Coordination to the fourth power

Well, the republic is saved and this week’s competition for best academic abstract is all but over. The title alone — “Emerging Theoretical Understanding of Pluricentric Coordination in Public Governance” — essentially ended the competition. But within the abstract itself, the Danish authors of the paper surpass the title by miles and miles, hitting this new height of obfuscatory explanation: “Although the traditional theories of coordination tended to view vertical and horizontal forms of coordination as radically different modes of coordination, the new theories question the analytical value of this distinction by pointing to the relational, interpretive, interdependent, and interactive aspects of all coordination processes including processes in which public authorities seek to govern their subjects.” Game, set, match (without mentioning four uses of the word “coordination” in a single sentence). Even if they were aided by a bad translation or less than fluent English language skills, I have only one thing to say to these researchers: Good work, Danes!