Selbstverwaltung und Selbstregulierung aus rechtshistorischer und governancetheoretischer Perspektive (Self-administration and Self-regulation from a Legal Historical and Governance Theoretical Perspective)

No. 2015-01

The aim of the paper is to look at the well-known phenomena of self-government and self-regulation, combining in a rather unusual way the governance perspective with the perspective of legal history. Starting point is the observation that nearly every group – as a collective entity with governance capacities (Governancekollektive) – has a tendency to set up rules and to manage its own affairs. These sociological findings explain a lot of the organisational behaviour of local, religious or professional communities, as many examples in legal history show. These institutional “figurations” (Norbert Elias) have to be distinguished from new modes of steering such as bargaining strategies or the “cooperative state” or the quite successful strategy of “regulated self-regulation”; a second glance shows that these new modes of governance are no real “relatives” of classic self-government. The paper concludes by looking at self-government and self-regulation as institutional expressions of a sense of belonging to a local, an ethnic or a religious collective unity.

Note: Downloadable document is in German.