what is the 'post-bureaucratic' state?

We know at least two things about the Tories, and they are probably connected. Firstly, they want to cut spending on public services substantially, even if this doesn't make a tremendous impact on Britain's budget deficit. And secondly, they want to amplify the 'power of information' that the internet can exert over government services and transparency. This Prospect article suggests that "The starting point will be to flood the public sector with information. No budget will be secret or hard to track down." Their capture of Tom Steinberg - "the coding man's Richard Dannatt" - confirms that they may be serious about rethinking some of the basic protocols of how government information is organised. I've speculated on what such 'conservatism 2.0' might look like in the past. 

The potential connection between public sector efficiency and liberating information works as follows. Bureaucratic inefficiency and under-performing public services become impossible to conceal. Government comes under the spotlight of (what I've heard Michael Power term) the permanent audit. Pressure from users of public services rises, as they are empowered to know how much better or more efficient the government could be. Presumably the media is expected to be a willing accomplice in this holding to account, although that will no doubt look like masochism within weeks of the Tories taking office

In principle, this means that conventional auditting could gradually wane, as this Demos report suggests. And in principle, this introduces a new phase for the neo-liberal state.

The paradox of the neo-liberal state has always been that it is managed by self-loathing bureaucrats. It has conducted a recurring rationalist critique of its own rationality, constantly restructuring, reinventing, reimagining its own loathed inefficiencies, but never being able to settle on anything that can be agreed on as efficient. Hence the endless present participles; it is constant work in progress. This paradox explains why attacks on 'middle management' and the public sector tend always to inflate both: the only means of criticising and stream-lining a bureaucracy is to hold it up to a bureaucratic critique. Decentralisation to 'the front line' requires ever greater centralisation of power to be enacted. 

The Tories now suggest we are entering the 'post-bureaucratic age', and promise a state suited to it. Up until now, neo-liberalism has been not so much a post-bureaucratic project, as a meta-bureaucratic one - it is a constant critique of the state, from a position of supposed neutral economic rationality.

For the Tories' claim to hold up in any way, the alleged power of decentralised information has to be realised. Lets assume, for the sake of argument, that consumer and media pressure is able to genuinely impact upon bad public services and wasteful government practices. And lets assume, for the sake of argument, that there are no class imbalances in the ability to convert information into power (i.e. that those dependent on social services simply need more information, in order to become the equivalent of the pushy middle class parent at the gates of the primary school). Then lets assume, for the sake of argument, that the piling of audit upon audit, of meta-analysis upon meta-analysis, could gradually go into decline, what sort of state would we have?

My instinct is that this would certainly deliver transparency, might offer a version of accountability, but would fail to achieve legitimacy. Here's why.

Our old friend Weber tells us that the legitimacy of the modern state lies chiefly in its capacity to know with some degree of objectivity and to process with some degree of efficiency. The neo-liberal attack on the state is an attack on the possibility of this centralised expert knowledge, based on Hayek's resolutely post-modern claim that objective knowledge is not only impossible, but a more dangerous ambition than the distributed opinion represented by the marketplace. The irony, of course, is that this critique is generally marshalled by alternative elites - central bankers, economists, consultants. But as Philip Mirowksi argues in his post-script to the magnificent new essay collection, The Road from Mont Pelerin, the consummation of neo-liberalism is in fact manifest in wikipedia, where a collective perspective on the world is the closest that we can get to knowledge.

But as Mirowksi also argues, Hayek was entirely unconcerned with the Weberian problem of state legitimacy. He had a Schmittian, nihilistic or Leninist zeal, which drove the neo-liberal project forward with no regard for its authority. Claims to authority were intrinsically suspect and a threat to liberty, which made initiating a legitimacy crisis a necessary political act. An illegitimate dictator who safeguarded economic freedoms was a safer bet than a legitimate state that claimed to know what was best. (The Chicago School involvement with the Pinochet regime is a case in point.)

So, following Mirowski, we might say that 'government 2.0' is the final realisation of the neo-liberal state. No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information. As David Weinberger says in triumphant Hayekian style, "transparency is the new objectivity." In some instances, consumer perspectives may form the basis of action - demanding change if they're a prominent journalist or campaigner, selecting a different service supplier if they're a fortunate lay-person, or just mouthing off on facebook if they're not so lucky.

But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some rival position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare only to the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis.

Of course there is a sunnier tradition of political thought than Weber's, in which democracy plays the central role in determining the legitimacy of the state. Lets not forget that Hannah Arendt also elevated opinion over expertise, as the necessary condition of politics. Perhaps, Tories might argue, this is not about knowledge and efficiency at all, but about participation. Perhaps. The fear is that, by forging a path between the instrumentalist Weberian defence of the state and the democratic Habermasian defence (a path manifest in the concept of 'civic hacking' that mySociety represents), that we get some hybrid of bureaucracy and democracy, that is neither quite as effective as the former, nor as empowering as the latter.

Comments

[gapingsilence.wordpress.com]

Thanks for reminding me why I stopped reading David Weinberger. He apologises upfront for using the "X is the new Y" cliche, but it's actually how he thinks: we used to believe Old Stuff, but now we believe New Stuff. I'm just glad I'm too young to remember those dark days when 'we' got our news from the newspapers and came away thinking we'd learnt the Objective Truth. (Oh, wait, I'm older than he is.)

As for the Tories, the words are about empowerment but the overtones are very governmental - I can't help feeling it's as much about giving people the opportunity to mould themselves as active citizens as it is about channelling anything from below.

I'm very disappointed by Tom Steinberg's decision. I was quite a vocal anti-Labour blogger in the run-up to the last election; from memory, my eve-of-poll advice was "Don't abstain. Don't be an idiot and vote Tory. But don't vote Labour." I've never understood anyone having anything to do with the Tories.

- Phil

[Tony Bovaird]

While the concerns expressed here are understandable, this post does a disservice to the government 2.0 debate. It is talking about non-government 2.0 and sets up a straw-man-opponent in which hardly anyone could possibly believe, then demonstrates convincingly how to knock this opponent over. Most of those involved in the government 2.0 debate do indeed want much richer interactions between citizens, service users, professionals, managers and politicians. However, few want the views of citizens and service users to trump the views of the others, just to have much greater weight in the future - not a lot to ask, given how little weight they have had up to now. A long way down the line, we are going to have to face up to the issues which Will Davies raises here, deciding where the proper balance lies between expertise and 'perspective' (better characterised as 'formally-validated expertise' and 'experience-based expertise). And we will certainly wish to ensure that both play major roles in decision making on public services and issues. But it is wholly implausible for Will Davies to suggest that we are now reaching the point where 'expertise' is being swamped, so that the legitimacy of current governmental decision making structures and systems is threatened by ill-informed, non-expert 'opinion'-peddlars.

[Will Davies]

Tony - this is fair enough, and evidently better informed than my own post. The distinction between 'formally-validated expertise' and 'experience-based expertise' is extremely interesting to me as a sociologist - I'd love to know more about where that comes from and where it leads.

I should qualify my post by saying that I'm theorising, not proscribing or making policy recommendations. Max Weber (who I guess is my main intellectual inspiration in life) sought to define the 'ideal types' of modern social institutions, which meant trying to specify the norms and philosophies which governed them, but which they never quite adhered to in any particular instance. This is kind of what I'm doing. Of course David Cameron is not about to transform the state from a top-down bureaucracy to an open network of data in the space of a few years. But it's worth thinking about the latter model as a political philosophy that is active in how governance structures are being transformed. Your comment (and the concept of 'experience-based expertise') actually confirms my hunch about this shift.

[Ian Falconer]

I'm interested to hear where you believe the automated expert fits into your argument.

As data becomes more and more accessible the desire to 'contract out' opinion to automated systems seems to have grown, whether it is the trading systems of bankers or the threat recognition systems of the military and intelligence communities or other 'expert systems' for meeting more quotidian needs such as food distribution. They are all distinctly post-bureaucratic.

The opinions are formed numerically, guided by coders who may not have the knowledge to actually understand the responses that they are dictating or the guile to provide escape avenues for the systems that they build.

"Computer says no" appears to be the response most apt to the post-bureaucratic age. I'm afraid that David Walliams is the limit to my academic references this Saturday morning, but I'm looking at this from the perspective of a resurgence of Game Theoretical analysis in complex behavioural systems and the potential use/misuse in future development of online discourse.

To put it another way - with transparency and open data access what is an opinion if it is formed or informed by a machine ?