A Phenomenology of Institutions

Relationality and Governance in China and Beyond

Raul Lejano, Jia Guo, Hongping Lian, Bo Yin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317212423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

To a degree insufficiently captured by the term governance, the present age is one of institutional complexity. China is a case in point. An amalgam of socialist, capitalist, corporatist, and pluralist characteristics, China's systems of governance defy classification using extant categories in the institutionalist literature. What, after all, is a socialist market system?

A Phenomenology of Institutions begins with the problem of describing emergent institutional phenomena using conventional typologies. Constructing a new descriptive framework for rendering new, hybrid, and flexible institutional designs, Raul Lejano, Jia Guo, Hongping Lian, and Bo Yin propose new descriptors, involving concepts of autopoeisis, textuality, and relationality, that might better describe new and emergent models of governance. The authors illustrate the utility of this framework with a number of case studies, each dealing with a different aspect of Chinese legal and civic institutions and comparing these with 'Western' models.

This book will be a valuable resource for institutional scholars in the fields of public policy, political science, organization studies, public administration, and international development, studying new and emergent forms of governance.

1

Introduction

The Phenomenology of Institutional Innovation

1.1 The Problem of Description

This book is about institutions. More specifically, it is about how they confound us. We feel we have the measure of them – how they are organized, how they work, their form and function. But we have not found the words to say what makes them special and, examined closely enough, invariably unique. The problem we take up in this book is that of institutional description and the difficulty of such given the paucity of descriptives with which we can render new, perhaps innovative, programs.

Take the case of China. The 21st century has, thus far, been its coming-of-age story. Averaging an annual growth rate of 9.5% over the last two decades, China has officially become the largest economy in the world (after adjusting for purchasing power parity).¹ The nation has become the world’s largest exporter, since 2009, and the world’s largest trading nation, since 2013.² Even given a slowdown in its annual growth rate the past few years, China remains an engine for global change.

Change is apace within the nation. At the same time as its economy continues to grow, China has been undergoing an era of profound institutional reform. The process of modernizing its economy meant that the old institutional regime, characterized by massive state-owned enterprises, rural economy, and insularity, needed overhauling if China was to take its place at the helm of the world’s developed nations.

Take, for example, the massive process of urbanization that has taken place in China over the last 20 years. It has been a period of unparalleled city building and urban expansion that the world has never seen before – between the years 2000 and 2015, China’s urban population grew from 459 million to 780 million, adding an urban population about equal to the size of the US (United Nations, 2015). To generate the capital needed for such an expansion of its urban area, its housing, and industry, the state needed to tap into private capital and direct foreign investment. This required institutional change, such as amending the absolute nature of state ownership of urban property in favor of a system allowing usufruct rights for private interests (e.g., land grant contracts allowing use and profit from the land for 50 years for industrial land and 70 years for residential land).

The idea that institutions themselves needed modernization took off during Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in the 1980s, and it started a revolutionary process of reform. This continues to this day. In 2014, at the Third Plenum of the ruling party’s central committee, the leadership expressed the following commitment:

The overall goal of deepening the reform comprehensively is to improve and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics, and to promote the modernization of the national governance system and capacity. We must pay more attention to implementing systematic, integrated and coordinated reforms, promoting the development of socialist market economy, democratic politics, advanced culture, a harmonious society and ecological progress.³

Notwithstanding the decisive tone of the party’s pledge to reform, the fact is that what these reforms mean, in real terms, is an open question. It is unclear what, exactly, a socialist market economy should look like, and how governance is to be modernized while retaining Chinese characteristics (and what these characteristics are is never spelled out). What it suggests, however, is the idea that whatever evolves in this grand institutional experiment, it may have many features unique to its context. The leadership is well aware of the extent and depth of the changes underway, as well as the inescapable need to innovate. As China’s current premier and party leader, Xi Jinping, stressed: “We must improve current systems and promote institutional innovation with theoretical innovation based on practice … The basic foundation for building socialism with Chinese characteristics is that China is in the primary stage of socialism.”⁴

China’s ongoing experiments in governance are an important laboratory from which to learn about institutional design. This is no more evident than in the sectors taken up later in the book (namely, land reform, civil society, jurisprudence), where the scale and pace of such change in China are unprecedented. What is clear is that the present regime is undergoing a period of institutional experimentation. For example, scholars are beginning to study how decentralized policymaking is creating a kind of institutional laboratory (Teets & Hurst, 2014). The Chinese government’s longstanding practice of adaptive incrementalism allows us a chance to see a kind of institutional innovation at work. Whether one refers to it, as the policy sciences literature does, as incremental layering or policy patching (Howlett, 2014), China’s adaptive process of institutional design allows local experiments around different innovations in governance, which can then be scaled up or outwardly diffused should they prove successful.

Many, perhaps most, Western scholars presume, a priori, that the ultimate goal of institutional modernization is to mimic institutional ideals in the West, where the ideals of free market capitalism and liberal institutions are firmly espoused (though not firmly practiced). But this is too strong an assumption, in the opinion of the authors – even more so since these are mainly institutional “ideals” in the West, not realities. To be sure, many of China’s reformers do aim toward these institutional targets (e.g., private property, liberal politics, political pluralism), but only in general terms and not universally, not necessarily coalescing into definitive institutional forms. And there are reasons to think that the forms evolving now are taking on characteristics unique to them, diverging in (as we will discuss) important ways from the idealized Western models. In other words, we may be seeing the evolution of a unique “socialist market system with Chinese characteristics.”

The analytical problem is that the modes of institutional description scholars often use are embedded in the forms and language of Western institutional types. These modes of description tend to have strongly dualist frames of reference – i.e., property is either public or private, political agents are either state or nonstate actors, etc. In this introductory chapter, we sketch what we will refer to as a partially phenomenological stance toward institutional description. That is, we bracket away or postpone applying conventional descriptives and attempt to fashion new ones that better capture “the thing itself,” a point of view espoused by Edmund Husserl (1901).

The main focus of the book is to find new ways to characterize the “experimentation” underway in China vis-à-vis the design and workings of its institutions. The idea of an “institution” (as a repeatable pattern of actions) is itself phenomenological, allowing us to not talk about legal structures and agencies and classifications, allowing us to bring together otherwise separate fields of law, public administration, and physics or the legislative, executive, and judicial. The idea of an institution has allowed new forms of scholarship, allowing us to focus not just on the formal constitution of government and organizations, but on their practice. In our treatment of institutions, we do not make so much use of structural or functional framings of them, but more as repeatable thought-action complexes. This treatment is not far removed from the idea of discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008), except our treatment is even more phenomenological than this – i.e., institutions can result from precognitive patterns of behavior, where individuals are not consciously aware that they are creating a social construction. Simply, an institution just “is” or, more accurately, is simply “being.”

The chapters in this book examine specific areas of governance and closely study how institutions are evolving into what may be unique forms. There is ample evidence that this has been happening for quite some time. Institutional experimentation is deeply embedded in China’s system of governance. In a speech on political reform, Xi Jinping described the system in these terms:

Wading across the river by feeling the stones and top-level design are two component factors of our reform effort … To continue reform and opening up, we need to strengthen our macroscopic thinking and top-level design … At the same time, we must still encourage bold experiments and breakthroughs.⁵

In so doing, Xi would repeat the same idea originally put forward by Deng Xiaoping two decades ago. This logic of experimentation is not simply what Lindblom (1959) referred to as muddling through, but one of institutional innovation through smaller-scale institutional experiments (Heilmann, 2008; Heilmann & Perry, 2011; Florini, Lai, & Tan, 2012). The goal of the book is to come up with better, deeper ways of describing the institutional innovations that are emerging.

1.2 The Phenomenological Attitude

In this book, we attempt to open up our capacities for observing unique or novel forms of institutional life. In this vein, we take a phenomenological stance toward institutional description, which aspires toward describing phenomena in the most authentic, faithful way possible, which is to bracket away preexisting or dominant conceptual lenses and pay attention “to the things themselves” (Husserl, 1901). Without entering into the epistemological question of whether it is possible to completely bracket away defining concepts, we approach the phenomenological ideal by meeting it halfway and being open to new conceptual lenses by which to describe institutions and, at the same time, attempt to account for our genuine, pre-filtered observations of institutional life as practiced.

While the word “phenomenology” encompasses a wide range of schools of thought and thinkers (e.g., Franz Brentano, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others), we employ key concepts drawn from Husserl, particularly from his treatise, Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1901) and Ideas I (Husserl, 1913). We begin with moving our focus away from strong notions about what things are to how they appear to us. And this draws from the insight that whatever a thing is, we only know it from our experience of it. That is, things in the world are not objects that we might define or measure, as assumed in the natural sciences, but neither are they completely or wholly subjective thoughts or mental construction, as a psychologist might frame it. Rather, they are phenomena, which are the appearances or experiences of things that we focus our consciousness upon.

Being open to the way a thing is experienced or presents itself to us means setting aside the tendency to pre-judge what a thing is. For example, if one chooses to frame the world of business, a priori, as a competitive game, then one’s understanding of a business situation might be overly restricted to this conceptual scheme. But perhaps the same situation, if approached from a less rigid perspective, might be experienced in different ways: Experiencing friendship, an artistic act, a cultural rite. Thus, the goal of phenomenology might be understood as “to understand and describe phenomena exactly as they appear in an individual’s consciousness” (Phillipson, 1972, p. 123).

One key idea, in Husserl’s phenomenology, is that of epoché, or the bracketing of prefiguring conceptual frameworks. In the description of institutional life, this amounts to letting go of a priori forms of institutional classification, especially those derived from “western” (or Weberian) institutional traditions. What modes of description would one then use? In Husserl’s method, one turns to authentic descriptions of the experience of the thing – in our case, of pure observation of an institution at work, as well as the accounts of those social actors that enact these institutions.

The phenomenological attitude involves being open to the fresh observation of the everyday workings of institutional life. How might we describe seeing an institution, not as formally designed, but as played out in practice? It is not just the researcher’s observation that informs but also the experiences, as recounted, by policy actors themselves who enact an institution. It includes not just the form and specification of institutional rules, but its rhythm, its emotional valence, its cadence. There are many dimensions to the direct observation of institutional life, some of which we will explore. We do not examine every such aspect – for example, while we do not have occasion to analyze it, one notes that institutions are also embodied experiences and the way one physically encounters institutional life matters as much as anything (drawing from Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012).

Another key idea behind Husserl’s phenomenology is that of intentionality, which speaks to how the subject simply does not exist as an autonomous agent but is always intending toward or relating to something else. This suggests that we be open to more relational modes of institutional life, wherein a policy or program is not simply a formal set of rules and roles but a web of relationships that, as they play out, work out what the institution is. We will appreciate how this notion of relationality fits the Chinese context well and provides a depth of insight into institutional life. What we refer to as relationality goes beyond the notion of guanxi, or the importance of interpersonal relationships in institutional life, but the idea that formal institutional designs are left underdetermined. They are partly specified by the constituting text, but the rest is left for the network of policy actors to work out as they interact.

The notion of relationality draws from Lejano (2008), which develops the notion that the rules and roles of an institution can be under-determined. Either these formal rules and roles are underspecified or not followed in practice. Why would they be underspecified? In some cases, what an institution really means may be that which is spoken “backstage” as opposed to “frontstage” (Goffman, 1978) – i.e., it cannot be formally acknowledged though it is practiced. To turn toward an American example, right after the tragedy of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, US Congress enacted the Patriot Act which, ostensibly, was meant to deter further acts of terrorism. The aspect of deterrence is not to be doubted, but there were other, unspoken and uncodified, aspects to the Act – e.g., it became the impetus for a massive financial transfer back to the defense industry, which suffered under Bill Clinton’s defunding of the military (Joyce & Meyers, 2001). It also became the flashpoint that spurred a sweeping movement to roll back immigration and, in some cases, vilify immigrants.

In other cases, policies are underspecified perhaps because central government cannot spell out its details, leaving them to more local actors to work out, in adaptive fashion. As we will discuss in later chapters, we can see this adaptive stance at work in many instances of governance in China, beginning with the question of what exactly a socialist market economy is.

What substitutes for the formal and ostensible? It is the established pattern of actions and reactions that correspond to the web of relationships among policy actors. These actions correspond not to any codified text but, instead, to the habituated demands that relationships exert on an actor. If one likens formal institutional rules and roles to a text, then the working and reworking of relationships is part of the larger context in which the program takes place (Lejano, 2006, 2016). We develop these insights into modes of description in the succeeding chapters.

And so, we approach our study of governance in China by simply directly observing its institutional practices. As an example, we might examine the texts by which China’s leaders govern the nation and, observing it with fresh eyes, record our impressions of it. We will notice that there is much in the Chinese system of governance that pays respect to words, written and spoken, from its leaders even when they originate in purely ceremonial functions and other non-administrative events. Examining texts from speeches by the current leader, Xi Jinping, one notices, through pure observation, a penchant for using literary expressions (metaphors, aphorisms, euphemisms) often and predictably. Is this simply a matter of rhetorical style? Or perhaps it plays a role in governance in present-day China? Being open to new conceptual lenses, we consider the possibility that perhaps it is a little of both, and these expressions are both rhetorical and strategic.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of Terms
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: The Phenomenology of Institutional Innovation
• 2. Developing New Modes of Institutional Description
• 3. Governing by Metaphor: The Intertextuality of Institutional Life in China
• 4. Relationality in Rural Property Regimes
• 5. Relational Institutions and ENGOs in China: From Nu River to Changzhou
• 6. Multiple Legal Traditions, Legal Pluralism and Institutional Innovation: The Chinese Criminal Procedure System in Contrast
• 7. Conclusion: China, the Looking-Glass
• Index