ECREA16-Abstract

135

Thursday, November 10

1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0

CLP02

Governance, Power and Language –Approaches for Analyzing Communication Policy

PP 074

Doing Governance in Figurations: Proposal of an Analytical Framework

M. Oermann

, W. Schulz

, T. Mast

Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research, Media Law, Hamburg, Germany

Traditionally, Governance has been understood to be a counter concept to simple hierarchical control by powerful actors, such as states or companies, taking

all regulating subjects into account. After, the focus in Governance research widened to the object being regulated as well as the structures of regulation

themselves which soon proved to be very fruitful, especially concerning the disperse contexts of Internet Governance. But the full potential of the Gover‑

nance approach has yet to be raised: Today, concepts of Governance are still applied primarily to institutional structures, normative factors like law, technol‑

ogy and social norms and to their materializations in written law, contracts or code. However, if we do not see these materializations just as given artifacts,

but also as a common construction of social reality by actors, we can also shed light on uses and practices of these actors from a Governance perspective

as recent developments in STS i.a. by Woolgar, Neyland, and Ziewitz demonstrate. So it is possible to understand how normative structures influence

the behaviour of actors while being constituted through communicative constructions by these actors at the same time. That’s the„Doing Governance“-ap‑

proach. Unfortunately, theoretical concepts and methods needed for comprehensive analyses covering structures and processes based on the„Doing Gov‑

ernance“-approach are still missing. There is no comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework to empirically investigate, analyse and explain

the realisation of Governance in this sense. We propose such a framework by understanding Governance as an achievement of figurations in terms of Nor‑

bert Elias. Such figurations show determinable features: Individual and collective actors form specific constellations. Power, privileges and responsibilities

of the actors are corresponding with these. Furthermore, they realize specific communicative practices in determinable relevance frames. Approaching

Governance on the basis of this framework opens twofold methodological access: First, we can do hermeneutic content analyses of the materializations,

and the normative structures thereby. Second, we can observe the figurations and analyze their features and communicative practices. With other words:

we are able to merge the structure and process as well as the behavioural, actor-centristic perspective to arrive at an comprehensive but fine-grained un‑

derstanding of Governance.We illustrate that this framework is useful especially in the Internet context on the basis of the case of Governance of conflicts in

search engine entries after the ECJ’s 'Right to be forgotten'-decision (ECJ 05–13–2014, C-131/12 – Google Spain) based on a legal dispute between Google

Inc. and a person requesting deletion against the background of a changig media environment through ubiquituos availability of search engine servies

and their impacts on the normative structures and construction processes in general. This moment of irritation is defined as the starting point, producing

normative pressure for behavior adjustment of the actors of the figuration. It forces companies such as Google Inc., to set up their own procedures, rules and

departments to handle deletion requests by users. We examine this change in Governance of the use of search engines and show at the same time, how

helpful the proposed framework is for understanding such transformations.

PP 075

Regulations, Norms, Discourses and Technology: An Integrated Governance Perspective for Media and Communication Studies

C. Katzenbach

Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Internet Policy and Governance, Berlin, Germany

This paper proposal contributes to the conceptual debate on communication governance and media regulation. Based on a literature review and conceptual

integrations, the paper develops a governance perspective for media and communication studies that distinguishes four layers of ordering: regulations,

norms, discourses and technology. Although governance as a notion is routinely used in communication policy research as well as in practice, the conceptual

debate has not gained much traction after a promising start in the mid-2000s (Donges 2007, d’Haenens et al. 2007). For Internet governance, van Eeten and

Mueller (2013) even asked:“Where's the governance in Internet governance?”The most elaborated concept of media governance has probably been articu‑

lated by Puppis (2010). But even his understanding of governance as integrated view on rules does not extend prevalent notions of regulation substantially.

Concepts of governance apparently tend to be either too vague to be analytically helpful or too narrow to provide a conceptual surplus over related notions

such as regulation or politics (Karppinen/Moe 2013, Hofmann et al. 2014). Against this backdrop, this paper proposes a concept of governance for media

and communication studies that focuses not on rules as such, but on communication and negotiation processes around rules and expectations. In contrast

to prevalent concepts, this allows for a genuine disciplinary governance perspective that is not defined by its object of investigation (eg. the media sector)

but by its analytical perspective. Conceptually the paper draws on governance research, institutional theories and STS. This integration allows to show that

governance as the process of negotiating rules and mutual expectations is not restricted to law and policy-making but that it also consists of normative

orientations, discursive framings and media technologies. As a result, the paper suggests four perspectives of governance research for media and communi‑

cation studies: (1) A regulatory perspective addressing the provision and enforcement of formal rules such as laws, court decisions and terms of service; (2)

a normative perspective investigating the prevalent judgements on legitimate and illegitimate behaviour in a specific community or sector; (3) a discursive

perspective addressing the framings and debates on contested issues of communication policy and law; and (4) a technological perspective investigating

the embodiment of affordances and rules in infrastructures and algorithms shaping daily routines of communication. The analytical advantage of this

governance concept lies in combining these perspectives, understanding them as intertwined layers of ordering that jointly (or competitively) contribute

to the institutionalisation of rules and expectations. This conceptual proposal is illustrated along the field of copyright making this entanglement of regula‑

tive, normative, discursive and technological ordering processes visible. By spelling out this integrated concept of governance, this proposal contributes to

the theoretical development of communication policy and law as a subdiscipline as well as to the integration of different strands of media and communica‑

tion studies as a discipline. It might also be understood as a contribution to the nascent conceptual debate on the role of technology (infrastructures, data,

algorithms) in shaping media and communication.