Laboratoire d'Etudes sur les Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, la Communication, l'Innovation et le Changement - LENTIC

Business & economic sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others
Political science, public administration & international relations
General management, entrepreneurship & organizational theory

English

The Giant Sleeping at the Boundaries of Management: a Panoptical perspective to the governance of the TEN-T program

17 June 2015

34

L&B 4th Annual International Conference,

Science Po Paris

Paris, France

17 au 18 juin 2015

International

This paper is based on an empirical research addressing the EU managerial techniques characterizing the governance of the TEN-T program. The latter is a trans-national investment program aiming to fund the establishment of a trans-European network of transport infrastructures across EU countries enabling the full achievement of a frictionless and smooth functioning internal market. In particular, it presents the Lyon-Turin high-speed rail project (funded by the TEN-T) through the lenses of 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted by the author with several actors (managers and stakeholders) involved in the TEN-T network of governance. The paper provides: i) a description of the trans-national hierarchy of governance structuring the interplay between the different levels of government (supra-national, national and sub-national) involved in the program management; and, ii) a critical analysis of the construction and deployment of the managerial techniques (benchmarks, reports, evaluation, indicators, and agreements) that have been adopted to articulate and discipline the interactions between the actors operating at the different hierarchical levels of TEN-T. Drawing on Bentham and Foucault, the TEN-T architecture of governance is described as a panoptical system functioning on the basis of three disciplinary principles (hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination), enacted by means of managerial techniques following the three e’s logic (efficiency, effectiveness and economy), and operating out-and-out as foucaudian technologies of power whose ultimate purpose is getting things done. Drawing on the experience of the Lion-Turin project, the paper concludes that this panoptical mode of managing public programs can lead to risky legitimacy crisis of funded projects resulting in dangerous – sometimes violent - oppositions between the governors and the people, as well as entailing implications going beyond the realm of management and affecting some fundamental constitutional freedoms.

since 02 March 2016