When politics meets bureaucracy

Rules, norms, conformity and cheating

Christian Lo, Rod Rhodes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526136701
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book is based on a study of the strategies and tactics applied by municipal bureaucrats and local politicians in the pursuit of political goals in two small Norwegian municipalities. The enactment of a bureaucracy within these small and close-knit communities offer an insight into how formal and informal relations intersect during the production of public policy. By analysing the relation between normative and pragmatic rules regulating political action, Christian Lo demonstrates how the efforts to resolve these tensions and dilemmas involve a balancing of alternative sources of political legitimacy. Through ethnographic accounts of policy-making in action, When politics meets bureaucracy offers novel perspectives to the interdisciplinary debate about local governance. Most significantly, these accounts demonstrate how processes of hierarchical government are inextricably intertwined with broader processes of governance during policy processes, thereby dissolving the theoretical and normative separation between the two concepts characterising large parts of the literature. By centring its focus on the interconnections between government and governance, Lo explores the cultural and historical conditions informing this intertwinement, which, the author argues, enable horizontal alignments that can modify the hierarchical logic of bureaucratic organisations. Combining approaches and perspectives from political science, sociology and anthropology, this book is essential reading for those interested in the inner workings of bureaucratic organisations and how such organisations interact with their societal surroundings.

1
Introduction

Ambitions and perspective

Who makes policy? In this book I present an ethnographic approach to investigate this fundamental question posed within the multiple social sciences that concern themselves with the study of political and administrative practices. My research setting is local government in Norway. The accounts of policy development presented are from two neighboring municipalities where I carried out fieldwork among local politicians and administrative leaders in 2012 and 2013. Context is relevant in the holistic approach to the political that is inherent in political anthropology, and I will go on to emphasize the importance of interpreting political practices within their proper social, historical and cultural contexts. This, however, does not preclude an ambition to find the universal within the particular and letting my ethnographic account speak to bigger issues about governance. In my own biased opinion, there are at least three aspects of my Norwegian detail that might warrant some wider attention.

First, Norwegian municipalities vary greatly in size. To preserve my informants’ anonymity, the two municipalities serving as a site for this study will remain unnamed. It is, however, worth noting that both municipalities are among the more than 50 percent of Norwegian municipalities inhabited by fewer than 5,000 people. This places both municipalities well below the average size of the Norwegian municipalities, which averaged about 11,000 inhabitants at the time of my fieldwork. In accordance with the Norwegian principle of “general municipalities,” all municipalities are nevertheless responsible for providing the same basic set of services and functions, regardless of size. Since Norwegian municipalities are core providers of public services within an ambitious welfare system, the latter principle entails that even the smallest of Norwegian municipalities are tasked with running a relatively large and complex municipal organization. As the cases of policy development in this book demonstrate, the enactment of a legal-rational bureaucracy within a relatively small and close-knit society tend to essentialize some central (and perhaps more universal) tensions and dilemmas regarding how actors in bureaucratic organizations interact with their surroundings through both formal and informal ties. The specific ways of resolving these tensions and dilemmas, and their consequences for political life, are key topics of this book.

Second, the concept of equality has long been a recurring motif in descriptions of Scandinavian society and culture. Particularly in descriptions of political practices, past and present observers have found salience in the seemingly egalitarian codes of conduct promoting a consensual style of governance that (among other features) emphasizes wide participation as a source of political legitimacy (e.g., Barnes 1954, Park 1998, Christensen and Peters 1999). Within Scandinavian anthropology, there was for a long time a tendency to interpret this emphasis on equality as a cultural inherence from a recent historical past characterized by an apparent lack of diversity (e.g., Klausen 1984, Gullestad 1989b). There are, however, reasons to question this historical interpretation. As Halvard Vike (2018) has pointed out, equality, in the Scandinavian context, may rather be historically related to specific institutionalized mechanisms for protecting individual autonomy and dealing with political conflicts. As Vike notes, public institutions in Norway, the municipalities in particular, have been characterized by an “institutional vulnerability” where a lack of clear-cut boundaries and an accessibility to outside interests have made them difficult for elites to control from above. The intertwinement between governing bodies and volunteer organizations is one expression of these blurred boundaries. As others, too, have pointed out, the high degree of trust in public institutions, another salient feature of the Norwegian welfare society, may very well be understood as a product of this institutional vulnerability that allows political influence to be exercised through multiple (and often overlapping) networks (Wollebæk and Selle 2002, Vike 2018). Expanding on these perspectives, another central purpose of this book is to provide an analysis of the (egalitarian) social dynamics allowing such horizontal alignments to modify the hierarchical logic of bureaucratic organizations, while also avoiding the decline into personal dependencies and clientelism.

Third, given the two points above, the Norwegian municipality would seem a remarkably fitting case for network governance theory, which has become a dominant framework within political science for understanding the role of formal and informal networks in the production of public policy (e.g., Rhodes 1997b, Osborne 2010, Torfing et al. 2012). Through the influence of this literature, the term “governance” itself has taken new meaning and has come to signify an objection against the state-centric views associated with its antithesis in perspectives that emphasize the role of government. However, upon closer examination, I have found the Norwegian case to be remarkably resistant to confinement within the common narratives and frameworks of contemporary governance theory. An underlying reason for this mismatch is the tendency within influential parts of the literature to overemphasize the distinction between hierarchical government and networked governance by portraying them as, essentially, distinct types of governing processes. Particularly within the early strains of network governance theory, it seems to me that this distinction has been entrenched by the concern for providing a comprehensive account of a shift in governing practices toward network governance. By portraying network governance as an emergent phenomenon prompted by omnipresent societal changes, the distinction between the two concepts has become characterized by a normative and temporal dichotomy that serves to obfuscate their interrelation and portray hierarchal government as a dated approach to public steering. The ethnographic accounts of policy processes in this book confront these distinctions by demonstrating how, in practice, the hierarchal relations of government and the networked relations of governance are inextricably intertwined during policy processes.

The latter critique does not preclude utilizing these two concepts for more productive analytical use. The concepts of government and governance are applied in this book as analytical metaphors for a coexisting set of institutional logics regulating relations in municipal policy processes. By centering the focus on their interconnectedness, these two concepts enable analysis of a central tension in the examples of political struggle and the policy processes investigated: that is, the tension between adherence to the hierarchical command chain of the municipal organization and alternative alliances found both within and beyond the formal municipal organization.

Tales of municipal entrepreneurship, understood as political strategies at play among local politicians and municipal administrators in their efforts to develop and implement new policy initiatives, are the main vantage point from which to study the themes discussed above. In this effort, I employ analytical perspectives from political anthropology with F. G. Bailey's classical division between normative rules and pragmatic rules of political struggle as a salient framework for analysis. This allows for an understanding of how formal and informal processes of social control interact and regulate political action and, perhaps more interesting, how the different set of rules can relate to different institutional logics that can offer alternative sources of political legitimacy. The result is a complex interplay between different rules where conforming and cheating become essential parts of the political game.

Field, sites and cases

This study's research design has been largely explorative. Empirically, the field of this study – municipal policy development – has been investigated through a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork strategy. As indicated, two separate but geographically adjacent municipal organizations served as the main sites for the study. The data presented is based mainly on two separate one-month fieldwork experiences, one in each of the municipal organizations. This book, however, should not be read as an empirical investigation of a particular local community, municipal organization or region; rather, it attempts to explore the broader field of municipal policy development through these particular sites. In an effort to conceal the identity of the organizations and persons involved in the study, my descriptions do not differentiate or identify (neither by fictive nor actual name) the municipal organizations that participated in the study. The only exception is when particular analytical concerns call for comparison. Therefore the field, understood as a collection of sites, is treated in descriptions as singular, while cases of municipal policy development and associated social arenas are treated as the main unit of analysis in the study.

All geographic references and names have also been changed. In some cases that either I or my informants deemed particularly sensitive, I have taken extra precautions to protect the anonymity of those involved by altering personal information and descriptive details of events. In both of the main municipalities, I was provided with office space within the municipal halls for the duration of the fieldwork. Within those municipal organizations, I conducted participant observation among administrative and political personnel working within the municipal hall, and also conducted lengthy interviews with about twenty key informants. During fieldwork, I also gathered a wide number of documents, including meeting summaries, case proceedings and policy documents, which have contributed to the reconstruction of policy processes presented in the empirical parts of this book.

In addition to the participant observation conducted in various meetings and social arenas within the municipal halls, I also followed key informants to external meetings and events occurring away from the municipal hall and, in many cases, across municipal borders. Such meetings and events included collaborative stages, such as regional councils, meetings with private organizations and actors of other governmental bodies, meetings associated with intermunicipal collaboration, public meetings and so on. Therefore the empirical chapters also include data collected from organizations and informants not originating from the two main municipalities.

As the fieldwork and interviews were conducted in Norwegian, all quotations from informants and interview excerpts have been translated into English and edited by me. In the cases of vernacular expressions, I have included the original Norwegian expressions in brackets.

Structure of this book

While the main objective of investigating the relationship between hierarchies and networks has been constant, the practical operationalization of this theoretically derived objective has been in constant motion throughout the study. The structure of the book at hand echoes these analytical movements.

This chapter serves as an introduction and general overview. Chapter 2 starts with an overview of how the relationship between (hierarchical) government and (networked) governance is treated in recent political science literature. In the second part of the chapter I discuss the methodological implications of applying ethnographic methods (as well as anthropological and sociological theory and analysis) to explore the political science-derived concepts of government and governance. Besides applying different methodological tools, I argue that such interdisciplinary efforts also entail an analytical reconstruction of the research object itself. I provide an overview of the research strategies and methods applied in this study in the final part of the chapter.

Chapter 3 provides a contextual framing for understanding the Norwegian municipality and the practices of local government that are explored empirically in the later chapters. In this chapter, I present a selection of common narratives about local government in Norway. While these narratives inform my empirical analysis in the later chapters, their relevance will also be critically examined as their explanatory powers are tested. In the first part of the chapter, I introduce the Norwegian municipality through a brief historical overview and, thereafter, a discussion of the multiple roles and functions of the present-day Norwegian municipality. In the second part, I introduce three recurrent and interrelated narratives that dominate contemporary descriptions of recent developments within municipal leadership in Norway. These narratives are, first, the introduction of New Public Management (NPM); second, the narrative of a shift toward network governance; and third, a narrative of increased integration between state and local government under the state's hierarchical control. In the final part, I discuss the historical pathways and political culture informing the practices of the present-day Norwegian municipality. A key topic is the nature of the egalitarian dynamics and the associated emphases on consensus and conformity that past ethnographic accounts have found salient in descriptions of political culture in Norway. Along with other notions from the wider literature on political culture, the discussion of the nature of egalitarian individualism introduced here provides a theoretical background for the analysis of policy processes presented in the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 is the first of three empirically bas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From government to governance? Re-examining the transformation thesis
• 3 Narratives of local government
• 4 An introduction to municipal policy development
• 5 Normative hierarchy: the rules of political struggle
• 6 Pragmatic egalitarianism: tales of municipal entrepreneurship
• 7 Conclusions: between government and governance
• References
• Index