Kai Eriksson

Innovation has become a crucial part of the vocabulary of contemporary political governance and its conceptual equipment. As innovation has emerged as an ever-more significant political issue, the discourse on innovation has become intertwined with the notion of network. This paper argues that certain ontological elements inherent in this discourse tend to lose their openness when they are defined as policy-oriented concepts, and uses the innovation system concept as a case study to illuminate this. Insofar as innovation, the production of something novel, is the basis of contemporary economy, then political language has to strive both to attain what is new and, at the same time, to make it governable. It seems, however, that when a concept receives its political formulation, that is, when it becomes a means for governance, then the unifying process attendant to the production of a field of governance will replace the perspective of change. This essential tension is investigated in what follows through innovation policy as articulated mainly in the Finnish policy discourse.

The concept of the network has become embedded in social thought and imagery, articulating what at root is inarticulable. The network metaphor occupies an ontological space, but this space, insofar as it is posed as a philosophical question, seems to assume a network-like shape itself. It may be particularly rewarding to read the constellations studied by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from this point of view, in light of the analysis of the preconditions of networks. This paper examines how the question of the ontology of networks is addressed by these thinkers, especially with regard to the historicity of ontology.

The concept of co-production is gaining ground rapidly in the political and administrative sciences. Generally speaking, it is about involving citizens and users in the production of the same services they consume. Although the reforms and initiatives related to co-production have been considered as having many democratizing features, they also have the tendency to narrow and reduce the area of political discussion. This is mainly because individualized and personalized forms of governance seem to make it difficult to discern the structural issues underlying these forms. The article investigates how co-productional practices both open up and close down the opportunities for political deliberation and debate. In other words, how it both politicizes and depoliticizes political and administrative questions.

"It is possible to see “the speaking machine”, as the telephone was often called in the contemporary press, as having formed a speaking machine of the whole society at the end of the nineteenth century. This is because it provided a pattern not only for electric communication in the modern age, but also for the social system viewed as a whole. The telephone can be seen as an intersection of powers in and through which both the modern communication and industrial order — which are not to be treated as separate from each other — assumed their shapes. It is my intention here to bring out the path of development through which communication, seen as both the object and means of political projects during the age of telephone’s heyday, was given a pivotal position in the self-descriptions of society."

"Society can no longer be thought of as independent of networks because discourses, theories, images, and institutions have transformed and abandoned the metaphor of hierarchy. This paper investigates the space occupied by the network metaphor during the past few decades and how it deals with the demarcation between what is ‘‘inside’’ and what remains ‘‘outside.’’ Examining theorists such as Manuel Castells, Albert-La´szlo´ Baraba´si, and Michel Callon, who have tried to map out the conditions of a ‘‘network,’’ the paper elucidates why ‘‘networks’’ should be approached ontologically more than as a matter of a conceptual tool."

"Although in communication the message replaces noise, noise is an integral part of the message itself. The post-war period is one of an intensified attempt to think of communication and noise together, so that the latter does not appear only as the source of disorder but also as the material part of communication. Noise is thus absolutely necessary for communication. On the other hand, in order to make a shared meaning possible, a remarkable part of this noise has to be excluded. Furthermore, communication has to be given a form in order to be distinguished from noise. Yet communication itself cannot be given any single form, for it escapes all formalizations. This movement of sharing and excluding, form-giving and fleeing from organization, is what determines the field of communication. This article investigates the ways in which this movement has found expression in the writings of Serres, Girard, Latour and Callon."

"This article focuses on a specific political ethos of current developed societies, on what we call ‘self-service democracy’. The ethos essentially springs from the technologies, policies, structures and ideas promoting the ‘individualization trend’ in the provision of services as opposed to the allegedly passivizing system of the classical welfare state of the 1970s and the early 1980s. We review the conceptual history of self-service, its current core features, and the forms it has assumed in the political regimes of post-war Western societies. The focus has moved from the services provided by the state to the activities and responsibility of individual citizens and organizations. Consumerist citizenship and personal responsibility, with the assistance of new information technologies, can open up novel channels for interaction and participation, but at the risk of rendering common political concerns into individual matters. The article investigates the political implications of this new emphasis on individualized, selfservice-centred governance processes for democracy, and democratic participation and representation in particular."

"The purpose of this paper is to identify ‘participative politics’ and what is here called ‘self-service politics’ as distinct political themes inmany advanced democracies, in order to investigate their main
elements and chart their interrelationships. These two themes are examined from the viewpoint of politicization and depoliticization tendencies. Participative politics consists of three main forms,
defined as active citizenship, citizen networks and co-production. Self-service politics, in turn, connects each of these forms to a larger political transformation by pitting themes of activating politics, social governance and accountability against them. The paper investigates what bearing participative politics, and self-service politics as its inevitable attendant, have on the sphere of democratic deliberation."

The book at hand will investigate communication and its changing conditions with respect to the conceptualizations of the political community in the United States. It examines the communicative forms of constructing society from the nineteenth century onward. The central aim is to deliberate upon how the ideas relating to communication technologies ranging from the telegraph to computer networks have organized the conception of society and how they have played a part in the shaping, ordering, and governing of the society according to certain political aims and principles. While communication has structured the political community and its coherence, communication has also, in the same process, become organized as a concept itself. Together with the discourses in which communication has been taken as both the object and the means of governance practices, communication technologies have formed an environment wherein “communication” as such has become an object of systematic thought — that is, it has become a distinct theoretical concept and a social concern. It is in these discourses and practices that the inherent relationship between communication and control was forged, and this is what makes them the main focus for a “modern” history of communication — a history preoccupied with the idea of control. The book will analyze the relationship between historical forms and technologies of communication, on the one hand, and the constitutive, ontological dimension of communication, on the other, to the extent that this relationship is built up through — and has served as a conceptual means for understanding — the society and its central processes in the modern era. It thus sets out to examine how communication has generated coherence to the political community and how a certain coherence, on the other hand, has been a precondition for thinking about communication as a socially significant concept.