Bureaucratic Ideology Research Articles

The dictatorship of bureaucratic ideology in modern school culture

The article presents the results of a study of the infuence of bureaucracy values on the functioning and development of a modern educational organization and, in particular, on its management, due to the traditionally conservative intention of the cultural activities of legitimate bearers of power. Analyzing the reasons for the bureaucratization of school management, the authors believes that they are determined both by the mental parameters of the value preferences of Russians and by changes in the political environment, stating the defeat of the democratic orientation of school life. Hypertrophied «with the load of all sorts of nonsense and absurd ideas» (N. A. Khrenov), bureaucratic culture, bringing to life previously unthinkable forms in education management, ceases to perform positive functions, destroying the value- existential meanings of school communication, pushing pedagogical creativity to the periphery, disrupting parity of values as parity of cultures. The methodological basis of the study, within which the methods of theoretical and empirical research were used: interdisciplinary analysis of scientifc literature, analytical interview, written survey, is an axiological approach that allows us to consider the current space of bureaucratic culture, in accordance with the norms of which the local reformatting of the school value system is carried out. The empirical basis of the scientifc work was the materials of the study of the problems of bureaucratization of education, prepared by undergraduates of the Department of General and Professional Pedagogy of Orenburg State University. In 2019, an anonymous written survey of teachers and heads of educational organizations of the Orenburg region and the Republic of Bashkortostan was conducted, in which 1457 people took part. The problem of bureaucratization of school management is relevant both in theoretical and applied terms, since the provision of normal life of an institutionally united school community depends on the degree of its development.

Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Singapore by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and Chee-Hoo Lum

Reviewed by: Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Singapore by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and Chee-Hoo Lum JinXing (Gene) Lai (bio) Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Singapore. Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and Chee-Hoo Lum. Singapore: Springer, 2018. 248 pp., color illustrations, bibliographies, glossary. ISBN: 978-981-13-1010-2 (hardcover), $109.99; ISBN: 978-981-13-1011-9 (e-book), $84.99. Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture and Identity in Contemporary Singapore, by anthropologist Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and music education scholar Chee-Hoo Lum, is a timely book that provides an update on the Singaporean music scene. It contributes to "a deeper understanding of the diverse, fluid, interconnected, and constantly evolving assemblages that make up Singaporean musicians' contemporary identities and creative practice" (8). In this ethnographically rich book, the authors seek to mitigate a balance in power relations between researchers and interlocutors, and accordingly they draw heavily on the voices of their interlocutors in their discussions. In chapter 1, Lizeray and Lum define the theoretical groundings for the book. Borrowing from Nicolas Bourriaud, an art critic and curator, they [End Page 154] interpret their case studies using the notions of semionaut and radicant. According to Lizeray and Lum, "A semionaut … is a person who navigates signs. This entails constructing pathways through a field of signs, and creating new and uncharted connections between hitherto unrelated ones. A semionaut of tradition is one that does so with traditional signs or signs relating to tropes and understandings of tradition" (2). Additionally, Lizeray and Lum use radicant to interpret their interlocutors' efforts to negotiate their musical and ethnical identity in different contexts. Radicant and semionaut act as heuristic tools that help us to interpret the constantly changing identity of a globalized, multicultural city such as Singapore (6). In chapter 2, Lizeray examines the "Singapore sound" ideology, derived from the official racial categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others, or the CMIO model, which celebrates differences among Singaporeans. Musicians who are engaged in the "Singapore sound" ideology are given incentives and receive more performance opportunities from government agencies. Lizeray notes that most of her interlocuters disdain the Singapore sound ideology. They seek to create music that is genuinely artistic rather than music that adheres to bureaucratic ideology. In chapter 3, Lum examines the benefits of collaborative creative processes. He notes that collaborative creative processes among musicians from different musical traditions encourage the broadening, deepening, and diversifying of their musical vocabularies. Chapter 4 features NADI Singapura, Singapore's first Malay percussion group that performs on an eclectic collection of percussion instruments from the Malay archipelago. In this chapter, Lizeray discusses how members of NADI Singapura preserve Malay traditional music while actively innovating from it. She observes that the elements that have led to their success include the notion of community as family, charismatic leadership, Malayness as a group ethos, and the ensemble's open-mindedness to innovations. In chapter 5, Lum examines his interlocutors' perspectives on fusion. Among the perspectives, a few points emerged. First, musicians create fusion music to attract younger audiences and to change audiences' perceptions of their musical tradition. Second, through collaborations, musicians exchange musical ideas and learn new musical languages. Finally, fusion is necessary, but there must be some form of gatekeeping. This ensures that the musical tradition is still recognizable despite the integration of new musical elements. Lizeray examines three local Chinese music ensembles in chapter 6—Nen (念), MUSA, and SA (仨)—as well as three Singaporean Chinese musicians based in New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Lizeray highlights that contemporary musicians' creative endeavors and personal affinities transcended racial boundaries and assumptions of cultural purity. Lizeray arrives [End Page 155] at her argument by comparing how Singaporean Chinese musicians based in Singapore and overseas express their Chinese identity in idiosyncratic ways through their musical works and performance practices. In chapter 7, Lum discusses how musicians used nostalgia as "hooks" in their music and performance practices to engage Singaporean audiences. These hooks (145) include the use of familiar rhythmic patterns and folk tunes, the creation of music videos that feature Singapore's landscapes, and the participation in collaborative music projects that revitalize the...

Deportation as a sacrament of the state: the religious instruction of contracted chaplains in U.S. detention facilities

ABSTRACTIn family detention, religious practice does not stand alone as a faith free-zone, but rather unfolds within what Néstor Rodríguez and Cristian Paredes call ‘coercive bureaucracy’ that from its accumulative effect have a bearing on religious practices [(2014). “Coercive Immigration Enforcement and Bureaucratic Ideology.” In Constructing Illegality in America: Immigrant Experiences, Critiques, and Resistance, edited by Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom, 63–83. New York: Cambridge University Press, 70]. From a meta-narrative vantage point, the concentrated flows of asylum seekers from Central America to the United States have spawned a new era of detention and deportation religiosity. Amid the amorphous complexity of the present U.S. immigration context, religion can be found at the intersections of the coercive arm of the state and the private-detention industry. Here, several ethical issues arise as to the precise social contours of the religious services provided in state-contracted private-detention facilities such as making deportation as the only viable mode of liberation detainees have to envision. With a constraint on notions of liberation in family detention, religious single-parent families are forced to accept deportation as the religious practice of liberation or what I call, deportation as a sacrament of the state.

Federal employee unionization and presidential control of the bureaucracy: Estimating and explaining ideological change in executive agencies

We present a formal model explaining that US presidents strategically unionize federal employees to reduce bureaucratic turnover and ‘anchor’ the ideological composition of like-minded agency workforces. To test our model’s predictions, we advance a method of estimating bureaucratic ideology via the campaign contributions of federal employees; we then use these bureaucratic ideal point estimates in a comprehensive empirical test of our model. Consistent with our model’s predictions, our empirical tests find that federal employee unionization stifles agency turnover, suppresses ideological volatility when the president’s partisanship changes, and occurs more frequently in agencies ideologically proximate to the president.

Beyond nursing nihilism, a Nietzschean transvaluation of neoliberal values

Like most goods-producing sectors in the West, modern health-care systems have been profoundly changed by globalization and the neoliberal policies that attend it. Since the 1970s, the role of the welfare state has been considerably reduced; funding and management of health systems have been subjected to wave upon wave of reorganization and assimilated to the private sector. At the same time, neoliberal policy has imposed the notion of patient empowerment, thus turning patients into consumers of health. The literature on nursing has accordingly reported on the significant repercussions on all aspects of the profession, from delivery of care and treatment, through training for new nurses, to legislated policy reforms regarding the role and responsibilities of modern nurses. In light of these developments, this paper analyses and theorizes about the way the injection of neoliberal policy is linked to and affects the practice of nursing. Drawing on a number of Nietzschean arguments, we begin with an exploration of the complex effects of neoliberalism, bureaucratization, and technocratization on the health system and the practice of nursing. Our main theoretical point here is that neoliberal policy engenders and promotes a neoliberal tide, which results in the conversion of the values that drive modern nursing practice. We then examine this tide in the light of Nietzsche's concepts. Starting with an analysis based on the ontology of the will to power, we show that nurses are dominated by neoliberal values embedded in technocratic and bureaucratic ideologies. Finally, we argue that the application of neoliberal policy constitutes a form of domestication from which one might potentially be freed through the Nietzschean concept of transvaluation of values. This transvaluation, as its freeing from some of the neoliberal tide, may be accomplished in accordance with a hierarchy of specific life-affirming values for nursing culture and practice.

Political Influence on Street-Level Bureaucratic Outcome: Testing the Interaction between Bureaucratic Ideology and Local Community Political Orientation

A basic principle of good government is that politics should be restricted to the input side, whereas the bureaucracy should operate independently of political considerations. However, 10 previous ...

Measurement and Public Service Motivation: New Insights, Old Questions

ABSTRACT This article reviews some recent research from political science that speaks to the public service motivation (PSM) literature. Specifically, it discusses research that describes new measures of bureaucratic ideology and agency performance. These new measures might usefully be employed in the PSM literature and a discussion of them highlights some potential pitfalls in PSM research more generally.

Shepherds of the People: Yasuoka Masahiro and the New Bureaucrats in Early Showa Japan

This essay revisits the meaning and significance of the ideal of bokuminkan (officials who shepherd the people), arguing that the archetype derived primarily from Tokugawa administrative thought and practice and helped shape the ethos of the modern Home Ministry. It further demonstrates how the nationalist intellectual Yasuoka Masahiro (1898–1983) incorporated his particular bokumin ideology into a Confucian-influenced discourse legitimizing a pivotal role for the “new bureaucrats” in an age of parliamentary politics, bolstering their identity as “transcendental,” nonparty political elites and serving their agenda of enhancing bureaucratic authority. In sum, this essay elucidates an important yet overlooked component of bureaucratic ideology in early Showa Japan.

Secretaries of Pork? A New Theory of Distributive Public Policy

Scholars have focused attention toward congressional influence over distributive grant allocations, but they have less frequently examined the extent to which administrative agencies play a role in that process. We present a new theory of ideology-contingent executive decision making within a multiple-principals framework to explain the geographic distribution of policy benefits. Our theory is novel in that it locates interbranch ideological conflict and confluence at the center of bureaus’ allocational strategies. Discretionary Department of Labor (DOL) grants and Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from 1991 to 2002 are examined to provide evidence that agencies deliver more grants to senators with proximate ideologies. To measure bureaucratic ideology, we generate comparable ideology estimates for cabinet secretaries, presidents, and members of the U.S. Senate via an item-response model. Our findings suggest that ideological congruence between senators and DOL or DOD is associated with significantly larger amounts of grants or contracts, respectively. These findings are important as they recast our understanding of distributive politics into ideological terms.

Perfecting the machine: Instrumental rationality and the bureaucratic ideologies of the state

Abstract Bureaucracy represents the most consistent effort to apply science and instrumental rationality to the control of human behavior. Recent studies of the sociology of science have undermined the positivist distinction between science and ideology and revealed the role of human interests in the ‘social construction’ of all forms of knowledge. This provides a basis for understanding the ideological character of the discourses of science and expertise, discipline and control, anti‐politics and depoliticization which characterize the forms of professional knowledge practiced in modern bureaucracies. Such ostensibly objective and disinterested knowledge obscures the contradictions and conflicts of social structure and maintains existing distributions of wealth and power. Other accounts of reality, reflecting the experience of dominated groups, are silenced by the claims of scientific expertise. However, bureaucratic ideologies cannot comprehend or deal with the ‘great issues’ of politics which continue ...

Bureaucracy as an issue in Third World management: An African case study

AbstractOrganizational theory has been of surprisingly limited value in illuminating the problems of public sector management in the Third World. One reason for this is the ideal‐typical bias of most studies of Third World management. This has led to an emphasis on assumed optimal performance criteria to the detriment of an understanding of how Third World organizations actually perform. The case of public sector administration in Liberia is used to illustrate this theme. The major role of administrative incorporation in the stabilization of the Liberian State is established, and consideration given to the ways in which the span of administrative employment and the extent of its popular impact were maximized through the elaboration of an idiosyncratic bureaucratic ideology. Central features of the Liberian bureaucracy are discussedthe over‐definition of its external boundary; the weakness of its internal boundaries; the relative insignificance of specialized expert knowledge to bureaucratic roles; and the idiosyncratic nature of the bureaucratic career. While Weberian standards did not apply in the Liberian instance, it cannot be assumed that the latter was therefore a ‘failed bureaucracy’; for the Liberian administration was arguably effective in relation to certain goals, even if these were not ones which would have applied in the ideal‐typical case. These goals were essentially political and must be understood in relation to political constraints, rather thanas is often suggested in studies of Third World managementas ‘cultural’ phenomena. Attempts to improve public sector managerial performance in the Third World need to give as much attention to operational issues as to conventional targets.

Political culture and state bureaucracy in Mexico: The case of adult education

This article describes some of the principal traits of the political culture of the bureaucracy working in the National Institute of Adult Education (INEA) in Mexico. Since the Mexican state is defined as a corporatist state, it is argued that bureaucratic ideologies and factions are very important in understanding policy formation. Two main bureaucratic factions are identified in Mexican education: ‘normalistas’ (i.e. people trained in teachers colleges) and ‘technocrats’ (i.e. people trained in the universities). Similarly, the notion of bureaucracy has been distinguished between ‘organic’ and ‘subordinated’. Practical implications for policy making and educational research in dependent societies are drawn.

William Pitt and the Commission on Fees, 1785–1801

On 17 February 1785, William Pitt reported to the house of commons on his administration's response to the reports of the commission for examining the public accounts established by Lord North five years earlier. Since 1780, the commissioners of accounts had summarized and rationalized the new approaches to public administration that had blossomed in the economical-reform movement of the early 1780s; their work has been described by recent commentators as ‘a comprehensive and quite radical philosophy of the public interest’, and even ‘a new bureaucratic ideology’. For his part, Pitt commended the commissioners for having ‘given light to parliament on subjects hitherto involved in the most inscrutable obscurity’, and he stated that it was ‘the duty of the House to profit from the Reports’. After reviewing their findings of manifold deficiencies in the issue and audit of public money, Pitt introduced legislation to reform the treasurership of the navy and to set up a new department for auditing public accounts. The commissioners' more sweeping recommendations for reforms of official compensation and discipline were to be addressed by a new commission on fees, whose broad charge would be: to inquire into the fees, gratuities, perquisites, and emoluments, which are, or lately have been, received in the several public offices…; and to report such observations as may occur to them for the better conducting and managing the business transacted….

POLITICS AS RITUAL: RULES AS RESOURCES IN THE POLITICS OF THE LIBERIAN HINTERLAND

IT IS CHARACTERISTIC of all but the most extreme forms of totalitarian control that the dominance of the state must be established not only through coercion but also through legitimization. For whilst it is possible, as Max Weber noted,' to envisage such a community of interests between a ruler and his staff, and such a concentration of power in their hands, that the achievement of popular legitimacy need not even be contemplated, there would nevertheless still require to be a relationship of authority within the ruling class. Such authority, if it is to be maintained in a stable form, requires structure and predictability in the practices of government, and thus some sort of bureaucratic administration will inevitably emerge. But in the case of a totalitarian regime, this creates a dilemma, for not only does the delegation of power towards the periphery inevitably diminish that at the centre, but the presence of a bureaucratic ideology itself conflicts with the very authoritarianism in the service of which it was initially generated. Even in authoritarian situations, therefore--or perhaps, particularly in authoritarian situations--there tend to develop irreconcilable conflicts between the interests of the ruling stratum and the expectations bred by the system of bureaucratic control. Where the regime and the administration are ethnically distinct, these conflicts are likely to be accentuated, and where the administration shares with the mass an ethnic identity the preservation of which is itself necessary to the maintenance of the system as a whole, so also will the tendency to political instability be reinforced. These considerations are particularly pertinent in the case of Liberia, a society in which, at least until the time of the 1980 Coup, the major political connections exhibited a high degree of transparency, yet in which a numerically small but enormously privileged core had succeeded, with the aid of an administrative staff from which it was ethnically separated, in maintaining its hold over an almost

BUREAUCRATIC MALAISE IN THE MODERN SPY NOVEL: DEIGHTON, GREENE, AND LECARRE

Modern espionage novels and particularly those of Deighton, Greene, and LeCarre provide exceptional insights into bureaucratic politics. As well as offering a wealth of material about bureaucratic structure and behaviour, their works speak to the negative consequences and effects of bureaucratic pressures and ideologies on the human spirit. Specifically, these novelists posit that in a bureaucratic world heroism is flawed: that principles no longer flow from moral purpose, and that the evil which needs to be conquered can no longer be identified solely with an externalized enemy. The conclusion drawn is that the bureaucratic state, which substitutes technique for purpose and principle, and bureaucratic personality for individual initiative and motivation, is largely responsible for this malaise. The world which remains reflects, paradoxically, both order and disorder — the image is that of a universal clock winding its way down to an uncertain, yet organizationally dominated future.

Bureaucratic Ideology in the United States and the Soviet Union

The concept of "bureaucratic ideology " is provided here, as well as empirical grounding by means of interviews with American and Soviet local government officials and with those who educate and train them. The interview data tend to support the concept developed previously as an abstraction from the professional literature on administration in these two countries. However, the data also require some qualifications in the concept as certain differences in outlook emerge between those who practice, and those who stud) and teach, public administration.

Beyond Explanation

In response to Michael Urban's article, "Bureaucratic Ideology in the United States and the Soviet Union: Some Empirical Dimensions," this commentary argues that three modes of knowledge acquisition: the explanatory, the interpretive, and the critical, may be employed by those seeking an explication of our general adherence to hierarchical principles. However, an understanding of the specific purposes to be served by each of these modes is a necessary prerequisite to their use in specific cases.

Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving.Charles E. Lindblom , David K. Cohen

<i>Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving.</i>Charles E. Lindblom , David K. Cohen

Citizen participation: Antagonists or allies

The nature of American communities, with their multiple forces and types of organizations and with their massive concentration of diverse ethnic, economic, social and religious groups, demands equally complex systems for decisionmaking; systems which will somehow reflect the wants and needs and interests of such groups. However, the people who inhabit American communities do not possess equal influence in this complex process, and the result has been that some, especially the middle class and less priviledged, have been least effective in making their needs felt and in securing action relevant to their interests. Many residents in populated areas, but particularly middle class and lower socio-economic groups, suffer from a pervasive sense of powerlessness, which in large part accounts for civic apathy. This, in turn, contributes to the persistence of conditions that prevail in many American urban and suburban areas, poor housing conditions, lack of good medical care, delinquency, vandalism, crime, drug addiction, discrimination, fear, pessismism, helplessness, and a general civic and social apathy. The most realistic explanation for an apathetic public is a bureaucratic-technocratic type of administration; an administration which plans for and not with people. Bureaucratic ideologies tend to restrict the areas in which community participation is deemed appropriate, while technocratic ideology suggests that only those highly trained and certified in their own specific area

Functions of a Bureaucratic Ideology: "Citizen Participation"

Functions of a Bureaucratic Ideology: "Citizen Participation"