Bureaucracy and Society in Transition

Comparative Perspectives

Haldor Byrkjeflot, Fredrick Engelstad, Haldor Byrkjeflot, Fredrick Engelstad

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787432840
• eBook ISBN: 9781787439221
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften

New Public Management has held a central position within public administration over the past few decades, complemented by various models promoting post-bureaucratic organization. But 'traditional' bureaucracy has not disappeared, and bureaucracy is in transition in the West and the rest of the world. Bureaucracies still fill crucial positions in modern societies, despite growing criticism of assumed inefficiencies and unlimited growth.  

This volume examines a range of issues related to bureaucracies in transition across Europe, with a particular focus on the Nordic region. Chapters examine a range of topics including a reinterpretation of Weber's conception of bureaucracy; the historical development of institutions and organizational structures in Sweden and Greece; the myth of bureaucratic neutrality and the concept of 'competent neutrality'; performance management systems; the anti-bureaucratic identities of senior civil servants; the role of experts and expertise in bureaucratic organizations; the impact of reform on public sector executives; the curbing of corruption in Scandinavian states; an interrogation of the Nordic administrative model; Supreme Audit Institutions; 'street-level' bureaucracy; and the establishment of an 'ethics of office' amongst Danish civil servants.

PART I
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

BUILDING STATE INFRASTRUCTURAL CAPACITIES: SWEDEN AND GREECE

Apostolis Papakostas

ABSTRACT

Transition into modernity takes very different roads, depending on the sequencing of bureaucracy and democratic regime. This is demonstrated by comparing Sweden and Greece. At an early stage of the long-term modernisation of Swedish society, due to early penetration of the internal territory and before the extension of suffrage and political modernisation, a number of state organisations were established at the interstices between state and society, creating direct relations between the state and society. The impressive Lantmäteriet, the organisation of tax authorities, the establishment of authorities for registering the population and the Tabellverket are typical illustrations of such organisational structures. Such organisations functioned as social mechanisms that elucidated society making it legible and thus strengthened the infrastructural capacity of the state. In Greece, where the state was built after political modernisation, the establishment of similar organisations proved to be more difficult. Although there is evidence that similar Swedish practices were known in Greece to be possible paths, they were not chosen. The establishment of a land registry system, for instance, was discussed in the decades prior to the 1871 land reform. On other issues, such choices could not be materialised given opposition or political counter-mobilisation to abolish the reforms after they were approved by parliament. These reform efforts were rather short-lived or countered by new reforms and exemptions, creating an ambiguous labyrinth of regulations of state–society relations and a state without the capacity to intervene in society and implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm. On the whole, the state remained a distant entity, mostly a distrusted one, and relations between the state and society were mediated by parties and by social and kinship-based networks.

Keywords: State autonomy; legible society; ambiguous society; state–society contingencies; historical contingencies; state–society relations

STATE AUTONOMY AND INFRASTRUCTURAL CAPACITIES: THE RELEVANCE OF EXTREME CASES

Among the many achievements of the Swedish social sciences is the high quality research conducted in the discipline of social history. It has expanded the field of history from the study of wars or kings to the study of ordinary people in past times in an unprecedented manner. While the term social history was introduced in Sweden during the 1960s, the study of the everyday life of peasants, workers, women, excluded social groups or local societies has long been a key focus of Swedish history. Such studies, some spanning centuries, are usually empirically rich and full of tables and time series analyses reflecting the data collected, stored and available in archives. In this respect, the availability of data reflects the continuity of the Swedish state and its capacities to collect and store data.¹

Another impressive field of studies is quantitative studies, particularly in sociology but also in other academic disciplines such as political science, economics, health studies and psychology. Several social science faculties at Swedish universities have research fields and centres largely dedicated to analysing large data bases using sophisticated quantitative methods. Some materials in these data bases were collected by scientists for this purpose, such as the Swedish Level of Living Survey at the Institute for Social Research or the Metropolitan Project at the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University.

But, in general, the data used in social history as well as quantitative studies in the social sciences have not been gathered for scientific reasons. For instance, my research colleagues at Södertörn University have access to data bases with geocoded material containing detailed information about individuals at the postal code level. It enables them to analyse the social realities of the neighbourhoods in southern Stockholm using sophisticated methods. The same data base has been used by city and regional planers to develop the enormous regional development plan for the Stockholm region (Regional Plan RUFS 2010). This information was collected by a state agency, the Statistical Central Bureau.

While scientists in the Nordic countries take the availability of reliable data for their studies for granted, scientists in other countries have difficulty finding reliable material. Information has not been collected or saved or was sometimes destroyed in war or by fire. A prominent historian in Greece told me that it has taken him years of effort to collect and compile a series of annual state budgets and balance sheets in order to study the distribution of tax burdens during the last two centuries.

And it is not just historians or social scientists who have this kind of problem. After Greece adopted the euro, budget deficits had to be revised numerous times, and the international public became acquainted with the term ‘Greek statistics’. But for specialists in the field, it was well known that the entry for ‘Greece’ in official statistical books published by international organisations was followed by asterisks, indicating that the numbers were not fully reliable.

During the most recent economic crisis and implementation of reform programmes, various statistics had to be revised. A new inventory was needed in 2010 to determine the exact number of public employees. In 2012, another inventory was needed to determine the exact number of pensioners in the country. According to media reports, several thousand cases of misconduct were revealed in both inventories.

I could offer more examples of such differences; I simply use them here to illustrate the various kinds of information that states in particular have about their society. Some states have registered, counted and surveyed their citizens, mapped the landscape, categorised its qualities and created land registers. The capacity of states to collect data about their society is closely related to the development of what Michael Mann has called the infrastructural power of the state, ‘the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm’ (Mann, 1993). In order to implement political decisions logistically, states need to collect information about the realm or, to put it another way, about the societies around them.

In macro/comparative studies over the past three decades, the question of a state’s infrastructural capacities in the development of the state has to some extent been secondary to the issue of the insulation of the functioning of the state from particularistic interests in society. This issue of autonomy has four main components:

(1) The functional separation of the activities of the state from particularistic politics.

(2) The functional separation of the activities of the state from particularistic interests in economic life.

(3) The insulation of the everyday functioning of the state from particularistic interests in everyday life.

(4) The separation of the interests of office holders from the positions in state authorities.

The main assumption in such studies is that an autonomous state is by definition a state with infrastructural capacities. Such states can implement rules in a universalistic manner without the interference of particularistic interests. Usually this type of study, if it mentions the state’s capacities, uses the extractive capacities of a state, mainly an outcome of state capacities, as an indicator of state capacities without considering the qualities of the concrete methods used for building state capacities.

The question of autonomy is an important one, and comparative studies in this tradition have highlighted the importance of historical sequences by criticising the older tradition of modernisation and the issue of differentiating social, political and economic activities as societies became more modern. Issues highlighted in modernisation theories have been put aside and sometimes ignored. But since modernisation has been discontinuous in time and asymmetric within societies, historical and comparative studies shed light on how different sequences of development led to different configurations of rather incomplete differentiation in societies.

Sequential processes of social change – usually the timing of state formation, political modernisation and economic development – have been a focal point in such studies, which were mostly detailed comparative studies involving a small number of cases (e.g. Senghaas, 1985; Shefter, 1994). Several years ago, the US political scientist Francis Fukuyama expanded the scope of such studies on a global scale in his book Political Order and Political Decay (2014). A major finding in this type of study is that autonomous states tend to develop in political systems where states developed before political modernisation and the extension of suffrage. According to Fukuyama, a pre-condition for this outcome is the previous development of the rule of law.

As for the consequences of state autonomy, many studies have noted positive outcomes of good governance worldwide. For instance, researchers at the Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have identified several positive policy outcomes in areas such as health (subjective health, life expectancy, infant mortality and child mortality), environmental sustainability, the economy, social policy and life satisfaction (Holmberg & Rothstein, 2014; Holmberg, Rothstein, & Nasiritousi, 2008; Rothstein, 2011).

Studies in the aforementioned traditions seem to take the question of the internal penetration of the territory and the state’s infrastructural capacities as given. Their analyses imply that autonomous or universalistic structures have such capacities without specifying how capacities develop and with what kinds of methods. Mann mentions some general mechanisms that are important for the development of state capacities – the division of labour inside the state apparatus, the spread of literacy, the development of coins and measuring standards and the development of communication and transportation – but not the organisational capabilities of the state organisation itself and the variation in such capabilities for concrete states.

It is widely known that the Western state is based on the establishment of two monopoly mechanisms, a monopoly on taxation and a monopoly on the means of violence (Elias, 1994). Usually the need to build an army in times of war, or sometimes after losing a war, was associated with the penetration of the internal territory in order to mobilise the human and material resources needed (Tilly, 1990). Two administrative innovations in particular are associated with this process – the cadastral map and the population (or male) register. The first one registers the taxable resources of the population while the second registers the population of taxpayers and later citizens or soldiers. Both constitute a basic scheme of a state’s observation of its society. Such registers have been developed, refined, standardised and extended, recording and storing more information. On the basis of such registers, simplified representations and objectifications of the internal domain were produced mainly through categorisation, aggregation and abstraction.

Such categorisations, representations and objectifications, once in place, were later used as input in political life and for social reforms based on information-gathering methods taken from statistics, demography and topography, among other fields. Such uses were not intended from the beginning; they developed as unintended consequences of efforts to establish a monopoly on taxation and a monopoly on the means of violence. Societies are too complex, and no state bureaucracy can work with societies. Bureaucracies can function according to rules based on categories, and such rules can be produced by organisational capacities to observe society and make typifications and simplified objectifications. This is a major source of state capacities and, at the same time, a source of a state’s failures because of the apparent risk of uncertainty absorption (March & Simon, 1958). States with infrastructural capacities can accomplish a great deal, but they can also fail; states without capacities usually fail. In my view, this is the problem with Scott’s (1998) conclusions that rational schemes to improve the human condition generally fail. There are failures of state capacities due to uncertainty absorption, but they accomplish a great deal. Most states are unable to act and fail because of their incapacity.

Not all the states of the world developed methods that enhance a state’s capacities. It is possible to make a rough distinction between states that largely accumulated their resources by penetrating their internal territory and states that generally accumulated their resources from sources outside their own territory (Badie, 2000; Tilly, 1990). While Sweden and other Northern European states represent concrete approximations of the first type, Greece can be categorised more as the second type but also as an early liberal democracy in the broad Western European tradition of state formation. Within this tradition, there are states that developed before political modernisation and states that developed after political modernisation. In another work (Papakostas, 2012, pp. 80–102), I compared the different sequences of development in Sweden and Greece and will now concentrate on the penetration of the internal territory and the evolution of methods developed by the states in order to expand their scope inside their own territory. A more extensive version covering the mapping, fixation and representation of land boundaries in both countries and the pacification of the internal territory can be found in another work (Papakostas, 2016). Readers not familiar with the Swedish and Greek sequences of development may find it rewarding to read all three texts.

In the following pages, I will provide an account of the mode and timing of the internal penetration of the territory in Sweden and Greece as well as the institutions and organisational structures that developed as a consequence of this long-term historical process. I compare the time before the economic take-off in both countries, following the paths opened by the seminal work of Moore (1966), with a particular emphasis on the way the land question was resolved before industrialisation and the timing of economic take-off in both countries.

Because Moore never studied small countries, it was the task of the Norwegian political scientist and sociologist Stein Rokkan, partly together with Seymour Martin Lipset (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967), to accomplish this using his conceptual maps of sequential logics of party and state formation in several European countries (Rokkan, 1967). Rokkan and other political sociologists following in the same tradition do not pay sufficient attention to extreme cases on the spectrum so that, despite their inspiring accomplishments, these conceptual maps tend to remain rather descriptive.

In addition to the different modes and historical timing of the penetration of the internal territory, the Swedish and Greek states are deviant cases considering the outcome of this process: they represent extreme cases of infrastructural state capacities within the European context of state formation. The chapter thus follows the logic of comparison, selecting cases to maximise social distances and studying and analy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editorial Board
• List of Reviewers
• About the Authors
• Introduction: Bureaucracy in Transition
• The Impact and Interpretation of Weber’s Bureaucratic Ideal Type in Organisation Theory and Public Administration
• Part I Comparative Perspectives
• Part II Nordic Bureaucracy
• Index