This is a section of the research which I have been doing examining the bureaucratic processes, and the people who action them, in the social systems that govern the lives of many people in contemporary Britain. It is a sociological investigation prompted by the harms witnessed by institutional activity on the financially least advantaged populations.

You can read the previous section of this project ‘Action Research: Equity in Relation to the Problem’ by clicking HERE.

This article examines how society has notionalised bureaucracies and how these notions – as fictions – inform attitudes and behaviours in relation to the administrative systems people have to negotiate.  In a highly vertically integrated society of hierarchies (class ridden) there are many myths and fantasies curated to account for the way things are done as ideal.

These myths and fantasies I suggest are making people ill and killing people.  This is ‘strong meat’ as a statement but I contextualise this in relation to how prior to the travesty of the first world war, the reality of ‘shell shock’ which is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, was not recognised.  As a result, in the British history of this travesty, a great number of people were executed ‘by their own side’ for deserting simply because they no longer had their faculties about them due to the psychological trauma they were experiencing.

Administrative processes and structures are scrutinised here firstly in a historical way highlighting that they have been used specifically to concentrate power allowing people to make decisions on other people’s lives and situations at great distance.  Just like an algorithm is just an opinion in code (says Cathy O’Neill), policy and administrative processes I suggest are.  Policy and administration suggests itself as transparent and concrete, however a better investigation needs done to identify the differences between functional and degenerative forms of administration.

In line managed settings, people lower down the hierarchy are enacting the decisions of those up the hierarchy all too often marrying up their actions with an uncoupling of personal responsibility when it is their job on the line.  The offer of money and the threat of precarity manage to shift the value base of a great number of people.  This entropy of the individual in the face of power is a lasting problem in a colonial country like Britain; dissent is made unpractical and work groups police each other with soft power which hardens pretty quickly when challenged.

I place the ‘end user’ in this context pointing out there is a social organisation taking place in bureaucracies which is not explicit but eliding – that is, it all too often opaque as to the values at work in forming the outcomes carrying with them saintly institutional images protected from problematisation.

Preamble

A great deal of my interest as a researcher comes through dealings with my local authority on a number of occasions where the maintenance and repairs have been mismanaged.  When the administrative structures have failed and third party subcontractors have bungled their way through being paid for failure over years, it has placed me in a situation where the idea of trying to get anything done – however simple – is a living nightmare.

As a tenant I have seen situations where instead of fixing a leaking boiler, trade subcontractors came out time and time again to put pressure back in a leaking boiler system.  It felt like I was going mad because when I relayed this bonkers way of elongating a basic problem to people outside of my experience; I was regularly met with comments like “that cannot be right” or “you must be doing something wrong”.  This scenario became so bad that it got to the stage that ’emergency’ gas and heating engineers would come out to ‘fix the problem’ by putting more pressure into the worsened leaky boiler and by the time two days passed the boiler was not functioning again.

In the end, it was only when I got someone from a third sector organisation to stand in the house and witness the fact that engineers were turning up not to fix the problem but to put a sticking plaster on a broken leg that anything changed. It was through the agency which a third party observer brings that an inspector was then issued to come out to identify the problem and mandate a fix put forward; it turned out that the expansion vessel needed changed because it was indeed leaking pressure.  This took two years of increasingly smaller increments of time before the boiler failed again.

What was as equally hazardous to mental health was the fact that people who I tried to relate the situation to engaged in ‘secondary or tertiary gaslighting’, speaking from personal positions of cultural security and without knowledge on the subject.  Someone who is pulling down 40K per annum imagines the world is going as well for others as it is for them in a society which caters for the wealthy, in a society where people know that the wealthy can afford legal representation or to buy themselves out of problems.

I now have decades of experience with the labyrinthine and archaic structures of the local government, so much has my experience been traumatising that now, rather like the medical system, I avoid seeking any support unless it is absolutely vital because these systems are rubric bound and if the rubric is not suited for the situation it is damaging attempting to get something which is.

The thought of having to try and dialogue with non-transparent, faceless administrative systems to get say chronic draughts fixed in the badly installed antiquated double glazing where the seals to the glass panes don’t meet, means that I actively engage in a psychology called ‘Adaptive Preference Formation’ in order to avoid being brutalised by the administrative system and those who are actioning it…

This means that I adapt my preferences to accommodate situations which otherwise, to people in other more secure social tenure would not put up with. The complaint system of the local authority as in many laden structures is token – as are most nearly any situations where people mark their own homework; failure as a source of scandal is obfuscated in the name of ‘protecting institutional reputation’.

There is a tyranny of soft power at work in vertically line managed structures which can produce a context based narcissism in those at the top of the power juncture and a sort of trauma bonding co-dependency behaviour of those at the bottom of the power juncture. Just as Philip Zimbardo suggests in his book ‘The Lucifer Effect; Understanding How Good People Turn Evil‘ context shapes behaviour as he explores the nature of moral transformation as an outcome of the relationship between individual disposition, situation, and systems of power.

Drawing on another of many examples… There is a well known organisation involved with the local authority which talks a good game but is widely known to be feckless; after months of trying when I finally got a visit from an employee to look at draught exclusion (necessary in a northern latitude), they handed me a tube of silicon sealant and said that is all they can do.  As useful as a chocolate teapot; recently – several years later – at the guidance of the local authority I attempted to get their help in relation to seeking support for spiraling energy bills they wrote back after a couple of months telling me to email them again in several months. Spectacularly unregulated, spectacularly useless.

The latest in the saga relationship with dysfunctional administrative systems has been my having sought permission from the local authority to have my boiler disconnected due to the escalating extortion of the energy companies based in the dodgy hell gates we call the stock market. Knowing that I could not afford the rising costs of heating my home as well as afford to eat and study and travel – I saw my only option to remove a cost by switching off my gas supply to the property.

Learning from many years of experience I forensically documented every step of the way and sought permissions prior to any action; (this has been a long term project of ethnographic documentation for me). I got permission and then got the boiler disconnected, which interestingly was extremely hard to get the energy supplier to do – they employed many tactics to avoid doing this.  Once done, and having communicated all this step by step, I started to get cards put through my door for annual gas checks which – surprise, surprise – were happening more than once annually, and which brought along with it all the chaos of the subcontractors not being contactable to properly arrange an appointment when I could be in.

Going back over the years, several times in my life I have returned to my home having found that the door had been forced and the locks changed.  Several times in my life I have had the trauma of being broken into by the council contractors due to their incompetence.  Several times I have had to provide documentary evidence with the witness statements of senior third sector organisations showing the malfunction/malfeasance was on the contractors side, not mine, and as a result the sub-contractors were found errant and removed from their running contract and replaced with another subcontractor. Never an apology despite statutory law in Scotland making provision for this.

After I hit a point of desperation I got in touch with my local politician; I could not sleep properly, I was scared to leave my house, I lived with the fear of arbitrary power locking me out of my own home.  I asked them to please investigate the issue as no-one in the council department was dealing with this ongoing issue; I had been met with silence by the housing department.  The politician got back in touch and for a while I really had hope as they were apparently versed with issues of mental health brought about by stress.  They had said that they had got in touch with the head of the housing department and initiated an investigation.

What followed was a communication from a housing officer whom I had been trying very hard to coordinate with over the issues of housing, along with two emails from the housing department I had not seen before appended to the CC function. The communication said that I had not been given permission to disconnect my boiler and without a suitable means to heat the house I would be in default of my tenancy as it risked damp; to this I responded that I had been keeping forensic documentation of all communications (having been prepared enough to have been copying in advocacy from the beginning and going through the whole process by the numbers) and could provide this by way of timestamped legal documents. As well as this, I made them aware that I had a dehumidifier (which I use to prevent my breathing problems becoming exacerbated from damp).  The line of communication went dead…

The uncertainty continued along with the silence; the damaging effect it has had on my life has been very disruptive.  Any sense of security in my own home has been stolen by the bureaupathology at work (See Prof Gerald Caiden for his scholarly detailing of this as a part of his administrative reform and United Nations research).

The most therapeutic thing has been to document and analyse my experience to rationalize what was happening.  I got in touch with the politician again asking about whether the investigation was going to take account of my experience and take statements; I also made it clear that I did not think it was not individuals I felt which were at fault because only a systems problem can account for the consistent failures over time.  I emphasised that my complaint was not a vexatious claim I was making but I was pushing for a systems fix which ultimately would save the local government a whole load of money as what Prof John Seddon phrases “Failure Demand” would be avoided.

And what have I got in response to this ? Silence. Deafening silence. No dialogue, no reassurance, no investigation of the systems failure(s) which were witnessed by senior support workers at a reputable third sector organisation.

I have adapted my life to live with the cold of the winters and the absence of some functioning basics because of the damage which is done in engaging with the administrative processes utilised to deter people from getting the rudimentary services needed to maintain a property as having modern amenities.

‘Why is this ?’ some retorts snort with disbelief finding it hard to imagine that an organisation with such agency can behave such a way.  We are quick to judge places like the USSR when they refused to acknowledge anything like corruption or incompetence could happen in their culture; things ain’t so good here on a number of fronts in dodgy Britannia. When you ask any of the old and bold of a range of support services – those who have not left the profession for more secure income to base their lives on – they say ‘the more things change, the more things stay the same’… What I am saying here is no secret that you have to go digging deeply for; you need only scratch the surface veneer to find the shit show beneath.

Support workers and third sector organisations are all too familiar – off the record – with accounts of how the local administrations have created an impenetrable system which has failure baked in; but they are mindful to remember where their bread is buttered too.  They are familiar with the fact that an expensive part of their time is involved in sitting on a phone waiting for a call to be answered in a call center in another city to jump through a number of hoops only to lend their authority as an employed skilled helper to verify that the system has malfunctioned again and it needs corrected in another given instance.  They are commonly familiar with the hostile environment which greases the bottom of the ladder to deter people from trying to climb up it.

This kind of sociological setting creates such precarity, such uncertainty and anxiety that all kinds of spin off harms come about, from self medication for the stress, to what gets diagnosed – not as sociological aberration caused by the systems purporting to solve the problems they cause but – as mental illness come about through nervous exhaustion.  The narcissistic and abusive behaviours of corporate structures are rife; be it in places and times in local authorities or being in stock market run companies – like phone companies – which writhe like a leviathan before they let people out of a contract which they have been shafting someone with.

The setting is, of course, important to unpack the behavioural mores which get played out in the cultural setting.  Dehumanisation goes on in everyday settings and people are treated as less than human, sometimes with less care than gets given to cats or houseplants.  When someone’s job is threatened, groups close ranks and tend to punch down.

This is understandable because the way corporate structures are forged is to use people and discard them – throw them under a bus, if needed; workers are useful when they are useful, but deadweight costs when a new bottom line is being eyed up. For millennia humans have enacted the ritual where a goat must be picked in a setting of complicity and into that the evil spirits of the village are exorcised before it is driven out – sometimes with a golden handshake, sometimes with a shunning chorus of tutting.

Whistleblowers and critical voices are commonly perceived and treated as problems – in commercial companies, in local authorities, in health services, in policing, in churches etc.  Why are sources of the vital criticism necessary for functional evolution towards better arrangements pushed to the margins ?  There is some interesting work in the field of dehumanization psychology which might offer an account of an ecology of perceptions which facilitate the moral disengagement from the public and others when looking onto scenarios where a victim has called out a victimizer only to find themselves shunned into silence too:

“Consider a situation where one person physically assaults another individual. In this case, the perpetrator is clearly the one who becomes aggressive, and the victim is the recipient of that aggression. At times, there may be onlookers—those who see the altercation take place but also those who hear about it secondhand (perhaps from a friend who saw the abuse or from one of the parties involved). We argue that dehumanization may arise from any one of these perspectives.

By taking account of these different points of view, we will highlight that dehumanization cuts both ways, affecting how perpetrators view their victims and how victims view their perpetrators. Beyond being confined to victims and perpetrators, observers of these transgressions form impressions of both victims and perpetrators, and in doing so may view both parties as dehumanized.

Finally, dehumanization may be evident not only in the perceptions of others, but also in self-perception. Victims of interpersonal harm may feel that their humanity has been reduced due to their own maltreatment. Likewise, when perpetrators treat others in less-than-desirable ways, these actions may change how perpetrators see themselves.”

As someone who is forensically documenting and detailing these failures of my local authority, I find it quite intriguing how little interest there is from people who discuss critical pedagogy.  Eyes glaze over and silence becomes thick.  Intriguingly I have also found that senior civil servants have been very responsive to conversation, which has surprised me.

What I suspect is the problem is the structure of our organisations being opaque and punitive and riddled with middle management entranced with abstractions of outcomes and measurements, cost savings and efficiencies, graphs and charts, meetings about meetings. We must question the paradigm of how society is being organised to protect ‘institutional reputation’ as it is bringing about a bad reputation….Hence this action research project.

A History of Bureaucracy

An analysis of the origins of the word ‘bureaucracy’ sheds light on its nature. There’s a long-standing tension in organizations between effectiveness, innovation, efficiency and bureaucracy. Excessive layers of management and antiquated processes are often implicated when a promising idea fails to realise its potential or when a service becomes decrepit.

The tension contained in the word can be traced back at least 340 years, to friction between two French government officials. In 1665 King Louis XIV appointed Jean-Baptiste Colbert as his comptroller general of finance to shore up bad management in the economy. Colbert prosecuted corrupt officials and reorganized commerce and industry according to economic principles in mercantilism. To assure the population that the government would act fairly in monetary disputes, he imposed a set of regulations that all officials were to abide by.

In 1751 Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay became France’s administrator of commerce. Gournay was outraged by what Colbert had put in place and spoke out against the multitude of government regulations he believed were suppressing business activity. To describe a government run by insensitive creators and enforcers of rules, who neither understood nor cared about the consequences of their actions, he coined the term bureaucratie which translated directly to “government by desks” [35].

 

[35] William H. Starbuck, “Bureaucracy” Becomes a Four-Letter Word, Harvard Business Review, October 2005, Taken from Internet 08/08/2014 http://hbr.org/2005/10/bureaucracybecomes-a-four-letter-word/ar/1

In 1838 John Stuart Mill wrote about this arrangement: “That vast network of administrative tyranny which did not exist under old French government, which the Convention created for a temporary purpose, and which Napoleon made permanent: that system of bureaucracy, which leaves no free agent in all France, except for the man at Paris who pulls the wires” [79].

This history has relevance as now we face an economy with generations of people in management jobs which create administrative systems for tasks they have no real life experience of, and layers of management (middle management) existing in abstraction from real life situations, who are isolated from experiential discovery by the systems they have created [120].

 

[120] Everjoice Winn; ‘If It Doesn’t Fit on the Blue Square It’s Out’ An Open Letter to My Donor Friend’, Inclusive Aid: Changing Power and Relationships in International Development By Leslie Christine Groves, Rachel Barbara Hinton, Page 123

Accountability in Contemporary Organisations

Organisational knowledge is text mediated throughout contemporary organisations in post-industrial society. The care work Campbell et al [54] studied via Institutional Ethnography was organized through text-based practices which co-ordinated it, and made it accountable. Here the quality of accountability is worth exploring more thoroughly as an element of a functional bureaucracy. The term accountability must be set in a relative context – that is, something is more accountable (being transparent to all) and less accountable (being transparent only to the author).

 

[54] Marie L. Campbell, Institutional Ethnography and Experience as Data, Qualitative Sociology, March 1998, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp 55-73

The question and axiom “Accountable to Whom ?” is important here. What documentary information is made available to whom, and how well does the text based practice reflect the real life experience of the stakeholders ? If we off set this against Webers criterion of functional bureaucracy we can start developing an understanding of how to assess a system of administration against ideas of effectiveness. Lack of accountability defeats a core purpose of administration; the ability for multiple people to coordinate around a complex task such that, when another party needs to take on a role which is part of the matrix, all the necessary information is available to perform the necessary functions which each remit demands.

Not only this but, should an issue arise, ownership, authorship and responsibility need to be inherent in the information to be able to track where a specific issue arose. This information should be inherent and serve a forensic capacity. These characteristics of accountability, transparency, ownership, authorship, and responsibility are all critical in a functional bureaucracy

Characteristics of Bureaucracy

Max Weber famously wrote about the ‘Characteristics of Bureaucracy’ [23]. He describes how “modern officialdom functions”, articulating “there is the principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, that is, by laws or administrative regulations… The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones.

Such a system offers the governed the possibility of appealing the decision of a lower office to its higher authority, in a definitely regulated manner. With the full development of the bureaucratic type, the office hierarchy is monocratically organized… Specialized office management – and such management is distinctly modern – usually presupposes thorough and expert training… The management of the modern office is based upon written documents (“the files”), which are preserved in their original or draught form… The management of the office follows general rules, which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be learned.” [23]

 

[23] Max Weber: Essays in Sociology by Max Weber (author), edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Copyright 1946 Oxford University Press, Inc

To summarize Webers description of bureaucracy:

• The management of the modern office is based on written documents
• The office hierarchy is monocratically organized
• Such a system offers the governed the possibility of appealing the decision of a lower office to its higher authority
• The management of the office follows general rules which can be learned

Distortions of the Function of Bureaucracies

Here we can start to understand the differences between the comparative positions and opportunities afforded to those inside the system (enfranchised) and those outside the system (disenfranchised). In the management of modern social services, the culture of paperwork is an imperative one, with which individuals approaching the services for support, are expected to be able to engage with, should the individual in question desire access to support in some form.

The bureaucracies presuppose ‘thorough and expert training’ and that ‘the office follows general rules…which can be learned’ [23]. The realities of living and working with modern social services bureaucracies is that the client side does not receive the necessary training required to engage successfully with the system of management which is pivotal to operate in the society it constructs.

Often there is a situation where the governmental position of clerks in benefits is one where they cannot advise on what benefits the individual is entitled to nor can they advise the individual in their application for benefits. This is not specific to benefits offices but is common to the proliferating bureaucracies that come with the type of managerialism which accompanies an increased ‘tendering culture’ for any kind of funding resource acquisition or request for opportunity.

The rules of the system are opaque to those outside, the language of the system is esoteric and the qualifying criteria kept secret. This command and control, top down culture of managerialism is also imposed on smaller organisations in a landscape of imperfect knowledge which is deliberately maintained such that organisations are held in a rigid hierarchy and pitted against each other in said tendering processes.

These tendering processes are costly in organisational and financial terms, and the sunken costs are iterative. The result is that these processes cause organisations and individuals to fail, thinning the diversity of involvement and inviting skewed metrics of need – should the measurement of need be based upon applicants.

The stifling and opaque paperworks serve a rhetoric of efficiency, in practice causing many enterprises and individuals to ‘fail through trying’. The outcome is that large and established organisations, and enfranchized trained individuals which have the resources to weather the tendering ‘decision-making-cycles’ have come to dominate the landscape.

Thus the enfranchised individual gains the help needed by the disenfranchised, and the dominant organisations (and companies) maintain and increase their hold on the opportunity market, all the time a narrowing succession of monopolies.

The idea that the “system offers the governed the possibility of appealing the decision of a lower office to its higher authority” is now an antiquated notion. Now complaints mechanisms are lateralized in a structure (non-agential) or entirely externalized to an isolated ombudsman which usually offers little more than a voluntary code of conduct to industry sectors.

The level of abstraction is so significant now that higher levels of administration and decision making are explicitly unreachable without the chain of command elevating the query, in sequence (and, in theory, without losing detail but what in practice results in a process of Chinese whispers).

For example, the Care Commission – which is responsible for overseeing standards and ‘quality control’ in the caring professions of the UK – cannot be approached without the authority and qualification of a third sector organisation without the elevation of a complaint. Acutely observable is the effect of call centres, to utterly isolate the user from any responsive core of the companies in question.

Any interaction is not documented on the user end and the operators are limited (often low paid and undertrained) in what they can do. Accountability and demonstrability are removed from the structure and therefore the requisite evidences for engaging legal processes are occluded, by proxy omitting the possibility of engaging the legal system as a form of just representation.

Entropy in Vertical Systems

In ‘The Politics of Bureaucracy’ Gordon Tullock devoted considerable attention to the loss of control as orders go down or information comes up through a bureaucratic hierarchy. The person supervising three people cannot know as much as each one does about a particular problem or work unless it is very simple. They are also unable to determine how much attention each person is giving to the job.

If they supervise three people and each of these people are supervising a further three people, the problem is thus compounded. Supervisors do not have perfect control at each stage. To some extent, the people in the next stage below will be doing things which their immediate supervisors do not want and have already deviated from the person at the top’s position. The deviation increases exponentially as the number of levels is increased [85].

Early in basic training, the American army used to employ an experiment as a teaching device. Seven to ten soldiers would be arranged in a large circle out of earshot of each other. The remainder of the unit would be concentrated at a point on the circle. The officer in charge of the experiment would then give a simple message to the soldier at that point which would be heard by the ‘audience’ but not by any of the other soldiers on the circle. The next soldier would run to deliver the message to the next man on the circle who would pass it along to the third, and so on until the circle was complete.

The last soldier would repeat the message, as he thought he had received it, to the officer in the hearing of the ”audience”. There was normally little resemblance between the message after it had completed its circuit and the original text. The message that the army drew from this was that messages should be written rather than oral – concise and verbatim.

In the first place, careful selection and training of personnel would, no doubt, secure somewhat improved results over that achieved through the use of untrained recruits. The basic principle has a truth to it. The method is highly inefficient as a means of transmitting information. The amount of error (“noise” in communications theory terminology) increases exponentially with the increase in the number of persons in the transmission chain and with the complexity of the message transmitted. The cause of this phenomenon is not really the use of oral rather than written transmission.

There are probably some errors of simple mistake in understanding, but the main distortions arise within the brains of each person. The person hears a message, mentally interprets its contents, and selects the important points for repetition to the next person and reduces it through simplification. Through a series of such reductive operations, the original message becomes something entirely different.

If the message should be transmitted by means of a written note obviously there would be no distortion if each man simply made an exact copy. But if each man should receive a written note, discard it, and then run to the next person and write out the note again in their own words, roughly the same pattern of distortion could be predicted. The distortion of information is found in the reduction, simplification and abstraction from circumstance.

The experiment is useful in refuting the popular view of the way in which a bureaucracy works. The “normal” or standard version of bureaucracy seems to be something like the following: The lower levels of the structure receive information from various sources. This information is then passed upward through the pyramid. At the various levels the information is analyzed, collated, and coordinated with other information that originates in separate parts of the pyramid.

Eventually, the information reaches the top level where the basic policy decisions are made concerning the appropriate actions to be taken. These decisions on policy are then passed down through the pyramid with each lower level making the administrative decisions that are required to implement the policies sent from on high.

“This descriptive scheme has not, to my knowledge, been used by any serious student of bureaucratic hierarchies, but it does seem be the version held by the ‘average person’ and by most bureaucrats themselves. The army experiment discussed disproves this theory of bureaucracy” [86].

There are many sources of ‘noise’ in a bureaucratic system which results in varying outcomes. The effect is often a level of arbitrariness that can manifest as B. F. Skinner’s variable-ratio (VR) reinforcement [121], and Martin Seligman’s Learned Helplessness [95]. In these settings, cultural capital, as laid out by Pierre Bourdieu [101] and Linking Social Capital as laid out by Professor Simon Szreter [122] play critical roles in outcomes from individuals; i.e. what changes for the client.

 

[121] Terry J. Knapp, ‘Behaviorism and Public Policy: B. F. Skinner’s Views on Gambling’, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Behavior and Social Issues, Volume 7, No. 2, Fall 1997

---

“We have seen that a major consequence of experience with uncontrollable events is motivational: uncontrollable events undermine the motivation to initiate voluntary responses that control other events. A second major consequence is cognitive: once a man or an animal has had experience with uncontrollability, he has difficulty learning that his response has succeeded, even when it is actually successful. Uncontrollability distorts the perception of control….They had difficulty perceiving that responses could affect success or failure….Learned helplessness produces a cognitive set in which people believe that success and failure is independent of their own skilled actions, and they therefore have difficulty learning that responses work”

 

[95] Peterson, C., Maier, S., and Seligman, M.E.P. (1993). Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford. Page 37

---

 

 

[101] Bourdieu, P., Nice, R., & Bennett, T. (2010). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge. ISBN: 0-415-04546-0 Page 162

---

 

 

[122] Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock, Health by association? Social capital, social theory and the political economy of public health, International Journal of Epidemiology 2003; 33:1–18 DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyh013, International Epidemiological Association 2003

For example, my elocuted, posh accent counts for me gaining a receptive ear in some places, because of the ingroup and outgroup assumptions which go with dialect; however, by broken teeth and disheveled clothes count against me in gaining ingroup status, and the nurturing behaviours which accompany such an association.

The Social Organisation of Bureaucracies

Smith has argued that this form of text based interaction is ubiquitous in contemporary western societies, discursively organising social relations in ways that can be investigated as practical activities. Managers often rely on texts for their knowing experience, their human interactions and their environment in ways relative to those of frontline workers, the clients, and extensions of these core peoples (i.e. family, friends, and extended society).

In the process of gathering observational and interview data, there are often different versions of what was understood and what actually happened as the individuals which are engaged speak from different ways of knowing the workplace and the work. A significant proportion of the work in any organisation consists of turning events, experiences, transactions of the people whose lives are its concerns into text and acting on the basis of those text based accounts [54].

 

[54] Marie L. Campbell, Institutional Ethnography and Experience as Data, Qualitative Sociology, March 1998, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp 55-73

Ng shows how accountability relations influence an organisation’s goals and activities: “The emergence of a hierarchical division of labour into board and staff indicated how relations within the employment agency were transformed as a result of the incorporation and funding procedures” [68]

“Categories and concepts of ideologies substitute the ideological expression of a textually mediated discourse for actual relations, that is, actual practices, work processes and the organization of practical knowledge of actual individuals. Thus an examination of the actual relations, practices and processes, and the discursive forms substituted for them, reveals the ideological features of social organization [53]”.

 

[53] Gillian Walker, The Conceptual Politics of Struggle: Wife Battering, the Women’s Movement, and the State, Studies in Political Economy 33, Autumn 1990, pp 63 – 90

“Not only does ruling rely on specialized knowledge, but a central task of ruling is to organize and generate knowledge in a form that is useful for ruling practice…A setting known through special texts may appear to be different from how it is known experientially and…this may create problems [52]” both for managers who rely heavily on textual accounts and for caring persons whose work is tied to local settings where knowing has an immediacy grounded in its physical present.

While people understand their experiences in organisations through text based mediations, they remain bodily present in a physical reality which is not codified into the abstractions of written language and bureaucracy. The active experiences of the everyday world from their various locations in it are more important than the compressed representations which are reduced down to form an administrative matrix. This places a humanist perspective as a rationale and source of knowledge.

The position one occupies in an organisation determines what one experiences, and the position from which you derive your perspective shapes what can be known to an important extent. De Montigny provides an illustration and analysis of how this happens:

“To do social work is to engage in socially organized practices of power: the power to investigate, to assess, to produce authorized accounts, to present case ‘facts’, and to intervene in people’s lives…Foucault’s notion of a ‘mechanics of power’, the exercise of power as realized through specific tools, is used to focus on one particular tool for the exercise of power, its textual production in the form of organizational records. Specific acts of textual production are moves through which forms of professional power are constructed….Power is realized as social workers construct their accounts about client lives and thereby appropriate for themselves the right to tell the story and to decide what gets counted as relevant” [51].

The ruling relations must be seen from relative perspectives, whereby account must be taken not only of clients who receive support from services, but importantly from the context of the frontline workers as well. The dispossessing nature of hierarchical bureaucracies impacts greatly on those working in the juncture of service and need.

Being hired to fulfill a job remit, and then being put under conditions which prevent the individual from achieving the remit has radical and disturbed consequences. The situations which become engendered put the individuals in double binds, leading to the increased likeliness of stress induced illnesses [69]. One such illustration is given in the report written by Professor Alexis Jay OBE on the child sexual exploitation which went on in Rotherham between 1997 – 2013.

 

[69] Frances E. Cheek, Marie Di Stefano Miller, The experience of stress for correction officers: A double-bind theory of correctional stress, Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 11, Issue 2, 1983, Pages 105–120

Here an excerpt puts into sharp relief the disenfranchised position which frontline workers were put in: “Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham.

The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of coverup. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them. In the early 2000s, a small group of professionals from key agencies met and monitored large numbers of children known to be involved in Child Sexual Exploitation or at risk but their managers gave little help or support to their efforts.

Some at a senior level in the Police and children’s social care continued to think the extent of the problem, as described by youth workers, was exaggerated, and seemed intent on reducing the official numbers of children categorised as Child Sexual Exploitation. At an operational level, staff appeared to be overwhelmed by the numbers involved” [70].

 

[70] Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997 – 2013 Alexis Jay OBE, Independent Inquiry was commissioned by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council in October 2013. Accessed online 11.09.2014: https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherhamXV0=

What we might take from this exploration is that a simplistic, binary notion of power is not sufficient to represent the complexities or barriers which people face. As we shift our perception from one position of understanding to another, we find that different levels of privileged information emerge, as are situated notions of the double bind for the different people engaged in the support/need juncture.

It is important to analyse the differences in the possibilities of knowing that relate to the knower’s location, everyday work and their means. Central to embodying a deeper picture is understanding how such local experiences are ruled discursively and thus contracted ideologically as the same across all knowers due to the dominant paradigm being that of the managerial text. Gillian Walker suggests that “Discursive organisation” is the practical activity of policy making and governing.

The Stereotype and Policy Composed Ideals

In institutional and policy controlled settings, the danger is the mean representation of the realities which people encounter. When this mean representation is taken into practice and the worldly experience dismissed for the mean policy perspective, the extremes are imagined away and thus not engaged with. This homogenisation is anathema to the realities people live with.

The policy perspective also carries the aspirational ideal that paints the world as imagined. For example doctors embody the Hippocratic Oath and always put the patients needs first, mothers are nurturing and loving, teachers always seek to improve you and give you the knowledge that you need; your lovers love you.

These aspirational ideals embedded in the hearts of institutional structures are misleading on the occasions when human fallibility is manifest in Moral Hazard. It is imperative to accept this fallibility as a reality especially in institutional spaces where the professional is shielded by governance structures as an organisation protects itself. This imperative is vital to protect the erosion of the ideal via its positive overshadowing of calamitous failure.

For example, doctors can malpractice, mothers can be abusive, teachers can impede the growth and understanding of people; and your lovers can destroy you. The ideal, the role and the individual can all be assumptions, and assumed upon. In the world which policy constructs and inhabits, stereotyping prevails and generates real world behaviour based upon misrecognition manifest through ladders of inference (a common mental pathway of increasing abstraction, often leading to misguided beliefs) [123].

 

[123] Senge, P. M., Senge, P. M., ‘The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization’, Random House Business; 2nd Revised edition edition, ISBN: 978- 1905211203, Page 178

Bibliography of References

[23] Max Weber: Essays in Sociology by Max Weber (author), edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Copyright 1946 Oxford University Press, Inc

[35] William H. Starbuck, “Bureaucracy” Becomes a Four-Letter Word, Harvard Business Review, October 2005, Taken from Internet 08/08/2014 http://hbr.org/2005/10/bureaucracybecomes-a-four-letter-word/ar/1

[51] De Montigny, G, 1995, ‘The Power of Being Professional’ in M Campbell and A. Manicorn (eds) Knowledge experience and ruling relations, pp. 209- 220, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Page 209 – 219

[52] Campbell and Manicorn, 1995, ‘Knowledge, experience and ruling relations’, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Page 9

[53] Gillian Walker, The Conceptual Politics of Struggle: Wife Battering, the Women’s Movement, and the State, Studies in Political Economy 33, Autumn 1990, pp 63 – 90

[54] Marie L. Campbell, Institutional Ethnography and Experience as Data, Qualitative Sociology, March 1998, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp 55-73

[68] Roxana Ng, 1996, ‘The Politics of Community Services: Immigrant Women, Class and State, 2nd Ed, Halifax: Fernwood, Page 90

[69] Frances E. Cheek, Marie Di Stefano Miller, The experience of stress for correction officers: A double-bind theory of correctional stress, Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 11, Issue 2, 1983, Pages 105–120

[70] Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997 – 2013 Alexis Jay OBE, Independent Inquiry was commissioned by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council in October 2013. Accessed online 11.09.2014: http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_inquiry_cse_in_rotherham

[79] J.S. Mill, The Westminster Review, Volume 28, Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1838, Original from University of Chicago

[85] The Selected Writings of Gordon Tullock, Volume 6, Bureaucracy, Liberty Fund, ISBN: 0865975256, Page 263

[86] The Selected Writings of Gordon Tullock, Volume 6, Bureaucracy, Liberty Fund, ISBN: 0865975256, 148 – 149

[95] Peterson, C., Maier, S., and Seligman, M.E.P. (1993). Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford

[101] Bourdieu, P., Nice, R., & Bennett, T. (2010). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge. ISBN: 0-415-04546-0

[120] Everjoice Winn; ‘If It Doesn’t Fit on the Blue Square It’s Out’ An Open Letter to My Donor Friend’, Inclusive Aid: Changing Power and Relationships in International Development By Leslie Christine Groves, Rachel Barbara Hinton, Page 123

[121] Terry J. Knapp, ‘Behaviorism and Public Policy: B. F. Skinner’s Views on Gambling’, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Behavior and Social Issues, Volume 7, No. 2, Fall 1997

[122] Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock, Health by association? Social capital, social theory and the political economy of public health, International Journal of Epidemiology 2003; 33:1–18 DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyh013, International Epidemiological Association 2003

[123] Senge, P. M., Senge, P. M., ‘The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization’, Random House Business; 2nd Revised edition edition, ISBN: 978- 1905211203, Page 178