Responses to Governance

Dixon and his colleagues provide a behaviorist perspective on governance. Their concern is with the governed's responses to those who seek to govern them-their governors-and the counter responses that they induce from the governors. They take as axiomatic that the governed are not a homogenized and amorphus them in the them-us dichotomy, reduced to what Carlyle called a dead logic formula, thereby, for the purpose of this analysis, leave begging all the relevant questions.

The governed are not a disembodied abstraction; they are an aggregate of men and women of flesh and blood. In a corporation, they are corporate directors (whose governors are those who own or, perhaps, have a stake in that corporation), corporate managers (whose governors are the corporate directors), corporate employees (whose governors are the corporate managers). In a society, they are individuals or groups of individuals, perhaps in corporations, located within its jurisdiction (whose governors are the members of societal politial and administrative elites). At the global level, they are individuals or groups of individuals in countries and corporations within the jurisdiction of international governmental organizations and international regimes (whose governors are those who seek to control those global governance mechanisms). Whether the governed's response to their governors' processs is one of compliance or antagonism, and how the governors response to any antagoism, has implications for governance capacity, good governance, and governability. A provocative study that will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, international relations, and management and organizational theory as well as those who are concerned with issues of goverance at all levels, corporate, societal,and global.

JOHN DIXON is Professor of International Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. Among Professor Dixon's 30 books are The State of Social Welfare: The Twentieth Century in Cross-National Review with R. P. Scheurell (Greenwood Press, 2002), The Marketization of Social Security: International Perspectives, with M. Hyde (Quorum Books, 2001), and The Chinese Welfare System: 1949-1979 (Praeger, 1981).