Governance As Theory: Five Propositions, By Gerry Stoker

The topic that was chosen for this project is one that has been studied and looked into before. Many articles and even a few books have been written concerning the conflict of interest, the DSM, and the pharmaceutical industry, and literature also exists that deals with other aspects of the issue. Both sides of this issue contained relevant information for this project. In the literature that was anti-DSM, there was a clear bias. Using both sides, brought more neutrality to our perspective, which led to a less biased viewpoint. This project has taken a different path than others because it combines economics, political science, and sociology. Also, other authors gave their opinion on how this conflict of interest should be stopped,

Thereby we chose Gerry Stoker’s article from 1998, “Governance as theory: five propositions”. This article puts up 5 propositions that characterizes governance. As Stoker also states, these propositions lies the foundation for a questioning of how public administration traditionally has been viewed with extended focus on the government. Governance, according to Stoker means “a change in the meaning of government, referring to a new process of governing; or a changed condition of which society is governed” (Stoker, 1998, pp. 17). The priority of governance is to ultimately construct conditions for an ordered rule and a shared, unified action. Stoker states that “the first message of governance is to challenge constitutional/formal understandings of systems of government” (Stoker, 1998, pp. 19). This aspect was important to implement in the writings of this project because it helped to analyze the policies and institutions. Within the article about governance, Stoker writes about five different propositions that can be used to analyze the pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, the five propositions helped to understand the inner workings of the industry from a governance viewpoint (Stoker,