This is the next installment of a long running scrutinisation of how bureaucracies and organisational structures are operating in the lives of people who live under them. The articles published on this website are a series of ethnographic perspectives in the preambles brought together with sections of a more academic thesis which interrogates the imposition of paperworks such as ‘The Outcomes Star’ bureaucracies on the third sector and the ultimately the people who rely on support from the third sector to survive in the highly financialised sociological setting of modern day Britain.

 

Accompanying these articles designed to provoke more reflective thought within policy and practice circles (please lord let it be so!) are a series of interviews and transcripts done with a range of people who work from ‘the front lines’ of social care up to senior civil servants and CEO’s of third sector organisations who have to navigate this complex terrain.  As frontis pieces to each installment more ethnographic preambles are offered using more fruity language to break up and the academic dryness of the language of the main study. You can find the collection of published work so far by clicking HERE.

 

You can read the previous section of this project ‘Action Research: A History of Bureaucracy’ by clicking HERE.

 

This article examines the political nature of bureaucracies – governance systems which extend the reach of decisions made from a centralised seat of power; moral hazard and adverse selection – situations where there is an asymmetry of information between two parties and changes in the behavior of one happens after an agreement between the two because that asymmetry of information is exploited.

 

I then go on to explore how public value is being displaced in an increasingly financialised society which is forcing people to abandon humane values.  As this abandonment of values happens and moral disengagement occurs slowly and steadily I draw on management theorists and sociologists to explore how this marketisation of our living world can be challenged and the alienation of people checked.

 

Preamble

Stories, stories, stories, stories… I am sick of my stories; I am sick from my stories.  In bureaucracies and when faced with engaging an institutional apparatus I am made to perform stories. Asked to recount traumas and rehearse how I arrived at the support/need juncture endlessly I am made to perform before the account becomes tailored to fit the little blue boxes into which one has to recount eight, or three, or five or whatever number of years of experience.

 

 

Besides those junctures where I am asked to give accounts of traumas, searing moments of life which have sliced into me or smashed me stealing dreams of a society of humans that gives a damn, I am made to repeat and repeat how systems failures have happened bringing about a situation where the mundane becomes traumatic – I am shifted down the paperwork factory line to tell the next line managed person the same set of details which I had to to the person before.

 

 

Pretty soon; after enough times, you feel like a dancing monkey threatened with the knackers yard unless I do that dance, and do that dance with a smile on my face, a Duchenne smile, something which says ‘thank you, thank you, thank you for mercy master’.  Formed into ‘peer communities’ you have to tell the story of the pain, of the people who have taken it on themselves to break you into the shape they feel you should be in, a paper folded, tangled, mixed up cypher of a self and a policy architype performed with grace and anxiety but not real angst.

 

Passed through and round the KPI mill from exited service to exited service, from crumbling pillar to flogging post, lambasted by the shame of poverty and the forthrightness of privilege, the soft Machiavellianism of process manuals and their velvet waiting rooms start to make up endless corridors in a mind which is not your own; a labyrinth walked by the managers and ‘product’, a repeating instrumentalising nightmare of a deferent society plied with soma to keep you going, pliant and keep you quiet.

 

 

The surreal supplants the real as layered on the ancient root system of interpersonal interaction and social dynamic come the cyphers of the fictions of funders, fundraisers, consultants and managers tumbling down like a ticker-tape parade on the fifth estate from the glass and steel towers built to elevate often coked investment classes into the clouds where their dopamine surges thrill them with senses of their causality. Meantime on street level the sunlight is blocked out; a place to sit in the sun has gone along with the benches, public amenities and air fit to breathe.

 

Poetic don’t you think; it feels good with all the details knocked off, polished and distant, unvisceral and safe – nothing which can thoroughly threaten the technocratic paradise which we see on the metaphysical billboard posters that advertise the sleek aspirational statements that the good citizen embodies. None of the tears, or blood, or misery; none of the chronic hours and days of laying still – just still, incapacitated by the desolation.  Too costly to get on a bus and buy coffee; too costly to buy a fish supper any more or take part in social rituals or engagements. Still, still, still, just still – if I lie still enough will time pass less painfully in thought ? Days are filled with stillness and isolation because the scorn of not having money when out in the world slices into you through expressions of snobbery, fear and misanthropy.

 

 

Snobbery because some people look at you and judge you on the clothes you wear which are unbranded or from a cheap retailer. I buy clothes when I am compelled to because I cannot afford to pick and choose. Walking through the economy bargain stores I think of other people of relatable situations somewhere else in the world made to produce clothes and textiles with their slave labor which they don’t have the option of not offering up. So I wear the garb of exploitative and unsustainable textile producers painfully in my local context occasionally some Trustifarian hipster brought up in walled gardens or Hyacinth Bucket from a bridge team choir, a new money slieghter or solipcistic mercenary sneers because I’m not wearing Patagonia.

 

Fear because people fear what they don’t know so wince when you ask them what time they make it or hold a door open for them, lining their mind a notion that whatever you do it is part of a ruse carefully planned and orchestrated to hoodwink and separate what they have from them – they look at you like a criminal but never check where their pension fund is getting its gains from. Being looked at like a thief without a right to reply as yet undiscovered is stock and trade of the caste system seared into the souls of an ever so ‘umble British mentality which runs from the rafters to the ash floors. It is painful to see that alienating look in the eyes of people, a barely perceptible glassy terror positioning offence as the best defense in the day to day meandering pantomime.

 

Misanthropy because the darkest part of night is held in the worst of humans actions, humans who are more common than we are led to publicly acknowledge amongst the mundane isolation of the fairytales of noble and just deeds and actions. Some who wear the mantles of healer, leader, justice, nurse, companion and lover draw from their status some twisted Kane like mandate of wrath sometimes displayed like a bully to get followers in a playground, sometimes secreted as a black dagger when you have been brought in from a storm under a charade of hospitality.

 

 

These damages are repeated and recreated in the human interpersonal space – the misanthrope as real as the philanthrope – and built into the bureaucratic depersonalised structures which shape and determine the paths individuals are allowed to take in a predetermined society. Charity has become a profitable industry for some and a secular indulgence for others pinned to lapels, a brocade of status rolled out like belly thunder at a feast where pinched humour marvels at the fact that the worlds largest needles were manufactured in order to march camels through with marching bands.

 

 

The worst of all of the performative story telling is the damage to others. That is what broke my last straw, the moment I decided to die standing on my feet for when in a run of bad fortune when happened upon the golden souls who really listen and give their lives over to understanding the make up of the hardened amygdalic responses that haunt broken responses to the chaos of a structurally violent society, in the sheen of the black pearl held inside my chest I glimpsed the tears of an empath. Here the deepest and most final pain comes.

 

The secondary trauma that others take on as they listen to the twists and turns that have brought you to that moment is the most indigestible of all. When doctors, nurses and support workers, strangers and companions identify the helplessness of the human condition and the sociological cascades that have brought about the harms they too weep for what could, should be, the joy of life.

 

 

Coming to understand the first position of humanness, that when someone stubs their toe and it is seen, others feel too that pain; that was the moment I decided not to share the stories made up of insoluble problems and bring others into the double binds. Misery loves company and invites in others to see from the inside a barbed and tangled hierarchy; sentience desires otherness in various forms as it is a bread of life, the precious make up of love as an expression of happiness.

 

 

Secondary trauma is a tempest which keeps people bound to a place which suggests no resolve. Its doppler complexity continues through generations and across apartheid walls re-enacting its knarly sorrow like weeping wounds that will not close. Even the strongest, most burly and just become wounded via their exposure to the things which have gone wrong resulting in inflictions we have no words for. So those details, those sadnesses and hauntings I wrap in iridescent colours and swallow down thankful to have witnessed the best of the human spirit.

 

 

No, some stories I don’t tell any more because of the effects they have on the listeners as no good has come of them.  Even when the iron suit of administration insists skilled helpers get into the details, I now know that the bread of the poor laws is not sufficient to satiate the hungry ghosts which walk with me, with us, so I refuse to be a part of generating more collateral damage. Sorry skilled friend, this is why I part ways. I step away and count my blessings to have known the goodness of those who want to know, to carry for some of the way the instruments used to silence the plebian protest.  No longer on my knees, I have wandered past Cincinnatus‘ farm and seen his virtue and his paradox of duty.

 

 

“Jacques once told me that my sense of rootlessness would increase in direct proportion to the number of places in which I felt at home, and that the day I reverted back to my core culture, my core identity, would be both my happiest and my most lonely day.”

― Daniel Levin, Nothing but a Circus: Misadventures among the Powerful

 

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The Politics of Bureaucracies

Eva Etzioni-Halevy discusses definitions of bureaucracy in her book ‘Bureaucracy and Democracy; A Political Dilemma’ [76]. Bureaucracy is a “hierarchical organization of officials appointed to carry out certain public objectives” (the discussion is restricted to state bureaucracy). The extent to which an organization accords to Weber’s classical model of bureaucracy can be empirically investigated.

 

The definition of Power she gives is “control over (or ability to determine) the allocation of resources on which others are dependent and therefore, ability to influence other people’s life chances”. She suggests that Elites are defined as “those people or groups of people who wield such power. State elites are those people who wield power by virtue of their position in the institutional structures of the state”.

 

She argues that the role of bureaucracy in a democracy is problematic because this is one of the areas in which democratic rules are ill-defined, ambiguous, self-contradictory and controversial. Bureaucracy creates a dilemma for democracy as bureaucracy is becoming independent and powerful whilst the rules governing the exercise of that power are not clearly defined.

 

She suggests that bureaucracy thus poses a threat to the democratic political structure and to the politicians who run it. Etzioni-Halevy also highlights the paradox that a powerful, independent bureaucracy is also necessary for the prevention of political corruption and for the safeguarding of proper democratic procedures. Bureaucracy is thus a threat to, but also indispensable for, democracy.

 

“Democracy generates a dilemma for bureaucracy and the bureaucrats who run it, because democratic rules are self-contradictory and put bureaucracy in a double bind. By such rules, bureaucracy is expected to be both independent and subservient: both responsible for its own actions and subject to ministerial responsibility; both politicized and non-politicized at one and the same time” [76].

 

 

Thus in a democratic society where people’s lives are governed by bureaucracy, there is a necessary requirement for bureaucracies to function with the characteristics of Weber’s description of a functional bureaucracy [23] but also for individuals, working within and subject to the structures, to have appeal to the rule of law. Without these what manifests is a vertical and autocratic system which is subject to various defects from social justice.

 

 

Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

Principal agent theory can be readily applied to policy making in the bureaucracy. Administrative agencies are agents to whom policy making authority is delegated. This authority originates with principals such as chief executives, legislatures, and judiciaries. The act of delegation brings each of these principals face-to-face with particular manifestations of adverse selection and moral hazard [77].

 

Bureaucracies are valuable to government actors pursuing specific self interested goals. Legislators build their cases for re-election in part by helping constituents overcome bureaucratic ‘red tape’. Importantly, the motivation behind the delegation of authority to the bureaucracy cannot
be meaningfully separated from agency effectiveness [77].

 

 

Just as there is a danger (moral hazard) of the therapist/support worker creating, encouraging, and/or stimulating an ‘asymmetric co-dependency’
(a needs based relationship which brings more benefits to the enfranchised than the disenfranchised), there is a danger that lifeworlds are colonized [124] professionalized and generate situations where dependency is perpetuated by the professional ‘class’.

 

 

More and more of human experience is being enclosed and subjugated to profit creation remote to the source of wealth. Financial wealth is being mistaken for the value of the human beings, like a cuckoo in a nest. Profit has been writ into control and authority in civic quarters. This is tacitly done in the jubilant non-distributed message of ‘entrepreneurialism’ and the generation of excess, which is mistaken for freedom and abundance. As money trickles up, workload travels down, cost flows out, as agency travels inward toward fewer and fewer elites.

 

Society recreates the hegemony of the family and the aberrations which can – and do – arise within it and human relations. Our culture expresses a secular caste system where one persons gets access to one set of circumstances/opportunities at the top of the ‘food chain’, and another gets access to a different set of circumstances/opportunities at the bottom. In the modern western context, bureaucracies are part of the social ‘rules’ which re-create the advantage/disadvantage of people privy to one set of knowledge and not another.

 

The negative aspects of bureaucracy are discussed in Veblen’s concept of “trained incapacity”, Dewey’s concept of “occupational psychosis”, and Warnotte’s view of “professional deformation”. Trained incapacity refers to the situation in which one’s skills/abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills, will, in a changing dynamic, result in more or less serious maladjustments to the situation [20].

 

 

The phrase “A doctor will see disease, a policeman will see crime, and a reporter see conspiracy, wherever they go”, helps illustrate an aspect of the myopia’s which can develop through ossification to professional and marketised values. Dewey’s concept of occupational psychosis rests upon much the same observations as Veblen. As a result of their day to day routines, people develop special preferences, antipathies, discriminations and emphases. The term psychosis is used by Dewey to denote a “pronounced character of the mind”.

 

These occupational psychoses develop through demands put upon the individual by the particular organization of their occupational role [21]. If someone defines the world only in terms of their professional learning, theory of mind is diminished and the realities which exist outside these ways of expressing the world cease to have purchase. The expression “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” helps reveal an aspect of this narrowed way of perceiving the world; it suggests behaviour of changing realities to suit perception.

 

 

The concepts of Dewey and Veblen refer to fundamental ambivalence which arises with people acting within systems. Any action can be considered in
terms of what it attains or what it fails to attain: “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing – a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B” [22].

 

 

The Displacement of Public Value for Market Value

The managerialism which defines the character of the current zeitgeist in 2015 is brought together under the name of cost cutting, efficiency and competitiveness. The rhetoric that ‘the market will decide’, set against a backdrop of ‘a rising tide will lift all boats’ is a free market fallacy which accommodates the economic sacking of societies and cultures for the gain of private, unaccountable interests; i.e. ATOS, G4S.

 

We arrive at the enigmatic public situation where bureaucracies serve tendering processes, cost cutting and efficiency which favour the dominant powers and any action (or failure) goes unexamined in the overshadowing light of ‘competition’. Competition, uncontextualised, carries with it the inference of meritocracy, but when we contextualize this we can see that it has instrumental effects which are traditionally regulated against.

 

For example, in sporting competition, a bantam weight boxer would not be matched with a heavyweight. Uncontextualized competitiveness is an illusion of choice which suggests a world in which ‘all things are equal because we all live in the world’. This Panglossian fallacy carries in it the notion that ‘we live in the best of all possible worlds’ and is a common opiate which disguises modern impoverishments and social justice issues.

 

The command and control cultures which are installed from the commissioning level where funding is gatekept, are invariably bureaucratic in nature. Through these means the values of marketisation are imposed on all other previously existing communities of practice engineering behaviours of anxious pragmatism, at best, rather than winning minds and hearts.

 

Those voices of lesser scale are removed from the discourse, those of equal scale which dissent are starved through lack of opportunity to become voices of a lesser scale; and those which pragmatically capitulate have their value base shifted from delivery of public goods to those of market values.

 

Challenging Marketisation by Numbers

To relate a life to heuristics such as the Outcomes Star can be a helpful aid when used as an optional adjunct with a cosmos of other activities and tools; or, it can be depressingly reductive if it becomes the dominant necessity serving a Payment By Results culture of a command and control structure which never invests itself in engaging with, or fostering the individuals it suggests are at the heart of its policy. [104]

 

 

Veblen insists that “an eye single to pecuniary gain” (relating to or consisting of money) puts workers, the community, and business people at cross purposes. It is not simply that different interests are at stake; it is that business people are trained to ignore larger concerns associated with “the industrial situation.” Here Veblen expresses the problem coining the phrase of ‘trained incapacity’:

 

“Of course, all this working at cross purposes is not altogether due to trained incapacity on the part of the several contestants to appreciate the large and general requirements of the industrial situation; perhaps it is not even chiefly due to such inability, but rather to an habitual, and conventionally righteous disregard of other than pecuniary considerations.” [19]

 

 

Can we rightly place the ilk of cost cutting managerialism in this frame if the values of marketisation and financialisation are redefining operational standards in the public and third sector. Does trained incapacity describe the technocratic strains of an overpaid consultancy management caste which have come to impose targets and measures on areas of service provision (which provide public value) in the name of efficiency, competition and austerity ?

 

In perception terms, we need to be able to clearly separate the representation from the reality. When market values such as cost-efficiency, productivity and competitiveness dominate the agenda of how services are run, a thorough inspection of the means of achieving these ideals is necessary lest we lose track of the original aim based on a specific need.

 

Economic modeling and the administration which it is often put forward to be scientific in its deductive consistency and rigor. The problem is that even the natural sciences require use of induction, which, in turn, requires varying the method of study to accord with the phenomenon which is being studied [32]. If ever there were an epoch which underlined the failure of Payment By Results culture, this might be it with the demonstrable collapse and repeated failure of the financial systems we have seen.

 

 

In their book ‘Confronting Managerialism; How the Business Elite and their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance’, the authors Locke and Spender examine the current culture of managerialism which is sweeping the Western world. Rather than presuming the changes in management technique and attitude of the current paradigm are beneficial, their book illustrates how a class of omnipresent managers has been created and the damaging impacts this caste and its practices have had.

 

They set out to show how the methodologies introduced into business school education combined with managerialism to foster today’s ‘world out of balance’ [58]. While management can be defined as getting things done in organizations through people, managerialism means that in businesses, managers have come to view themselves, and act as a professional caste. The distinction between managing and managerialism enables us to criticize managerialism without denigrating the critically important function of good management [58].

 

 

Managerialism is defined as follows: “What occurs when a special group, called management, ensconces itself systemically in an organization and deprives owners and employees of their decision-making power (including the distribution of emoluments) – and justifies that takeover on the grounds of the managing group’s education and exclusive possession of the codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of the organization.”

 

Along with fetishizing quantification in the business school curricula, students are trained to forget “soft” issues in a most self-destructive ideological switch. Locke and Spender put forward that real business, as opposed to the models imagined and propagated by the University of Chicago economists, is about many things which cannot be measured [58].

 

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke called the point where people could not rely on a numbers-driven logical conclusion the ‘moment of subjective judgment’; others speak of the use of imagination, meaning that point in the analysis and evaluation where the agent’s mind, for lack of a determining relationship between cause and effect, intervenes to supply her/his “subjective” solution [58].

 

No one leading a school of general medicine will stop students from learning the practice of surgery simply because cutting the human body cannot be reduced to rigorous theory. Those obsessed with the primacy of numbers find it difficult to accept the proposition that non-quantifible variables have to be considered. The point they make is that human agency counterbalances the seeming objectivity of numbers or rather it comes into play where numbers leave off or fail [58].

 

“Quantification is generally important but seldom all-important, and sometimes it is not important at all. This means that agents/managers must understand the limits to their agency, know where and when the numbers are determining, as well as when they are not” [58]. Unlike mathematical modeling, which rests on ostensibly universal principles, the agency/analytical synthesis is always specific to a unique situation, never generalized or stored as manager-independent heuristics or Standard Operating Procedures. Agency is profoundly morally burdened since it is not just an idea. It leads on to actions that affect others and the world [58].

 

Campbell created an institutional ethnography surrounding a long term care hospital and the implementation of a “Service Quality Initiative” management strategy. In it she argues that the particular management initiative altered staff client relations at “the most intimate level”. “Contrary to the democratic sounding explanations of the strategy, it attempted to enforce a different and more rule-bound kind of practice, as it also revised the hospital’s ideology of care that previously had been organised around being ‘home-like” [47].

 

 

She concluded that this new ideological “Quality Improvement Strategy” would result in a creeping colonization of the minds and hearts of the care givers with the goals and values of the market – in which competitiveness, productivity, and cost-efficiency are given primacy. She argues that experiential data offer a secure and methodological basis for her conclusions. Campbell has studied and written critically about the methods that organisations implement in an attempt to try to make more efficient and effective use of caring labour and other costly resources [47].

 

These methods are urged on health care managers by the difficult fiscal constraints under which health care is provided. She expresses concern as the managerialist approach to service provision spreads with little critical appraisal throughout the social health and service sector.

 

Bibliography of References

[19] Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship: And the State of Industrial Arts, Macmillan, 1914, Harvard University, Page 347

[20] Robert K. Merton, ‘Bureaucratic Structure and Personality’ in Classics of Public Administration, Fourth Edition, (eds) Jay M. Shafritz, Albert C. Hyde ISBN: 0-03-019382-6, Page 101

[21] Kenneth Burke (1935), Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, New York: New Republic, pp. 58-59

[22] Kenneth Burke (1935), Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, New York: New Republic, pp. 70

[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. Page 196 – 198

[32] John Kay, ‘The Map Is Not The Territory: Models, Scientists, and the State of Modern Macroeconomics’, Critical Review 24(1): 87–99 ISSN 0891-3811, 2012 Critical Review Foundation, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2012.684476

[47] Campbell, M and A Manicom (Eds), 1995, ‘Knowledge, experience and ruling relations’ Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802007209, Page 10

[58] Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender, Confronting Managerialism; How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance, Zed Books London & New York, ISBN-13: 978-1-78032-073-1, Pages 1 – 22

[76] Bureaucracy and Democracy; A Political Dilemma, Eva Etzioni-Halevy, 2010, Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN-13: 978-0710200532, page 85 – 87

[77] William T Gormley Jr and Steven J Balla, ‘Bureaucracy and Democracy; Accountability and Performance’ Third Edition, CQ Press College, ISBN-13: 978- 1608717170, Page 72 – 75

[104] Martin E. P. Seligman, ‘Helplessness; On Depression, Development, and Death’, ISBN 0-7167-0751-9, Page 93

[124] Jurgen Habermas (Author), Thomas McCarthy (Translator), ‘The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2; Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason’, Beacon Press Boston, ISBN: 0-8070-1400-1, Page 305