Paper short abstract:

A „Doing Governance“ approach allows us to take the practices into account, in which norms and their materializations are constructed. But this research is in need of proper analytical instruments. Our framework, which understands Governance as an achievement of figurations, can provide them.

Paper long abstract:

Concepts of governance had been applied primarily to institutional structures, normative factors like law, technology and social norms and to their materializations in written law, contracts or code. However, if we do not see them just as given artifacts, but also as a common construction of social reality, we can also shed light on uses and practices from a governance perspective. That's the "Doing Governance"-approach.

Unfortunately, theoretical concepts and methods needed for comprehensive analyses covering structures and processes are still missing. We propose to connect these by understanding governance as an achievement of figurations in terms of Norbert Elias. Such figurations show determinable features: Individual and collective actors form specific constellations. Power, privileges and responsibilities of the actors are corresponding with these. Furthermore, they realize specific communicative practices in determinable relevance frames. Looking at governance on the basis of this framework opens twofold methodological access: First, we can do hermeneutic content analyses of the materializations, and the normative structures thereby. Second, we can observe the figurations and analyze their features and communicative practices.

We illustrate that this framework is useful on the basis of the case of Governance of conflicts in search engine entries after the ECJ's decision on Google Spain. This forces companies such as Google, to set up their own procedures, rules and departments to handle deletion requests by users. We examine this change in governance of the use of search engines and show at the same time, how helpful the proposed framework is for understanding such transformations.