Heterarchial Networks for Global Corporations: Emerging Unstructured Complexity in Regulatory Landscape

The transformations in the existing forms of governmentality and power regimes are deeply rooted within the political economy of advanced neoliberalism, having profound implications in the governance matrix. The new rationalities and instrumentalities of governance involve ‘governing without government’ (Rhodes, 1996) following the delegitimisation and deconstruction of the Keynesian Welfare State and the gradual enactment of what Jessop (2002) calls the Schumpeterian Competition State. This chapter throws open the play field for competing standpoints on governing the mega corporates. Various theorists consider that there is emptiness within the existing global regulatory armoury concerning the operational activities of TNCs. The convolution of ‘steering’ in this poly-centred, globalised societies with its innate uncertainty makes it tricky to keep an eye on the fix of ‘who actually steers whom’ and ‘with what means’. There also appears to be huge disinclination to spot systemic technical description of the evolving modern institutional structure of economic regulation in a composite and practical manner. Thus, the complexity of international issues, their overlapping nature and the turmoil within the arena in which they surface defy tidy theorizing about effective supervision.

This brings in the wider questions dealt with in the chapter – Is globalisation then a product of material conditions of fundamental technical and economic change or is it collective construct of an artifact of the means we have preferred to arrange political and economic activity? The new reflexive, self-regulatory and horizontal spaces of governance are getting modelled following the logic of competitive market relations whereby multiple formally equal actors (acting or aspiring to act as sources of authority) consult, trade and compete over the deployment of various instruments of authority both intrinsically and in their relations with each other (Shamir, 2008). The chapter also looks into these messy and fluid intersections to situate the key actors at the heart of processes of ‘rearticulation’ and ‘recalibration’ of different modes of governance which operates through a somewhat fuzzy amalgamation of the terrain by corporates, state hierarchy and networks all calibrating and competing to pull off the finest probable’s in metagovernance landscape. Unambiguously, this chapter seeks to elaborate on an institutional-discursive conceptualization of governance while stitching in and out of the complex terrain a weave of governances for modern leviathan – the global corporates.