Private governance and public governance: An attempt at theoretical and interdisciplinary rapprochement

Abstract

A history of research on governance would show that the first theoretical works on this concept were developed in the early 1930s, essentially within Anglo-Saxon managerial firms. It follows then that governance, since its appearance in the theoretical literature, is part of a perspective of regulation of the behavior of leaders and the definition of the rules of the managerial game. However, the findings of Berle and Means (1932) only confirmed older literature, widely answered in political science, which deals with the governance of political leaders. Thus, whether it is a question of addressing the relationship between the rulers and the people (public governance) or between the leaders and the shareholders (private governance), the problem always falls within the field of governance. In reality, these interdisciplinary connections are not surprising since governance itself is defined as being a system of regulation of the managerial game which implicitly induces an institutional dimension, natural in political science, law and sociology, and which in economics has experienced a real revival of interest with the emergence of the neo-institutionalist current, in particular the approach of (North, 1990a). It is indeed this intertwining that constitutes what governance researchers call National Systems of Governance (NGS) or “global governance” or even “culture of governance”.

This research aims to present the different theories of governance that make it possible to understand this intertwining between private and public governance.

Classification JEL : H11, H19

Paper type: Theoretical Research