Facilitating Transfers: Regulatory Governance Framework as 'Rites of Passage'

The concept of governance has mutated into an all‐embracing buzz‐word characterised by a low degree of conceptual precision and empirical focus. This paper therefore suggests a narrower and more precise understanding of governance and the regulatory function it fulfils by advancing the argument that the essential functional and normative purpose of regulatory governance is to facilitate, stabilise and justify the transfer of condensed social components (such as economic capital and products, political decisions, legal judgements, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge) from one social contexts to another. Such transfers both involve extraction of social components from the departing context and the incorporation of these social components into the receiving context.
Paradoxically, increased globalisation has implied an increase rather than a decrease of contextual diversity in so far as the implosion of the euro‐ and later on Western‐centric world has increased the pluralistic structural setup of contemporary world society. The contemporary world is at the same a community of common destiny and a world which consists of many worlds insofar as the globe is characterised by a multiplicity of contextual societal orders (societies, communities, regimes etc.) with some of them being state‐based and some of the falling outside the category of statehood. This development, acting as the central structural driving force for the emergence of regulatory governance frameworks, can be traced back to specific logics of temporalisation and spatial expansion of a diverse set of social processes in relation to, for example, the economy, politics, science and the mass media.
On this background, the paper will more concretely develop a conceptual framework for classifying different contextual orders and different types of transfers between them. It will, furthermore, explore the role and “quality” of different types of regulatory governance frameworks in relation to the facilitation, stabilisation and justification of transfers.