Abstract

The term «governance» does not merely name a new style, but rather a new concept of government, whose semantic field is marked by the dominance of the corporate logic of post-Fordism. On this plane, the traditional input-oriented legitimacy, based on the authorizing dynamics of political representation and on the fiction of social contract, gives way to an output-oriented legitimacy, linked to the performative capacity of institutions, i.e. the capacity of various institutional actors to link (contingent) interests and solve (equally contingent) problems. The participatory structure that distinguishes this new concept risks, however, obscuring the way in which power continues to be exercised and the capacity of a limited number of actors to guide its dynamics