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Anders Esmark, Maybe It Is Time to Rediscover Technocracy? An Old Framework for a New Analysis of Administrative Reforms in the Governance Era, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 27, Issue 3, 1 July 2017, Pages 501–516, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muw059
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Abstract
The article argues that recent decades of administrative policy and reform have led to the emergence of a late modern technocracy, defined by the intersecting ideas and principles of connective governance, risk management, and performance management. Connectivity, risk, and performance have remained consistent concerns across the various market-based and/or network-based alternatives to bureaucracy found in New Public Management (NPM) and post-NPM reforms. In contrast to the image of a flexible compromise between bureaucracy, markets, and networks prevailing in current debate, the article suggests that the long-standing tension between technocracy and bureaucracy are of vital importance to the administrations of advanced liberal democracies. Indeed, the partial compromise between technocracy and bureaucracy reached in the earlier creation of a “techno-bureaucracy” designed for planning and social engineering has been largely supplanted by a more adversarial stance towards bureaucracy in late modern technocracy due to the requirements of connectivity, risk, and performance.
Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass Verwaltungspolitiken und -reformen in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu der Herausbildung einer späten modernen Technokratie geführt haben, definiert durch überschneidende Ideen und Prinzipien wie Vernetzte Verwaltung, Risiko-Management und Performance Management. Digitalisierung, Risiko und Performance sind aktuelle Themen in verschiedenen "New Public Management (NPM)“-Reformen und Post-NPM-Ansätzen, die Alternativen zur klassischen Bürokratie darstellen. Im Gegensatz zu dem Leitbild des flexiblen Kompromisses zwischen Bürokratie, Märkten und Netzwerken, das die derzeitige Debatte beherrscht, verweist dieser Beitrag auf die anhaltende Spannung zwischen Technokratie und Bürokratie und deren Bedeutung für die Verwaltung in entwickelten, liberalen Demokratien. Der partielle Kompromiss zwischen Technokratie und Bürokratie, der zur Schaffung der "Techno-Bürokratie“ führte, deren Fokus vor allem auf der Planung und dem "Social Engineering“ lag, wurde weitestgehend durch eine kritische Perspektive gegenüber der Bürokratie und durch einen neuen Fokus auf Digitalisierung, Risiko und Performance abgelöst.
Note: Um die Übersetzungen der Zusammenfassungen übersichtlich und einfach verständlich zu gestalten, wurde bei allen personenbezogenen Bezeichnungen immer das generische Maskulinum verwendet, das sowohl Personen des männlichen als auch des weiblichen Geschlechts einschließt.
Translation credit: Alexander Kroll of Florida International University and Johanna Smyth
Ten years ago, Johan P. Olsen suggested that bureaucracy, contrary to rumors of its imminent death, continues to play a vital part in the current “struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances” in public administration (Olsen 2006, 2). Similar defenses of bureaucracy against empirical and normative claims about the irrelevance of the bureaucratic model of administration constitute a solid trend in debates on administrative reform and the state of liberal democracy in a wider sense (Du Gay 2000; Lynn 2011; Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Suleiman 2003). While fully acknowledging that bureaucracy remains a fundamental building block of public administrations everywhere, as well as the subject of important normative considerations, the article argues for a rediscovery of an alternative approach to administrative policy and reform largely forgotten in the current debate: the technocratic project.
The question motivating such a rediscovery is this: how are we to interpret administrative reforms and policy that have challenged the bureaucratic model in recent decades? Current debate suggests that the answer lies in two broad avenues of reform. The first wave of reforms, taking place in the 1980s in the United States, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and, to some extent, continental Europe and Scandinavia, can be grouped under the heading of New Public Management (NPM) (Kuhlmann 2010; Peters and Pierre 1998; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Although the differences between specific national reforms remain a matter of debate, the NPM label denotes a common orientation towards the development of public quasi-markets through organizational disaggregation, competition, incentives, changes in budgeting and accounting practices, use of contracts and performance targets, etc. (Dunleavy et al. 2006; Hood 2007).
The use of networks constitutes a second avenue of reform, partly overlapping with NPM and partly interpreted as countermovement to NPM associated with an alternative program of “joined-up government” and “whole of government” based on horizontal coordination and collaboration, as well as involvement of external stakeholders (Ansell and Gash 2008; Bevir 2013; Goldsmith and Kettl 2009; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004; McGuire and Agranoff 2011; Rhodes 2007; Stoker 2006). The network approach is also associated with the label New Public Governance (NPG) seen by some to constitute a full-blown alternative to NPM roughly since the turn of the millennium (Osborne 2010). Networks became fashionable earlier, but NPG can be seen as an extension and elaboration of network governance (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 21).
Ongoing debates notwithstanding, there is an emerging consensus that current public administration has entered a state of mixed administration defined by the interplay of bureaucracy, markets, and networks as a consequence of these reform waves. Markets and networks have become established organizational alternatives to bureaucracy, but the latter clearly persists (Christensen 2013; Christensen and Lægreid 2007; Lodge and Gill 2011). Hence, it is now the “mix” that matters (Keast, Mandell, and Brown 2006) and governments must develop the ability to “meta-govern,” that is to select, calibrate, and combine bureaucracy, markets, and networks depending on the specific policy problem at hand (Jessop 2011). Olsen’s defense of bureaucracy accurately reflects this understanding of the current reality of public administration:
“Bureaucracy, therefore, is not the way to organize public administration, for all kinds of tasks and under all circumstances. Bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of overlapping, supplementary, and competing forms coexisting in contemporary democracies, and so are market organization and network organization” (Olsen 2006, 18).
This interplay between bureaucracy, markets, and networks, subject to a more or less amiable compromise and institutional balancing through competent meta-governance, undoubtedly captures important aspects of the current administrative reality. However, it also largely ignores the technocratic project at work in the various reform waves of recent decades. NPM and post-NPM reforms have not only meant the addition of markets and networks to bureaucracy but also the emergence of a late modern technocracy guided by the principles of (a) connective governance linking interests, identities, forms of knowledge, and resources in the face of changes brought about by new information and communication technologies (ICTs), digitalization, and the proliferation of informational networks in the network society; (b) risk management ensuring constant organizational change, adaptation, and flexibility in the face of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and wicked problems in risk society; and (c) performance management ensuring evidence, learning, development, and accountability in the audit society. Although rooted in earlier technocratic attempts to appropriate bureaucracy for purposes of planning and social engineering, these principles have given rise to a distinct late modern form of technocratic rationality, ideology, and culture that poses a particular challenge to bureaucracy.
This argument is developed through the following steps. First, the technocratic project is defined comprehensively in terms of its scientific-technological rationality, an ideology of scientific management and the organizational culture of the so-called technostructure. Secondly, the early and more well-known version of the technocratic project associated with mechanical technology, industrial production, efficiency, and progressivism condensed in the administrative model of planning and social engineering is discussed. Thirdly, the governance paradigm is identified as a late modern version of the technocratic project defined by the intersecting principles of connectivity, risk, and performance, each elaborated in a separate section of the article. Before a brief conclusion, the empirical and normative implications of the proposed rediscovery of technocracy for future studies of administrative reform and policy are summarized.
The Technocratic Project
The comparatively sparse literature on technocracy has always been faced with the problem that there never was a Weber of technocracy. Or, more specifically: although Weber did not use the term, he subsumed technocracy under the broader process of rationalization of which bureaucratic organization is an expression. As emphasized by one of the more important additions to Weber’s analysis on this point, however, technocracy and bureaucracy are far from identical phenomena (Habermas 1971). In Fischer’s apt terminology, we can define technocracy as a “project” geared more to towards “the shape or form of governance rather than a specific content per se” (1990, 21). This project is distinct from what could reasonably be called the bureaucratic project in terms of its basic rationality, its ideology, and organizational culture.
1. On the most basic level, technocracy is defined by its scientific-technological rationality. Technocracy is “deeply embedded in our cultural past, particularly the scientific and technological worldviews of the modern Western tradition” (Fischer 1990, 59). The particular marriage of these two worldviews can be seen as a “scientization of technology” based on the development of a “feedback relation” between technical development and scientific progress intimately related to industrialism and the emergence of the industrial society in which “science, technology and industrial utilization were fused into a system” (Habermas 1971, 104). This system, and its idealization of the technical sciences, engineering, mechanics, and the machine, provides technocracy with its founding idea: that “technology’s productive potential holds the promise of a society of abundance. Its link with science and its inherent dynamism have the allure of modernity. Its efficiency, the perfect mating of men and machine, is a model for society” (Kuisel 1981, 76).
Kuisel’s definition stems from an empirical investigation of interwar modernizers and rationalizers in France, indicating a certain gravitation towards France, and ultimately to the founding ideas of Saint-Simon, in the development of the technocratic project. As one observer states: “the United States gave us the word ‘technocracy’, but France seem to have some claims on the thing itself” (Porter 1995, 114). As if to illustrate the point, Daniel Bell’s pivotal analysis of technocracy and post-industrial society resorts to the “Grand Larousse” in order to define technocracy as a “political system in which the determining influence belongs to the technicians of the administration and the economy” (1974, 348). This American–French axis notwithstanding, technocracy has broad implications across countries and different political systems, as is the case with bureaucracy.
Rather than scientific-technological rationality, the rise of bureaucracy is linked to the earlier institutionalization of a legal order ensuring the centralization of legislation, jurisdiction, and use of force in the modern state and what Weber referred to as the “quantitative extension of administrative tasks” in the “big state” (1978, 969). More generally, bureaucracy is the organizational expression of the ascension of rational legal authority over traditional and charismatic authority in the modern era. Weber’s basic outline of bureaucratic principles such as functionally separated spheres of competence “in the legal sense,” hierarchy, impersonality, obligations, procedural compliance, etc. are derived directly from the fundamental categories of rational legal authority and the claim that the “purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff” (Weber 1978, 220). It is the intrinsic relation between rational legal authority and bureaucratic principles of organization that makes bureaucracy the “most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings… superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability” (Weber 1978, 223).
2. The orientation towards scientific-technological rationality rather than legal-procedural rationality informs the technocratic understanding of good government as the “rule of experts,” that is, a “system of governance in which technically trained experts rule by virtue of their specialized knowledge and position in dominant political and economic institutions” (Fischer 1990, 17). The shape and form of governance pursued by the technocratic project can be defined as scientific management, based on the “assumption that human problems, like technical ones, have a solution that experts, given sufficient data and authority, can discover and execute. Applied to politics this reasoning finds interference from vested interests, ideologies, and party politics intolerable. Its antithesis is decision making through the weighing of forces and compromise” (Kuisel 1981, 76).
The commitment to scientific management makes the technocratic project, sometimes aggressively, anti-political, anti-ideological, and in no small measure also anti-democratic. In this sense, scientific management is inherently related to depoliticization. For technocrats, “progress can be achieved only by the ‘depoliticization’ of problems” (Ridley 1966, 43). In other words, the technocratic “scientization of politics” effectively “severs the criteria for justifying the organization of social life from any normative regulation of interaction, thus depoliticizing them” (Habermas 1971, 112). Technocracy is fundamentally at odds with the practical experiences of ordinary citizens, public involvement, the influence of interest groups and bargaining, as well as the discretion and leadership of elected representatives. Even if more recent discussion of what has been called the “public politics of depoliticization” has abandoned the concept of technocracy, the core technocratic idea of scientific management remains clear and, as summed up by Hay, as radical as ever: “politics is a pathogen; depoliticization an antidote” (2007, 93).
Technocratic depoliticization based on scientific management has been characterized as an “apolitical ideology” (Fischer 1990, 21). On the one hand, the technocratic project is strongly opposed to the established ideologies of parliamentary and democratic politics. On the other hand, scientific management can be said to constitute an ideology in its own right insofar as interest politics is supplanted by a “politics of expertise” where political decisions are presented as necessary interventions above political contestation and debate (Fischer 1990, 26). In Habermas’ original outline of this argument: scientific management may be less apparently “repressive” and less relevant for a critique of ideology than the conventional list of grand ideologies, but the abstraction from questions of practical experience and social forces also make the technocratic “fetish of science” functionally equivalent to an ideology insofar as it even more efficiently impedes broad political thought, reflection, and debate about the foundations of society (1971, 111).
The technocratic aversion towards democratic politics also extends to bureaucracy. In a wider sense, the relation between bureaucracy and democracy is contentious in itself, as evidenced by Weber’s observation that “direct rule of the demos” and broad public influence “inevitably comes into conflict with bureaucratic tendencies” (1978, 985). Nevertheless, bureaucracy also accompanies the process of “passive democratization,” “the levelling of social differences,” and ultimately “modern mass democracy” (Weber 1978, 983). This co-evolution of modern democracy and bureaucracy has made bureaucracy “part of society’s long-term commitment to a Rechtsstaat and procedural rationality for coping with conflicts and power differentials” (Olsen 2006, 3). From the technocratic point of view, however, the legal-procedural rationality that binds bureaucracy to representative government in a democratic polity effectively makes bureaucracy an extension of politics. For the technocrat, politics and bureaucracy are two sides of the same coin: politics “can only prevent the adoption of the technically most proficient solution to any given challenge…it lacks the technical proficiency and specialist knowledge required to select the optimal policy choice; it is costly, inefficient, bureaucratic and self-referential to the point of being tiresome” (Hay 2007, 93).
3. The technocratic project is not defined by formal principles of organization rivaling those associated with bureaucracy, nor has being a technocrat ever attained the status of a work description or an admission ticket to a distinct elite or group in the same way that being a bureaucrat has. Nevertheless, the technocratic project is also expressed in the organizational culture of what has fittingly been called the “technostructure” (Galbraith 1967). The technostructure is a rather heterogeneous group of people from different backgrounds operating from the top to bottom in public and private organizations, defined only by a shared capacity to bring specialized knowledge, experience, and expertise to group decision-making. A rough outline of this group, which is clearly subject to expansion and modification depending on the context, might look like this: “From this vantage point, the technostructure – policy planners, economists, engineers, management specialists, computer analysts, social scientists and technologists – process the critical information essential to the stable and efficient operation of our contemporary institutions” (Fischer 1990, 110).
This otherwise heterogeneous technostructure does share a particular culture defined more or less explicitly in opposition to the organizational culture of bureaucracy (Clegg 1990; Parkin 1994). For the technostructure, rational legal authority is rather a form of dogmatism akin to religion, aesthetics, tradition, and other forms of nonscientific knowledge. Expressed in the terms of an individual belief system, the “mind-view” of technocrats revolves around the “emphasis on the logical, practical, problem-solving, instrumental, and disciplined approach to objectives” and its “reliance on a calculus, on precision and measurement and a concept of a system” (Bell 1974, 349). Putnam’s empirical assessment of the theory of technocracy sums up the “technocratic mentality” in six lodestars: (a) an apolitical role based on the replacement of politics with technics, (b) skepticism and even hostility towards politicians and political institutions, (c) disregard for the openness and equality of political democracy tending towards authoritarianism and absolutism, (d) the belief that social and political conflict is misguided or even contrived, (e) policy as a question of pragmatics, not ideology or moral, and (f) technological progress is good and questions of social justice are unimportant (Putnam 1977).
The Technocratic “Take-Over” of Bureaucracy: Planning and Social Engineering
In its original incarnation, the technocratic project can be seen to herald in “a new or second stage in that ‘rationalization’ which Max Weber had already comprehended as the basis for the development of bureaucratic domination” (Habermas 1971, 62). Available analyses of technocracy largely support Weber’s bold historical claim that “the development of modern forms of organization in all fields is nothing less than identical with the development and continual spread of bureaucratic administration” (Weber 1978, 223). However, the rise of the technocratic project also involves a particular dynamic not entirely foreseen by Weber: the technocratic take-over of bureaucracy. Although technical expertise is important in a bureaucracy, Weber also saw it as being confined by rational legal authority and submission to political leadership. By contrast, the technocratic project pursues a complete “rationalization of power in which the initiative has in any case passed to scientific analysis and planning” (Habermas 1971, 62).
In terms more critical to bureaucracy than technocracy, the same development has been described as a tendency for “old-established bureaucracies” to turn to technical knowledge in order to gain the power, prestige, and moral authority of technical competence and knowledge that is not inherent to bureaucracy itself: “technocracy may be thought of in one sense as a means of promoting and extending bureaucracy, or, to put it another way, as the fusion between technology and bureaucracy with the first adding an element of dynamism to the second” (Meynaud 1968, 64). Making a similar observation about the technocratic “culture of objectivity” and infatuation with quantification, Porter states that “the appeal of numbers is especially compelling to bureaucratic officials who lack the mandate of popular election, or divine right…Objectivity lends authority to officials who have very little of their own” (1995, 28).
The “second stage” in the development and spread of bureaucratic organization, thus understood, implies that bureaucracy is gradually taken over by technocratic rationality, ideology, and culture, resulting in a “techno-bureaucracy” where technocrats are “in a position to gain support from a bureaucratic machine or manipulate its fundamental principles” (Meynaud 1968, 65). The techno-bureaucracy, with a more recent formulation, is an administration where the technocrat “is assigned the central task of fitting the bureaucratic organization to the technological mission of society” (Fischer 1990, 64). The administrative principle at the heart of this technocratic take-over of bureaucracy, or simply the techno-bureaucracy, is efficient management of the social machine through planning and social engineering.
Although this idea can be traced back to Saint-Simon’s industrial vision of a society completely based on the logic of production and machinery, it is only through the fusion of technology and science in the framework of advanced industrialism that it comes to hold significant influence on administration and government (Lindberg 1976). In Bell’s exemplary version of this argument about the belated realization of the technocratic project: it is only with the “birth” of post-industrialism in the immediate aftermath of WWII that society comes to be defined pervasively by the “fundamental themes” of “rationality, planning, and foresight – the hallmarks, in short, of the technocratic age. The vision of Saint-Simon seemingly has begun to bear fruit” (Bell 1974, 348). Technocratic management, in Bell’s view, is suited to the post-industrial era “because it is the mode of efficiency – of production, of program of ‘getting things done’” (1974). Indeed, technocrats “value efficiency much as liberalism celebrates individual freedom. Efficiency, however, is both an intrinsic value and an instrumentality; it is a means of achieving economic abundance, social peace and strong government” (Kuisel 1981, 76).
The technocratic commitment to the administrative model of planning and social engineering corresponds to a vision of the state as an “organ of a thoroughly rational administration” (Habermas 1971, 64), that is, “an ‘administrative’ state designed for technocratic governance” (Fischer 1990, 25). This association with the idea of an administrative state fully committed to planning and social engineering is also the underlying theme in the rather widespread idea that the technocratic project has been realized to the fullest extent in socialist or communist regimes such as the former Soviet Union and China (Andreas 2009; Hoffmann and Laird 1985). Bell characterizes Marxism as a “great source” of technocratic thought and provides a lengthy exposition of Lenin’s preoccupation with scientific management (1974, 354). In the United States, the work of Veblen and the self-anointed technocratic movement illustrate a similar logic (Akin 1977; Segal 1985; Tilman 2014).
The alliance with socialism or communism is, however, far from endemic to the technocratic project. Planning, social engineering, and the administrative state are no less visible in states where attempts to ensure regulatory efficiency through planning and social engineering are completely integrated in, rather than fundamentally opposed to, the constitutional framework of the liberal democratic state. In this respect, France represents a political system defined by the intersection of liberal and socialist principles, whereas the United States represents the most clear-cut example of technocratic influence in a liberal framework. In the US context, the notion of a fully fledged welfare state is of course somewhat contentious. Nevertheless, the rise of American technocracy is conventionally associated with Taylorism and scientific management embedded in welfare capitalism and an inclination towards progressive social reform in the era of the organizational and managerial “revolution” (Burnham 1941).
Although the managerial revolution is defined by the emergence of large-scale enterprises at the high point of industrial production, the development of planning systems and the emphasis on technical expertise and scientific knowledge were no less influential as a model of government, supported by the booming disciplines of economy, policy studies, management, and administration (Burris 1993; Fischer 1990; Haber 1964). As an instrument of social reform and bulwark against increasing social tensions produced by unrestrained capitalism, the application of scientific management to government presented an ideal solution that had substantial influence on the commitment to planning from the New Deal administration and decades onwards (Graham 1976).
At the high point of enthusiasm for planning and social engineering, Drucker (1954) described scientific management as the greatest American contribution to Western thought since the federalist papers. Harold Lasswell championed the role of science in the development of policy. Galbraith identified the technostructure as the intelligentsia that would ensure increased welfare based on the development of extensive planning systems described as “an update of Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy and expertise” (Fischer 1990, 97). Robert Reich sums up this historical analysis while looking ahead to the “next frontier” in 1983: scientific management emerged in the second decade of the 20th century and shaped American history “for the next fifty years” (Reich 1983, 49).
A Not so Quiet Revolution: Governance Reforms and Late Modern Technocracy
Today, the term technocracy is used rather superficially and mainly as a derogative term. Although the same can of course be said of bureaucracy to some degree, the significant efforts vested in serious debate about bureaucracy are largely absent in the case of technocracy. One of the most important exceptions to this rule is Fischer’s idea of a “quiet” technocratic “revolution” (1990, 19), beginning roughly at the end of the 50-year period outlined by Reich. The technocratic project has, according to Fischer’s argument, become more influential than ever in recent decades by abandoning aggressive and public commitments to technocracy: rather than posing as the “new men” of the future with sweeping statements about technological and scientific progress combined with blunt rejections of politics, current technocrats “modestly step forward” as organizational “servants” in a “subdued and pragmatic language addressed to organizational and technical ‘imperatives’” (Fischer 1990, 110).
This is an important indication of a significant shift in the nature of the technocratic project that provides some explanation for the increasing academic silence on the subject. However, the shape and impact of the technocratic project in recent decades amounts to more than the quiet revolution suggested by Fischer. For one, the current technocracy may not be quite as subdued, pragmatic or “faceless” as suggested (Fischer 1990, 19). In the era supposedly dominated by a quiet technocratic revolution, the governance paradigm has rather provided the technocratic project with a recognizable visage. Although the governance paradigm clearly deploys the language of organizational and technological imperatives, it is not exactly hidden or subdued: it is rather an open, assertive, and largely transparent paradigm that has brought technocratic rationality, ideology, and culture to bear on administration and government for decades.
Secondly, and more importantly, the governance paradigm has led to subtle but important changes in technocratic rationality, ideology, and culture. In terms of substance, the quiet revolution suggests a “striking continuity of basic technocratic ideas” (Fischer 1990, 109), invoking the idea that technocracy is simply an “ever-recurring intellectual doctrine” of which Saint-Simon is one of the most “original exponents” (Meynaud 1968, 12). As such, the quiet revolution is a variation on the belated realization thesis, according to which the technological, economic, and social transformations associated with post-industrialism provide the conditions for the realization of the technocratic project as it was conceived prior to these transformations. Indeed, the original “hallmarks” of the technocratic age are affirmed and reinforced through the quiet technocratic revolution: “there is an increasing reliance in the political system on technical expertise for the definition of, if not the actual resolution of, social and political problems. As result, there will be more and more emphasis on the planning of political and social life” (Fischer 1990, 102).
This is, however, not quite the technocratic project of the governance paradigm. As outlined in the introduction, the emergence of a governance paradigm in public administration can be traced from the market-oriented NPM reforms of the 1980s past post-NPM reforms, network governance, and NPG to the current reality of the mixed administration. The various reform waves more or less distinctly committed to markets and/or networks are, however, indicative of a more fundamental reorientation of administrative reform and policy towards the intersecting principles of connectivity, risk, and performance, leading the technocratic project beyond the earlier commitment to the administrative model of planning and social engineering. Connectivity, risk and performance are, in turn, related to technological, economic, and social developments that are clearly post-industrial, but also more far-reaching than the image of post-industrial society invoked by earlier analysis of technocracy. These developments are summarized here as the emergence of network society, risk society, and audit society. Figure 1 provides an overview of this argument.
If the hallmarks of early technocracy were planning and foresight, the hallmarks of late modern technocracy are connective governance, risk management, and performance management. The intersecting principles of connectivity, risk, and performance provide late modern technocracy with an alternative to the administrative model of planning and social engineering as well as the early form of technocratic rationality, ideology, and culture behind it. Correspondingly, late modern technocracy loses the key reason behind the earlier technocratic interest in the appropriation of bureaucracy characteristic of the “second stage” in the development and spread of bureaucratic organization. Instead, the new hallmarks of connectivity, risk, and performance lead late modern technocracy to question the merits of bureaucratic organization more fundamentally. The following sections elaborate on these aspects in more detail.
Connective Governance: Technology, Informational Networks, and Communication
Connective governance must be seen in the context of the network society. Although the network society is in many ways an extension of post-industrial society, it also embodies an “information age” defined by digital ICTs in a way not considered by Bell and other early observers of the post-industrial age. The principal analysis of this leap in the history of media technology sparked by the emergence of digital ICTs is Castell’s exploration of how digitally enhanced networks processing information have become the primary principle of societal organization across the economy, civil society, and the state (Castell 2000–2004). Faced with the transformations brought on by the proliferation of informational networks, states are forced to engage in what Castells has defined as the imperative but often difficult transition from the modern state to a late modern “network state” (2005, 15).
This imperative but difficult transition to a network state provides late modern technocracy with a constitutive principle of reform. The most basic expression of this reform principle is the implementation and use of information technology, largely conducted under the umbrella of e-governance. The imperative but difficult transition to a network state requires “the diffusion of e-governance (a broader concept than e-government because it includes citizen participation and political decision-making); e-health; e-learning; e-security; and a system of dynamic regulation of the communication industry, adapting it to the values and needs of society” (Castells 2005, 17). Although this development has been intensely researched by the considerable but sometimes rather technical literature on e-governance (for an overview, see Dawes 2008), the transformative effects of digital technology and information systems have to some extent been absent from the wider debate about changing modes of governance, administrative policy, and reform (Hood and Margetts 2014).
One important exception to this rule is “digital era governance” (Dunleavy et al. 2006). Aiming explicitly to bridge the gap between e-governance and the wider debate on administrative policy and reform, the concept of digital era governance is based on the claim that “it now makes sense to characterize the broad sweep of current public management regime change in terms that refer to new information-handling potentialities…The advent of the digital era is now the most general, pervasive, and structurally distinctive influence on how governance arrangements are changing in advanced industrial states” (Dunleavy et al. 2006, 478). This state of affairs is, moreover, infamously linked to the “death” of NPM. Similarly, the imperative but difficult transition to the network state can be described as a decisively post-NPM principle of reform concerned with the development and utilization of networks rather than the creation of public quasi-markets.
Connective governance is, however, broader than e-governance and digital era governance, even in the wider sense of these terms. Ultimately, connective governance involves the “transformation of political management, representation and domination under the conditions of network society” (Castells 2005, 16). These conditions are produced by the connective logic of informational networks including, inter alia, globalization (networks have the potential for global reach and reduce the importance of space and territory), openness (the organization of networks in nodes and hubs ensure multiple points of entry and continuous extension), flexibility (networks can be build and modified faster than other forms of organization), scalability (networks can be formed and reformed to suit any level of action or governance), complexity (networks represent a form of “ordered complexity,” making disordered complexity manageable), self-organization (networks can form and function without central or hierarchical guidance), and recursion (networks process information in a nonlinear and modulating way) (Castells 2005; Chadwick 2013; Crozier 2007; Lash 2002).
The imperative but difficult transition to a network society is a technocratic reform principle suggesting that peak technologies and socioeconomic changes prompted by technological innovation constitute ultimate conditions that must be accommodated through public sector reform in order for states to survive (Castells 2005, 15). However, the new imperatives highlighted by connective governance also indicate, first, an important modification of technological-scientific rationality. Specifically, the focus on ICTs and the attributes of informational networks signify the substitution of the mechanical understanding of social and economic systems, or what has been referred to as “mechanical objectivity” (Porter 1995, 7), for an informational type of technological-scientific rationality. Rather than the design and operation of social machines, connective governance requires the adoption of an informational logic and the attempt to deal with the transformative effects of informational flows (Crozier 2007, 7).
Secondly, the attributes of informational networks also supply technocratic ideology with a new emphasis on openness, self-organization, and communication. The information age, according to the logic of connective governance, requires an informational and communicative form of government (Bang 2003; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). For some, this is tantamount to saying that connective governance is inherently democratic (Sørensen and Torfing 2007). The basic function of networks, however, is to act as an instrument of coordination, negotiation, qualification of knowledge, and increased implementation capacity. Network management has, correspondingly, become a defining part of technocratic culture. The most important network managers of the current technostructure, however, are not the actual engineers of informational networks in the field of e-governance, but rather the policy developers and management specialists ensuring the integration of networks and their connective logic in all stages of the policy process, with or without use of advanced hardware, through the creation, facilitation, and utilization of networks (Klijn and Edelenbos 2007).
The development and integration of informational networks increasingly supplants the earlier technocratic interest in the appropriation of bureaucracy for purposes of planning and social engineering: “Indeed, the rational bureaucratic model of the state is in complete contradiction to the demands and process of the network society” (Castells 2005, 17). Although other proponents of connective governance may adopt a more compromising stance, bureaucratic organization is nevertheless an almost point-to-point contradiction of the connective logic ingrained in informational networks. Bureaucracy is bound to a national/local heritage and cannot be re-scaled fast or easily. Bureaucracy may be constitutionally bound by rules of publicity, but also remains inherently committed to secrecy and nondisclosure. Bureaucratic procedures and hierarchy stand in the way of flexibility and flow. Bureaucratic demands for centralization, oversight, and control contradict self-governance. Bureaucracy has limited capacity to organize complexity and remains committed to a linear logic of information processing. This technocratic critique of bureaucracy must, however, be seen in conjunction with the principles of risk management and performance management.
Risk Management: Organizational Change and Adaptation
Whereas connective governance is based on an idea of organizational design in accordance with peak technologies, the primary concern of risk management is the overall function and problem-solving capacity of government. This shift is prompted, in turn, by an emphasis on uncertainty and threats rather than networks as the defining features of post-industrial society. Although proliferation of networks and increased connectivity are certainly a source of increased risk exposure in current society, the principal “epochal difference,” in Ulrich Beck’s landmark analysis, is between industrial society and risk society: this epochal difference occurs at the moment when the economic, social, biological, and ecological hazards facing the political system “undermine and/or cancel the established safety systems of the provident state’s existing risk calculations” (1996, 31).
The provident state is Beck’s term for the welfare state of the industrial era forced by its own “cognitive and institutional apparatus” of “insurance calculation” to stem the autonomous forces of economic and social development through planning and “after-care,” for the purpose of which “there exist accident scenarios, statistics, social research, technical planning and great variety of safety measures” (1996, 30). In risk society, such measures are undercut for two reasons. For one, hazards and dangers have multiplied and infiltrated each other to a level where existing safety systems offering insurance and compensation for exposure to risk are overburdened. Secondly, risk society implies a growing realization that even more than autonomous forces outside the state, hazards, and dangers are produced by the state itself. Decisions invariably produce unintended consequences and further risk. The corresponding abandonment of existing safety systems and the insurance logic of the provident state provide late modern technocracy with a second pervasive principle: the internalization of risk and the impossibility of insurance against dangers and uncertainty.
Risk is, according to the standard definition, the “effect of uncertainty,” and risk management is based on an injunction to relinquish the demand for certainty and cope with uncertainty and change (Beck 1996; Renn and Schweizer 2009). Risk management consists in the combination of comprehensive risk assessment of hazards with workable forms of damage control in the occurrence of catastrophe. As Beck has highlighted, however, risk means the anticipation of catastrophe rather than responses to catastrophe itself: when the catastrophe actually occurs, risk as always “moved elsewhere” to the anticipation of new dangers and catastrophes (2006, 332). Risk assessment requires a state of uninterrupted anticipation that can be described as state of perpetual threat and permanent crisis requiring continuous change.
Risk management is often related to large-scale catastrophes such as global financial crisis, overpopulation, climate change, or natural disaster. However, the internalization of risk and impossibility of insurance against dangers and hazards equally concerns the problem-solving capacity of everyday policies faced with unintended consequences and wicked problems. Indeed, Rittel and Webber’s original characterization of wicked problems as being diffuse, open-ended, uncertain, unique, and relational precisely embodies the problems facing decision-making in a risk scenario (1973). More than isolated procedures related to natural disasters and other large-scale catastrophes, the internalization of risk and decisions based on the impossibility of insurance involve the reconfiguration of the vast majority of policy problems as wicked problems and efforts to deal with such problems on all levels of governance.
Reforms in pursuit of better risk management have turned to markets as well as networks. Markets can “force individuals to take cost-effective protective measures prior to disaster based on risk assessments,” whereas networks ensure the flow of information that “may influence individuals to behave differently with respect to the actions they take before and/or after disaster” (Daniels, Kettl, and Kunreuther 2006, 8). However, markets have also been criticized as a framework of risk management due to their dependence on economic incentives, fragmentation, turf wars and, in cruder forms of NPM, an idealization of private business practices that tend to reinstate planning systems cloaked as corporate strategies (Head and Alford 2013, 721; Stoker 2006). Networks are, according to this line of argument, more suited to ensure critical components of risk management such as collaboration, coordination, accumulation of knowledge, and the flow of information (Conklin 2006; Helbing 2013; Syrett and Devine 2012).
This network-oriented form of risk management has been described as risk governance, that is, a form of risk management based on openness, coordination, and the application of “the principles of good governance to the identification, assessment, management and communication of risks” (Renn and Walker 2008, 11, see also Renn 2008). In this sense, risk governance arises at the intersection of connectivity and risk management, of network as organization and problem-solving capacity as function. The link relation between risk and connectivity is, by the same token, entirely reversible and fundamental to the governance paradigm. Rather than a limited subcategory of risk management, the concept of risk governance suggests that the requirements of effective risk management, although often implicitly, provide the basic rationale for a substantial part of the networking activities pursued by current governments and administrations (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004).
On the level of technological-scientific rationality, risk governance imbues the technocratic project with a new emphasis on adaptation to external circumstances quite distinct from, and to some extent even a reversal of, the staunch belief in the power of technology to ensure control of the economy, society, and the material environment characteristic of early technocracy (Habermas 1971). Risk management supplants this proactive and assertive belief in mechanical control with a more reactive and defensive idea of adaptation in the face of risk and uncertainty. In its formal and cybernetic meaning, adaptive capacity defines the ability of a system to adapt to an environment that is, by definition, always more complex than the system itself and always changing at a faster rate (Helbing 2013). In a more general sense, adaptive capacity implies that organizational survival and “resilience” can only be ensured through continuous change and transformation in response to risk and uncertainty (Syrett and Devine 2012, 96).
Furthermore, risk and uncertainty introduce a standard of reflexivity to scientific management, defined by the “self-confrontation with the effects of risk society that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system of industrial society – as measured by the latter’s institutionalized standards” (Beck 1994, 6). More generally, risk society is seen to coincide with the onset of “reflexive modernity” (Beck 1996, 39), also referred to as the “enlightenment shock” of risk society (Beck 2006). The realization that there is ultimately no protection against threats and that government decisions are likely to exasperate existing problems and/or produce new ones makes the original technocratic belief in the proportional relation between technical knowledge and problem-solving capacity untenable. One potential result of such reflexivity is of course governmental defeatism and retreat. Another, however, is the reshaping of the technocratic ambition as form of meta-governance based on “self-reflexive ‘irony’ such that the participants in governance recognize the likelihood of failure but then continue as if success were possible” (Jessop 2011, 117). Such “irony,” not to be confused with risk aversion, can furthermore be seen as a defining characteristic of late modern technocratic culture.
That risk, uncertainty, and wicked problems pose a problem for planning and foresight was already clear to Rittel and Webber (1973), who nevertheless insisted on the viability of the planning model (see also Webber 1978). Since then, however, risk management has more or less come to mean the opposite of planning. As Beck states, risk awareness and reflexivity are completely irreconcilable with “linear models of technocracy,” which proceed from the assumption that technical knowledge and planning capacity will ensure the development towards a society of “zero risk” (Beck 1996, 35). The very idea of planning is to ensure certainty and maintain stability. Unexpected occurrences are the result of insufficient planning and will only require more comprehensive planning. Late modern technocracy, however, has substituted the idea of zero risk for the notion of permanent risk and continuous adaptation to changing circumstances. Planning and forecasting have clearly not disappeared from government. It has, however, largely been subsumed under an overriding concern for risk assessment, adaptation, and continuous change.
Risk management tends to invoke a critique of bureaucracy almost to the same extent as connective governance, albeit for other reasons. Beck goes so far as to claim that risk “stands for a type of social thought and action that was not at all perceived by Max Weber” (Beck 1994, 9), thus rejecting the idea that risk management is yet another stage in the development and spread of bureaucratic organization and its underlying process of rationalization. From a risk perspective, bureaucracy is part and parcel of the “provident” state. The legal and procedural orientation that make bureaucracy indispensable to the safety systems and insurance logic of the provident state are, in risk society, also a set of institutionalized standards within which the required reflexivity and continuous adaptation cannot be exercised. In the terms of the governance paradigm: “traditional hierarchical forms of organization and systems of control, focused on input monitoring and process compliance, substantially limited the opportunities to think expansively about the policy issues of the type that might be thrown up by wicked problems” (Head and Alford 2013, 719).
Performance Management: Policy Innovation and Learning
Performance management covers a wide terrain of related concepts and models such as quality management, evaluation, evidence-based policy, budgeting for results, and auditing. However, these standards and concepts are all expression of a more fundamental commitment to improve public policies through measurement of their effects. Performance management cannot be related to a variation of post-industrial society quite as distinct as the network society and risk society. The structural trends linked to performance management rather invoke an image of a hyper-rational and increasingly enlightened society placing stronger demands on governmental capacity and transparency. Such a society can be conceived as a “learning” society defined by a pervasive commitment to the emancipatory potential of experimentation, innovation, reality testing, and self-criticism (Sanderson 2002). In a more critical analysis, Power has described the very same society, based on the extension of performance measurement into all corners of organizational life, as the audit society (Power 1999).
The overall goal of performance management is to link the sequences of the traditional linear process of policy-making together in a cyclic and continuous process of innovation and learning that will ensure the development of better policy solutions (Van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan 2015, 21). This requires development of internal procedures for performance measurement based on relevant indicator selection, data collection, analysis and reporting, and the subsequent use of the performance information by relevant decision-makers (Van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan 2015, 65). The basic reform principle of performance management is thus the development of procedures that will ensure learning from evidence and the continuous improvement of policy.
Performance management has a certain affinity with risk management. This intersection of performance and risk, designated here as change governance, revolves around ideas such as rationally guided social and organizational change, policy experimentation, trial and error, “the role of reflection, lesson drawing and continuous adaptation” (Stoker 2006, 49), and ultimately “reflexive social learning” (Sanderson 2002, 9). However, learning from evidence and the continuous improvement of policy constitutes a reform principle in its own right, associated first and foremost with NPM reforms. The importance of other factors notwithstanding, the principal legacy of NPM is the development of public quasi-markets as frameworks for performance management, or vice versa (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 10). The market model is thus dominant to the point of sometimes being synonymous with performance management, specifically in the shape of cost/benefit analysis and so-called ratio indicators, including efficiency, productivity, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness, which in turn requires specific types of data on costs, inputs, outputs, and outcomes (Van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan 2015, 21).
However, the type of indicators and information associated with the market have also been subjected to post-NPM criticism calling for “wider” and “deeper” understanding of performance information (Van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan 2015, 21). This NPG approach to performance management involves a broader standards of public and social value beyond the market (Moore 1995; Stoker 2006), as well as a more holistic perspective on the role of performance management in the “whole of government” (Sanderson 2002). Moreover, this approach to performance management mirrors the overall post-NPM emphasis on the value of networks. The use of networks in performance management has been described as performance governance, that is, an “interactive” and “hyper dynamic” form of performance management, based on a recognition of the need to “organize the public sector to allow for citizens and customers of public services to participate in the whole policy cycle. This means that citizens are involved in co-designing, co-deciding, co-producing and co-evaluating public services in society” (Bouckaert and Halligan 2008, 189).
The goal of co-designing, co-deciding, co-producing, and co-evaluating resonates deeply and widely within the wider governance paradigm. Even more than improved risk management, improved learning, and innovation provide proponents of network governance and NPG with a key rationale for the use of networks (Osborne 2010). The systematic integration of networks in the policy process is seen here not merely to qualify public services from a user perspective, but to deliver critical information about policy problems, as well as knowledge about concrete effects of public policies that are vital to collaboration, learning, innovation, and the development of sustainable policy solutions in a wider sense (Agranoff 2007; Ansell and Gash 2008; Eggers 2005; Goldsmith and Eggers 2004; Goldsmith and Kettl 2009; Ulibarri and Scott 2016).
Performance management is to some extent the most obvious heir to scientific management and, in this capacity, a strong candidate for confirmation of the idea that current technocracy is the latest incarnation of an ever-recurring intellectual doctrine. The history of performance management has, for example, been presented convincingly as a succession of eight performance movements, leading from Taylorism to NPM and current evidence-based policy claiming that “research and indicators rather than ideology and opinion have to undergird policy” (Van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan 2015, 51). Nevertheless, the part played by performance management in late modern technocracy goes beyond “revitalization of old concepts” and increased “intensity in the use of performance information” due to “technological changes” (Van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan 2015, 55).
For one, current performance management involves a more experimentalist type of scientific-technological rationality than the functionalism of early technocracy, which was primarily invested in the creation of models identifying and linking the key forces of the social machine. Learning from evidence and continuous improvement of policy, by contrast, involves an experimentalist ambition about finding out “what works and why.” Although experimental methodology in the strict sense is to some extent the gold standard for this ambition, experimentalism is best understood more broadly as a search for evidence, effects, and causality (Sanderson 2002). In this broader sense, experimentalism includes the intensive mining of data sources, specifically designed studies and program evaluations, as well as the comparative approach found in the emblematic expression of current performance management: grading, scoring, and ultimately ranking of individuals, organizations, types of policy, and, in the case of good governance indicators, the entirety of government as such (Pollitt 2014).
Secondly, performance management has introduced a new standard of accountability not found in early technocracy. For the early technocrats, measurement and quantification was a means to provide an administrative elite with the numbers necessary to exercise “expert judgement and general managerial skills” with a significant degree of discretion and even secrecy (Porter 1995, 146). Performance management, by contrast, consistently associates scientific management with a standard of accountability that is more or less diametrically opposed to secrecy and discretion. Accountability may owe an intellectual and etymological debt to accounting, but it implies transparency and a governmental responsibility to continuously demonstrate results and provide evidence to the general public, the media, and stakeholders with a vested interest in particular issues. The alternative to discretion and secrecy presented by the notion of accountability is in this sense based on the demand that governmental decisions be presented—in a completely transparent manner—as necessary actions given the available evidence.
Finally, performance management can be said to imbue technocratic culture with a new emphasis on innovation, development, and entrepreneurship no longer contained by the industrial concept of efficiency so central to the early modern technostructure. For late modern technocrats, innovation rather than efficiency as such is the primary goal. NPM reforms already supplanted narrow concepts of efficiency with broader standards of effectiveness, utility, and sustainability. With network governance, NPG, and even broader concepts of public value, innovation tends to become the new intrinsic value and instrumentality of technocratic culture thought to ensure economic abundance, social peace, and strong government. Current technocratic culture is not so much based on the leitmotif of getting things done, identified by Bell, as coming up with something new (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Indeed, this attribute is the reason for Du Gay’s identification of NPM and “entrepreneurial governance” as a main source of contemporary bureaucracy bashing (2000, 61).
More generally, current performance management exasperates a conflict with bureaucracy that was always inherent to the administrative and governmental reliance on quantification, measurement, and scientific management. Although this conflict may have been moderated and balanced in the earlier technocratic take-over of bureaucracy and the creation of techno-bureaucracy, current performance management is less inclined to strike a compromise with bureaucracy. So long as the technocratic preoccupation with quantification and measurement is purely a matter of providing the numbers needed by an overseeing and controlling administrative elite, it remains compatible with and even dependent on bureaucratic organization.
For late modern technocracy, however, systems of quantification and measurement have less “to do with policing or surveillance in the normal sense of external observation, although elements of this may exist; it has more to do with attempts to re-order the collective and individual selves that make up organizational life” (Power 1999, 42). At the level of formal organization, performance management is to some extent still molded into bureaucratic organization through accounting practices, technical budget reforms, strengthening of the Treasury, the emergence of the “performance audit,” and “Supreme Audit Institutions” since the late 1970s and 1980s (Pollitt et al. 1999, 5). However, this development also signifies a potential abandonment of earlier technocratic compromises with bureaucracy and a more far-reaching displacement of bureaucratic culture and its underlying ideology and rationality in the organizational life of public administrations.
Technocracy, Bureaucracy, and Democracy Revisited
In contrast to the idea of a quiet and belated realization of the early technocratic project, the principles of connectivity, risk, and performance can be seen to provide the late modern version of the technocratic project with (a) a more informational, adaptive, and experimental type of scientific-technological rationality; (b) a commitment to an open, reflexive, and accountable form of scientific management; and (c) an organizational culture defined by the primacy of network management, requisite irony, and innovation. Although it should be seen against the background of the early technocratic project and a second stage in the development and extension of bureaucratic organization, late modern technocracy nevertheless adds a different dynamic to the development of public administrations. Whereas technocratic animosity towards bureaucracy is to some extent mediated and contained in the techno-bureaucracy, late modern technocracy reinforces the critique of bureaucracy due to the requirements of connectivity, risk, and performance. This development goes a long way in explaining why several scholars have felt compelled to mount a defense of bureaucracy.
Even if late modern technocracy is more adversarial towards bureaucracy, however, bureaucracy clearly still persists both as a form of organization and as a project providing a counterpoint to technocratic rationality, ideology, and culture. Empirically, the proposed rediscovery of technocracy does not suggest a wholesale transformation to a new technocratic administration, but rather increased attention to technocracy as a source of influence on the past and future development of public administration together with bureaucracy. However, renewed attention to the current implications of the long-standing tension between technocracy and bureaucracy does suggest a somewhat different research agenda than the idea of a more or less stable institutional compromise between bureaucracy, markets, and networks invoked by the rather pervasive consensus on the current reality of the mixed administration. Taking a general and comprehensive model of public management reform as a point of departure (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 33), this agenda can be outlined as follows.
1. The core assumption underlying the proposed rediscovery of technocracy is that technocratic influence on administrative reform and policy increases with the advance of post-industrial society. Building on the existing version of this assumption in the literature, the case has been made that post-industrialism in its more recent guise should be conceptualized along the dimensions of the network society, the risk society, and audit society, which in turn is seen to give rise to a distinct late modern version of the technocratic project. This is both a hypothesis in favor of a broad and pervasive transition towards technocratic administration and of differences across countries depending on the degree of post-industrial development. This emphasis on post-industrial trends emphasizes socioeconomic forces behind reform vis-à-vis political system variables that provide the context for elite decisions on administrative reform and policy (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 33).
However, the hypothesis also assigns a more prominent role to technology, in particular ICTs, as a pivotal force of transformation that cuts across the economy and civil society. Even if the development of ICT and proliferation of informational networks have been rather rapid judged by the standards of technological innovation, it is still a slow and fundamental structural trend that can only be viewed appropriately in a prolonged historical perspective. By comparison, even deep and long-lasting trends such as global economic forces are more cyclical and short-term. Even though events such as fiscal crises may well produce a resurgence of administrative basics such as tight budget control, oversight, and centralization, they also take place within the more fundamental advance of network society, risk society, and audit society.
Network society, risk society, and audit society present, on the one hand, a set of global forces that are more directly related to technological development, more fundamental, and more one-directional than the forces of market integration, trade liberalization, and increased global competition. On the other hand, network society, risk society, and audit society also comprise a set of concrete governmental concerns working across a broad range of socioeconomic policies that can also be considered part of the structural context of elite decisions about administrative policy and reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 36). States are not merely subjected helplessly to the advance of post-industrialism, but also active agents and developers of network society, risk society, and audit society through a range of socioeconomic policies.
2. Even if technocratic influence is seen to increase with the advance of post-industrial society, it must also be seen as contingent upon “political system” variables behind administrative reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 37). Specifically, technocratic influence can be assumed to depend on the strength and institutionalization of bureaucratic rationality, ideology, and culture in political and administrative systems. Keeping in mind that the technocratic project is a later addition to administrations based to varying degrees on bureaucratic principles, the extent to which bureaucratic rationality, ideology, and culture may rebuff and deflect technocratic influence becomes a pivotal issue. Exploration of this argument requires attention to historical sources and comparison of specific cases building and expanding on existing measures such as commitment to the Rechtsstaat, separation of ministers and mandarins, and integration of advisory functions in the civil service (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 55).
3. National particularities and sensitivity to specific cases notwithstanding, two possible outcomes of the current and future conflict between technocracy and bureaucracy can be identified, setting aside for now the unlikely (if theoretically possible) outcomes of a complete bureaucratic deflection of technocratic influence as well as the counterimage of a complete subjugation of bureaucracy to the technocratic project. The first possible outcome resembles what has been called the Neo-Weberian State (NWS). As Pollitt and Bouckaert state, NWS is “not Weber plus NPM” (2011, 119). However, NWS could well be seen as Weber plus technocracy. NWS consists in a continued commitment to the role of the state, legal-procedural rationality, representative democracy, and a public ethos combined with the following “neo” elements: a professional culture oriented towards quality of service and a corresponding professionalization of civil servants such that “bureaucrats” are no longer just rule-followers and “experts in the law,” new modes of consultation, more ex-post control, and a “degree of performance management” (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, 118). In addition to the link between professionalism and performance management already established in these attributes of NWS, the managerial side of current professionalism also extends to network management and risk management. More generally, the standard of professionalism is connected with technical expertise, less politics, and “the Progressive’s vision of the administrative state” (Bourdeaux 2008, 350).
The crucial attribute of NWS, in this view, is that the technocratic influence is partially rebuffed and contained by politico-administrative systems based on a strong institutionalization of bureaucratic rationality, ideology, and culture. Bureaucratic essentials such as administrative law, equality before the law, and legal scrutiny remain the bedrock of public administration, even if they are partially modernized. New standards of professional competence and expertise are added to, rather than supplanting bureaucratic ideas of civil service and a public ethos. However, NWS must also be assumed to be less regionally specific based on the argument presented here, even if the fact that the label was originally applied to continental European states corresponds well with the strong institutionalization of bureaucracy found in this group of countries. More importantly, NWS must be seen as the result of a potentially fragile compromise between bureaucracy and technocracy.
Hence, the second possible outcome: the Neo-Technocratic State (NTS). Although it could be argued that the last thing needed in the current debate is yet another three-letter acronym, NPM and NPG are not appropriate alternatives here since their underlying logic is the commitment to, respectively, the market model and the network model. If NWS is indeed seen as an outcome where technocratic influence is met with a high degree of bureaucratic resilience, the crucial alternative is a situation where technocracy has effectively subjugated bureaucracy and become the defining element of the administration. This tipping point from NWS to NTS can be said to appear when the professionalization of civil servants is no longer an extension of the public ethos to better public service and the ability to meet the needs and wishes of citizens, but rather intended to nurture a professional devoid of any basis in bureaucratic skills or ethos, when avenues of participation offered to citizens are less a matter of consultations supplementing representative democracy than involvement in scientific management requiring relevant knowledge and expertise from citizens and their organizations, and when we are no longer witnessing a moderate degree of performance management and ex-post control but rather an extensive implementation of quantification and measurement systems that affect even the most mundane of administrative practices and routines.
If, where and when the tipping point from NWS to NTS is reached is a matter for further empirical research. It is clear, however, that the most likely candidates to the NTS label are not necessarily the ardent NPM adopters conventionally contrasted with NWS states. Grouping these countries together is, beyond the broad idea of an Anglophone family tree, usually based on political system variables, primarily majoritarian government, and the strong influence of NPM-style reforms. However, the group is far from unison when it comes to the combined forces of network society, risk society, and audit society, even if the institutionalization of bureaucracy is assumed to be comparatively weak. Conversely, the pressure generated by these forces may well be significant enough to overrule bureaucratic resistance in various states otherwise assumed to belong to the NWS group.
In addition to this agenda for empirical research, the rediscovery of technocracy also has some bearing on normative issues, complementing the current defense of bureaucracy based on the idea of an intrinsic relation with “constitutional democracy and the separation of powers” (Olsen 2006, 9). Although the technocratic ideology of scientific management and depoliticization can be seen to involve a two-pronged attack on bureaucracy and democracy alike, the particular nature of late modern technocracy adds a complication to this stance: whereas the stance towards bureaucracy has become more adversarial, late modern technocracy embraces openness, reflexivity, and accountability in the name of democracy. Nevertheless, the underlying goal is still scientific management rather than democracy, even if the position of late modern technocracy is more subtle and ambiguous than the open and aggressive anti-democratic sentiments of early technocracy (Bevir 2006). This leaves three issues of critical importance to the more normative debate about administrative reform.
Connective governance has indeed made administration and government more open to stakeholder participation, communication, and dialogue. However, ICTs and the informational logic of networks are not inherently democratic and networks are not inherently avenues of connective action and political contestation, even if they are often presented as such. For one, networks are often exclusive, offering participation primarily to those in possession of critical knowledge resources. Moreover, the form of deliberation is mostly technical and focused on problem solution. Simply pushing networks higher on the ladder of participation will not, however, make connective governance inherently democratic. Participation and deliberation, no matter how extensive, is deeply entrenched in technocratic concerns within the parameters of connective governance.
The increased reflexivity and awareness of governmental self-limitation associated with risk management may indeed lead to more openness towards external circumstances, resources, and perspectives. Reflexivity is not, however, an invitation to the exercise of free and unbounded debate and contestation. It is a particular mode of thought and action strictly limited to the parameters of continuous adaptation, resilience, and even “survival.”
In similar fashion, accountability, which is undoubtedly the most crucial concept in the late modern bid for democratic legitimacy of scientific management, may well produce more governmental transparency and offer new possibilities to citizens as service users, co-evaluators and even co-producers of public policy. Even if accountability may be desirable for such reasons, however, it remains democratically ambiguous at best. Rather than a strong standard of democratic representation, participation, or deliberation, accountability invokes a standard of output legitimacy based on the ability to take necessary action and deliver results.
Conclusion
The proposed rediscovery of technocracy provides a missing counterpart to the rediscovery of bureaucracy. That the empirical and normative defense of bureaucracy is to a large degree motivated by the rise of the governance paradigm has been clear from the outset. Indeed, Olsen’s defense is directed at the “apolitical” language about “historical necessities” and an “inevitable shift” towards a more advanced administration put forth by market and network enthusiasts alike (2006, 13). However, this line of defense also tends to misconstrue the nature of the challenge to bureaucracy. As argued, this challenge must be seen in the broader theoretical and historical context of the technocratic project. Given that it represents a first step in this direction, the article has necessarily presented this argument in rather general terms. Further development of the argument will clearly call for more specific analysis guided by the empirical and normative parameters suggested above.
Footnotes
My thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for the challenging but thoughtful and helpful comments.
References
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