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 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” 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 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 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 macro-theory 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 sel...