The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Understanding Governance: Ten Years On
Open accessAbstract
The paper reassesses the argument in Understanding Governance (1997). The first section summarizes where we are now in the study of governance, reviewing briefly the key concepts of policy networks, governance, core executive, hollowing out the state and the differentiated polity. The second section engages with my critics with the aim of opening new directions of research. I concentrate on the key issues of: the context of policy networks, explaining change and the role of ideas, the decline of the state, rescuing the core executive, and steering networks. Under each heading, I sketch a decentred answer to the question of where we go from here. I argue the analysis of governance should focus on beliefs, practices, traditions and dilemmas.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Wicked Problems: Implications for Public Policy and Management
Head, B. W., & Alford, J. (2015) · Administration & Society · doi:10.1177/0095399713481601 · Cited by 1,514
Professionals, Managers and Discretion: Critiquing Street-Level Bureaucracy
Evans, T. (2011) · British Journal of Social Work · doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcq074 · Cited by 450
UNDERSTANDING HYBRIDITY IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS
DENIS, J., FERLIE, E., & VAN GESTEL, N. (2015) · Public Administration · doi:10.1111/padm.12175 · Cited by 349
Big data in the policy cycle: Policy decision making in the digital era
Höchtl, J., Parycek, P., & Schöllhammer, R. (2016) · Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce · doi:10.1080/10919392.2015.1125187 · Cited by 331
“Kjaer (2004), for example, distinguished between governance in public administration and public policy, governance in international relations, European Union governance, governance in comparative politics, and good governance as extolled by the World Bank (Rhodes 2007).”
BackgroundOrtega, F., & Orsini, M. (2020) · Global Public Health · doi:10.1080/17441692.2020.1795223 · Cited by 325
Metadata
- Authors
- Rhodes, R. A. W.
- Venue
- Organization Studies
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2007-08
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1243-1264
- ISSN
- 0170-8406 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-3044
- OpenAlex
- W2127868403
- Cited by
- 1,385
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 133.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Understanding Governance: Ten Years On. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0170840607076586
- The paper
- Rhodes, R. A. W. (2007). Understanding Governance: Ten Years On. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840607076586
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.