Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Eight Principles of Governance in Network Society
Castells (1993 1–2)introduced the term network society to describe a society built on technologies of information technologies, time–space compression, post-Fordism, and the advance of finance capital, which is characterized by networking, globalization, and the flexibility, individuality, and instability of work. Peters and Pierre argue that the dominant feature of the governance model is the argument that networks have come to dominate public policy (Peters and Pierre 1998). So a fundamental change in how we conceptualize social life is taking place. In order to addres this type of fundamental change we need to focus on the metaphors shaping social life.
Metaphors in the social realm often remain relatively stable over time. For example, the metaphor of society as a body was the foundation of political thought from antiquity to the 17th century, and still influences our thinking today (Livy 1998). Since then, the social contract metaphor has shaped the debate from Hobbes (1998) to Rawls (1971). With the beginning of the 21st Century the network metaphor is emerging as an alternative to contract society. However, we are not yet fully immersed in it. To understand how it will structure social life, we can analyze its grammar. This can be done by analyzing its main grammatical principles, guiding how we imagine social and political life.
The Technology Principle:
Network Society is mediated through technology.
The precondition for any network society is technology. Only with technologies (even though they can be as unsophisticated as mail or the telegraph) can we imagine networks that bridge space-and-time. This means that the CIO is moved to center-stage as the manager of the network.
The Choice Principle:
Any network participant chooses to participate or to leave at any point in time.
The most radical departure from our understanding of collectivities as naturally given or contracted before the beginning of time is the paradigm of choice. Network members choose to become members, to contribute, and to leave at any time. Think of instantiations of network society on the internet and beyond, such as the Smallworld, OpenBC, MSN-Messenger, Skype, the Linux-Kernel-Team, to imagine the future of political life. The governmental CIO will have to guide policy on what type of social software to offer to potential network-participants.
The Consensus Principle:
Decisions in choice-communities are made by consensus.
Because of the ability of network participants to leave at any time, decisions need to be made by consensus. This does not mean that there is no hierarchy. Consensus is not Unanimity. Unanimity means that everybody agrees, consensus means that no-one disagrees. The distinction is not merely semantic, and in practical life it makes a huge difference: a decision is taken without a vote, but giving every participant the right to disagree (consensus), is fundamentally different from a world where everybody must explicitly agree to everything (unanimity). Consensus also does not mean equality between the participants. It just means that a project is pushed forward and participants are not disgruntled enough to leave (known as forking in Linux terms). This type of decision-making comes natural to CIOs, however,
The Scale and Network Effects Principle:
Network effects are the glue of network society.
One might question, however, how a community based on choice and consensus might scale up to real political communities. This is where network effects as the glue of network society come in. The network effect causes a community to value a potential member dependent on the number of members already participating. Metcalfe’s law states that the total value of a community possessing a network effect is roughly proportional to the square of the number of existing community members. Therefore, joining a network benefits others who have joined before – the classic example is that by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. Network effects make it very difficult for members to leave, because the community value lies in the interconnections to the other members. However, that is not the only glue holding networks together.
The Path Dependency Principle:
Path dependency makes it costly for us to exercise choice and leave any given network.
Path dependency is the simple but important concept that change in a society depends on its own past. Think of the impact of the Mexican revolution on policy-making today or the QWERTY keyboard, which would not be in use now except it happened to be chosen a hundred years ago. Once we invest in technologies (or practices), moving to something completely different becomes very expensive.
The Transparency Principle:
Transparency takes the role of democracy as the standard against which any governance situation is evaluated.
In network society, a member might want to understand how a specific decision was reached to assure that the principle of consensus was not violated and why a specific standard was set in the way that it was. That is where transparency (and its little sister documentation) comes in, and explains why it has become so very fashionable in the last few years. We often link transparency to democracy, however, if we look closely at academic writing through time, nobody really talked about transparency before network society.
The Reflexive Governance Principle:
The term governance assumes that the right of any participant in any decision-making situation needs to be reflected at all times.
The first documented use of the term governance was by Wyclif in 1386, “ 
is stiward..faili
in governaunce of e Chirche.†(Sel. Wks. III. 346). His usage of governance as the action or manner of governing introduces the concept as a fairly neutral critical instrument to compare and evaluate different forms of governing.
It is interesting to see how this concept has not played an important role outside of the Anglo-Saxon world until the end of the 20th Century. For 600 years languages like Spanish or German happily ignored it. In Spanish, the word most commonly used to describe questions of how we can govern in the transforming world is gobernabilidad and in German it is Steuerung or steering. These terms are not grammatical or conceptual equivalents to the English term governance. In 2000, finally the Real Academia (2005) included governance [gobernanza] into the Spanish language, with both the old English meaning and the second meaning which describes the move from government to governance, including alternative political actors, like this:
Arte o manera de gobernar que se propone como objetivo el logro de un desarrollo económico, social e institucional duradero, promoviendo un sano equilibrio entre el Estado, la sociedad civil y el mercado de la economÃa
This definition exemplifies the move from Governing to Governance in network society (Peters and Pierre 2000, Castells 1999). The concept of governance automatically foregrounds the question of how an aspect of social life should be governed, superseding the modern idea that the state is solely responsible for the administration of the public. It forces us to reflect on how social life can or should be organized.
The Outcome Legitimacy Principle:
The legitimacy of a policy that aims to create public value is derived from the public value created (as defined by its stakeholders)
In contract society the legitimacy of any policy was derived by the institutional legitimation of the actor that was pursuing it. In order to question the legitimacy of any act, one asked, is actor x endowed with the legal right to pursue the policy y? In network society, this becomes irrelevant. The question is transformed into, did policy y have an actual public value creating impact? Which of course leads to the meta-question of, who gets to decide that a public value has been created? This is not trivial and the network society term of stakeholder hides more than it enlightens.
These eight principles describe the grammar of network society and outline the framework in which policy-making is and will be taking place.
