...beyond the state to do more of the governing of service delivery. We illustrate how these issues are unfolding in the context of the Canadian public sector.

Keywords: Governance and autonomy, state and civil society, public service delivery, advanced liberalism, welfare liberalism.

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Canada's shift to contract governance, as we call the new technology being adopted in several Western countries, reflects tendencies within advanced liberalism to govern through freedom rather than through society (1)--or, more specifically, to govern through technologies of agency. This article, with the aim of analyzing the governance of the working relations involved in the provision of public services in Canada, examines changes in the provision of Canada's public services.

The current regime in Canada, whose ideas formed against background of the problematization of previous attempts at governing service-delivery work and expertise, aims to promote flexibility in the management of service-delivery functions, thereby overcoming the perceived rigidities and closures associated with the management of these services under liberal welfare. Central to the promotion of flexibilities in these areas is the increasing use of contracts as a technology of governance.

Contract governance is an instance of the folding back of liberal governmental objectives upon themselves, where the objects of liberal rule have been transformed into a means of advanced liberal governance. This process of folding has resulted in the instrumentalization of market contrivances such as contractual relations in programs of management, but it is also implicated in the transformation of working relations within the public service. This process of folding reflects tendencies within advanced liberalism to blur formerly held liberal distinctions between public and private spheres and between the state and civil society. In the expanding liminal space between the formerly "autonomous" private and public realms, advanced liberal programs of government, such as those in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, are experimenting with various forms of contract governance in the management of public-service work.

In a few instances, this has resulted in the wholesale transformation of governments from producers of services to consumers of service-delivery regimes provided by private contractors. In other instances, such a wholesale shift has not been realized as governments continue to test the market contrivances in the delivery of public services and continue to experiment with the terms and conditions of employment for those who provide them.

Liberal Governance

Attempts at governing form around particular ways of thinking and acting on problems such that governing is shaped by the ways in which problems come to be rendered thinkable or intelligible, by the various ways in which the authority of governmental authorities are constituted, by the availability of conceptual and practical tools, and by the problematization of previous attempts at governing. Indeed, as Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller argue, (2) the history of government might well be written as a history of problematizations. (3)

It is around these problems that governmental rationalities are elaborated and specific programs of government are conceived. But the mentalities that aspire to rule become governmentalities only to the extent that they attach themselves to technologies for the enactment of their plans. (4) Such technologies often comprise readymade, heterogeneous conceptual and practical tools that are adventitiously and contingently assembled into functioning machines whose sole defining feature is that they somehow work. (5) The consistency of an assemblage lies in the regularity of its effects and in the work of thought that aims to hold its disparate elements together by providing coherent rationales for its functioning.

Liberalism, therefore, is not simply a normative philosophy or an ideology but an assemblage of programmatic efforts aimed at managing conduct. (6) These programmatic efforts consist of various rationalities and technologies, or theories and practices of rule. They are not undertaken merely for reasons of the state but on behalf of something external to the formal governmental domain--namely, civil society. (7) During the second half of the eighteenth century, the term civil society ceased to designate a particular type of well-ordered political association and came to signify, instead, a natural realm of freedoms and activities outside the legitimate sphere of politics. (8) In relation to this autonomous realm, (9) the scope of political authority was to be limited, and political rule was given over to the problem of managing conduct in this private realm without destroying its autonomy. Liberalism authorized and justified its capacity to rule by claims of "limited government" within a "minimal state," (10) wherein the regulation of conduct was not wholly dependent only upon political actions, the imposition of law, the administrative activities of state functionaries or publicly controlled bureaucracies, or the surveillance and discipline of an all-seeing police. (11)

In order to accomplish maximal governance with a minimal state, liberal programs of government, rather than simply issuing regulations, govern conduct through the "instrumentalization" of autonomous, nonpolitical forms of authority beyond the state, (12) such as philanthropic agencies and organizations, (13) the agencies of private governance that have grown in tandem with liberalism, (14) and the agencies of global governance that have shaped liberal-based development policies. (15)

The relation between political rationalities and the development of specific programs of government is one not of derivation or determination but of translation: both a movement from one space to another and an expression of a particular concern in another modality. (16) Mitchell Dean elaborates this transformative movement as a process of folding, a process that takes place between the constitutive domains of liberal government. This analytic involves three dimensions: (1) explication, or the unfolding of the formally political sphere into civil society and upon nonpolitical agencies; (2) implication, or the enfolding of the processes of civil society into the political sphere; and (3) replication, or the refolding of real or ideal values and conduct of civil society into the political sphere. (17) The difference between earlier liberal modes of government and advanced liberalism lies in the differential folds between the state and civil society and the different autonomous agencies instrumentalized to enact liberal programs of government.

The principles and ideals of liberalism are based upon a particular conception of the nature of society and its inhabitants. (18) Imagined as an original conscious and rational exchange of natural liberty for civil liberties or security (Rousseau, Hobbes) or as a spontaneous nonconscious order governed by customary rules established in the course of its own development, (19) civil society comprised a quasi-natural reality of economic and noneconomic interests whose immanent laws of functioning were to be respected by governments. Under classical liberalism and liberal welfarism, civil society was perceived as an autonomous domain external to government whose fundamental discontinuity with government was to be protected by the contrivances of legal guarantees and imposed limits on intervention established by institutional and juridical orders.

The liberal problematic centered on how to render and maintain civil society as external from the state so as to preserve the autonomy of its functioning. Replacing the subtractive character of sovereign power, liberalism under the welfare regime adopted a productive orientation vis-a-vis civil society, seeking, through an assemblage of diverse mechanisms, to enhance and secure social and economic objectives; to increase its means of subsistence, augment its wealth, increase prosperity of its members, multiply its numbers, and foster its welfare generally by eradicating pauperism, criminality, and degeneracy. (20) The rationality of welfarism was programmatically elaborated in relation to a range of specific problematizations: the declining birthrate; delinquency and antisocial behavior; the problem family; the social consequences of ill-health and the advantages conferred by a healthy population; and the integration of citizens into the community. (21)

To know and administer these problematizations and link the aspirations of authorities with the lives of individuals, (22) liberal welfarism needed to staff its inherited bureaucratic apparatus with a cadre of social experts. At the same time, however, it needed to ensure discontinuity of this administrative mechanism from direct political rule and special interests. In the public service in Canada, for example, the liberal solution to the problem was to reinvent a merit system of governance to ensure the autonomy of the various agents and...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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