Introduction: Framing Regulatory Managerialism as an Object of Study and Strategic Displacement

Abstract

The regulatory state’s entanglement with managerial governance is undertheorized and poorly understood, with consequences that are increasingly dire. Key characteristics of regulatory managerialism include not only its preferences for procedural informality and privatization—long recognized by scholars of the “new governance”—but also its distinctive techniques and their underlying logics. The result has been an incomplete account of the managerial turn in administrative governance—an account that overlooks many of managerialism’s signature practical and ideological components and that, consequently, understates the shift in governmentality that managerialism represents. The entrenchment of regulatory managerialism, moreover, has coincided with an era in which information and information technologies have become both principal inputs to and outputs of economic production and principal mechanisms for control and oversight of economic production. This is no accident; informational modes of production and control and managerial modes of governance have strong affinities. But the ascendancy of informational modes of production and control also raises the stakes. Legal and regulatory tools developed to address the harms of an industrial society are ill equipped to address the harms of an informational society. Therefore, simply unwinding the changes and reverting to legacy regulatory models is not a realistic option.

The goals of this symposium issue are twofold. First, we develop the foundation for a thicker description of regulatory managerialism, including its practices, its underlying logics, and the specific mechanisms by which it displaces or co-opts preexisting legal-institutional frameworks. Second, we introduce a series of proposals designed to break the feedback loops of the managerial turn. The proposals fall into two categories. One group of articles, discussed in Part II, considers strategies for reorienting and broadening regulatory managerialism’s approach to knowledge production and value-setting, particularly with regard to systemic threats and harms. The other, discussed in Part III, explores mechanisms for improving inclusion of and accountability to the publics whose interests regulators are supposed to serve

Keywords: regulation, managerialism, new governance, administration

JEL Classification: K20, K23