Governance vocabulary displaces the vocabulary of power from organized life.

Evidence

Most definitions of good governance include the following elements: participation, consensus, accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, equitability, inclusiveness, and following the rule of law. Thus, while governance analytically describes decentered and devolved power, as a policy term, governance aims to substitute consensus-oriented policy formation and implementation for the overt exercise of authority and power through law and policing. It is a short step from this reorientation of democracy into problem solving and consensus to a set of additional replacements fundamental to the meaning and operation of governance today: “stakeholders” replace interest groups or classes, “guidelines” replace law, “facilitation” replaces regulation, “standards” and “codes of conduct” disseminated by a range of agencies and institutions replace overt policing and other forms of coercion. Together, these replacements also vanquish a vocabulary of power, and hence power’s visibility, from the lives and venues that governance organizes and directs. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 249

Categorization

• DEFINE: Specifies what governance means as a policy term and enumerates the exact lexical replacements that constitute it.
• XREF: connects to: Governance displaces the rule of law with business instruments — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 137; Governance as a noun signifies power detached from governing agents — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 236; Governance analytically displaces the state as the center of rule — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 238 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Participatory management rhetoric conceals a reorganization that strips subordinate power. #exemplifies (0.90)
• Politics disguised as culture becomes insoluble jargon. #exemplifies (0.85)
• Power analysis must shift from sovereignty to relations of domination. #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1696
• Culture becomes administrable precisely by being severed from practical action #exemplifies (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 161
• A ruler can pacify society by draining each class’s institutions of political meaning. #expands (0.75) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1811