Jon Pierre is Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg and professor of public governance at the Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne. He serves on the editorial advisory board of Policy & Politics.

Two recent papers in the October 2015 edition of Policy & Politics  provoked my thinking about governing and governance; Bob Jessop’s “Crises, crisis-management and state restructuring: what future for the state?”, and Allan Cochrane, Bob Colenutt and Martin Field’s “Governing the ungovernable: spatial policy, markets and volume house-building in a growth region”. They did so for quite different reasons. Or so I thought.

The two texts could not be more different in style and presentation. For me, reading Bob Jessop has always been like having a bowl of fettuccine al burro in an Italian restaurant; it is pure delicacy but at the same time so incredibly rich that in order not to choke you have to proceed very slowly. You read a paragraph or even just a sentence (sometimes that can be one and the same thing) and then find yourself forced to sit back to take in and digest Bob’s argument. His analysis covers several discourses and perspectives, then puts a diachronic spin on the analysis and ends up asking Continue reading →