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This article argues that even in its most critical moments public administrative thought has failed to move beyond the basic socio-political coordinates and divisions of modernity, elements of what the author calls the "political ontology of representation." Contemporary theories of governance, however, raise serious questions about the efficacy of this ontology and so open avenues for rethinking the nature of the field's inquiry and practices. These theories gesture toward a conception of order that breaks from the tripartite state-market-civil society model. But governance theory is not without its own lingering fidelity to representation that generates some important tensions and contradictions between its empirico-historical account of the contemporary world and its conceptual apparatus. The article concludes with an outline of how to advance our understanding of governance beyond representation and modernity through a fundamentally relational rather than sectoral conceptualization of governing called the "analysis of compositions." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We in public administration and the interdisciplinary spaces where public administration theory is increasingly relevant are seemingly engaged in an academic discourse about alternative constitutions of state administration, a fact that may be reason for optimism. Yet this is a fabricated discourse to the extent that there is very little discussion about how the state and its associated literary practices are constitutive and therefore whether or not this discourse represents genuinely liberating alternatives to the often undemocratic past. The lack of public debate and critical thinking about the concept of governance raises the question of whether or not governance can be considered a "democratic" development and whether or not it represents a break with previous conceptions and forms of the state. What has changed is not the ontology of the state, but the constitutive logic of the late capitalist state. In this brief discussion I re(ad)dress network governance and the ontology of the liberal constitutional state. Subsequently, I explore the question of whether or not governance represents a break with the ontology of liberal constitutionalism. Finally, I will propose that in their constituitiveness theories of the governance network represent a new constitutional theory of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]