IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v52y2001i8p1151-1166.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Comparative institutional response to economic policy managed competition and governmentality

Author

Listed:
  • Light, Donald W.

Abstract

This article provides a comparative conceptual framework for understanding why so many governments found economic policies based on managed competition attractive and yet dangerous to implement. The framework conceptualizes governments as a kind of organizational complex and thus governments as an international population of organizations, each embedded in a state that tries to harness and direct behaviour through what Foucault called "governmentality". This nascent concept is made more robust here and joined with Fligstein's historical research on the response of leading organizations when fundamental change threatens a population of organizations, by embracing a new conception of control that allows them to re-establish their control and pre-eminence. Fligstein studied corporations, but his model can be fruitfully extended to governments. Economic sociology has not to date been able to do much comparative research on institutional responses to economic policy; but this set of case studies and conceptual framework provide such an opportunity.

Suggested Citation

  • Light, Donald W., 2001. "Comparative institutional response to economic policy managed competition and governmentality," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 52(8), pages 1151-1166, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:52:y:2001:i:8:p:1151-1166
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(00)00236-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Westra, Daan & Angeli, Federica & Carree, Martin & Ruwaard, Dirk, 2017. "Understanding competition between healthcare providers: Introducing an intermediary inter-organizational perspective," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 121(2), pages 149-157.
    2. Skinner, Mark W. & Rosenberg, Mark W., 2006. "Managing competition in the countryside: Non-profit and for-profit perceptions of long-term care in rural Ontario," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 63(11), pages 2864-2876, December.
    3. Jan Kerssens & Peter Groenewegen, 2005. "Consumer preferences in social health insurance," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 6(1), pages 8-15, March.
    4. Gross, Revital & Harrison, Michael I., 2006. "Responses of Israeli HMOs to environmental change following the National Health Insurance Law: Opening the black box," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 76(2), pages 213-232, April.
    5. Theobald, Hildegard, 2004. "Entwicklung des Qualifikationsbedarfs im Gesundheitssektor: Professionalisierungsprozesse in der Physiotherapie und Dentalhygiene im europäischen Vergleich," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Labor Market Policy and Employment SP I 2004-104, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:52:y:2001:i:8:p:1151-1166. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.