Moral Economies, Economic Moralities

University of California - Berkeley

U.S.A.

June 24 - 26, 2016

Across many social domains, familiar models of management and policy design have been destabilized by the convergence of technological change and ideological claims for the power of distributed and collaborative governance.  The digitization of information has created new media for coordination among actors located in diverse organizational settings, subject to varied principles and practices of accountability. New policy regimes and incentive systems encourage greater participation in decision-making, yet rely on metrics of reward that may distort the evaluation of outcomes.  Such policies simultaneously unsettle the categories of states, markets and firms while driving potentially transformative changes in the everyday practices of producing goods and services and information.

These developments pose new empirical puzzles that speak to some of the most foundational questions of organizational analysis.  As one step toward framing a generative conversation and research agenda, this panel surveys these developments from multiple perspectives – theories of governance, health care reform, higher education and transportation – in order to identify important lines of convergence and divergence in the reorganization of public/private governance in the present moment.