand, it can be called epistemic capital (Alasuutari, 2018). For one thing, the more there are actors that take someone or something seriously by, for instance, referring to it as an authoritative source, the more influential it is. Such accumulation of authority is reciprocal: all the organizations that voluntarily commit to this mission add to the UN’s authority, but by committing to the highly respected mission of the UN, their own authority also grows. Part of the accumulation of the UN SDGs’ authority is the point that the goals and targets are so all-inclusive, ranging from poverty reduction to green-

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house gas emission mitigation. Because the program promises to tackle many widely recognized global problems, they add onto the program’s total amount of epistemic capital. Authority is analogous to capital also in that, like money, one can invest in and lend it. In this case, the organizations and stakeholders that have committed to this mission have invested in the UN by supporting the mission, and the UN can use those investments in advancing the goals and targets. In that sense the UN appears as an “influence bank” (Coleman, 1963; Parsons, 1963). The UN can “reinvest” that authority to promote goals that all the organizations that have “lent their name” to it do not entirely approve of. Vice versa, the same is true of the lenders; they can “borrow” the authority of sustainable development in ways that do not really advance the original mission. Since the UN mission regarding sustainable development provides an authoritative view of the ontology of the environment, all kinds of actors utilize that authority for their own purposes. For instance, global corporations express their commitment to the mission because they want to be seen as responsible members of the global community. It is not just window dressing; all the partnership networks are an essential element in the UN’s and the international community’s effort to reach the goals. But whether or not corporations genuinely aspire for sustainable development, signaling their willingness to be good global citizens has become important. Citizens and customers across the world have become increasingly conscious of the environment. Corporations seen to be behaving irresponsibly regarding environmental questions and other issues concerning sustainable development can attract bad publicity and boycotts.

Conclusion Taking the SDGs as a case example, in this chapter we asked how to account for the existence, and rapid increase in the number, of IGOs in the modern world. Existing research accounts for the IGOs’ role by suggesting where power resides. Neorealist and neoliberal approaches suggest that they serve the interests of states as the principal actors, whereas institutionalist approaches attribute autonomous power to IGOs themselves or to groups of actors such as scientists influencing state policies through IGOs. Finally, world society theory proposes that actors in the modern world are agents of world culture, enacting the scripts that pervade rationalism to all walks of life. While taking on board many points made in previous research, we approached the phenomenon from the EG perspective by asking how to understand various actors’ interest in IGOs. Given the eagerness with

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which states have established IGOs and various actors have sought to advance their objectives through them shows that people believe in IGOs’ ability to change the world. From this vantage point the question is, what assumptions of a shared worldview do the actors involved appeal to in trying to affect others’ conduct? It is obvious that people respect credible, impartial scientific evidence. In the case of SDGs, for instance, the UN’s authority relies on a long line of empirical evidence that defines the state of the environment and justifies the policy recommendations. Respect for scientific evidence is apparent also in the ways the UN and various stakeholders have tried to affect the views and conduct of others. In the SDGs project, the UN has tried to incorporate different scientific communities in defining reality and the policy measures that are needed. The same goes for others, such as states, INGOs and climate change denialists: they appeal to facts and evidence and may also claim to represent scientific expertise. Political actors also try to buttress people’s belief in IGOs’ power by resorting to prevalent imageries of the social world. To that end, IGOs may be branded not only as reliable sources of information about reality but as powerful organizations that can use force to impose their will on their member states and other actors in the world. In this instance, branding resorts to the imagery of world society as a bureaucratic power hierarchy, with IGOs—or the UN system—functioning as the world government. Entwined with epistemic work focusing on the ontology of the environment, IGOs’ influence also depends on their proficiency to act upon people’s norms and identifications. As an organization that has been able to unite nations under shared norms and ideals such as human rights, the UN carries weight as a moral authority: political actors can justify their views by appealing to globally agreedupon principles or, say, criticize others’ behavior by pointing out how it violates UN resolutions. IGOs’ influence also rests on their success in bargaining between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. If political decision-makers only identify with their nation and its interests, they consider international agreements created by an IO as limitations and respect them only if they believe that the international community has ways to punish violators. If, however, the norms ratified by the IO in question are considered as moral principles that define people as human beings, those international norms have a firmer grounding. The EG approach to understanding IGOs in the modern world enables us to see that these different reasons why actors comply with, or otherwise take into account, IGOs’ policies and recommendations enmesh with one another. In trying to strengthen their power, IGOs also resort to multiple strategies.

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They produce and collect scientific evidence to influence people’s view of the world; they are engaged in creating an image of themselves as proxies for a world government; and they act upon people’s norms, ideals and identifications. In that sense actors are eclectic in accumulating authority embodied in IGOs. In this activity, IGOs are not alone: NGOs are engaged in the same business. IGOs and NGOs accumulate epistemic capital also by joining forces with one another. NGOs both at the national and international level form advocacy coalitions and networks, and IGOs incorporate those NGOs and their networks in the processes wherein international policies and recommendations are drafted. Likewise, IGOs allude to programs and concepts that other IGOs have fashioned, integrating them with their own goals, in this way also amassing their own epistemic capital. That is because authority as epistemic capital is relational, dependent on others’ recognition. It increases in use and decreases in disuse. This circulation or mutual accumulation of authority does not mean that, eventually, organizations and peoples of the world unite under the UN as in a single set of principles and vision of the world. The world system also comprises conflicting goals and groups that compete for dominance in different domains. The EG perspective provides conceptual tools to study how the actors build such power blocs: how they construct identifications and alliances. On the other hand, aggression, terror and violence can also be studied from the perspective of amassing epistemic capital: they are means to affect the enemy, for instance convince them that resistance is useless (Alasuutari, 2018). As world society theory stresses, it is evident that conformism and hypocrisy are endemic in world society (Meyer, 2004). For instance, in addition to states, thousands of organizations and networks have registered their voluntary commitment to SDGs, but how much it really changes their behavior is a different matter. Because of their tendency to imitate others, people may also follow models that are poorly suited to the local conditions or contradict with the original goals; for instance, enact policies or give statements that do little or nothing to advance sustainable development. Yet, from the viewpoint of actors conforming to others may be sensible. In science, for instance, there is no higher authority than the scientific community in defining that is true and what not. And if others believe in something being true, respectful or otherwise worth taking into account when considering one’s own moves, it makes sense for an actor who wants to influence others to utilize such beliefs, regardless of their own beliefs.

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• This chapter discusses parliaments as sites of social change. • The chapter locates national parliaments as part of world culture, similar in very many respects, and shows the epistemic aspects of parliamentary discourse. • Parliamentarians tend to assume that their national audiences identify with the nation, and then work on that identification to argue for a course of action. We illustrate how such identification work also mobilizes certain norms and pictures of reality. • Parliamentarians also often carry an imagery of the social world as progressively modernizing, and they cast their arguments for social change on the basis of that imagery.

Parliaments are a more complicated site of governance than may be first thought. Of course, it is generally naïve to imagine that parliamentarians are merely public representatives who logically deliberate on proposals and then pass laws or policies that directly benefit the whole nation. Indeed, parliaments may well be rubber-stamps for decisions already taken within a power elite, and many examples could be given from authoritarian regimes across the world. Yet, it is noteworthy that even dictatorships have a parliament. This shows that the idea of deliberative decision-making, embodied in a national parliament, is a widely acknowledged world-cultural principle to which even autocratic regimes pay insincere respect by putting on a show. The same is more or less true of democratic polities. For instance, in 1974 the National Assembly in democratic Pakistan approved a constitutional amendment declaring the Ahmadiyya community legally “heretics” and disbarring them © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_6

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from calling themselves Muslim. This resolution had tremendous and long-standing popular support and was passed unanimously without a single dissenting vote (Qadir, 2015). In fact, the Prime Minister of the country had already declared his intention for this earlier that year in a meeting of the World Islamic Council. Yet, the National Assembly conducted “hearings” to build a case and argue for the need to pass this amendment. The transcript of the two-week legislative debate covers 23 volumes—more than 3000 pages—of speeches and statements justifying an amendment that was in many ways a foregone conclusion. The fact that parliamentarians spend a lot of time debating proposals is not entirely irrelevant. We must bear in mind that the audience for parliamentarians are not just their colleagues in the legislature. They are also talking to the visitors in the gallery, their parties, their constituents, the national public through media coverage and public transcripts, and even in some cases to international listeners. In practice, the floors of parliaments are often used to seek legitimacy for a position domestically or internationally. In that sense, parliaments are sites of ritual process through which the leadership collects and ensures symbolic support for the regime within the members of parliament (MPs), the state administration, the nation, and indeed their reference group internationally. Although MPs may well know that they have no real choice to do anything else than to vote for the government’s proposals, the ritual play contributes to committing them to, by making them formally responsible for, the decisions made. This significance of the floor debate in democracies is primarily due to its function as a public forum in which politicians justify their views in morally acceptable and rationally convincing ways. Indeed, the “debate” is rarely decisive concerning the fate of a bill for a number of reasons. For one thing, before entering the so-called second reading, bills have typically been processed through smaller committees in which representatives of different parties have discussed them and made them more acceptable from the perspective of different stakeholders. Expert reports and comments on the proposed legislation may have also been invited and received. So, most of the preparation work has already been done. Second, whether a law will be passed depends on its support among the parties represented in the parliament and how many MPs they have. A bill sponsored by a majority government will be accepted with all likelihood, provided that it has the support of other ministers. That is because ministers are normally the leading figures of the party, or parties of a coalition government, and the bills introduced to the parliament have been discussed within the governing parties. In most cases, party discipline strongly disapproves of MPs voting against bills sponsored by the party leadership. Despite these formal constraints on floor debates, the ritual of public discussion on legislative proposals is meaningful. In the process of justifying or

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opposing new laws, parliamentarians construct arguments that evince public sentiments and beliefs. That is, parliamentary debates are a window on acceptable discourse. For instance, when an MP makes a case for laws promoting environmentally friendly industrialization, she works on the belief that her multivalent audience supports the protection of nature, the wellbeing of our children’s children, good of the population as a whole, and so on. Naturally, parliamentary rhetoric does not immediately translate into improvements in people’s lives. Given the limited control that a government in the modern world can have over social and economic changes within a country, it is erroneous to assume that nation-states are governed solely by public policies. Contemporary national societies are in any case highly complex entities, which mean that they cannot be run like hierarchically structured organizations. For the most part, modern society—and individual nation-states as semi-independent entities within it— drifts forward like a rudderless ship. It is true that if there is a single bridge from where a national state is led, it is the parliament, with the government’s hands on the steering wheel. That is because, as an institution, the parliament is an attempt to coordinate the interests and aspirations of the whole power elite and even the entire population, so that the decisions can have real effects, however, small. Yet the whole functioning principle of modern, complex society is based on a great number of independent actors that also, for their part, affect the steering of the ship. Therefore, even successful policies can only slightly push or pull the shape of the mess that is formed of all people going about their business. Yet that is exactly what people expect from politics. This paradox boosts the tendency of politicians to make statements where they declare their aims, targets, and measures taken to strive for them even though they know their tools are scarce and their chances slight. In that sense, when it comes to actual change in the conduct of the citizenry, the parliament’s role is also typically not to determine everything that happens within state borders. Rather, parliaments set standards and norms with the express goal of improving the wealth and wellbeing of the population. Taking on this responsibility makes politicians look active, powerful, and concerned. This, in turn, makes speeches, policies, and laws made in a national parliament thoroughly significant. That is, even if they do not end up improving the wellbeing of the citizenry, the public speech acts of parliamentarians reveal the assumptions they believe the public at large hold and the tactics by which they work on those assumptions to greater or lesser effect. Even if they have nefarious designs on a section of the population, parliamentarians are careful to appeal to what they feel are widely held ideals and identifications. Indeed, success in a parliamentary career often translates into how much legitimacy an MP has garnered to “serve the people.”

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This is notably the case in parliaments all over the world. In fact, it is remarkable how very similar the ritualistic nature of the legislative process is in so many different countries. When we look at parliamentary debates anywhere, they are much alike regardless of the country in question. The modes of justification and figures of speech are very similar, with slight variation in rhetorical style and emphasis due to differences in the domestic configuration of the field of parties, the degree of independence of different parts of the country, and the way in which parliamentary work is organized. In this sense, we are at the very core of world culture, institutionalized in the system of territorial states, each of which contain the same basic institutions and in which argumentation on policymaking is pretty similar (Alasuutari, 2016, p. 80). One common feature of parliamentary debates and policymaking that stands out is how often MPs refer to international laws, norms, treaties, and crossnational comparisons. Occasionally, parliamentarians will refer only implicitly to the international community, but very often a debate in any policy sector includes conscious and explicit references to what is going on outside the national borders or what we are “compelled” to do. Our study on a sample of six countries, ranging across the board demographically and economically, finds that over two-thirds of all parliamentary debates in all policy sectors include such explicit references to what is going on elsewhere (Alasuutari, 2016, p. 94).1 That is, laws and related political discourse are generally “synchronized” around the world: This doesn’t mean that everywhere things are the same, but rather that policymakers respond to the same signals they pick up from across national borders. Typically, this is done to argue that the nation is not performing well enough in a certain area, and hence build a case for reform in the country. At other times, the case may be to show how the nation is at the forefront of the international community in some dimension or normative ideal, as often the case with ecological or human rights policies. For instance, even in the remarkably dissonant case of legal hereticization above, Pakistani MPs often justified their argument by referring to similar moral or legal principles in the contemporary world (Qadir, 2014). The point is

1The

USA and Russia are notable exceptions where explicit references are rare, albeit still evident. Partly this is because of the confederated nature of these very large states, which makes it more common to refer to relatively autonomous entities within the national borders. However, upon closer scrutiny, it is evident that national parliamentarians in both countries refer largely implicitly to the international community, and so are very much part of the same discursive tradition common to other parliaments. Both countries also often appeal to temporal change (that is, comparing with their nation at an earlier time) as a justification (Alasuutari, 2016, pp. 97–99; Tiaynen-Qadir, Qadir, & Alasuutari, 2018).

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that parliamentarians keep a keen eye on what is happening elsewhere, and they use those anecdotes, facts or international obligations in their domestic argumentation. What that means is that they believe their audience also thinks it important to keep up with the international community, and they use that assumption to justify their own domestic proposal. In other words, however relevant or otherwise lawmaking may be to what individual citizens end up doing, the parliamentary process remains an important element in national governance. As such, the deliberative work of parliaments can also be analyzed as comprising work on the beliefs of others about the ontology of the environment, norms, and ideals, as well as identifications. In this ­chapter, we focus on the latter object of epistemic work but, again, it is important to stress that this is merely to illustrate this dimension. We do not suggest that the identification aspect of persuasion work is more relevant in parliaments than in other sites of change. Rather, we want to illustrate how this object of epistemic work can be analytically useful to spotlight tactics of change, which also involve knowledge production and norm-building. These tactics may be somewhat different in other sites of change, but for parliaments they build on domestic community-building and international identifications.

“Us”-Talk: Building the Nation Michael Billig (1995) highlighted the persistent, and often implicit, construction of national identity in a myriad ways, terming this “banal nationalism.” He pointed out that while domestic media houses report on global events, at the same time, they “bring the flag across” the homes and hearths of households consuming mediated news: Daily newspapers and logomanic politicians constantly flag the world of nations… they address ‘us’ as a national first person plural, and they situate ‘us’ in the homeland within a world of nations. Nationhood is the context which must be assumed to understand so many banal utterances. Cumulatively, such flaggings provide daily, unmindful reminders of nationhood… It is no wonder, then, that a national identity is seldom forgotten. (Billig, 1995, p. 174)

The same trend can be seen in debates and discussions in national parliaments, which are after all places symbolizing and epitomizing the state. National policymakers often draw on trends and models in other countries to identify a problem or come up with a solution, but at the same time, they consistently reinforce national identity. Policies are rarely justified by arguing “this is how they do it,” but

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rather by constructing a national interest and defining a solution that is relevant for “us.” Elsewhere we have referred to this as “domestication” of global policy trends (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014). In the domestication process, cross-national comparisons are a first step to define a problem as well as a way forward, after which the policy solution is typically naturalized as a solution relevant to “our” context. In that process of naturalization, the national interest is constructed more or less implicitly. For instance, when proposing the construction of a national bioethics committee in Finland, parliamentarians drew heavily on American or other “models” of such committees, but then proposed amendments to make the final solution their “own,” even though there was no urgent crisis or domestic issue that demanded such a tailored solution (Syväterä & Alasuutari, 2014). In making their case, parliamentarians typically assume that their peers, their constituents, and the national observers identify with the nation as a whole, much like a corporate brand. They work on that assumption, delivering their speeches to appeal to such identification with the nation as a whole. Countering such an argument becomes very risky, leaving an opponent open to the charge that he does not identify with the nation or the national interest. Instead, opponents have no choice but to redefine the national interest in some other way, and in the course build on exactly the same identification but leading to a different practical solution. Consider, for instance, the debate on the 2006 Airports Amendment Bill in Australia, which was intended to privatize further aspects of airport management across the country. When the Parliamentary Secretary for Transport, of the (Liberal-aligned) National Party, introduced the bill she stated that “the bill represents a balanced and measured package of changes which recognise the importance of aviation to national and regional economies while also respecting the rights and interests of those affected by airport development.” She argued that local as well as national economies would benefit from additional privatization and went on to suggest that everybody in the parliament should support the bill as it spoke to the national interest. However, a Labor MP opposed the bill, arguing that: When it comes to planning control itself, it is clearly in the national interest that strategic economic infrastructure like our major airports, just like our ports, remain under proper planning process. And the airports should absolutely remain under Commonwealth control.

The Labor MP went on to argue that the Treasury bill served only “those with a vested interest” and that “instead of doing the right thing and clearly articulating the national interest, the Treasurer [of a related governmental commission] went missing in action.” Just as parliamentarians typically rely on justifications that

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connect their listeners with the nation as a whole, so too in their critiques they often accuse political opponents of not truly attending to the national interest. It is very rarely the case that an MP in a national legislature will argue for a proposal that is good only for her constituency, or an interest group she is closely connected with, without any respect for the rest of the country. Rather, if a constituency or local interest group is invoked, it is often connected explicitly with the interests of equity or benefit to the entire nation. This is well illustrated by another Labor MP in the same debate, representing a constituency in Sydney, who claimed that “the proposals by Sydney Airport Corporation for a sizeable development at Sydney airport—which I will return to a little later on—are a matter of local, state and, ultimately, national interest.” He went on to argue that the bill violates the rights of local residents to be heard when making decisions on airport management, and suggested that this was of national concern, not just a matter for Sydney residents. Numerous other instance could be cited as similar examples. In the example noted above regarding the establishment of a national bioethics committee in Finland, it was very strongly evident that stakeholder groups’ interests were aligned with the imagined national interest to propose this or that variation in the final legislation (Syväterä & Alasuutari, 2014). Even in the case of the hereticization noted earlier, parliamentarians in Pakistan went to great lengths to claim that the status of heretics would be in the interest of the entire nation, both the majority non-Ahmadi Muslims who wanted to preserve their exclusive definition and the small Ahmadi community who would be thereby “protected” as a minority. Similarly, MPs who might be strong advocates for environmental sustainability do not characteristically propose measures or laws by arguing that these will be good for the climate movement; instead, they build a case for how environmentally friendly policies will benefit everybody, including those not born yet. Similarly, parliamentarians may present an argument by referring to voices from their constituency. However, when appealing to their own constituency, MPs do not stress the partial interests of their voters but rather refer to their constituency as a miniature picture of the nation as a whole, as people whom they know at a personal level, which gives the speaker more legitimacy to say that they know what the nation wants and thinks. So, in both ways of referring to smaller groups, the interest of the nation as a whole is typically presented as the aim of all policy measures that MPs propose, even though everybody hearing a speech knows that politicians represent different interest groups, voters, ideologies and political parties. Indeed, it is so often and so obviously the case that parliamentarians build an identification with the nation as a whole, or with some “national interest,” that is easy to overlook this tactic. Yet, from the perspective of epistemic governance, it

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is tremendously significant. Nationalizing an issue, even a parochial one, is one aspect of what Billig termed banal nationalism. What it means is that governance functions by way of constructing identifications with the imagined nation. Of course, individual parliamentarians may not be terribly concerned at any given moment with how well the nation is doing in terms of how loyally people identify with it. Rather, they grasp that people—their constituents who will have to reelect them, their party seniors who may promote them, and the press which may publicize them—believe in the significance of such identification. And they weave that identification into their argumentation, ensuring that their audience is fully aware that they identify with the nation and their proposals are most sincerely in the interests of everybody who lives within the borders.

Constructing the National Interest Again, we argue that such formal identifications with the national interest are common to parliaments everywhere. How that national interest is defined naturally varies from country to country, from time to time, and even from case to case. Certain meta-narratives seem to be paramount in contemporary times, such as economic growth, distributive equity, creative innovation, or environmental friendliness. Others may be less evident now than they were in the past. Very often these meta-narratives boil down to fashionable catchwords that fly around the world polity and function as global shock waves that all countries seem compelled to respond to. Take the relatively sudden rise of the term “social cohesion” in parliaments around the world after about 1980 (Alasuutari, 2016, p. 122ff). In Europe, the term signaled a consideration of social security alongside the ongoing economic cohesion to establish a common European market, and that is, how it was referred to for some time. But, by the late 1980s, the term “social cohesion” was no longer restricted to EU policies, and parliamentarians in European countries began referring to it more loosely in their argumentation around equity-oriented policies. By the mid-1990s, the term had spread to many countries, where politicians used it in lawmaking without any reference at all, or only nominal reference, to the EU context. It appeared to be a novel concept, but in fact, it merely collected under a new umbrella the same issues and solutions that such politicians would in any case refer to or argue for. The same is true for the rise and rise of the term sustainability: It is virtually impossible to imagine a parliamentarian stand up and claim that sustainability is irrelevant, or that we simply don’t need to worry about the environment at all.

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Instead, they would probably claim that the environmental dimension of an issue had not been properly understood or appropriately measured, or that the solutions proposed are not timely, etc. National security is another example of a catchword that existed earlier but was suddenly catapulted into political discourse when the grammatically puzzling “war on terror” was launched. Shortly thereafter, the war was domesticated into different national contexts as a new term addressing more or less long-standing national security concerns and was used to argue for evermore authorities and budgets (Qadir & Alasuutari, 2013). In all these, and many more, cases, political actors justify their goals and ambitions by applying catchwords which they believe speak to the audience. The point for us here is that such catchwords are not merely fashionable window dressing. Rather, these catchwords indicate how national interest is perceived, shaped, and worked upon by those seeking change in a national society. In other words, the category of “national interest” is a relatively stable one, even though what it means varies so wildly, unpredictably, and subject to cross-border influence.

The Nation in Its Reference Group For some, it is no doubt disconcerting that seemingly stable concepts such as “national interest” are built on such flimsy foundations and can so readily change apparently on the whim of actors not even in the country. That is because it is so natural for us to conceive of the world as being divided into relatively stable, homogenous, and bounded containers called nation-states. Such “methodological nationalism” (Chernilo, 2006) is a staple of popular thinking and scholarly analysis, especially after the wave of decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the tradition of sociological institutionalism has convincingly pointed out that it is far more useful to think about a single world polity, albeit one without a single state, that is divided into comparable national polities (e.g., Krücken & Drori, 2010; J. W. Meyer et al., 1997; Schofer, Hironaka, John, & Longhofer, 2012). From that perspective, one of the ironic features of modern world society is that most people are convinced of their national uniqueness, although all national societies are unique in the same ways! That also means that states tend to respond to the same global trends, or to those in other countries, and the net result is of a synchronized world system when seen from a birds-eye view. So, even though a dominant feature in national governance by parliaments is to stress their truly unique national interest, this is, in fact undercut by the fact that politicians in other countries are stressing precisely the same thing in

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response to precisely the same models. The worldwide spread of national bioethics committees is a good case in point, where different countries in the 1990s and 2000s referred to practices elsewhere, then argued for the need to develop a unique model that met national needs, and then all wound up with more or less the same structure although there was no single world leader ordering them to do so (Syväterä & Qadir, 2015). If we take a step back from such examples, it is easy to see that the idea of national uniqueness is built upon at least the implicit idea of comparable nations. Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) made the same point with regard to ethnicities: Even though all ethnicities, especially “exotic” ones in any context, proclaim their uniqueness, this must be balanced by the fact that all ethnicities are proclaiming exactly the same. One ethnic group may claim to have their specific dress, language, food, rituals, and customs, yet all other ethnicities do so as well and, in some cases, even invent or recover some lost custom to join the club. There is nothing very sinister or “fake” about this; rather, it is a natural way for groups to build coherence by looking around at comparable groups. The same is true of national societies to the extent that they are governed by parliaments. MPs look around at what they consider are comparable groups, in their case other nation-states, and they take into account what those comparable groups are up to when governing in their own domestic polity. They propose laws that take into account international norms or standards. When it comes to policies, the point is not that parliaments are mere hypocritical conformists, as for instance, sociological institutionalists note (J. W. Meyer, 2004). Of course, parliamentarians also approve laws that they do not believe will work simply for the sake of appearing globally legitimate. But this doesn’t mean that, by contrast, there are some truly functional laws that would have worked better or be more domestically appropriate but not internationally acceptable. Rather, it is that this is how governance functions in general. Those seeking change justify their arguments in part by grasping what they think (and believe that others think) comparable nation-states are doing and claiming that we should be doing something similar or better. Take, for instance, the paradigmatic example of Russia, which has long been considered exceptional in world society as standing apart from Western democratic practices. The bulk of political research on Russia starts from the position that Russian policymaking is significantly different from the West, either because Western democratic values are “lagging” in Russian political culture (e.g., Neumann, 2008; Stivachtis, 2015) or because of the crippling legacy of socialism (Rogers, 2010; Tsygankov, 2015). Yet, our study finds that Russian parliamentarians employ the same tropes and tactics of “keeping up with the Joneses” as do their Western counterparts (Tiaynen-Qadir et al., 2018). In fact,

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if anything, Russian parliamentarians are profuse in deploying the imagery of competition among nation-states, at least as much as are for instance European parliamentarians. Despite significant political changes in Russia, such as the development of “Putinism,” we find that these tropes have not changed much. Examples abound in floor debates where statements such as these are made: “We have to overtake the West at least in this; we have not succeeded to overtake in terms of economy, but we have rich experiences regarding perfection of the border area” (Bill on border protection, Duma, May 2002). So, even the prima facie exceptional case of Russia, it is very common that Duma members refer to what is happening in other countries as a justification for their own proposals or critiques. The same is true across the board. This commonality reveals two important features of parliamentary governance. First, parliamentarians not only keep an eye on what’s going on in other countries (which are structurally comparable groups) but they also believe that including such references in their speech will swing the argument in their favor. Of course, whether they are successful or not depends on many other factors as well but, in any case, they generally feel that their audience will “buy” the argument if it includes a reference to how others behave. Second, what countries are brought into the rhetoric really depends on what kind of argument is being made. Our research and similar studies have identified two categories of such identifications with other countries.

The Civilized Community of Nations One common category in which the national interest is identified internationally is that of an imagined ideal-type of “civilized” or “progressive” nations. If and when an MP is able to convince others that a particular course of action entitles the nation to become part of an elite club of civilized nations that case is very hard to refute. It is hardly feasible that an opponent would argue that the country should not be considered civilized, nor indeed do we find any such references. Rather, the category of a civilized community of nations is kept rhetorically intact although a critic may argue that the original speaker had misrepresented what that category means or what we should do to belong to that category. For instance, when moving the UK “Care Homes and Sheltered Accommodation (Domestic Pets) Bill” in May 2010, the Conservative MP argued: It is a staggering and depressing fact that about 38,000 healthy animals are put down every year simply because their owners are going into a care home or sheltered housing project and the rules do not allow them to take their pet with them. That

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is bad enough, but it is also estimated that a further 100,000 pets have to be given up for adoption for the same reason. Many become so distressed because of being abandoned by their owners that they eventually have to be put down. That is totally unacceptable in a civilised country. Many other countries, such as France and the USA, have laws aimed at allowing people to keep their beloved pets.

This quote shows well how such abstract identifications with civilized societies are built by parliamentarians seeking a particular change in their country. Once this motivation was accepted, the rest of the debate naturally focused on the domestic provisions of the bill. This particular topic seemed to be one on which there were few reservations. Yet, the same type of international identification discourse is evident also in more contested issues. That was the case with the “Corporal Punishment (Offenders Over Sixteen) Bill” introduced in 1994 in Trinidad and Tobago, a controversial proposal that sparked a four-and-a-half-hour debate transcribed in 60 pages. In that case, the Attorney-General moving the bill focused on technical aspects but hardly referred to any other countries (although he occasionally spoke about the views of the “international media” and “international community”). However, the opposition MP retorted with an hour-long speech in which he opposed the introduction of corporal punishment and justified his position by referring to what “civilized” countries do no less than five times, for instance: you have reports from the human rights committee under the International Covenant and Civil and Political Rights; decisions from Commonwealth courts—one from Zimbabwe—which has held that corporal punishment, in any form, is barbaric, inhumane and not tolerable in any civilized society.

Or, again, he pointed out that, “How the system works is that in the United Kingdom or in any country which is committed to civilized government, a Green Paper would be published in a matter like this.” Such identifications with the civilized community of nations are quite frequent, even in cases where the proposal runs counter to established international norms or treaties. So, the constitutional amendment that hereticized a particular community in Pakistan in 1974 was indisputably a violation of Pakistan’s international legal commitments under the UN Declaration of Human Rights (Khan, 2003). Yet, the arguments in favor of it included references to how all “civilized” countries introduce morally motivated bans that restrict freedom of speech and practice (Qadir, 2014, p. 146). Similar identifications rely upon related categories such as “progressive” or “forward-looking” nations.

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Race to the Top The idea of “progress,” though, has a different sense of international identification. In general, the idea of modernization is a powerful discourse embedded in national governance. As we discussed in Chapter 3, this is indeed a very common imagery of society. When it comes to governance by national parliaments, it is also significant as a category of identifying with other countries. Consider this extract from the 2011 US Senate report on “Alternative Fueled Vehicles Competitiveness and Energy Security Act”: The market for clean energy technology is growing quickly and many countries have mounted aggressive national efforts to capture market share. China, for example, has moved quickly to dominate the development of next generation clean energy products through low-cost production and investments in research infrastructure. As the President said, “‘this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” (…) To win the future, we have to be a nation that makes, creates, and innovates. (U.S. Senate Report 112–171, 2011, page 30)

Here, the speaker identifies the country with another nation that is racing “ahead” and with which we need to keep up. In a similar way, MPs may seek change by posing a more abstract race, as for instance in the following quote from a speech by a Canadian parliamentarian discussing the “Public Service Modernization Bill” in 2003: Today governments, the private and voluntary sectors are facing a rapidly evolving operating environment. The pace of change seems to be accelerating, driven by technological advances and globalization.

By contrast, parliamentarians may ridicule their own country by posing an undesirable identification, as in the following example of a 2002 debate on “Consumer Protection” in the Russian Duma: A:  N  ot a single country in the world has 7-percent barrier. There are a couple of countries where there is a 6-percent barrier. 7-percent is found nowhere. B:  As I remember, there is 7-percent in Turkey. A:  Well, Turkey… I don’t think that we should equate to such countries as Turkey, in this question, in the question of following democratic norms. Everybody knows how they “follow” them [in Russian, presupposes skepticism] there in many directions.

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The point in all these examples is that in parliaments around the world, it is common to justify an argument by suggesting a national identification with other countries in one way or another. The argument may be successful (as in the UK bill for domestic pets) or unsuccessful (as in the Duma case for consumer protection), and that naturally depends on many factors. Yet, either way, speakers who are promoting a particular course of action to govern their societies explicitly identify with certain reference groups among the set of comparable nation-states. In doing so, they reveal their own beliefs that the people they are speaking or trying to convince—including those outside the halls of the legislature—also identify similarly with other countries, either as civilized nations to be emulated or as competitors to be raced against.

Identifications, Knowledge Production, and Values When parliamentarians work on domestic and international identifications of their audience, they are trying to influence people into certain courses of action. In other words, it is not that an MP simply “makes up” some untenable identification and then tries to convince people to align with it; or rather, such an attempt would quite likely fail. Instead, the point is that these broad ways of identifying already exist among the wide-ranging audience that an MP has in mind when debating a law. What she is trying to do is to utilize that identification to outline a course of action. Such identification talks are not isolated or stand-alone instances of rhetoric. Rather, they are woven into larger narratives in which the speakers also bring in and appeal to their audience’s sense of the ontology of the environment and norms and ideals. As discussed in Chapter 2, these three objects of epistemic work go together in any argument, all to support the speakers’ attempt to bring about some change. As we discussed in the previous chapter, domestic actors utilize the knowledge produced by intergovernmental organizations in their attempts to determine how things should be handled, and in the process, they also appeal to what they believe are widely held values and identifications. In this case, too, the identifications that parliamentarians work on are tightly coupled with a sense of how the world truly is and what is a desirable course of action.

Identifying with Values In a very direct sense, identification talk is intimately related to defining and reinforcing values. In the instances above, particularly when it comes to

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cross-national references, it is often immediately obvious what kinds of norms and values a speaker is reinforcing or counting on. For instance, in the 2010 debate on domestic pets in assisted-care homes in the UK, the MP is appealing to the British people’s love for dogs, as well as to the consideration of companionship for elderly or those requiring special care. When the identification is of an internationally competitive sort, there too certain values are being reinforced, although it might not be immediately obvious from limited excerpts. For example, in the 2002 discussion on consumer protection in the Russian Duma, the speakers are all appealing to “true” democratic norms of grievance redress. They assume that their colleagues and other listeners understand and support this norm, but the two speakers have different senses of how this should be put into practice. There are other cases where references to the international community are more vague, typically in US parliamentary talk. There, it is common to refer to the nation as an example of “best practice” that others (of course, meaning other countries) follow or should follow. A strong feature of American parliamentary talk is to identify their country as a model for others, and when they do so speakers are appealing to what they obviously feel is a characteristic of their audience: pride in their nation’s self-image. Yet, again in such instances, the point is very rarely simply to bolster that pride or to critique how it has slipped due to some ill-conceived steps. Rather, they use that identification to connect to a particular ideal, often enough related to an interpretation of democracy, justice, or liberty. For example, when debating the “Authorization for use of military force against Iraq Resolution of 2002” in the House of Congress, a speaker closed his argument in favor of the resolution by saying: I ask my colleagues to join with me, so that the Congress may speak in one clear voice, to answer the President’s call for peace throughout the world, to remove those who seek to harm not only their own people, but everyone who believes in liberty and justice, and to bring freedom to the people of Iraq–by any means necessary.

In this quote, the speaker not only identifies his country with civilized nations and peoples, but weaves in the ideals that he feels his compatriots and colleagues will support. Or, again, when supporting the bill for the “Bosnia and Herzegovina Self-Defense Act of 1995,” a member of the US House of Representatives noted that: The United States has always been known as the true defender of democracy and basic freedoms. I say then, let us take the lead in promoting that legacy … The Bosnians don’t want us to train and advise them. They don’t want us to plan their military operations and send in American ground troops to defend Sarajevo. What they want is a fighting chance. And with this vote, we can give that to them.

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Similar value-definition is obvious in the case of domestic “us” talk in which a particular interest is identified with the national interest to convince others of the right way to go. For example, in moving the 2006 Airports Amendment Bill in Australia discussed above, the Parliamentary Secretary belonging to the National Party (predictably) equated the policy of privatization with the general interest of efficiency that she believed her audience would support. In opposition, the Labor members stated confidently that “of course” strategic infrastructure like airports should remain under centralized “proper planning process.” In religiously oriented polities, as in the case of hereticization in Pakistan cited above, such norms are obviously rooted in interpretations of scripture or pronouncements of religious authorities. Speakers then quite naturally rely on the assumption that national audiences identify with the interests of “the religion” and work on that to reinforce such norms as they derive from that religion, such as purity in belief and practice, dogmas, etc.

Identifying Through Facts In the same vein, parliamentarians seek to govern by supporting their identification talk with “facts” about how the world really is and where, therefore, we should identify with. A factual report of the situation at hand, for instance, using statistics or league tables, is used by parliamentarians to build a community of interest that can naturally be equated with the national interest to impel a course of action. For instance, when moving the “Daylight Saving Bill (2010)” in the UK House of Commons, the Conservative MP argued by relying on evidence from associations such as Age UK and Saga, who had pointed out “how much safer older people will feel, and how their fear of crime will be drastically reduced, with longer daylight hours.” She identified this interest with that of the whole nation and did the same by quoting environmental groups who had noted the potential savings in electricity (nationally amounting to £180 million annually) that would also affect fuel-poor sections of the society. Furthermore, she argued that: The modelling from Dr Garnsey’s team at Cambridge suggests that we could cut our carbon emissions by the equivalent of taking nearly 200,000 cars off our roads each year. That is why serious environmental pressure groups such as 10:10 are so heavily behind the Bill.

In this example, various types of qualitative and statistical evidence were brought to bear in building a case for a national interest. Or, again, in pro-

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posing the “Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act” in 1997, the Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Finance in the House of Commons brought in reams of statistical projections from the country’s chief actuary. He used these projections to build a case for a 9.9% hike in contributions over six years. In doing so, he appealed primarily to those about to retire in the coming decade, pointing out as well a “shared commitment to ensure that the CPP is there, that it is sustainable and affordable for today’s working Canadians and for our children.” Facts are, indeed, a very convincing way to build identifications, especially because they obscure other ways of seeing the world. So, for instance, the case of hereticization of Ahmadis in Pakistan in 1974 was built in part on the argument that three million Ahmadis in the country represented a significant “threat” to the country’s religious harmony and even national security. When these numbers were contested by the Ahmadi representatives being questioned in the National Assembly, much of the discussion swung into how to calculate precise numbers, thereby obscuring the point that whether the number was higher or lower could not really be said to matter to national security.

Conclusion In this chapter, we discussed parliaments as sites of governance and concentrated on how parliamentarians work on identifications of their audiences in order to conduct others. Whether or not parliamentarians, or a parliament as a whole, in fact influence change in their societies is an open question and relies on more than parliamentary talk. However, that talk in itself is thoroughly relevant to understanding the assumptions a society holds true. We argued that such identifications can be defined in two ways as far as parliaments are concerned: domestic identification of a particular community or interest group with the national interest, and international identification of the nation as part of a reference group of other nations. In each case, we also illustrated how identification talk is part of a broader narrative that also includes norms and values, as well as knowledge and facts. Parliamentarians work on all three dimensions to try to influence society and bring about a change that they, for whatever reason, believe to be the correct course of action. It is worth mentioning again that this pattern of identification talk is not evident only in parliaments. The same is true about governance through international organizations, or in the media, and quite evidently in social movements.

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References Alasuutari, P. (2016). The Synchronization of National Policies: Ethnography of the Global Tribe of Moderns. London: Routledge. Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (Eds.). (2014). National Policy-Making: Domestication of Global Trends. London: Routledge. Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Chernilo, D. (2006). Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431006060460. Comaroff, J. L., & Comaroff, J. (2009). Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Khan, A. M. (2003). Persecution of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan: An Analysis Under International Law and International Relations. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 16(2), 217–244. Krücken, G., & Drori, G. S. (Eds.). (2010). World Society: The Writings of John W. Meyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, J. W. (2004). The Nation as Babbitt: How Countries Conform. Contexts, 3(3), 42–47. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., Thomas, G. M., & Ramirez, F. O. (1997). World Society and the Nation-State. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 144–181. Neumann, I. B. (2008). Russia as a Great Power, 1815–2007. Journal of International Relations and Development, 11, 128–151. Qadir, A. (2014). Parliamentary Hereticization of the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan: The Modern World Implicated in Islamic Crises. In G. Ganiel, C. Monnot, & H. Winkel (Eds.), Religion in Times of Crisis (pp. 135–154). Leiden: Brill. Qadir, A. (2015). When Heterodoxy Becomes Heresy: Using Bourdieu’s Concept of Doxa to Describe State-Sanctioned Exclusion in Pakistan. Sociology of Religion, 76(2), 155– 176. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srv015. Qadir, A., & Alasuutari, P. (2013). Taming Terror: Domestication of the War on Terror in the Pakistan Media. Asian Journal of Communication, 23(6), 575–589. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/01292986.2013.764905. Rogers, D. (2010). Postsocialisms Unbound: Connections, Critiques, Comparisons. Slavic Review, 69(1), 1–15. Schofer, E., Hironaka, A., John, D., & Longhofer, W. (2012). Sociological Institutionalism and World Society. In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology (pp. 57–68). Hoboken: Wiley. Stivachtis, Y. A. (2015). Liberal Democracy, Market Economy, and International Conduct as Standards of ‘Civilization’ in Contemporary International Society: The Case of Russia’s Entry into the ‘Community of Civilized States’. Journal of Eurasian Studies, 6, 130–142. Syväterä, J., & Alasuutari, P. (2014). Converging National with Stakeholder Interests: Establishing a National Bioethics Committee in Finland. In P. Alasuutari & A. Qadir (Eds.), National Policy-Making: Domestication of Global Trends (pp. 164–180). London: Routledge.

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Syväterä, J., & Qadir, A. (2015). The Construction and Spread of Global Models: Worldwide Synchronisation and the Rise of National Bioethics Committees. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2(3–4), 267–290. Tiaynen-Qadir, T., Qadir, A., & Alasuutari, P. (2018). Russia in World Society: A Comparative Perspective on International References in Parliamentary Debates. Acta Sociologica [Online First]. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699317749287. Tsygankov, A. P. (2015). Vladimir Putin’s Last Stand: The Sources of Russia’s Ukraine Policy. Post-Soviet Affairs, 31, 279–303.

7

Social Movements and NGOs

• This chapter discusses how movements and NGOs work for social change. • We introduce different theories of social movements and show the value-added of the epistemic governance theory. • The chapter shows that social movements tend to justify their moral goals by assuming an imagery of the social world as a spatially organized hierarchy and work on people’s conceptions of what is right or desirable to do. In the process, they further rely on, and become themselves, moral authorities. • The chapter illustrates the explanatory potential of epistemic governance by briefly studying the Occupy Wall Street movement and its aftermath.

The Occupation of Wall Street On September 17, 2011, a group of about 1000 people marched into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, New York, and “occupied” it. Banners held up that day proclaimed, “Occupy Wall Street.” Within two days, a Facebook page for the protest had been put up, and within a month, Facebook reported 125 sites for Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The movement had been envisioned by Kalle Lasn and Micah White of the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters. Adbusters had floated the idea of an Occupy movement earlier that year and had told its subscribers in June that America needed its own version of Tahrir Square, the site of the democratic movement in Egypt that succeeded in change the regime of that country in February 2011. © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_7

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Alter-globalization movements joined OWS, as did social justice movements, democracy and transparency movements, and various others. NGOs and international movement representatives as well as academics joined in from time to time. The first day involved about a thousand protestors, but numbers attending fluctuated widely over the months that the protest lasted. A march organized on October 5 included about 10,000 protestors, while on November 17, a day after police tried to clear out Zuccotti Park, about 30,000 resisted police action. However, no more than 200 actually slept in the park on any one night. With such varying memberships, it became difficult to gauge who precisely was there and when, but surveys conducted at various times showed an average demographic of relatively young individuals (average age 33), about equal numbers identifying as men and women and some of other genders, a smattering of religious affiliations (but only unofficially), predominantly white (over 80%), mostly employed and some rich (a third earning over $75,000 annually), overwhelmingly well educated (76% had undergraduate degrees), and the majority unaligned with any major political party. OWS did not formulate a single political demand or list of grievances. The primary organizing principle was recognition of extreme income inequality and immunity of the super-rich by virtue of their non-democratic collusion with the political structure. This was reflected in the most popular slogan, “We are the 99%,” implying oppression by the 1%. Other popular slogans included “They can’t represent us,” which became the mobilizing principle of the pro-democracy protests in Russia in 2012. Some academics, like Slavoj Žižek (2011), have argued that OWS crystallized around the identification of capitalism as the problem, and for the need to democratize late capitalism in USA and elsewhere. The internal organization of OWS was strongly consistent, with decisions being taken in a general assembly meeting every day during the protests. Decision-making was agreed to be consensual, or by 90% majority vote if a consensus could not be reached, a modality known as “horizontalism” (Dellacioppa, 2017). In addition, working groups coalesced around mostly administrative issues such as feeding protestors or raising financial support for the movement. People were expected to respect others’ views and time, and no conflicts were recorded around this over three months. Minutes of working group and general assembly meetings were circulated so as to keep those informed who were not present. While most of the day was spent in meetings and discussions, people had ample time to listen to visiting speakers and read books. In the very first few days, people began leaving and collecting books in a cardboard box at Zuccotti Park. This collection grew to over 5000 books by November 2011. Media activism was likewise not centrally coordinated, ramping up over the weeks. In addition to Facebook posts and Occupywallstreet.org Web site updates,

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a free newspaper began to be printed in October 2011, titled Occupied Wall Street Journal. An Occuprint collective was formed to collect, publish, and circulate images for the movement under open source (Creative Commons) licensing. An Occupy Gazette! published six issues between October 2011 and September 2012, with the articles later anthologized in a book (Blumenkranz et al., 2012). Another biannual magazine—Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy—published four issues from December 2011 through March 2013. Of course, mainstream media outreach was a major focus of the organization, and coverage increased at various event points during OWS. After beginning on September 17, mass media coverage peaked around November 15 and 16, 2011, when police action forced protestors out and closed Zuccotti Park for overnight stays. Three months after beginning, OWS was no longer a physical reality. A small group tried to re-occupy it on December 31, 2011, and some activists have re-occupied Wall Street every year on the anniversary of the original occupation, but this happened last in 2014. The Occupied Wall Street Journal published its last issue in February 2012, and other OWS outlets soon closed. The movement did not result in any policy or law in USA as a direct response to OWS, although President Obama and some leading Democrats at the time expressed sympathy for the movement’s agendas. In the last news item on occupywallst.org in August 2016, one of the co-founders of OWS, Micah White, posted that the movement was a “constructive failure.” He argues in a book that protests are now becoming “irrelevant” and are co-opted to present a sheen of democracy within the autocratic capitalist system (M. White, 2016).

So … Nothing Happened? From this limited perspective of input and output, OWS did not achieve much. Indeed, the fact that OWS did not issue a clear or consensual list of grievances or demands made it hard to even expect “achievements.” What is striking is that a strong—and successful—contingent within OWS resisted issuing any precise demands. Academics like Judith Butler supported this lack of demands by OWS (J. Elliott, 2011), connecting with a vein of activism that resists issuing demands on which necessarily a negotiation takes place to compromise the extent and depth of change being demanded. The no-demand position shows that there is more at stake in OWS than overturning the capitalist system or bust. Most scholars recognize that the primary outcome of OWS was how it inspired and fed directly into other Occupy movements. Indeed, the label, and even the collection of activists involved, spread far and wide. “Occupy” became

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the name for a worldwide movement for global social justice protesting against the global financial system’s control of the world by disproportionately benefiting a tiny minority (the 1%), undermining democracy and eventually degrading the planet’s resources. Using the movement slogan of “We are the 99%” and #Occupy, organizers arranged similar seizures of public (and putatively public) spaces around the world. Already at the peak of OWS, on October 15, 2011, worldwide protests were called for and arranged in at least 900 cities across the globe. The protests were most evident across the USA, where hundreds of cities reported Occupy camps in 2011 and early 2012. An Occupy The Roads movement shut down inter-state traffic briefly in October 2011 to bring the message to other Occupy camps springing up in the country. In other countries, too, the label quickly caught on, with Occupy Zurich and Occupy Paris being two notable European events. In Hong Kong, the movement spiraled up in 2014, when the Chinese government announced a reform of the island’s electoral system. Protests resisting this change took on the name Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) in September 2014. When Hong Kong and Chinese mainland officials responded with force, OCLP numbers swelled to over 100,000, seriously impeding public spaces in the city. After months of violent confrontations, negotiations, and arrests, police eventually cleared out OCLP on December 15, 2014. In all, the Occupy Directory (http://directory.occupy.net/) recorded 1518 Occupy protests in 2011 and 2012 on every continent and in many countries (least of all in Africa). The label was adopted by apparently unrelated movements as well, particularly in the USA. Occupy Faith began in Zuccotti Park to initiate a discussion on religion and left-leaning activism (Campbell, Torpey, & Turner, 2015). Occupy Sandy came together to monitor US state relief in the wake of destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and then to provide relief where it was needed. Years later, the label remains current. For instance in April 2016, supporters of democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders launched a movement to Occupy CNN to protest mainstream media’s unbalanced allocation of airtime to candidates. Similarly, Occupy DNC claimed that Hillary Clinton “stole” the Democratic National Committee nomination for presidential candidate in 2016. In addition to new movements, which have transnational organizational linkages with OWS, the 2011 movement also birthed some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and oriented other, existing NGOs to join in with emerging movements. One related movement was Occupy University (OccU) in the USA and Canada. Formed as a working group in OWS, OccU later spun off into an Occupy Debt (also, Strike Debt) movement that “liberated” 2761 individuals from their student debt worth almost four million US$ by 2014 (Ashton, 2014). In OccU,

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students occupied spaces in university campuses around the continent, from McGill to Occupy Cal (University of California Davis and Berkeley). However, the move to occupy university spaces has a longer history than that of OWS, reaching through the early 2000s back to 1968. In the early 2000s in the USA, the slogan of students coalesced even more radically than OWS: “Occupy everything, demand nothing,” the point being to create a “momentary opening [or rupture] in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketches the contours of a new society” (Communique from student collective, Research and Destroy, in 2009 occupation of University of California, quoted in Bowden, 2017, p. 198). These and hundreds of similar cases from around the world show that, arguably, the greatest impacts of OWS have been that it affected political rhetoric and built long-lasting solidarity across movement issues and national borders. To these, we should add another significant outcome: Theorizing of social movements has intensified especially since the early 1970s and has fed into the organization of movements themselves.

Social Change and Cycles of Protest For many scholars, OWS and its aftermath is the new normal in social change (Vanden, Funke, & Prevost, 2017, p. 1). Most theorists identify OWS as part of a global cycle of anti-capitalism protests, similar to other cycles such as the Zapatista movement in the Chiapas in 1994 or the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999 (e.g., Bowden, 2017; della Porta & Mattoni, 2014a). Ongoing movements of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter are other cases, as are the land reform movement in South Asia and climate action mobilization around the world. Although social movements have been defined in different ways, Tarrow (2011, p. 9) captures most of the common elements when he suggests that they are “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities.” OWS and the other social movements mentioned above are readily captured by this definition and constitute a major site of social change in the modern world. In this chapter, we focus on the epistemic aspects of social movements and how they seek social change. As with the other sites discussed in the book, an epistemic governance perspective offers insight into how social movements go about affecting change. The framework points to the need to unpack certain aspects that other theories—such as those discussed briefly below—would overlook. That is, activists in OWS and other movements or civil society organizations try to convince other people of the right course of action by relying on and

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portraying a “correct” picture of the world, building identifications to recruit members and supporters, and drawing upon what they consider irrefutable norms and ideals. In this chapter, we focus on how social movements and non-governmental organizations take into account and act upon this last object of epistemic work: norms and ideals. Moreover, we show that many modern social movements often build on an imagery of the social world as a hierarchy, and so this chapter is intended as an illustration of how to analyze that object of epistemic work and this imagery in any site of change. To appreciate these features, we must take note that new social movements may have had varying degrees of “success,” but in all cases have vocally and consistently contested given orders of reality and impacted on the way in which these issues are debated. The same may be said for “old” social movements (like labor) and generations of non-governmental organizations. Some of these have been remarkably successful in achieving their goals such as collective bargaining for labor wages in welfare states or delivering social services and monitoring human rights violations in under-developed countries. But, even when they haven’t had such striking success, in all major cases such organizations and movements have in any case altered the discourse of social change around certain agenda points and spread rapidly around the world, labor being a notable example. Although we focus on new social movements here purely as a heuristic device to illustrate our point about norms and ideals as an object of epistemic work, the same point holds true for “old” social movements in modernity, as well as for NGOs. Some consider OWS not as similar to other cycles but as part of a longer “cultural epoch of contention” (McAdam & Sewell Jr., 2001) for global justice against state-legitimated capitalism and unrepresentative democracy (cf. Funke, 2014, 2015; Smith, 2010). Tilly and Tarrow (2015), indeed, consider a much longer time span to theorize generic “contentious politics” that take the form of cycles of protests and movements such as that which included OWS. This thinking draws on Tilly’s (1978) idea that social movements can be found at the very birth of institutions that we now recognize as emblematic of the nation-state, such as representative parliaments, unionized labor negotiations, and other participatory democratic mechanisms (cf. Smith, 2013). Or, as Lichbach (1998, p. 403) suggests, “state structures and social movements are reciprocally constituted: Authority begets the resistance that transforms it.” Although he classifies social movement theories in an unusual way, he also notes that Thomas Hobbes wrote two major books: the famous Leviathan, a metaphor of the ordering state, and Behemoth, signifying “lawlessness, chaos, disorder, anarchy, heterodoxy, and deviance” (Lichbach, 1998, p. 402). Politically, Hobbes saw the movement-based English Civil War (1642–1651) as a period of chaos in which the country lost its

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soul, but academically he admitted that similar movements were always evident in polity-building. Social movements are hence the underbelly of political institutionalization of the nation-state, making or resisting coercion-backed claims of the state, although of course their forms, organization, and membership profiles have changed drastically over the centuries. Of course, such similarities in cycle only characterize one dimension of social movements around global social justice and not, for instance, new religious movements that operate on different principles (Rubinstein, 2018). However, to the extent that new religious movements also seek social change—and not just to alter conceptions of their own members—similar mechanisms of cycles of protest may be identified. In other words, some cycles of protests are visible in many different realms even though most scholarship is around the global justice cycle. Much conceptual effort has been dedicated to explaining how such cycles of protest are sustained over time. Standard explanations of social movements have been rooted in political opportunity structures (POS) that seek causes for certain movements in local political dynamics. Indeed, such theories have successfully described how local mobilization in particular movements can be successful. For example, POS theories explain how violent protests in Soviet Union ramped up in 1989 upon the position taken by Mikhail Gorbachev that the Union had to allow a small measure of de facto permission to non-state actors in order to compete effectively with the West (Tarrow, 2011, pp. 157–159). They can also explain how the sense of a crisis of representation in the wake of recession and revelation of economic mis-management in Spain in early 2011 led to the Indignados movement (Roos & Oikonomakis, 2014). However, POS theories have been less successful in explaining how protests have spread across countries (for instance, it is difficult to find structural similarities leading to both Indignados and OWS in New York) or sustained across time (from protests in 1989 to demands for regime change in Moscow in 2017). Instead, where such structural similarities are difficult to identify, culturally oriented scholars have turned to the concept of framing (Benford & Snow, 2000), especially “master frames” that unite different social movements into one mobilization or sustain movements over time (Benford, 2013).1 This marked a turn away from resource-based POS explanations that dominated social movement 1A similar concept is one of “relays” that explains how movements resonate across borders and time (Funke, 2014), drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of “rhizomatic,” non-hierarchical organization. Other attempts have been made by social theorists taken up in the cultural turn in social sciences, but framing remains the most consistently applied concept (Jasper, 2007).

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theory well into the 1990s (Jasper, 2007, p. 60). Frames such as “equity,” for instance, mobilized a variety of preexisting movements and NGOs to join OWS in September 2011 and can even be seen in spillover movements like OccU or OCLP. Indeed, the global justice movement has utilized the same framing of reality (as inequitable) at least since the Zapatista movement starting in 1994. Similarly, the frame of equity phrased more positively (“another world is possible”) has mobilized all manner of actors in the recurrent World Social Forums since the Seattle protests in 1999. In such explanations, a frame is “an interpretive schema that simplifies and condenses the ‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environments” (Snow & Benford, 1992, p. 137). Building on Irving Goffman’s seminal conceptualization of how individuals construct reality, and extending it to collective action, framing theory describes how meaning is made in social movements to attract membership and sustain action. However, frames by themselves do not offer a recipe for action, nor do they cover every instance of mobilization. In OWS, it also mattered a lot that Žižek and Butler attended and lectured and circulated writings, drawing in great crowds and creating conceptualizations for people to mobilize around. It was also important that OWS was self-labeled a “protest,” even as a protest leading to “revolution” (M. White, 2016) to reflect the emotional depth of resentment against unrepresentative democracy and juggernaut capitalism. Such activities cannot be reduced to framing yet were also instrumental in making meaning in OWS. Tarrow (2011, pp. 142–144) combines the three prevalent explanations for how meaning is made in social movements to argue that all need to be analyzed in any given case: framing, identity-construction, and emotion. This establishes a sound conceptual framework, which Tarrow uses to briefly describe a number of social movements around the world. However, very little research takes such a holistic stance to capture a comprehensive picture of a protest. Even those that do dive immediately into who is to blame (for the problem, or for the inability to address it). The concentration is, for instance, on whether OWS’ horizontal management system let it down in terms of achieving results (Dellacioppa, 2017), or on whether the movement was too self-congratulatory to engage with existing democratic institutions (Žižek, 2011), or how religious engagement assisted OWS in a reflection of postsecular America (Campbell et al., 2015), etc. Similarly, the transnational aspect of OWS needs further explanation. The fact that these movements spread into such diverse places means that local/national political or economic structures can hardly be the reason. Although recogniz-

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ing this disparity, most accounts of transnational social movements then rush into identifying the particular combination of local factors that allowed a movement to spread or not, and then succeed or not (e.g., the cases in della Porta & Mattoni, 2014b; Smith, 2013). That is, the spread of social movements around the world is, again, studied as a form of diffusion. Research accounts and empirical designs are operationalized explicitly or implicitly as instances of diffusion. In the case of OWS, for example, the question becomes one of why it spread to one place (London) and not to another (Berlin), or whether it can be legitimately considered part of the same cycle of globe-spanning movements against capitalism, or of whether such spread should be seen as hierarchically organized or “rhizomatic,” etc. However, such accounts overlook the point that social movements must, in any case, take into account how people conceive of the world in order to convince them of a course of action. In other words, they can’t explain the structural limitations of such movements that exist by virtue of their discursive nature. Whether by framing reality in a certain way (we are the 99%), or working on the emotions of potential recruits around a normative ideal (representation), OWS activists had to consider how people conceive of the world and cast their message and appeal accordingly. Moreover, despite the way in which OWS’ message was crafted, many of its slogans and forms of organization found support in NGOs that movement activists consider “part of the system,” or of politicians like President Obama who were precisely the target of protest, or even of alt-right groups that stood for values many movement activists rejected. Indeed, many OWS norms of democratic representation, equitable wealth distribution, and participatory management are championed and spread around the world by intergovernmental organizations like UN bodies, although the UN may in some cases be late to the issue and in others be in the driving seat. It is not analytically easy to make such a sharp distinction between movements, NGOs, and even IGOs, all of which are involved or invoked in a movement like OWS.

Norms and Ideals in Social Movements: An Epistemic Governance Perspective The framework of epistemic governance offers analytical purchase to appreciate how movements move and what limits their functionality, also leading to methodological tools that can be used to analyze individual cases. Whether we consider an individual like White wanting to make a large claim, or a social movement in full swing like OWS in October 2011, or a registered NGO like Greenpeace, these are all actors in search of social change. Eventually, whether they succeed

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in stated goals (end of state-sanctioned neoliberal capitalism) or achieve others (inspiring Hong Kong democratic mobilization), all these actors have to attract people around a normative agenda. To do this, social movements must take into account how people around them conceive of the world, and then work on those conceptions to achieve their targets. In social movements, such work is organized around a normative ideal: the “right,” the “good,” or the “desirable” (distributive equity, representation, justice, horizontal organization, sustainability, gender equity, and so on). In general, the fundamental principle of social movements is to move the agenda on any issue away from techno-managerial systems to a political approach. Consider the food security movement, which argues that the world’s governments and intergovernmental bodies have remained focused on enhancing agricultural productivity since the 1950s. However, they point out that the issue is one of politics: The world produces one and a half times as much food as is needed for every soul on the planet, yet for the first time in human history more people are expected to starve in the next generation than did in the previous one (Gimenez, 2013). In addition to the ideal of protecting people from starvation, the global food security movement thus also moves the agenda from technical productivity to a normative distribution, attracting diverse membership from the Global South and North to a politics of protest. In the same way, OWS activists sought to attract members around its normative agenda of moving the management of capitalism out of the hands of bureaucratic rules of economics and into an overtly political domain. Yet, it is important to note that organizers could not simply throw away people’s expectations of what a protest is and does, although naturally they innovated in some ways. So, for instance, throughout the history of contentious politics, social movements have worked on two strategic prongs: (a) blocking/amending the existing laws/ rules/policies (i.e., resisting claims by the state) and (b) promoting/developing new laws/rules/policies (i.e., making new claims on the state) (Smith, 2013). In order to make the protest into a movement that had some authority, OWS organizers had to sustain a message that appealed to these two prongs of resisting state claims (e.g., bank bailouts by government with no public debate) and making new claims on the state (stop using public money to bail out banks owned by the super-rich, and involve the majority, 99%, in making macro-economic decisions). As above, OWS had to rely on members and supporters appreciating these two prongs of protest and mobilizing around them. They also figured that they count on people recognizing themselves in the interest that OWS identified. But, after all, “interest” is only apparently an objective category; all interests are presented as being universally and objectively valid (Tarrow, 2011, p. 11). OWS built a

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broad enough claim that they felt the majority could relate to. However, it did so by eliding other interests such as racial justice that was beginning to re-mobilize African Americans around the USA at the time, resulting in a predominantly white OWS. Similarly, the form of organizing into an “occupation” of a public space, and thereby questioning its “public” nature, is a well-recognized one. Innovative as it was in terms of being the first occupation of lower Manhattan and of a major financial location, OWS was continuing a long history of such occupations for equity goals. Bowden (2017) connects such occupation tactics to the student movement protesting tuition fee hikes in New York and California in 2008 and 2009, which in turn was absorbed into OWS as OccU. Over a few years, students formulated a comprehensive philosophy of occupation of public spaces structured by private/elite interests, and thereby reinforced a legitimate protest strategy that could be recognized as such. Indeed, Bowden goes on to show that occupation for democratic ends has a long history as a protest through presence. Harvey (2014) traces this form back to the French Revolution, when democratic activists occupied Louis XVI’s tennis grounds in Versailles. From the perspective of epistemic governance, it is apparent that activists must organize a movement in a form that is recognized widely enough as being a movement of a certain type. OWS organizers might have intuitively known this when they initiated the movement with a call to imitate Tahrir Square, another instance of occupation of a public space to protest against the rule of private interests. In the same way, we would imagine that a religious extremist movement would not organize a peaceful occupation of this type! Although this is a known form of mobilization, it does not speak to or resonate with the membership that such extremists are seeking to mobilize. These examples show that protests are deeply and thoroughly transnational. Although attention to diffusion of social movements is revealing, as above, it does tend to obscure the more basic and constitutive form of transnationalism in social movement mobilization: that the forms and norms of social movements are already transnational. We can think of this in terms of “repertoires” of contentious action (Tilly & Tarrow, 2015), which must have spread already before a movement can draw upon them and erupt. Such a spread means that a movement is already transnational in a deep, constitutive sense. As with parliaments, discussed in Chapter 5, the degree of transnationalism that goes much deeper than the research on diffusion suggests. To appreciate this, we need only realize that activists, almost as a rule, refer to other countries and the movements there to legitimize their own actions. In doing so, they presume that similar norms would be readily understood and attractive to their own audiences. Thus, OWS organizers referred overtly to Tahrir and also

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implicitly to the student movement tactics of occupation. Cross-referencing in social movements is therefore not just an irrelevant aside, but indeed thoroughly constitutive of social movements. Naturally, the presence and technology of media makes such referencing more evident today than when Zapatistas referred to land reform movements in other countries in 1994. However, even Gandhi’s democratic social movement beginning with the Salt March in 1930 and ending with Indian postcolonial independence in 1947 was expressly organized around the principles of Henry David Thoreau’s “civil disobedience” that was rooted in the 1689 “Glorious Revolution” in Britain. As far back as 1789, French Revolution organizers were deeply influenced by and rhetorically used the American Revolution of 14 years earlier to mobilize people. Much more empirical attention is needed to map and trace when and how cross-national references are made in social movements, and how they are obscured to make a movement “relevant.” The point here is that when activists make such references, they appeal to certain ideals and norms (representation, equity, self-rule, etc.) that they believe people will see as applicable and necessary in their own context. An innovation is useful to generate new energy and channel new emotions but can never be too far away from what is seen as acceptable. What this shows is that the ground for a social movement is prepared transnationally. OWS relied on people understanding the concept of distributive justice and believing that protest is a good way to make progress. In order to strengthen this potential for resonance, White and Lasn referred to Tahrir Square in Cairo to signal the type of politics they were going for. Crucially, while the expressions were couched in local terms relevant to Wall Street, these norms were thoroughly mobile globally. This is evident in the OWS slogans, which were readily transported with little to no adaptation around the globe and to very different issues. This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Scholarship on globalization has been pointing out for many years that the nation-state acquires meaning and form only in a transnational space (e.g., Featherstone, 1990). We need to theorize a layer of principles beyond the nation-state that give legitimacy, form, and long life to the structure of nation-states.2 If Tilly (1978), among others, is correct and social movements have been inevitable accompaniments to nation-state (re)formation, then it also follows that social movements must be theorized beyond the nation-state. That is, in a very strict sense, social movements find their

2This

has been most comprehensively theorized by a long tradition of world society scholars; see J. W. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez (1997) for a cogent summary of the principles of this view.

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existence legitimated transnationally. Even though OWS challenged core elements of inter-state relations—liberal democratic institutions and transnational corporations—it was itself a third pillar of that self-same transnationalism, subject to the same trends of isomorphism. Indeed, the norms that social movement are organized on are typically transnationally housed, for instance in UN bodies or agreements. World society scholars show that environmental movements can be easily traced to norms found in international environmental agreements that came first (e.g., Frank, Hironaka, & Schofer, 2000); the same is true of human rights and the UN Declaration (M. A. Elliott, 2007). Smith (2013) points out that the UN officials in the Human Rights Commission are also “frequently involved in supporting the work of the transnational human rights movement.” Such transnational norms are typically used in a “boomerang effect” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998) or “domesticated” to the local context (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014) for mobilizing people. In either case, the global is a pre-condition for new social movements to function locally. This was also the case for “old” social movements, as with labor organizing into “Internationals,” but has become more the case now for labor movements as well as for new social movements. In this view of transnationalism, the spread of movements like OWS can be conceptualized not as diffusion from a single center, but as a nonlinear, pulsating pattern of synchronized outgrowths. A similar conceptualization helped to describe the synchronized but centrally unmanaged appearance of inter-referential models of bioethics policy committees around the world (Syväterä & Qadir, 2015). This is similar to the conceptualization of “rhizomatic” contention in social movements (Funke, 2014), drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987). The motivating question for research, in this conceptualization, is not why a particular movement diffuses or not to a given place, but what precise norms are invoked using what cross-national references, and how these are adapted in a local context by hiding that transnationalism.

Imagery of the Social World as a Spatio-Form Hierarchy What makes these normative messages so appealing in so many places and contexts? Some social movement theorists have pointed out a drastic and widening democratic deficit in the world, or a crisis of representation (Bowden, 2017, p. 191) as a structural problem in many societies that leads to mobilization. Roos and Oikonomakis (2014, p. 122) argue that the umbrella slogan of “They don’t represent us” mobilized not just OWS participants, but also the

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earlier Indignados movement in Spain and the subsequent democratic protests in Russia, making a case for a cycle of protest against unrepresentative polities. Yet, while many social movement activists might agree, there have been other very successful mobilizing slogans as well, such as “Another world is possible” of the huge World Social Forum and its local variants. Jackie Smith (2010, p. 3) compiles significant evidence to build continuity between global justice movements up to the 1990s and the alter-globalization movements since 2000 around a different norm: “a world order that focuses less on markets and more on people.” Similarly, Sigurðardóttir (2017) analyzes texts produced by digital platform Avaaz to show that its activists presume a global norm of inclusion, appealing to the ideal of common good for all humanity. The #MeToo movement, by contrast, is built on a normative ideal of justice against a history of patriarchal/misogynistic abuse. All these (and more) slogans and norms do not show a content-based unity. However, they all do have a formal or processual unity: They all build on a common imagery of the social world as spatially organized into a hierarchy with some “higher up” and others (most) “lower down.” OWS, no less than any other major social movement, exemplifies this with its message of the 99%. All its messages and the means by which it transmitted and performed them relied on its members and others believing that this is how the world is organized: into a hierarchy. Indeed, most normative agendas such as those that characterize social movements, are based on this imagery of what the world is and what needs to be done about it. Even social movements of religious extremists are founded on this imagery and their organizers recruit members or supporters by assuming that they, in turn, think of the world in this way. Likewise, new movements within established world religions (earlier pejoratively termed “cults”) recruit members by assuring them that they will “take on” the religious establishment and the higher authorities that do not allow such and such an innovation (Rubinstein, 2018). Of course, who the “higher up” is, varies from movement to movement: superrich, politicians, unelected officials controlling interest rates and creeds, Western imperialists, etc. Overlaps and disjoints between the targets often lead to fractures in social movements, as indeed happened in OWS. However, the basic imagery of the social world is the same. Another way to think about this is through the concept of frame alignment common in cultural analyses of social movements: the “processes by which organizers and recruits come (or do not come) to synchronize their ways of viewing a social problem and what should be done about it” (Jasper, 2007, p. 71). Benford (2013) identifies different ontological levels of frames that mobilize action around issues (social movement frames), contexts (collective action frames), and cycles of protests (master frames). However, all such statements have tended to remain at a relatively vague level of abstraction. In other

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words, they may help us understand what message is crafted (tax reform, wealth redistribution, or economic injustice, respectively in OWS), but now how it works. Imageries of the social world plug that analytical gap, showing the way in which any such message functions: by assuming that members, recruits, supporters, and target authorities believe this is how the world is structured. The imagery of society as a spatio-form hierarchy is most prevalent in social movements, but it is not the only one. OWS slogans also included messages that assumed people believed the world to be organized not in a spatio-form hierarchy but into eternally progressing/evolving organisms (“we have moved beyond unjust capitalism,” etc.). Similarly, new religious movements relish in calling themselves “new,” although much of what they say can be found within streams of the major world religions they seek to reform; indeed, it is very important for new religious movements to claim “newness” while also hearkening back to a tradition in which that newness is rooted (Rubinstein, 2018). Yet, imageries of the world are more or less stable categories that have to be activated in social change, for instance by social movements. Epistemic work, in this sense, is really work. As discussed in Chapter 3, consider that only a limited number of root metaphors—ways of modeling reality—lie at the core of all language (Brown, 1989). However, these metaphors have to be activated and can be molded in any number of ways to produce texts that are both descriptive and move people to action or emotion. In the same way, a limited number of imageries of the world lie at the core of social action, but these must be molded by a movement to move people. As discussed earlier, there are more imageries that need to be identified than just of the social world, for instance imageries of the individual, and so on. Much more empirical work is needed to also break down the pattern in use of imageries of the social world. For instance, are particular actors placed into the narratives more consistently and in certain times and places? How far back can we trace the reliance on an imagery of the social world organized as a spatioform hierarchy, and have there been any variations in this? How are the different objects of epistemic governance evoked (construction of reality, identification of actors, and norms) from movement to movement, and context to context?

Norming Nodes: Morality-Based Movements Framing Reality and Reaching Out These and other questions indicate the extent of empirical and theoretical research required to extend this framework’s tremendous explanatory potential for analyzing social movements. They also show that in the arena of social

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movements, as in other arenas of social change, one object that activists work on (norms) through one imagery of the social world (as organized into a spatio-form hierarchy) is only one part of the story. In fact, social movements act upon all three objects of epistemic work to generate their membership or have an impact. A good way to see this is to consider the widely prevalent concept of framing in cultural variants of social movement theory. As above, the organizing principle of social movements—their raison d’etre—is a moral call to replace order with individuals, or techno-managerial approaches with politics in any system. However, the moral call to certain ideals and norms is based on a presentation of reality. It has to be. As Lakoff (2011) points out in regard to framing OWS, “Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day … ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act.” As with any presentation, the social movement’s presentation of reality is selective, highlighting certain features and dropping other features of the world to draw attention to the “most important” aspects of reality. This is obviously well recognized in the very concept of framing, as with Snow and Benford’s (1992) definition cited earlier. In terms of our framework of epistemic governance, framing is a way to define the ontology of the environment, i.e., the way the world “is.” In most developments of framing theory, analysts then jump to point out which frame succeeded in carrying over the mobilization, such as injustice frame in OWS (Roos & Oikonomakis, 2014), and which didn’t such as horizontalism (Dellacioppa, 2017), etc. In making these points, scholars brush aside the fact that the selectiveness in this presentation of reality is, after all, work. That is, selectivity is a natural part of (re)presentation of reality in a simpler fashion than all of reality. But that doesn’t explain how the selection is done. When actors present reality in a simpler fashion than its totality, they define a certain ontology of the social environment, i.e., what must be counted as real and what must be discarded as irrelevant or even a hoax. Moreover, such selection of reality is based on certain, limited imageries of the social world. In the case of OWS, and of most global justice movements, this imagery is of society as a spatio-form hierarchy, which immediately implies a moral call for action toward the ideal of equity against those “on top.” What this leads us to recognizing is that when organizers of social movements such as OWS craft their message, they intuitively or explicitly appreciate that potential recruits and supporters as well as authorities see the world in this way. Which presentation of reality works in a particular case and which doesn’t is of course important. Yet, irrespective of any such conclusion, such presentation of reality relies on people accepting it as legitimate. In some sense, a social move-

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ment is a dialogical exercise: Organizers and their recruits plus potential recruits and supporters co-create the movement by making it discursively possible. This, in turn, means that working on people’s conceptions of the ontology of the environment is based on some epistemological sharing. Of course, social movements do not simply say, “this is how the world is!” White and Lasn, initially, and then the movement in its full throes relied on and referred to an extensive base of knowledge that supported their framing of reality. They drew on speeches in Tahrir Square and by Indignados, as well as the communique by the student movement in 2009 occupying UC Berkeley, and many others. The emphasis, right from the get-go, on Occupied Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, not to mention FB pages and internet sites, is crucial from this perspective of grounding the presentation of reality. Arranging speeches by academic celebrities like Žižek and Butler, circulating framing messages by Lakoff, and then reporting and freely sharing those addresses immediately, also aided in spreading the word in authoritative language. Similarly, the Zuccotti Park public library that spontaneously emerged during OWS is a very evident example of knowledge sharing that is present to some extent in all social movements. The climate movement is another example with a focus on knowledge being produced and shared, partly through “stars” who lend their authority and credibility to the message of how the world should be seen. In turn, the reality presented by OWS became a discursive authority in the tremendous uptake of the movement around the world and on diverse issues like Occupy DNC or Occupy Sandy, which is also the case for other movements like food security or #MeToo. In some cases, social movements can rely very heavily on knowledge production. For instance, in her widely referenced study, Katzenstein (1999) showed that Catholic feminists changed many of the Church’s ideas about women and gender by creating a knowledge community that generated new information and theologies. In this way, they gradually affected the Church hierarchy, and through it brought social change unobtrusively among so many Catholic communities and societies, without any recognizable mobilization or protest. Katzenstein refers to their strategy of reflection and reformulation through the creation of new knowledge as “discursive politics.” Indeed, we may broaden this to see discursive politics as a general strategy of the politics of contention. We should add to this aspect of knowledge creation, the by-now-unmanageable body of academic literature on social movements. As we noted in Chapter 3, in a very significant sense academics are also engaged in epistemic work and are bound, no less than anyone else, to express themselves in terms of the same imageries as the activists of the social movements they study. Furthermore, the abstracted analyses they produce objectively describe and then theorize the

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contextual factors in a case that can be utilized in mobilization by future movements. Especially in the case of the current cycle of global justice movements, academically trained and highly qualified individuals are at the center of activism (OWS co-creators Kalle Lasn and Dr. Micah White are good examples) and hence fully conversant with social movement theory (White was a student of Žižek as well as of Hardt and Badiou, all leading activist philosophers). In other cases, academic theories filter in through indirect sources, such as blog posts or popular articles in movement media (e.g., George Lakoff’s blog on framing appeared on multiple websites in October 2011). Academics is part of the co-creation of the system of resonance within which social movements seek to appeal to recruits and supporters. When making such an appeal, social movement activists and organizers are also working on the second object of epistemic work: identifications of people. As discussed in Chapter 5 on parliaments as arenas of social change, those seeking social change consider how people identify themselves and work on those perceptions. OWS made a tremendously broad identification: the 99% who are alienated from extreme capital manipulation and collusion with unrepresentative democratic institutions and individuals. It was a strategic choice and clearly aimed at maximizing recruitment. By working on this identification, OWS targeted solidarity among diverse actors against a very carefully selected elite. However, in the process OWS alienated those arguing for more targeted redistribution, such as African Americans, or elided other differences such as with altright members who claimed support for OWS but whose primary agenda many OWS activists protested. The climate movement makes an even greater claim— identifying with all of humanity, including people not yet born, and even mute fauna and flora. Tarrow (2011, p. 11) recognizes the importance of solidarity (along with framing and emotional work) in norm-based social movements, arguing that “leaders can create a social movement only when they tap into and expand deep-rooted feelings of solidarity and identity.” Tarrow (2011, p. 143) points out that identities are a “constructed set of boundary mechanisms that define who ‘we’ are, who ‘they’ are, and the locations of the borders between them,” and shows how this worked when Hindu nationalists mobilized religious and nationalist sentiment against Muslims in India when destroying the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992. When seen from this perspective, it is obvious that social movements do not appeal only to their own founding, existing, or potential members. They do that, too, and rely on the norms they are offering to appeal to those members. Of course, the messages are also aimed at a carefully selected target audience of

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elites. But, importantly, the normative message is also geared toward a broader audience that we have referred to as “supporters” in this chapter. When OWS developed and circulated their slogan, or posted on their Facebook pages, they also appealed to the broader audience “out there” who would support their effort. This majority (the 99%) were obviously not all in Zuccotti Park, but the messages and strategies were crafted in a way that would appeal to them. The movement could then speak in the name of the silent majority. Furthermore, just as we saw in Chapter 5 that parliamentarians speak “to the gallery,” social movements are also speaking to a broad and vaguely defined global civil society. By analyzing the way in which they craft their messages, we get a sense of what they feel this global civil society consists of and believes in. Such an approach to social movements can also lead to theorization of global civil society. For instance, Mahajan (1999, p. 1188) asks “whether civil society is, or must be seen as, an identifiable zone that lies outside the state?” She proposes that in the twenty-first century we should challenge the Lockean idea positing civil society as an extant and identifiable body of individuals outside the state, and instead turn to a Hegelian notion of it as a category that is activated in the pursuit of mutual recognition of individual interests. From our cultural perspective, global civil society acquires further significance as a discursive construct that is strengthened when social movements invoke it as an authority in whose name they speak. The contours of global civil society are informed by such invocations, and we need much more understanding of what those contours are and how they have varied.

Social Movements as Moral Authorities Why have we emphasized social movement attention to recruiting members and supporters in this chapter? Given that the fundamental organizing principle of social movements is normativity, it is self-evident that social movements do not command much capacity for coercion or force. Of course, OWS blocked traffic and walkways for a few hours at a time, and the mobilization over some hours on particular days created a security concern for city authorities. But there was never any real physical danger or threat posed. Even religious extremist social movements have little to no coercive capacity in themselves, although some elements may coalesce there to begin militant action akin to a guerilla army and will then have to take on the full armed might of a state. Typically, social movements are far less equipped with material and human resources than states or corporations and are often less homogenously oriented to act coherently. Even Greenpeace

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can, at most, board or block a boat or two in the Arctic. While a state’s impact may be measured by the punitive force that it threatens to mobilize, and a corporation’s impact may be gauged by the finances it can steer people’s lives with, a social movement has no resource other than its claim to moral principles. Yet, as above, social movements have an impact! A number of social movements and civil society agendas have fallen short of their stated objectives. Yet, as the literature on cycles of protests bears witness to, even when activists such as in OWS have failed to meet their stated objectives, they have anyway garnered so much popularity that future discourse is bound to take their concerns into consideration. In other words, their very popularity is a success. They inspire action on related issues in other places, and they change the discourse around which policy is made or implemented. This is because their moral action resonates with people who believe that the movement is voicing a legitimate concern or saying the “right” thing. NGOs like Greenpeace have not succeeded in stopping natural resource extraction in the Arctic, nor has the global labor movement achieved independent unionization in much of South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. However, even in these cases, NGOs and social movements have managed to generate a discourse that people cannot but refer to in making decisions or planning action. From economic equity and punitive measures for speculating financiers, to the need for renewable energy and collective bargaining for working rights, all these social movements have managed to shape public and political discourse. In that way, these movements (or at least their most visible activists and groups) have become authorities in global political discourse. That is, they have become markers to whom other actors and speakers may refer to in order to make a point or suggest a course of action. Thus, Occupy Central with Love and Peace (Hong Kong) started 15 months after OWS, but referred to the latter. OCLP also absorbed the student activist group Scholarism, whose founder Joshua Wong has become a key youth activist figure internationally. Now, Scholarism’s goals (electoral reform in Hong Kong) were far from OWS, as was the strategy (singledemand rather than no-demand) and the tactic (occupy with physical numbers rather than symbolically). Whether or not the two are inter-related or diffused from the same cycle, Joshua Wong claimed inspiration from both Micah White and earlier Hong Kong movement figures. In turn, he has now become a reference point himself for future democracy movements. Wong was included by Time magazine in its list of Most Influential Teens of 2014, nominated for Time Person of the Year in 2014, recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s greatest leaders in 2015, and is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Wong carries global authority now that derives in large part from his own activities and character, but also in a chain of succession from OWS. Between September and

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December 2011, OWS became a force to be reckoned with, and since then its most visible activists have had an enduring position as authorities that others refer to when talking about capitalism or democracy. The numbers that a social movement can claim are quite central to its moral authority. For it to become a force to be reckoned with—either to affect change in policies or inspire others—OWS needed to “play” the numbers game. Which means that it had to show to its own members as well as to others that enough people believed that the world was the way they said it was, and that enough people believed in doing what they argued needed to be done. In addition to claiming wide support, it is also apparently important for social movements like OWS to claim deep support, i.e., truly popular or grassroots resonance. OWS’ horizontalism seems to have supported its claim that it was a truly popular uprising, much like in Tahrir Square in Cairo earlier that year, and the conceivers—Lasn and White—were not more prominent in the movement than other activists or “stars.” This credibility is a significant component in general of the moral authority of social movements and NGOs, who argue that their organization is not top-down by diktat but rather bottom-up by spontaneous outgrowth. Not only does this lend urgency and importance to the epistemic work on people’s norms and ideals. It also feeds very readily from and into the imagery of society as a hierarchy. OWS and many new social movements seem to follow a similar pattern to establish their moral authority; it is a matter of empirical investigation to uncover other strategies and tactics by which social movements and NGOs build their authority.

References Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014). Introduction. In P. Alasuutari & A. Qadir (Eds.), National Policy-Making: Domestication of Global Trends (pp. 1–22). London: Routledge. Ashton, J. (2014, November 17). Occupy Abolishes Almost $4,000,000 in Student Debt, Enrolls Campus Activists, Announces Nationwide ‘Debt Collective’. Huffington Post. Benford, R. D. (2013). Master Frame. In D. A. Snow, D. della Porta, B. Klandermans, & D. McAdam (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Oxford: Blackwell. Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Blumenkranz, C., Gessen, K., Greif, M., Leonard, S., Resnick, S., Saval, N., … Taylor, A. (Eds.). (2012). Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America. London: Verso. Bowden, S. L. (2017). Occupy: Prehistories and Continuities. In H. E. Vanden, P. N. Funke, & G. Prevost (Eds.), The New Global Politics: Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 190–203). London: Routledge.

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Brown, R. H. (1989). A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, E. B., Torpey, J., & Turner, B. S. (2015). Religion and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Critical Research on Religion, 3(2), 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 2050303215593151. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. della Porta, D., & Mattoni, A. (2014a). Patterns of Diffusion and the Transnational Dimension of Protest in the Movements of the Crisis: An Introduction. In D. della Porta & A. Mattoni (Eds.), Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis (pp. 1–18). Colchester, UK: ECPR Press. della Porta, D., & Mattoni, A. (Eds.). (2014b). Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis. Colchester, UK: ECPR Press. Dellacioppa, K. Z. (2017). The Promise and Pitfalls of Horizontalism in the Occupy Movement. In H. E. Vanden, P. N. Funke, & G. Prevost (Eds.), The New Global Politics: Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 204–218). London: Routledge. Elliott, J. (2011). Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street. Salon. Retrieved from https://web. archive.org/web/20140503002548/http://www.salon.com/2011/10/24/judith_butler_at_ occupy_wall_street/. Elliott, M. A. (2007). Human Rights and the Triumph of the Individual in World Culture. Cultural Sociology, 1(3), 343–363. Featherstone, M. (1990). Global Culture: An Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2–3: Special Issue on Global Culture), 1–14. Frank, D. J., Hironaka, A., & Schofer, E. (2000). The Nation-State and Natural Environment Over the Twentieth Century. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 96–116. Funke, P. N. (2014). Building Rhizomatic Social Movements? Movement Building Relays During the Current Epoch of Contention. Studies in Social Justice, 8(1), 27–44. Funke, P. N. (2015). Global Justice Movement. In D. T. Cook & J. M. Ryan (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies. Sussex: Wiley. Gimenez, E. H. (2013). Got Food Security? Look to the World’s Growing Social Movements. Huffington Post. Retrieved from Huffpost website https://www.huffingtonpost. com/eric-holt-gimenez/food-security_b_4110993.html?guccounter=1. Harvey, D. (2014). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Jasper, J. M. (2007). Cultural Approaches in the Sociology of Social Movements. In B. Klandermans & C. Roggeband (Eds.), Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines (pp. 59–110). New York: Springer. Katzenstein, M. F. (1999). Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest Inside the Church and Military. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lakoff, G. (2011). How to Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street. Retrieved from eScholarship.org website https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5180z267. Lichbach, M. I. (1998). Contending Theories of Contentious Politics and the StructureAction Problem of Social Order. Annual Review of Political Science, 1, 401–424.

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Mahajan, G. (1999, May 15). Civil Society and Its Avatars: What Happened to Freedom and Democracy? Economic and Political Weekly, 34(20), 1188–1196. McAdam, D., & Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2001). It’s About Time: Temporality in the Study of Social Movements and Revolutions. In R. R. Aminzade, J. A. Goldstone, D. McAdam, E. J. Perry, W. H. Sewell Jr., S. Tarrow, & C. Tilly (Eds.), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (pp. 89–125). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., Thomas, G. M., & Ramirez, F. O. (1997). World Society and the Nation-State. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 144–181. Roos, J. E., & Oikonomakis, L. (2014). They Don’t Represent Us! The Global Resonance to the Real Democracy Movement from the Indignados to Occupy. In D. della Porta & A. Mattoni (Eds.), Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis (pp. 117–136). Colchester, UK: ECPR Press. Rubinstein, M. (2018). New Religious Movement. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sigurðardóttir, H. (2017). There Is Only One Colour That Truly Matters: Global Identification and Consciousness in Avaaz Discourse on Global Activism (Master’s Degree in Global and Transnational Sociology, University of Tampere Press, Tampere, Finland). Retrieved from http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:uta-201706262090. Smith, J. (2010). Social Movements for Global Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, J. (2013). Transnational Social Movements. In D. A. Snow, D. della Porta, B. Klandermans, & D. McAdam (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Oxford: Blackwell. Snow, D. A., & Benford, R. D. (1992). Master Frames and Cycles of Protest. In A. Morris & C. McClurg Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (pp. 133–155). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Syväterä, J., & Qadir, A. (2015). The Construction and Spread of Global Models: Worldwide Synchronisation and the Rise of National Bioethics Committees. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2(3–4), 267–290. Tarrow, S. (2011). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Rev., 3rd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1978). From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. (2015). Contentious Politics (Rev., 2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vanden, H. E., Funke, P. N., & Prevost, G. (2017). The New Global Politics: Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. White, M. (2016). The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. Toronto: Knopf Canada. Žižek, S. (2011, October 20). Speech at Occupy Wall Street (transcript available as ‘Slavoj Zizek speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Don’t Fall in Love with Yourselves’). Impose Magazine.

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Epistemic Governance as a Methodological Tool Kit

• This chapter shows how the theory of epistemic governance is also a methodology that can guide empirical research projects into social change. • The chapter discusses various types of discourse analysis with a focus on Foucauldian analysis and shows how epistemic governance adds a methodological layer to that. • We then illustrate the types of research designs introduced by epistemic governance.

In this book, we have presented a new way of understanding social change as epistemic governance, or governance that functions by taking into account how people conceive of the world, their place in it, and what is good or desirable to do. We have shown epistemic governance at work in three major sites of social change: international organizations, parliaments, and social movements. We have argued in each case that epistemic governance is not a different type of governance, on a par with other forms of governance like authoritative (Hajer, 2009), multi-level (Hooghe & Marks, 2001), or interactive (Torfing, Peters, Pierre, & Sorensen, 2012). Rather, we showed that all processes of governance are epistemic. If governance is always epistemic in the sense defined above, then analysis of governance must always take account of this epistemic aspect. That is, we argue that it is not possible to fully describe a situation or context of governance unless the epistemic aspect to it has also been captured. For instance, while it may be important to understand how a particular law came to acquire the shape it did through domestic political field battles or international comparisons, it is also © The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4_8

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important to ask what ontology of the social world is implicit when justifying the law, what audience identifications have been assumed, and what norms have been thought obvious that all people believe must or should be followed. Likewise, a complete picture of law being passed as part of governing a society includes a sense of what imagery of society and social action is at work. Often the imageries in play are at odds with each other, leading to conflicts or discursive battles. Such descriptions and nuances provide a more comprehensive picture of social change than would be possible without them and explain certain aspects that otherwise are difficult to make sense of. For instance, this framework helps understand why social movements claim large, grassroots membership that might not even be physically present and yet can still have an impact by motivating other movements. Or, it explains why international organizations devote so much attention to building an authoritative and putatively independent picture of social reality by way of indices, annual progress reports, and so on. What we have also illustrated in the preceding three chapters is how such an analysis can proceed. We emphasize again that these are illustrations and not presented as “complete” pictures of all that is happening in a particular case like the Occupy Wall Street Movement let alone all that is going on in any one site of social change such as social movements. We certainly do not believe that these cases exhaust each site of social change nor that these sites of social change are all that can be conceived, even though the amount of such sites is not limitless. Furthermore, we have concentrated in each chapter on a particular object of epistemic work and a particular imagery that is prevalent in that site. To get a more complete picture of what is going on in the complex reality of social change requires expanding or extending the sites of change, identifying further cases to study in each site, and analyzing all the objects of epistemic work in each case. In this chapter, we build on these illustrations to identify what such an epistemic governance methodology might look like and indicate the kinds of research designs that can use epistemic governance to understand social change. In what follows, we open up this methodology to present the kinds of topics, methods, and data that have been and are being employed in an epistemic governance framework. First, though, it is important to root the methodology in discourse analytic approaches of qualitative research. There are already far too many introductions to, advanced texts on, and specialist types of discourse analysis for us to make any meaningful contribution to the subject here. Nor, by this time, is it even feasible to “quickly” review the burgeoning literature in this subfield of qualitative research. What we can do is to indicate where epistemic governance is broadly positioned in that field and show its particular advantages in terms of concrete steps.

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Situating Epistemic Governance Methodology in Foucauldian Discourse Analysis It is customary to point out that there are as many types of discourse analyses as there are discourse analysts. In our case, we locate epistemic governance empirical research within Foucauldian discourse analysis. This is still about discourse—“institutional doing and the language it entails … it imposes frameworks which structure what can be experienced or the meaning that experience can encompass, and thereby influence what can be said, thought and done … allows certain things to be said, thought and done and impedes or prevents other things from being said, thought and done” (Hunt & Wickham, 1994, p. 9). However, much of discourse analysis since the linguistic turn of social sciences in the 1960s has attended to talk. In cases like discourse analysis pioneered by the Loughborough School, the attention to talk has resulted in very detailed analytical techniques for mostly interactional talk in particular settings. To situate the talk more firmly in social context, approaches such as Ideological Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 1998, 2013) and Critical Discourse Analysis (I. Fairclough & Fairclough, 2013; N. Fairclough, 2003), for instance, emphasize the contextual embedding and social relations of power that shape the way in which people talk and interact. These approaches add a contextual corrective to conversation-type analysis by following Michel Foucault’ point that institutions matter. However, Foucault was after more than a Gramscian sense of power holders—whether in the state, in a corporation or in another institution— abusing knowledge to control what people do and thus to maintain unequal relations of domination. Important as those features may be in some cases, Foucault redefined two crucial social theoretic terms that distinguish his approach to discourse analysis and bring it into focus. One is the term “institution.” With this, Foucault did not mean organizations like the French state in the 1960s or the University of Paris, or even groups of organizations like the French state in general or universities as such. Nor, by contrast, was he referring simply to conventions or customary ways of doing things, in the sense that Wittgenstein termed “culture.” Rather, he meant something in between these. Foucault was getting at the domain of knowledge production that authorized a particular form of knowing and relating, at the same time devaluing or obscuring other forms. Central to Foucault’s understanding of discourse is the field of knowledge production within which those organizations make sense and, in turn, create sense-making for people, i.e., psychiatry creating asylums to govern mad and sane behaviors (Foucault, 1973), or the law creating prisons to authorize criminal and lawful behaviors (Foucault,

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1977), etc. In this sense, even a state and a corporation are organizations created by authorized forms of knowledge production (such as political science or economics). Foucault thus removed science and scientists from their putative ivory tower observing social change and inserted them right into the mix of how societies are actually changing. Scientists, the knowledge they produce, and the organizations that utilize it are part of a regime of truth, an episteme, or what he once called the “order of discourse” (Foucault, 1981). Famously, Foucault’s understanding of knowledge is only one side of his couplet of power/knowledge. He argues that “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault, 1977, p. 27). However, equally famously, Foucault’s take on power is radically different from most others, including those analyzing discourse critically. For Foucault, power suffuses society. Of course, power relations are important, and Foucault showed in elaborate detail how the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and parish priests, for instance, used their positions in Medieval Europe to control how populations thought of and related to sexuality (Foucault, 1980). However, Foucault was after more than that. He wanted to show that the power relations we see are already one step removed from the production of that relation and of power itself. In this sense, Foucault was able to posit a revision of the theory of power by showing that power is not best thought of as a property held by some, or more by some, and used only by one agent to constrain action of another. In Foucault’s pithy words: We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms … In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (Foucault, 1977, p. 194)

Power, for Foucault, is productive for example by creating the very subject who can then enter into a relation of domination with others. But power is also always incomplete, in the sense that the process of production is never finished. Power has a perpetual character to it, which is often masked when it is presented as simple domination that can be “ended” with some radical action. An excellent metaphor for thinking of power in physics and by Foucault is provided by a discussion on the sociology of law as governance: … power, for us, is the always-incomplete technical process by which governance drives the machine of society … Just as the term “power” is commonly used to refer to the technical process by which petrol fuels an incomplete (imperfect) internal combustion engine for it to (imperfectly) drive a car, or the technical process

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by which coal, water or nuclear fission fuels an incomplete (imperfect) electricity grid to (imperfectly) drive any number of electrical appliances, so, we suggest, we should think of power in society. Engines drive cars and electricity drives appliances “incompletely” or “imperfectly” in the sense that they do not operate completely or perfectly, they are not expected to operate perpetually in exactly the same way, something always goes wrong. The only perpetual aspect of the process is the perpetual process of keeping the process going, that is, the perpetual governing. In these examples power is the process of “keeping things going”; it is not a “thing”, in the way fuel or electricity is. (Hunt & Wickham, 1994, p. 81)

These two distinctions about institutions and power make it clear that Foucault’s “brand” of discourse analysis is not quite the same as that of others. Foucauldian discourse analysis is far more complex and reliant on radical definitions than other forms of discourse analysis. To top it off, Foucault famously “eschews formalization” (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2011, p. 91). Indeed, “In one sense the term Foucauldian discourse analysis could be considered something of a misnomer in that Foucault did not develop a method for doing discourse analysis per se; in fact, he actively resisted doing so” (Cheek, 2012, p. 2). For some, a strictly Foucauldian discourse analysis is entirely impossible (Hook, 2001). It is a question, thus, of locating elements within Foucault’s oeuvre that lead to methodological insights for social research. Most such insights have led to Foucault’s writings on archaeology, genealogy, and governmentality as approaches to social issues. These are, of course, very insightful and cut a sharp distinction from standard, still dominant approaches to society in realist terms. Yet, in our view the methodology in most cases remains either vague or brushes aside Foucault’s tremendous insights into the rules of the game. By this, we mean to underline our earlier assertation that although Foucault was concerned with relations of domination, he was even more concerned with getting at the productions of power/knowledge that led to those relations of domination. In other words, Foucauldian discourse analysis is getting at the rules and assumptions by which knowledge is produced and authorized and then circulated through institutions to establish relations of domination that make it impossible to think outside those rules. The questions that are important are not just who is dominating whom and why, but how that domination came to be in the first place: What rules permit certain statements to be made and then to order those statements into a hierarchy of desirability and permissibility? Epistemic governance as a methodology operationalizes this aim in a very concrete manner by concentrating on justifications for social change. The methodology seeks to get at the rules of justification by which certain courses of action seem inevitable or desirable, and others non-viable or, simply, unthinkable.

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Two quick provisos before we distill this methodology from the earlier chapters. First, the idea of power being incomplete means that readings of power will also be incomplete. Although we may be able to point at a given historical moment at who is in a position of domination and to what extent, that is not the same as pointing to the mechanisms of power that put that domination in place. The latter is not only more evasive and multifaceted, it is also like hitting a moving target because power is always producing subjects, objects, and relations. This means that the search for an incontrovertible result through Foucauldian discourse analysis is misguided. Indeed, we might argue that such searches for certainty in other forms of qualitative research (and even in quantitative social research) are equally misguided transpositions from the physical sciences. Certainly, in Foucauldian discourse analysis more than in any other methodology, it will rarely if ever be possible to claim a final reading of a social issue or a text that other researchers cannot dispute or find further nuance in. Second, many versions of discourse analysis try to identify and then uncover the veil of “false consciousness” by which power-talk occludes its position of privilege and domination, and they seek to get a more true or real picture of truth and reality. However, this again misses Foucault’s point that even those in positions of domination are in that position because they have been produced by discourse. Epistemic governance is not, in the traditional conspiratorial sense, pointing to a hidden reality or to a crafty technique by which certain dominators secretly hold others in relations of domination. Rather, it is getting at those basic rules and assumptions of talk that create all relations, including relations in which the positions of domination are replaced or even reversed. So, while an epistemic governance methodology may not be able to get at the conspiratorial abuses of position and privilege by revealing false consciousness, it can lift the veil on the way in which social reality is defined by, so that those positions of privilege are defined and naturalized. This is what Foucault called the conduct of conduct (Foucault, 2007).

Sites of Change Analysis of epistemic governance focuses on different ways by which the actors involved aim to bring about change to the current state of affairs. This, already, is a turn from “typical” discourse analysis to a Foucault-inspired approach. Foucault has been called a philosopher/historian of discontinuity, although he himself offered a more nuanced position that was not a simple replacement of “continuity” by “discontinuity” but rather an analysis of a “play of transformations different from one another” (Foucault & Nazzaro, 1972). For the sake of enhancing

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applicability, we keep the concept of social change, while noting here that Foucault disturbed this very category of thought and that much more theory-building is needed to settle it otherwise. In the same written interview cited above, Foucault points out that he is not concerned with a “history of the mind” (intellectual history) but rather a “history of discourse” (Foucault & Nazzaro, 1972, p. 233). Change, for Foucault, is always discursive. But that does not just mean that change is only about talk. Rather, it means that social change is reflected in a change in talk (such as a change in talking about sexuality or madness or criminality), and that this is always institutional. The power-knowledge couplet, as discussed in the previous section, is at the heart of social change and can be got at by seeing changes in how people talk of things. In this sense, social change occurs in a site, which is not a set of organizations but more of an institution in the sociological sense, i.e., a pattern of thought and action. Foucault analyzed what we would term the “sites” of the asylum, clinic, prison, etc. (or, rather, the systems of madness, sickness, criminality, etc.). But many more such sites are possible and, indeed, necessary to identify when trying to map how society changes. Sites of social change, for us, are institutional locations where the power-knowledge couplet is evident. Of course, some sites are more significant than others in the sense of typically having longer-lasting, wider-reaching, and more consequential impact than others. We have analyzed in this book three such sites—international organizations, parliaments, and social movements—that we believe to have considerable sway in the modern world and that display clearly how the power-knowledge institutionalization works. Yet, scale is a matter of perspective and we follow Foucault to suggest that sites at many scales are intimately connected in the same web of productive power. Consider, for instance, a change in the recruitment and promotion policy in the New York headquarters of a multinational oil firm. Any such change would have a minimal impact to and beyond those who are recruited, promoted, and rejected. However, imagine that these small procedures progressively reinforce the company’s glass ceiling preventing women, visible minorities, and LGBTQ+ persons from reaching senior management positions. A lawsuit by a rejected applicant would burst this story onto the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and possibly lead to a case setting a precedent for other suits in other companies. Civil society organizations representing such groups and fighting for human rights would doubtless jump on the case in no time, perhaps even offering legal assistance and certainly extending the case beyond personnel recruitment to a social issue. A parliamentarian, seeing this popular groundswell, might decide to propose a

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bill to seek and destroy such prohibitive human resource policies and practices. In such a case, that parliamentarian would quite likely refer to human rights and labor conventions codified in the United Nations as cause to change the country’s laws and, depending on the momentum generated, that UN body might decide to include minority representation in senior management as part of their index related to equity. This story is not all that far-fetched. It serves to illustrate our argument that sites of social change may be identified at any of the points above, depending on what change one is trying to grasp. The particular firm (for the issue of that applicant or that new policy), the modern corporation (glass ceilings), the court (setting precedent for future corporate HR practices), social movements (rights), parliaments (legislation on equity), or international organization (measuring equity) are all sites of change. Each can and must be studied to understand social change related to equity in employment. However, the story also demonstrates that it doesn’t matter very much what the entry point is! Foucault’s point can also be understood as being that the power-knowledge which circulates throughout society produces and shapes one site as much as it does another. Pulling at any one of the threads will lead to similar understandings of what is considered authoritative, what is acceptable, what is desirable, and what (or, whom) is excluded in this domain of social change. Studying any of the sites will implicate in the same way the sciences of economics, normal psychology, law, and sociology that have been complicit in constructing the “normal” senior manager in an extractive industry. In that sense, choosing a site of social change for social research is more an empirical matter of balancing breadth and depth of impact, with manageability of data. Another concern with identifying a site of social change is what the point of comparison should be to define a “change.” In some sense, virtually everything has changed in human society in the historical blink of an eye between, say, the invention of the mechanical cotton gin in 1793 and the InSight robotic probe to Mars in November 2018. Going back even 200 years expands the sites of social change related to employment practices to virtually everything! Even within 100 years, social change might appear very gradual and hard to pinpoint, such as in the theory of the welfare state being replaced by a competition one (Cerny, 1997; Genschel & Seelkopf, 2014). However, if we accept losing breadth of data, we can still identify a single site of social change even over relatively long periods of time. Because, after all, by pulling at any thread, we will still get to the continuities and ruptures in the power-knowledge that allowed things to be (or, to be presented) like so and so, and then later such and such. Even the long durée analysis of a single institution is fine if we recognize that what we are getting at

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is not a specific relation of domination or privilege, but the way in which power-knowledge shaped our perception of reality. Hence it makes sense to study the asylum or even the brothel (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986) as heterotopic spaces over very long periods of time. Through such analyses, we can get to the most significant, and least visible, rules of thought that allow reality to be this way rather than that. As we have noted throughout, our purpose in focusing on these three sites of social change is by no means to suggest that they exhaust the list of useful sites to study! Far from it. We only use these sites to illustrate our theory and associated methodological approach, in fact guided by the relative empirical ease of access. There are many sites of social change that need to be arenas of study through epistemic governance, in addition to the three we have illustrated in this book: international organizations, parliaments, and social movements. For instance, Ojala’s (2017) analysis of the “Davos Man” uses epistemic governance to understand the way in which financial broadsheets construct economic “normalcy.” This outstanding study intersects the media (specifically, The Financial Times) as a site of social change with corporate-sponsored political summits (Davos) as a site of social change. Qureshi’s (2017) study of blasphemy laws also considers the media as a site of social change, where government actors, civil society activists, and legal scholars all try to argue their point for a change. Valkeasuo’s (2017) study of the rhetoric used by European science policy professionals, by contrast, takes the European bureaucracy as a site of social change. Changes in these three sites—mainstream media, inter-state bureaucracies, and political summits—have tremendous significance as well as deep and long-lasting impact. Moreover, they are sites in the sense we have described above of being intimately linked with production of power and authorization of knowledge. Corporate fora and the law courts are two more significant sites of social change, not to mention the hospital, which Foucault studied, and the university or the army, which he didn’t. Change occurs in both contiguous, public (or apparently so) sites and heterotopic, shadowy sites. Examples of the latter include Foucault’s asylum and prison, as well as sites like rehabilitation clinics, brothels, and kinship structures for conflict resolution. However, despite the great institutionalization and seeming proliferation of organizations in our daily lives, the number of sites is far from infinite; indeed, it is not all that big. Once we think of sectors of life (like education, health, disputes, economy, etc.), we run through these sites relatively quickly. However, any of these sites offers a virtually unlimited number of entry points. We can think of a swathe of changes that have taken place in each of these sites within the past decade, more if we extend our view back to the 1950s (which marked a turning point in highly institutionalized change patterns).

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Methods and Data In the three chapters discussing international organizations, parliaments, and social movements, we laid out the kinds of insights that an epistemic governance framework results in. How does this translate into a research design? One point that is obvious is that epistemic governance is concerned with discourse. Typically, this results in identifying entry points in a site of social change where some form of talk or text or clearly observable action is possible to pinpoint, such as documentation around the Sustainable Development Goals, or parliamentary debates on moving airports closer to cities, or activists marching on Wall Street, and so on. It doesn’t have to be the case that we can get access to usable data. Yet, for the most part, openly said and done things lead to the rules and assumptions that we want to get at in most sites of change. This point is worth emphasizing for an epistemic governance methodology. Naturally, it can be the case in a particular instance that what is evident is obscuring or hiding something else that helps those in positions of privilege to maintain that privilege or abuse their authority. Or, people might simply lie to protect their interests or their sense of self, etc. Much social research then rushes into getting at the correct picture hiding behind the lies, or the false consciousness, that veil the truth. If that is possible, say for a forensic accountant getting at the real way a crime syndicate keeps its books as opposed to what its front companies report, of course it would lead to a better dataset. However, in most cases, it is not that straightforward (not that getting a double agent into a crime syndicate to get evidence of tax avoidance is simple!). In fact, in most cases, a researcher would have very little access to what was going on in a social actor’s head, even if that stayed the same from day to day. So, at one very practical level, all that is available to the researcher are the statements that social actors make, not what they “intended” to do or what they were hiding. At another level, a Foucauldian discourse analyst might argue that it is precisely the fact of tax evasion and the forms of public financial reporting that hide the syndicate’s private accounting that are of interest. So, the Foucauldian analyst would not be all that interested in the SEC nabbing another tax evader, but rather in the rules and assumptions of knowledge that went into the process of avoidance. She would concentrate on how the front companies pretended to follow accounting science principles like double-entry bookkeeping and professional memberships, or how the law protects certain privileged tax evasion but penalizes certain tax avoidance, etc. All the information that the intrepid forensic accountant gathered in the first place would have satisfied the Foucauldian d­ iscourse

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analyst without knowing anything about the actual level of tax avoidance or the precise number of shell companies’ profits being laundered, etc. There is plenty of publicly available material that is highly interesting from an epistemic governance methodological perspective also because institutionalized forms of governance necessarily rest on the perceptions and understandings of the population at large. Individual opponents of the current regime in a country can be silenced by force behind closed doors, but even maintaining social order by violence and terror requires publicity: People are sent the message that protest is futile. In that sense, the understanding that the state or the ruling elite of a polity has monopoly of violence is one of the ways to persuade the population that they cannot breach certain rules or limits in their daily life. And as Weber (1978) notes, regimes may be built by conquering a territory by military force, but as soon as the new status quo of power is achieved, social order in that territory is secured also by rules that are justified by appealing to principles that the population respects, be they tradition, rationality, or charismatic leadership. An epistemic governance methodology approaches people’s talk and actions aimed at social change by seeking how that change is justified and how people are persuaded to act in a desired manner. Techniques of persuasion include assumptions about “correct” pictures of reality that can be empirically isolated and then probed. An epistemic governance research design would thus isolate the way in which some actor is justifying a call for social change and see what is involved in it. All text and action, including materiality, can be taken as discourse to probe how a particular course of action is argued for or against. The data at hand provide a window, so to speak, onto what kinds of justifications people deem acceptable, what kind of knowledge is implicated, how identifications are effectively made, and so on. Of course, there may be idiosyncratic variations from speaker to speaker. But rather than ignoring individual arguments as “outliers”— the way quantitative researchers might—all these different justifications can be put together to understand the variations in discourse. In the case of the Davos Man, above, Ojala (2017) uses an epistemic governance methodology to collect Financial Times (FT) reporting about the annual Davos summit and then isolates arguments by a “transnational elite” on specific corporate or macroeconomic issues. In this case, it would be very reasonable to suppose extreme cronyism between political and corporate elite that no one could have access to. Merely examining FT articles would hardly shed light on what these two groups may be cooking up behind closed doors in any one country or at the Davos summit. However, as Ojala shows, none of this detracts from the epistemic aspect to governance that can be seen in the FT articles. Ojala (2017,

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p. 4) is still able to show convincingly that “the global economy occupies a central place in elite ontology and is discursively constructed as an interdependent system” and that globalization is “positively connected to the values of growth and liberty.” Whatever else corporations and political elite may be up to, these justifications can be isolated when examining this or that change in tax laws or policy changes in freedom of capital movement that arose in a Davos summit. Similarly, Valkeasuo (2017) isolates the arguments made by ERA-NET science funding officers when justifying their actions by relating to different lifeworlds: science, Europe, national member states, science funding organizations, etc. Justifications for social change constitute what we have termed “epistemic work.” And they are work. People try to convince others of the “right” or “necessary” course of action, whether by talking or by acting (like threatening, as we discussed in Chapter 1) or by building spaces in a certain way, etc. “Work” doesn’t necessarily imply conscious intentionality. That is, an actor seeking change is obviously after something, but they might not be consciously strategizing how best to put every sentence, every step, every brick, and so on. An argument for social change may be more or less strategically designed. But it is in any case doing some work. It is working on people’s conceptions of what to do in a given situation. To get at the epistemic aspect of governance, then, unpacking justifications is the key as these are the work that people do to try and move something in one direction or another. Here, it is important to note a distinction between two levels of analysis when examining epistemic work in a site of change. One level is what Foucault was most interested in: the episteme, or the order of discourse. This is a relatively stable level of discourse, which changes in epochs and over historical periods. The idea of truth as having a value fixed to speaker and context versus being an utterance measurable devoid of context, the distinction between madness to be integrated and to be isolated, the question of being, and so on: These are the orders of discourse that Foucault was most in search of. In our terminology, we have referred to this as the paradigmatic level of epistemic work. This is the level at which it is most true (although never entirely so) that it doesn’t matter very much what dataset is selected—as long as it is rigorously done—or which particular policy step is put under the microscope. What an analyst will get at will, after all, be something so fundamental as to be evident in any other selection. We might say that this is a very fundamental level of epistemic work. The change in European sensibilities of sexuality, as ­Foucault showed, is such a paradigmatic level that moved relatively glacially from classical antiquity in Greece to medieval, Christian, Latindom, to the modern, colonial condition.

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The second level is what we term a practical level of epistemic work. If the paradigmatic level sets the yardstick by which things are measured, then the practical level is where those measurements actually take place. Note that we are still one logical level before an identification of what the measurement resulted in, or how one measurement compared with another. Rather, we are talking about the procedure of measuring, once a yardstick has been provided. So, the actual way in which Church dogma and Victorian sensibilities combined to transform sexual life between a couple and labeled some forms of sexuality heterodox are at the practical level of epistemic work. Clearly for Foucault, and as would be obvious to any social researcher, this is an equally important level and one that varies far more rapidly than the paradigmatic. In our examples around SDGs, parliamentary debates, and OWS, this is the level at which we are mostly operating. Getting at the paradigmatic level would require taking a much longer view, for instance by considering the change in understandings of the concept of social development, or the idea of a deliberative democracy based on moral arguments, or distribution of resources and people’s direct action.

Objects of Epistemic Work and Imageries Once justifications for social change by actors in a site have been isolated, what can a researcher look for? Up till now, the research design has largely followed the trajectory of an accepted Foucauldian discourse analysis. But this is the point at which Foucault’s reticence for formalism becomes apparent. There is no widely agreed sense of what precisely to examine when studying justifications for social change. In this book, we have been proposing that researchers pay close attention to the rhetoric employed for justifications by those seeking social change. So, the terms used in UN reports for SDGs, by OWS for capitalist reform, or by parliamentarians opposing a new legislation, are all very revealing about how people think others conceive of the social world. In order to build a complete picture of what the discursive assumptions are in a site or issue of social change, we propose a three-dimensional analysis of the rhetoric of change: (a) 3 objects of epistemic work; (b) imageries of the social world at pay; and (c) authorities referred to when justifying change. Furthermore, in each case, an analyst can track changes over a period of time. We propose that a close reading of the rhetoric of justifications for social change should analyze these four dimensions. Naturally, any one analysis might focus on only one dimension or on two, but a more or less complete picture of the issue would result from a three-dimensional analysis. Here is what we mean by this.

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(a)  Objects of epistemic work: An analyst needs to examine three levels of rhetoric: i. What does a social actor in question assume people think about the social world in terms of the ontology of the environment (what the world consists of). Does the social actor quote statistics about wealth and progress in nations, for example a financial reporter arguing how macroeconomic policies should be shaped (Ojala, 2017)? Or, does the social actor talk about civilized and uncivilized groups, for instance when parliamentarians in Pakistan debated about declaring a community “heretical” (Qadir, 2014)? And so on. The way in which the ontology of the environment is portrayed shows what an actor thinks people believe the world to be, and therefore how to convince them to undertake an action. ii. What does an actor assume people identify with in the world so portrayed (who we are as agents in the world)? Does the actor assume that “we” are, for instance, the 99% vs. the 1% (in OWS)? When trying to convince people to donate time or money to a cause, for instance, an online activist platform typically portrays internet browsers as identifying with justice-seeking progressives or as identifying with the world’s humanity as a single whole (Sigurðardóttir, 2017)? Or, does an actor assume that people identify with or against Irish language promotion in the Irish Language Act debates in parliament (Winkler, 2018)? In some cases, the analysis may boil down to isolating, coding, and analyzing mentions of plural pronouns such as “we” and “our” to see whether they refer to “us” European bureaucrats, science funders, or national agents when determining how to network for science grant-making in ERA-NET (Valkeasuo, 2017). In such cases, an actor seeking social change assumes that people identify with some collective or the other and then plays on that identification. iii. What does an actor promote as a value or ideal to be achieved in the situation at hand? Do they think that people should undertake a certain step because that will, say, generate wealth for the national economy that can generate welfare for those in need (Ojala, 2017)? Or, do they argue that people need to value dying languages like Gaelic to preserve local cultures in an increasingly monocultural world (Winkler, 2018)? Does an actor assume that people value protecting a religious scriptural interpretation, as in the case of justifications for a Pakistani man who murdered a politician that had reportedly considered the possibility for a procedural amendment to the country’s blasphemy laws (Qureshi, 2017)? In all these cases, what the social actor proposing change works on is an assumption about what the society they speak to values most. This, in turn, tells the analyst what discursive assumptions are at work. Winkler (2018) shows

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that such rhetoric around this object of epistemic work can be further analyzed into values (such as protection of local cultures), goals (e.g., save the Irish language), and actions (pass the Irish Language Act). However, another social actor may present an argument for quite the opposite action in the same structure of values (peace after decades of violence in Ireland), goals (integrate communities on the entire island), and actions (reject the Irish Language Act), and so on. (b) Imageries of the social world: What way does the actor appear to assume that their audience imagines the world (what we should do)? An analyst can unpack the imagery of the world at work in an argument relatively easily through close readings of the justifications. For instance, when those supporting acquittal of the Pakistani murderer wrote in newspapers, they assumed that their readers thought the world was divided into competing camps of Muslim defenders of Islam and non-Muslim attackers of the faith (Qureshi, 2017). Or, when the UN and allied NGOs advocate for meeting sustainable development targets, they presume that people believe the world is progressively modernizing, and that some countries “lag” behind others therefore needing “development” assistance. Similarly, when the Financial Times portrays the Davos summit community, it “reproduced the hierarchy of a world as a global political economy, where the most significant individuals are western investment bankers, big business executives, US government leaders, some European leaders, heads of BRIC countries, central bankers and a small number of international officials” (Ojala, 2017, p. 225). As we discussed in Chapter 3, these are the three most prevalent imageries of the social world that we find in empirical research: the world as divided into competing camps, as progressively modernizing, and as organized into a spatial hierarchy. However, we do not believe we have exhausted the list of imageries; more research is needed to identify further imageries of the social. In any case, when an actor weaves root metaphors of society and social conduct into a rationale for action, this shows how they feel people discursively understand society. That assumption is very revealing about the way in which discourses are organized and guide people. (c) Authorities: Appeals to authority are a well-known part of rhetoric. In most cases, those wanting to argue for a particular course of action will refer to some authority to borrow some credibility. What is revealing about a particular case is what that authority is. Thus, in the case of the Irish Language Act debate in the Irish parliament, some politicians referred to international human rights norms and conventions as a basis for passing the Act (Winkler, 2018). Likewise, Sigurðardóttir (2017) shows that the online activist platform

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Avaaz systematically portrays itself as having moral authority to convey the sentiments of grassroots movements. Or, one can readily see that FT reporting of the Davos summit community routinely picks on “authoritative” accounts of big banks, international financial institutions, and “leading” universities like Harvard when justifying the construction of a global elite (Ojala, 2017). In another way, in the example we began this book with in Chapter 1 showed how even tanks and warplanes can be used as authorities. Similarly, arms industry leader Northrop Grumman advertises a poster of aircraft carrier USS Nimitz with the byline “90,000 tons of diplomacy,” making it clear how moving the carrier around can be an authority to refer to in diplomatic negotiations. Or, in one follow-up to OWS, the 2014 Hong Kong pro-democracy student activist, Joshua Wong, became a worldwide authority for student activism worldwide since. These are four types of authorities (moral, ontological, capacity-based, and charismatic) whose variations may be identified in most sites of social change (cf. Alasuutari, 2018). In each of these three dimensions of analyzing social change, an analyst can also get at variations over time. In our three chapters on sites of change, we had not entered into any kind of genealogy for fear of complicating and lengthening the discussion at the risk of describing a novel approach. Indeed, in all three chapters—on international organizations, parliaments, and social movements— we only identified topical cases in each site and analyzed primarily how change was justified around one object of epistemic work and by using one imagery. In each case, we also drew attention to the authorities that were referred to for justifying change.

What Next? We believe that this book in general and the discussion in this chapter in particular are less of a methodological handbook and more of a program for continuing research. Indeed, we have tried to make it that way: as an invitation to social research using epistemic governance as a form of Foucauldian discourse analysis. Of course, there is a tremendous empirical vista to be explored through this framework. We can, and need to, examine all manner of topics and issues of social change in all manner of sites. For us, this empirical vista relates to a deeper theoretical agenda. Each empirical investigation into a new topic of social change builds a database with which to extend the theoretical framework and methodological tool kit. For instance, one

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very important agendum is to map the possible sites of social change. Earlier, we had hinted that there may be many such sites in the modern world, but probably not limitless. How many are there? Is there any way to determine a limit? Have the sites of social change themselves varied and transformed over time and, if so, what kind of time period? Also, do certain sites of change matter more in certain places and, if so, where and how? For us, the best way to address such crucial questions regarding change in our modern world is through empirical investigations that can help build up answers. Another agenda point is to investigate the imageries of society at work in justifications for change. Can more than these three imageries be identified? Do these three or new imageries have some cultural/temporal specificity, or are they quite general? Moreover, what we have only barely outlined here is that the social world is not all that is imaged or imagined. In addition, one very important imagery is that of personality (Alasuutari, 1997). What are the various ways in which people imagine personalities, and how do they weave such imageries into their justifications for a particular course of action? Again, more empirical investigation is needed to uncover such imageries. Moreover, what other kinds of imageries are at play. Such imageries, we suggest, go to the very heart of discursive assumptions in society that are crucial in shaping how people act and what they believe they can or cannot do. Another next step is to move into non-textual forms of arguments for social change. Although we have only used textual examples throughout, we do not mean to imply that epistemic governance is only useful in textual cases or (worse still!) that all change is textual. Rather, our choice in focusing on texts in the three sites of change that we illustrated our framework with in Chapters 4–6 had to do with two important features. First, texts are indeed very significant in most modern sites of social change. Whether written or verbal, recorded or unrecorded, textual rhetoric justifying social change is present in most places. It is, thus, a justifiably good place to begin, although not to end. Second, to illustrate our framework we wanted to choose options that were easier to find data on and relate to. This saved us having to make a case for considering data that are less orthodox for many social scientists and analyzing them with tools that many are unfamiliar with. In other words, it was also a pragmatic choice. Therefore, one obvious next step is to see whether the framework is applicable in non-verbal/non-textual cases. For instance, it is now widely accepted that spaces and the built environment are discursive entrants into human life. They organize and shape human life without words as such but no less effectively for that. Foucault’s discussion on the panopticon as a model for the modern prison is a good example. It is possible to go back to when the first modern prison in

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the first country was designed like so and examine the verbal/textual arguments made for that. But it is more likely that there was no one such prison, and that the design morphed into what is expected of a prison today much more gradually. Now, there are no such verbal justifications: This is just the right way to do things. Yet, the prison still shapes human life inside it and, by extension, disciplines how life outside it should be lived. These determinations are not at all verbal, and certainly in the latter part of the equation (shaping life outside the prison), they are never verbally or textually claimed. Additionally, while the panopticon model reveals something about organizing human life outside the prison, there are many other aspects to the prison not captured by the panopticon model. Panopticon or otherwise, the question remains: How does the prison design assume people think of the social world, and how does it work on that? What kinds of identifications does it enable, and which ones does it block? How has all this changed over time? And so on. The same questions can be asked of other heterotopic spaces, such as brothels and bars as Foucault indicated. But the same may be asked of putatively homogenous spaces—those very much a continuous part of the neoliberal capitalist order that we assume to be dominant today. For instance, business parks, universities, “downtowns,” and international bureaucracy offices are all liable to be questioned from an epistemic governance methodology. Religious architecture is also a candidate, particularly from a perspective of how it has changed over time. Brief as this ellipsis is, we hope to have conveyed our excitement about a wide theoretical and empirical agenda for social research into epistemic governance. As you will gather, we see this book not as a closure that bookends past enquiry, but rather an opening that reveals a new landscape for social research into what may be the most important question of our times: How did we get here?

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Index

A actors, definition of, 4n2 Ahmadi (Ahmadiyya), 105, 111, 121 authority, epistemic governance view of, 6–7, 15 capacity-based, 8, 62–63 charismatic, 8, 67–70 definition of, 60 four types of, 61–71 moral, 8, 65–67. See also moral ­authority ontological, 63–64 in ontological definitions, 24, 63 relational nature of, 96

church, 63, 65, 141, 161 climate change, policies on, 89, 90, 92, 98 movement for, 111, 129, 141 coercion, 32, 38, 63, 131, 143. See also force community, governance invoking, 2, 4, 7, 13, 23, 26, 27, 45, 63, 86–88, 119 building, 48–49, 109, 120 epistemic, 9–11, 39, 40, 80, 83, 84, 86, 96, 139 imagined, 27 international, 66, 79, 84, 86, 88, 91, 94–97, 108, 119 scientific, 40, 98

B banal nationalism, 27, 109, 112 Bourdieu, Pierre, 64, 66, 67 Brown, Richard Harvey, 41, 43, 49, 51 Butler, Judith, 127, 132, 141

D deception. See military deception Deleuze, Giles, 131, 137 democracy, 81, 119, 126–128, 130, 132, 144, 145, 161 countries with (democracies), 27, 72, 80 diffusion, 28, 39, 133, 135, 137 domestication, 110, 113, 137 Durkheim, Emile, 64, 65, 69

C Canada, 128 capitalism, 11, 45 problem of, 126–133, 145 Castells, Manuel, 6 catchwords, spread of, 29, 112 charisma, 67–71 China, 12

E Egypt, 125 emotions, appeal to, 2, 13, 26, 28–30, 132, 133, 136, 139

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 P. Alasuutari and A. Qadir, Epistemic Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4

189

190 charismatic connections with, 68–70 environment, policy for, 4, 27, 46, 83, 89, 90, 98, 107, 111, 112, 120 brand management regarding, 94 issues of, 13, 96, 97, 113 movements for, 74, 137 restrictions on, 46, 52 episteme, 2, 31–33, 152 epistemic, definition of, 2 epistemic capital, definition of, 59–61 accumulation of, 67, 71–74, 99 of IGOs, 92–93, 94 epistemic governance approach, 4, 11, 12, 87 and common conceptions of power, 15 as a general theory, 6 and IGOs, 86–88 research designs for studying, 158, 159, 161 and the role of knowledge production, 88 scope of, 8, 9–11 the starting point for, 87 epistemic work, three objects of, 7, 8, 14, 30–32, 118, 140 evidence, appeal to (use of), 2, 22, 24, 29, 65, 85, 86, 90, 92, 98, 120

F field, 6, 9, 13, 31, 33, 62, 108, 149, 150 Finland, 81, 90, 93, 110, 111 force, use of, 7–11, 46, 71, 79, 92–94, 98, 143, 159 military, 6–7, 21, 60, 93, 119, 159 Foucault, Michel, v, 2, 5n4, 9, 10, 13, 16, 28, 31, 32, 40, 46, 47, 88, 151–161 framing theory, 9–11, 129–131, 132

G gender, 26, 81, 126, 134, 141 globalization, 74 theories of, 49, 136, 160 governance, definition of, 3–4 governmentality, 5n4, 9, 153

Index Guattari, Felix, 131, 137

H Hobbes, Thomas, 49, 83, 130 human rights, 14, 29, 91, 92, 98, 108, 130, 137

I ideals. See norms identifications, 26–27 imageries of progress using, 42–43 parliaments using, 108, 114 research on. See epistemic governance approach, research design for studying social movements building, 142–143 UN using, 91, 92 identity, 26, 91, 109, 132, 142 imageries of the social world, definition of, 8, 38, 42 of competing nation-states, 3, 15, 26, 46, 49, 82, 93, 113, 115, 160 in parliaments, 113, 117, 118 of progress, 44, 45–46, 91, 115–116, 139, 162 in research design, 158–159 in social movements, 129, 136–137, 138, 139 of society as a hierarchy, 46–48, 93, 130, 137–139, 145 used by IGOs, 87, 92, 98 use in governance of, 32, 33, 37, 51 imaginary, social, 43 impression management, 2, 92–93 India, 136, 142 Indignados, 131, 138, 141 institution, definition of, 151 isomorphism, 6, 28, 38, 40, 137

M Marx, Karl, 5n3 media, 9, 11, 26, 31, 42, 50, 106, 109, 116, 121, 126–128, 136, 141, 142, 157

Index social, 74 methodological nationalism, 44, 113 military deception, 1 modernity, 44, 86, 130 modernization, Parson’s theory of, 5, 15, 44. See also progress ecological, 27, 45, 52 imagery of, 15, 45, 50, 52, 117 tacit reliance on, 44 moral authority, 8, 60, 65–66 in IGOs, 91, 98 in social movements, 143

N nation, interest of, 26–27, 45, 51, 91, 98, 111–115, 120 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 8, 80, 82, 88, 94, 126, 128, 130 growth of, 79, 84, 94 impression management by, 94 influence of, 71, 87, 144, 145, 163 SDGs involving, 79 norms, 28–30 IGOs defining, 85, 91, 97 moral authority using, 66–67 parliaments connecting identification work with, 119–120 parliaments using, 105, 111, 115 research on. See epistemic governance, research design for studying social movements appealing to, 135–137 social movements framing reality with, 140–142 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 8, 88, 93

O Occupy Wall Street, summary of, 4, 48, 125–127 ontology of the environment, 24–26 IGOs defining, 89–90, 96 parliaments defining, 119–120 research on. See epistemic governance, research design for studying

191 social movements defining, 140 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 25, 47, 51, 73, 93, 95

P Pakistan, 105, 111, 116, 120, 121, 162 Parsons, Talcott, 5n3, 44, 61n2, 97 parties (political), 2, 63, 106, 111 policy diffusion, 9–11. See also diffusion power, theories of, 6, 11, 12, 86–88, 93, 152–154 progress, views of, 24, 40, 81. See also modernization, imagery of

R relational, 47, 74, 96, 99 religion, 65 freedom of, 92 parliaments using, 120 religious capital, 66 social movements involving, 129 “world”, 65, 139 root metaphors, definition of, 41–42

S science, authority of, 3, 24, 44, 65, 82, 83, 86, 88, 99 root metaphors in, 41–42, 49 security, 91, 143 food, 134, 141 national, 113, 121 social, 112 signaling games, 1, 88 social movements, definition of, 129 sociological institutionalism, 4n2, 44, 85, 97, 113, 114 speed bumps, 13 sustainability, 28, 46, 81, 112–113, 134

T Tilly, Charles, 130, 136

192

Index

U United Nations (UN), 72–73, 80, 82, 88–89, 133, 137 United States (of America), 82, 85, 92, 116, 119, 126–129, 132

W Weber, Max, 15, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 68, 69, 71, 72, 159–160 world society theory, v, 9–11, 51, 86–88, 97–99, 113, 136n2

V violence, 1, 6, 11, 12, 62–63, 99, 159, 163. See also coercion; force in Ireland, 163

Z Zapatistas, 129, 136 Žižek, Slavoj, 126, 132, 141, 142