Technocratic System Research Articles

Dilemma of Democracy: Reasons for the Failure of Democracy in Pakistan

This article presents critical analysis of the dilemma of democracy in Pakistan. The objective of this study was to find out the major reasons behind the failure of democracy in Pakistan as most of the population is confused about what the actual cause is behind it. The design of the study was descriptive and teachers and students of international relation of university of central Punjab were the population of this study. The sample of study was selected through random sampling technique. In order to collect data, a validated questionnaire was used by the researcher. The major findings of the research showed that most of the population presented illiteracy, corruption, unfair justice system, pressure groups, feudal and tribal system as the major reasons for the failure of democracy in Pakistan and suggested technocratic system and presidential system as the major solution for the disoriented situation in the country. On the basis of research, a major recommendation of a technocratic system was provided by the researcher.

The European Union as a long-term political actor: an overview

ABSTRACT This paper provides an overview of the time perspectives with which the European Union conducts its politics and policies – an aim that has garnered very little scholarly attention thus far. We ask in which ways and to what extent is the Union able to employ long-term policy targets and considers the possible interests of future generations. Which factors determine the time perspectives, which institutions define them and what can possibly be done in order to employ longer-term perspectives in a more systematic manner within this complex technocratic system? We approach these questions from three viewpoints: the foundational ideas of integration; the governance structures within the EU system; and the Union’s policy objectives. In addition to analyses of EU documentary data, our reflections rely on a set of semi-structured interviews conducted with a group of EU-experts in the autumn of 2019. A range of governance logics and mechanisms already support long-termism in the EU, but much can still be done in order to create a real processual value supporting it.

Training for the Algorithmic Machine

In thinking about the ubiquity of algorithmic surveillance and the ways our presence in front of a camera has become engaged with the algorithmic logics of testing and replicating, this project summons Walter Benjamin’s seminal piece <em>The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility </em>with its three versions, which was published in the United States under the editorial direction of Theodore Adorno. More specifically, it highlights two of the many ways in which the first and second versions of Benjamin’s influential essay on technology and culture resonate with questions of photography and art in the context of facial recognition technologies and algorithmic culture more broadly. First, Benjamin provides a critical lens for understanding the role of uniqueness and replication in a technocratic system. Second, he proposes an analytical framework for thinking about our response to visual surveillance through notions of training and performing a constructed identity—hence, being intentional about the ways we visually present ourselves. These two conceptual frameworks help to articulate our unease with a technology that trains itself using our everyday digital images in order to create unique identities that further aggregate into elaborate typologies and to think through a number of artistic responses that have challenged the ubiquity of algorithmic surveillance. Taking on Benjamin’s conceptual apparatus and his call for understanding the politics of art, I focus on two projects that powerfully critique algorithmic surveillance. Leo Selvaggio’s URME (you are me) Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic<em> </em>offers a critical lens through the adoption of algorithmically defined three-dimensional printed faces as performative prosthetics designed to be read and assessed by an algorithm. Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen’s project Training Humans is the first major exhibition to display a collection of photographs used to train an algorithm as well as the classificatory labels applied to them both by artificial intelligence and by the freelance employees hired to sort through these images.

Anna Watkins Fisher. The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 292p. Paper, $27.95 (ISBN 978-1-4780-0970-2).

When I started reading Anna Watkins Fisher’s The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance , I was already in the middle of reading Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, a very different book that is also about intersections of art and sociopolitical reality. I mention Laing’s book here because she and Fisher both introduce “hospitality” as an important conceptual frame. To Laing, who borrows the term from John Berger, hospitality is about the potential for art to create critical openings that can help us connect and be free. For Fisher, hospitality, like everything else in the neoliberal, technocratic system(s) the title of the book references, has already been co-opted and redeployed as a tool for coercion.

The Dream of Clinical Supervision, Critical Perspectives on the State of Supervision, and Our Long-Lived Accountability Nightmare

This memoir essay was originally intended to revisit a time when instructional supervision became the ubiquitous practice in a ‘golden age of supervision,’ and to valorize colleagues who contributed their scholarly canons to the field. An introductory narrative describes the goals and hopes of a field that emerged through Morris Cogan’s popular clinical supervision, and other scholars who adopted and altered his principles with dreams of a road to effective school reform. It tells of the benefits as well as the dysfunctions of practices that occurred over the decades, including the all-encompassing metric world of public schooling. The nightmare includes a technocratic system that provides a view of teaching and supervision dominated by politicians, entrepreneurs, and special interest foundations, and serves a view of schooling based on valuing of cultural uniformity, a punitive notion of accountability, and an uncritical perspective of patriotic nationalism, corporate thinking and class, race, and gender privilege. Foucault’s Panopticon is used as an analytic device for instructional supervision in order to portray a power relationship between the observer and the teacher. Not only does the nightmare reveal what has been happening over the past decades, but it also serves as a cautionary tale for the challenges we are now facing in the pandemic-era schooling of the 2020’s.

Women in rural South Africa: a post-wage existence and the role of the state

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider women in rural villages of Keiskammahoek in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. What the author discovered is that some women are carving out a space through a complex, triple relation to the state. The state is distributor of social grants, a midwife of economic activity, and a technocratic system of governance and “service delivery.” The paper asks whether post-wage livelihoods are simply survivalists or have emancipatory potential.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on research conducted in 2013-2015 in the rural villages of Keiskammahoek. The author spent time in the villages informally speaking to women and conducted 39 in-depth interviews.FindingsThe author found that the women are finding ways to engender non-capitalist relations in new and creative ways within their rural communities. The three sources of state activity (and power) – grants, economic projects, and governance – are engaged and used in different ways, but together create an interesting nexus of livelihoods and survival. What is interesting is the survivalist livelihoods – even if not representing an alternative mode of production – are allowing women a degree of independence, dignity, and self-determination.Originality/valueThe research has not been published and this argument has not been made before. The manuscript is a new approach to understanding post-wage livelihoods.

Conceptualising Role of the State in Light of Classical Economic Thought

This paper attempts to analyse and describe the role played by a state in promoting economic growth by contrasting two classical schools of political economy, the Keynesian school of thought and Neo-liberalism. The British economist, John Maynard Keynes proposed optimising market practices under a technocratic system of governance. In recent decades, this influential approach has exposed its vulnerabilities to the revival of neo-liberal laissez-faire arguments. In the age of globalisation, the integration of economies around the world has put new demands on the modern state at the very same time, in many ways, which have reduced their capacities to deal with those demands. The state today is squeezed, on the one side, by the forces of global economy and, on the other side, by the political demands for devolution of power. There is an important role for the state to play in the economic development, whether it is through intervention or deregulation, the ultimate choice lies with the society regarding which of the two forms to follow. In some dramatic role reversals, the yesteryear champions of laissez-faire (the US and UK) are moving towards protectionism, whereas, the earlier advocates (China and Russia) of closed economies are today arguing the case of free and fair international trade and globalisation per se. This is no coincidence as, ironically, both the school of thoughts have a lot in common in that they complement each other in many ways in terms of intellectual ideology.

Costruire un'economia: la Turchia kemalista tra impero e repubblica

The birth of the Turkish economy system in 1923 can not be considered as a full watershed with the imperial past. The process of this economic change is far from the model of the Ancien Regime, tied to a technocratic administration system. On the contrary, since the nineteenth century, it progressively and slowly approaches to the Western capitalist model. The administration of the Young Turks had already embodied this protectionist model, in order to defend the Ottoman’s embryonic industrial system. However, the capitulations, the advantageous customs taxes for some kinds of products, the banking system and the public finance managed by the European powers, made the efforts of the young Turkey vain. Not even after the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, the republican Turkey was able to shake off the mortgages inherited by the imperial past. Only during the 1930s the new Turkish republic was able to achieve its independent economic policy with state characteristics.

Organising invention through technical mentality: Simondon’s challenge to the ‘civilisation of productivity’

ABSTRACTAccording to Simondon, it is through the implementation of a ‘technical mentality’ that a technocratic system grounded on a communitarian ‘ethics of productivity’ can be transformed into a system of metastable functioning as a value. Simondon’s overall project is twofold, aiming both at a unified paradigm for the social sciences, and at a pedagogy of technics, inspired by the concept of the technical mentality. The goal of this article is to provide a conjoint and consistent analysis of Simondon’s paradigm by connecting the concepts of ‘organising amplification’ and ‘technical mentality’.

Technikos esmės sampratos problema Heideggerio filosofijoje

The provided analysis seeks to uncover the similarities and differences of concept of technology in ancient and modern times. Modern technical analysis in Heidegger’s philosophy reveals its predatory nature foreign to authentic culture. Here reveals a fundamental difference from the traditionally understood technē as the process of spreading and implementing powers of nature. In the essence of modern technology, which is identified as “enframing” (Ge-stell), instead of self - actualisation in the light of being, when a person is involved in the process of self - actualisation only as a mediator and creator, the predatory-forced self - actualisation is happening and the human is participating as exigible force. Heidegger emphasizes the total domination of scientific experimental science of nature and developed technologies. With the help of modern science, the nature that is every time commoditized ever more, transforms into a simple container of resources. Modern technology and its initiated process of global resourcing and commodification will inevitably deepen the crisis tendencies and reinforce the processes of alienation. In this way, the article revealed and illuminated the horizon of potential disharmony, associated with the emergence and domination of global, autonomous technocratic system. Keywords: Heidegger’s philosophy, technics (technē), Ge-stell, resources. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/zz.2014.023

Rediscovering the Social Model of Childbirth

The assumption is often made that women in a traditional birth culture are bound to benefit by its replacement with a medical system. In a technocratic system, birth usually takes place in an alien environment among strangers, with routine use of invasive procedures that are promoted by multinational drug and equipment companies. For many women, it is an experience comparable to rape that leads to posttraumatic stress disorder. We need to rediscover woman-to-woman support, celebrate birth as a social process, and acknowledge that it is a political issue.

Varieties of Positivism in Western European Political Thought, c. 1945–1970: An Introduction

Summary This article introduces a set of essays examining the state of political thought in the Western European democracies of Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and Sweden in the post-war period between 1945 and 1970. In particular, as well as simply filling a gap, they seek to demonstrate that political theory in this period was more vibrant than has traditionally been maintained. A key part of this argument is that the discipline was less adversely affected by the ascendancy of positivism than historians and political theorists have normally argued, not least because ‘positivism’ was in fact a more diverse and varied phenomenon than is usually recognised. For while some positivists drew on either behaviourist social science of linguistic philosophy to justify their denial that moral and political values could be discussed rationally with reference to theoretical arguments, others argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that had made traditional political theory irrelevant. This meant that although few political theorists in this period were able to refute all types of positivism entirely, they were able to take issue with different aspects of it, and hence, at least to some extent, to pursue their discipline normatively. However, experiences in different Western European countries nevertheless varied widely. In Britain, normative political theorists faced both versions of the positivist challenge, but their ripostes were largely couched in academic terms, whether addressing the ‘end of ideology’ thesis, behaviourism or linguistic positivism. In West Germany, by contrast, the debate over positivism was much more overtly political, since the legacy of the Weimar republic caused the issue of whether political values in general, and laws in particular, were rationally justifiable to be a peculiarly sensitive one. But even in Sweden, which had a much quieter history, and has often been seen as the epitome of a technocratic political system, it is revealed that the degree to which ‘the end of ideology’ had been reached was much more keenly contested in practical politics than has previously been thought. And in France, it is revealed that there was more interesting academic political theorising being prosecuted than has traditionally been acknowledged, by such thinkers as Jacques Maritain and Raymond Aron, even if there was admittedly less than in, for example, Britain. And lastly, in Italy, despite a badly functioning political system, which tended to encourage cynicism about politics in general, there were in fact important and sophisticated attempts at formulating coherent normative positions, at least on an ideological level. Whatever the differences, however, the conclusion is clear: normative political theory was in general in much better health during this period than has traditionally been admitted, and, as such, is worthy of considerable further exploration.

Managerial Fiduciary Duty and Social Responsibility: The Changing Nature of Corporate Governance in Post-War America

Enron's demise and the corporate investigations that ensued have reinvigorated the debate on managerial fiduciary duty. Some have argued that the recent stock bubble and the ensuing revelations of managerial malfeasance merely repeat history: Capitalism regularly corrects market exuberance and redirects resources along an efficient path. True, each bubble has its particular causes. The most recent one arose in concert with over-investment in high technology and recently deregulated industries. Those who claim that the 1990s bubble marked a significant change point to evidence that Enron's practice of misreporting information to bolster performance figures and executive stock option values extended widely within the corporate sector. In this view, excess was connected to stock option incentive systems that allowed these managers to exploit information asymmetry between themselves and investors. Even Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, expressed this view when he openly questioned the market's ability to disperse information in an accurate and timely manner and the wisdom of reporting rules that did not demand that stock options be included as business expenses. In this essay, we elaborate this theme - that the stock market's deflation exposed a structural reworking of managerial incentive hierarchies and managerial ideology. During the 1990s, U.S. managerial capitalism underwent a profound transformation from a technocratic system to a proprietary one. In the former, managers functioned as teams to sustain the firm and to promote social welfare. In the latter, corporate bureaucratic teams broke up into tournaments in which managers competed for advancement toward the CEO prize. Because their reward system depended heavily on stock options that were accompanied by downside risk-protection, these tournaments turned managers into a special class of shareholders. And, like any other shareholder, managers sought to maximize their individual utility functions - even if it deviated from the firm's best interest. Once this new regime became established practice, managers discarded their technocratic, stakeholder creed and adopted a property rights ideology, originally elaborated in academia by financial agency theorists.

Midwifery practice and the crisis of modernity: implications for the role of the midwife

Almost since its inception, the concept of modernity was found to display tensions between its emancipatory potential to liberate the human subject from the manacles of tradition, and the application of reason to co-ordinate and control the natural world through scientific knowledge. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 12 midwives about their role in the Irish maternity services and argues that, in a period of late modernity, these tensions continue to manifest themselves in the context of the midwife's role. Although the contemporary period is marked by a loss of faith in scientific truths, widely contested obstetric knowledge and practices continue to exercise mastery over nature while undermining a central feature of the midwife's role—the liberation of the autonomous subject. Drawing on the theory of communicative action developed by the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, it is argued that the midwife's role in facilitating the autonomous choices of women through communicative action is impeded by the colonization of the lifeworld of labour and childbirth by the technocratic system of obstetrics. Although participants reported that their role involved empowering women and facilitating choices through dialogue congruent with communicative action, data also suggested that participants used strategic communication with clients aimed at achieving particular ends. The use of strategic communication was linked to the way in which the midwife's role is determined to a large extent by the practices and protocols of obstetrics, and also to the notion of client passivity. The instrumental rationality of obstetrics is linked to an outcome orientation to power and money, and a political economy perspective of medicine. It appears that communicative action between midwives and obstetricians is important in bringing about structural changes to facilitate the conditions for communicative action between midwives and their clients.

Social Networks, Civil Society, Democracy and Rule of Law: A New Conceptual Framework

Although social networks exist in every society, they are widely believed to play a different and more prominent role in Asian societies, especially those with a Confucian heritage, than in Western states, particularly Western states with mature capitalist economies, liberal democratic political systems with robust civil societies, and well developed legal systems characterized by rule of law and a modern bureaucratic administrative system. This chapter article examines the role of social networks along two dimensions: political reform and the implementation and consolidation of democracy; and legal reforms aimed at establishing rule of law and a modern technocratic administrative system. Clearly there are wide variations in the nature and role of social networks in Asia, which is to be expected given the wide diversity in Asian societies in terms of religious and cultural practices, political systems, levels of economic development and legal systems. Rather than attempting a broad comparison of social networks throughout Asia, my main focus will be on China, with reference to the experiences of other countries where relevant. In some Western states such as Poland and other former Soviet Union republics, social groups in the form of civil society played a central role in the transition to democracy; in more established liberal democracies, civil society serves important functions in monitoring the state, holding government officials accountable and counterbalancing state power. Buoyed by the experiences of the former Soviet republics, a number of China scholars turned their attention in the early to mid 1990s to the topic of civil society and whether the proliferation of social organizations in China would lead to democracy. Many scholars cautioned that the concept of civil society as understood in the West may not be applicable to China; some pointed out that civil society was mainly a topic among foreign scholars and Chinese living in exile, and that the idea of civil society has not become part of popular discourse in China; still others argued that state-society relations are better understood in corporatist terms, and that the corporatist nature of social groups in China may serve to bolster the authoritarian regime rather than lead to democracy. I consider whether the concept of civil society is applicable to China and how civil society is best theorized given the differences between the liberal democratic social-political philosophies dominant in the West and alternative conceptions of the relations between the state, society and individual in China. To that end I develop four models for state-society relations: liberal democratic, statist socialist, neo-authoritarian and communitarian. These models combine social political philosophies with a corresponding set of institutions, practices and rules, thus redressing the relative neglect to date in theoretical treatments of civil society in China of the institutional basis of civil society, and in particular the nature of the legal system and its role in creating, structuring and shaping civil society. I also take up the relation between conceptions of civil society and social networks. What do we gain by the change in focus to social networks? What do we lose? I suggest that in calling attention to horizontal relations between individuals and groups in contemporary society, the focus on (affective) social networks offers some insights into the space between the individual and the state missed by the more vertical conceptions of civil society and corporatism. However, social networks are themselves embedded in a vertical structure of state-society relations. Moreover, in many cases, social networks are themselves oriented toward the state in a vertical relationship, and thus constitutive of the vertical state-society structure. In short, attending to social networks enriches our understanding of civil society in China, providing for a form of civil society with Chinese characteristics as it were, rather than offering an alternative framework for analysis. Put differently, social networks studies and theories must still be placed within broader political theories and institutional accounts. The four models that I develop address both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of civil society, thus redressing on the one hand the failure of corporatism to pay adequate attention to horizontal relationships, and on the other the tendency of affective social networks analyses to emphasize the horizontal dimension at the expense of the vertical component or to fail to adequately link up a discussion of affective social networks to different political conceptions of state-society relations.

A Third Grade Teacher in a Technocratic School System Asks a Dangerous Question: What is Learning?

This paper, written by a practicing school teacher, offers a background and rationale to explain how his educational constructs of learning have been challenged, influenced, and changed by exposure to constructivist educational philosophy, to frame the tensions he encounters in his practice as a result of questioning educational beliefs in a technocratic school system, and finally, to discuss the resulting consequences this process has for his teaching. In addition, the author hopes to encourage dialogue between practitioners and scholars about the ways recent constructivist conceptions of education, teaching, and learning, although theoretically appealing, can be difficult to place into practice in a technocratic school system.

Technocratic organization and gender

Technocratic control is the most recent in a series of different types of workplace control: precapitalist craft/guild control, simple control, technical control, bureaucratic control, and professionalism. In recent years, as organizations have been socially and politically transformed around advanced technological systems, observable changes in structure have occured. Technocracies are characterized by a polarization into expert and nonexpert sectors, the declining importance of internal job ladders in favor of external credentialing barriers, the increased importance of technical expertise as a central basis of organizational authority, the transformation of professionals and managers into specialized experts concerned with administration and efficiency, and the emergence of a world-wide technocratic system. Technocratic reorganization is parallelling and reinforcing sex segregation, with women disproportionately found in the “nonexpert” sector, where mobility prospects are minimal or nonexistent and working conditions poor. Even women in the “expert” sector of technocratic organizations are disadvantaged, as stereotypes persist which define women as antithetical to technocratic norms of scientific rationality.