Delay As (Non)Foundation of Bureaucracy

The paper argues that delay constitutes the essence of bureaucratic power and has controlling effects on all of the three temporal modes – past, present, and future – that individuals are subjected to. The exteriorized and exteriorizing nature of temporal consciousness, in particular, is showcased thanks to Bernard Stiegler’s conception of the relation between technics and time. By discussing Franz Kafka’s fiction as well as the most common bureaucratic encounters, the paper argues that both the formal and the repetitive character of bureaucratic procedures are not only facilitated but even presupposed by the constitution of temporal consciousness, which is prone to temporal delay and to the controlling mechanisms that come along with it.

Journal of Political Power, 2016

Andes research seminars for their contributions to our work, in different ways, in diverse moments. Miguel Cunha gratefully acknowledges support from Nova Forum. We are especially grateful for the comments made by the members of the CMOS (Centre for Management and Organization Studies

The first half of the paper defines the concept of bureaucracy, its evolution over the time and the current academic debates. A short review of the most debatable theories written by Lowi, Niskanen, Dunleavy and Choudhury is included. The second half focuses on the three concepts of power put forward by Russel and the non-paid goals bureaucratic offices pursue on a daily basis. The paper also analyses the issue of monitoring the output of bureaucratic offices.

Unpublished Paper-Essay MRes Art, Theory and Philosophy, CSM, UAL, 2014, 2014

In western culture, time is organised in certain ways to produce specific effects that will help the implementation of power and control. Modern cultural patterns had been established by negotiation or coalition of values by the growing bourgeoisie. Those were the times of the first three French Republics, the establishment of EEUU, as a free multi-estate half continent, and the Anglican/Protestant worlds. This somehow, new consensus, implemented and settled strong global capitalist coordinates, and as far away from any possible true revolution. Constantly operating and colonising its possible deserters and seditions. There is a kind of flow that exist far off, the familiar institutional timely order, and that host's alternative bodies and events. These far-away events/bodies challenge the present ones, which get integrated as really “happening” by our western global clocks. These alternative actions/spaces can thus be called practical utopias. They belong to kinds of heterotopias that contest one another, as they could establish a dialectics between the Zoological Gardens and the Persian Rug, but also produce an equivalence between the Museum (Public-Private Gallery) versus the self-instituted Artist-led; coop, or charity research space. The examples of The Commune’s smashing of clocks and the creation of their entire new calendar (so that there is a will to exist on another tempo and measurements) were a way to actually re-organise their independence. This could help us understand a relationship between the case of the experimentations on duration and structural formats for the programming at Five Years (an artist-led research and exhibition-based space since 1998/2022) as a way of challenging the art world’s institutional timing and other signifiers of its discourses. Specifically, if looking at the time an artist's show; or an event is supposed to last contrasted with what our organising makes of those timings and lengths relating to exploring duration. This alternative time arrangement, its structural way of being set, its relation to content, and its way of dealing with self-management, are all parts that form a practical existence with contents, subjects, and projects that have inspired directly a series of works by new curators working in public institutions; all of which had not yet, seemed to have reached any consciousness or recognition of or about their references or sources, for their ideas, thus becoming recuperators, agents of subsumption in a neoliberal art world of mimic.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2011

Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2020

In this introduction we explain the overall approach taken in this special issue. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. We show, firstly, how bureaucracy has worked as a term of critique and how, in fin-de-siècle Europe, it became an analytical concept used for world-historical comparison with a strong Western bias. Against this background, we then develop our group's new approach to analyzing bureaucratic procedures as knowledge processes, a method we term "bureaucracy as knowledge." This approach builds on the history of science and technology and aims to recover actors' ways of organizing social and material worlds rather than judge them by modernist, Western standards. Third, we discuss if there is such a thing as "bureaucratic knowledge" sui generis and, based on the experience of our authors, suggest ways of studying plural knowledges that cut across different domains. Finally, we argue that historical bureaucracies merit close investigation because they have demonstrated the power to both make and break social and material worlds. The approach proposed in this issue can therefore help make better sense of the dynamics by which bureaucracies exert such power in situations otherwise studied by political, cultural, and social historians. This introduction is part of a special issue entitled "Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge," edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.

The term " bureaucracy " is of recent origin. Initially referring to a cloth covering the desks of French government officials in the eighteenth century, the term " bureau " came to be linked with a suffix signifying rule of government (as in " aristocracy " or " democracy "), probably during the struggles against absolutism preceding the French Revolution. During the nineteenth century the pejorative use of the term spread to many European countries, where liberal critics of absolutist regimes typically employed it to decry the tortuous procedures, narrow outlook, and highhanded manner of autocratic government officials (Heinzen 1845). Since then this pejorative meaning has become general in the sense that any critic of complicated organizations that fail to allocate responsibility clearly, or any critic of rigid rules and routines that are applied with little consideration of the specific case, of blundering officials, of slow operation and buck-passing, of conflicting directives and duplication of effort, of empire building, and of concentration of control in the hands of a few will use this term regardless of party or political persuasion (Watson 1945). During the years following World War ii this common stereotype was given a new twist by the witty, mock-scientific formulations of Parkinson " s Law, which derided empire building, waste of resources, and inertia by implying that official staffs expand in inverse proportion to the work to be done. Introduction This popular, pejorative usage must be distinguished from ―bureaucracy‖ used in a technical sense. Although the distinction is beset with difficulties, social scientists have employed the term because it points to the special, modern variant of age-old problems of administration, just as terms like ―ideology‖ and ―class‖ point to modern aspects of intellectual life and social stratification. The analytic task is to conceptualize this modern variant. At the macroscopic level, Max Weber's definition of bureaucracy under the rule of law provides the best available solution to this problem; none of the critics of Weber's analysis has as yet dispensed with his definition. According to Weber, a bureaucracy establishes a relation between legally instated authorities and their subordinate officials which is characterized by defined rights and duties, prescribed in written regulations; authority relations between positions, which are ordered systematically; appointment and promotion based on contractual agreements and regulated accordingly; technical training or experience as a formal condition of employment; fixed monetary salaries; a strict separation of office and incumbent in the sense that the official. A government administration so defined must be understood, according to Weber, as part of a legal order that is sustained by a common belief in its legitimacy. That order is reflected in written regulations, such as enacted laws, administrative rules, court precedents, etc., which govern the employment of officials and guide their administrative behavior. Such authoritative ordering of the

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2012

In this article AU :2 , we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more 'flexible'. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in the machinery of government may actually provide political life with particular required 'constituting' qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as 'conservative', we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call 'responsible' (as opposed to simply 'responsive') government. Through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, we indicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and responsible way.