Hidden Attractions of Administration

The Peculiar Appeal of Meetings and Documents

Malin Åkerström, Katarina Jacobsson, Erika Andersson Cederholm, David Wästerfors

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003108436, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book argues that the expansion of administrative activities in today's working life is driven not only by pressure from above, but also from below. The authors examine the inner dynamics of people-processing organizations—those formally working for clients, patients, or students—to uncover the hidden attractions of doing administrative work, despite all the complaints and laments about "too many meetings" or "too much paperwork." There is something appealing to those compelled to participate in today's constantly multiplying and expanding administration that defies popular framings of it as merely pressure from above. Hidden Attractions of Administration shows in detail the emotional attractiveness, moral conflicts, and almost magical features that administrative tasks often entail in today's organizations, supported by ethnographic studies consisting of over 200 qualitative interviews and participant observations fromten organizational settings and contexts across Sweden. The authors also question and complement explanations in administration-related research that have previously been taken for granted, arguing that it is a simplification to attribute all aspects of the change to New Public Management and instead taking into account what the classic sociologist Georg Simmel called an Eigendynamik: a self-reinforcing tendency that, under certain circumstances, needs only a nudge in an administrative direction to get going. By applying ethnography to issues of bureaucratization and meeting cultures and by drawing on findings in emotional sociology and social anthropology, this volume contributes to both the sociology of work and the study of human service organizations and will appeal to scholars and students working across both areas.

1 Eigendynamik

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108436-1

“Wouldn’t it help to have a checklist, in these situations?” Lisa, a social worker, asks. She finds it hard to know exactly what to say to parents when they are to be told that they have been reported for maltreatment of their children. “When I came here [to this social services unit] I discovered there was nothing” – no formal guidelines, no checklist. /---/ In her talk with her colleagues during this working group meeting, Lisa argues that they should write up what they should say at meetings with the families, so that these encounters are ordered from now on. Otherwise “it’s unclear what we do.” “What are we really doing?” (fieldnotes from the social services)

What are we really doing? Shouldn’t we have a checklist? Today there is a fascination with turning the social world to administration: pinpointing all activities, defining them, ordering them, arranging meetings about them, producing texts and tables related to them (and then more texts and tables on these texts and tables), and putting it all into digital systems.

A meeting that fails to end in a request for a document of some sort or the production of a document is hardly seen as successful. Documents are counted as tangible results and expected to be circulated digitally to structure all upcoming meetings. There is a chain of events, especially in today’s people-processing organizations, that reproduces and strengthens the administration society. “There was nothing,” Lisa says in the above-quoted fieldnote, implying that “no documentation” equals “nothing,” that the absence of administrative order is the same as a social void. Oral or wordless actions and conventions—undocumented routines or pragmatic ways of working that have not been put into schedules, squares, charts, and legitimized discourses—are downplayed or dismissed in favor of textualized and bureaucratically ordered ones.

No checklist? Won’t do. Without written systems with codified activities, there is no clarity, and without meetings, “nothing” is happening during a workday. Without figures and schedules, acronyms and webpages, boxes and arrows, there is no distinct idea of an organization. Without administrative accounts of an action, the action as such becomes almost unreal—as if it never happened. In fact, documents are the only permanent signs that, for example, social work (as in this case) has taken place or will do so. The documents come into existence before or long after any eventual concrete activity and physical interaction have occurred: they are tangible, respected, formal, and proper. Documentation—along with the meetings producing it—provides the opportunity to demonstrate a systematic, regular, and professional approach (Prior 2003).

This book is about the appeal of these administrative accounts. It deals with the pulls and powers of today’s surprisingly expanding administration, but we do not address this tension in terms of conventional organizational sociology. Instead, our approach is more in line with Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of organizations and Simmel’s analyses of interaction. It is an ethnographic investigation of “doing administration.”

Rather than trying to explain the top-down dynamics of this development (depicted by concepts like the Audit Society or New Public Management), this book expounds on something relatively neglected: the inner dynamics, the everyday attractions and contingencies that keep people’s appetite for administration alive. We try to analyze the interactive processes that sharpen and boost employees’ administrative ambitions in today’s society.

The book’s inspiration is the classic sociologist Georg Simmel’s term Eigendynamik, i.e., social processes of interaction that create their own momentum, for which Simmel (1978:119) used the metaphor of the circle. We want to investigate an Eigendynamik of administration, where it spins around itself in a self-preserving and self-strengthening way. We argue that when that spin is generated in settings involving strong ideas of rationality and democratizing ideas of “everybody’s involvement”—at times creating opposing social forces—it tends to become an expanding spiral.

In addition to discussing expanding administrative spirals, we seek to show how a variety of these spirals work and what forms their everyday attractions. We base our analyses on ethnographic studies of several people-processing organizations in Sweden—in psychiatric care, health care, the social services, youth care, and the border police (for more details, see appendix). We also draw on interviews and fieldnotes as well as personal experiences from academia and our own roles, as those experiences are not exempted from the tendencies we study.

We try to show what or who is left behind or sidestepped. In the above-quoted fieldnote, “parents”—the clients—are mentioned (“to know exactly what to say to the parents …”), but they are not placed at the center. The center is reserved for the checklist, or rather its disturbing and conspicuous absence, along with the comfort and relief that would arise if only somebody could formulate it. If only there were a checklist, goes the implied argument, meetings with families would become correct, exact, good, and proper because staff would finally know exactly what to say and do, and things would be ordered. But what’s next?

The spiral expands. The working group meeting we observed could very well be used to discuss this new checklist and specify it, and further meetings could be based on it. There may even be courses developed to train staff on how to use the new checklist properly and instructions that explain its rationale in detail. And these courses must be arranged and coordinated through a series of new meetings, properly documented, evaluated, and accounted for. All checklists at all departments could be reviewed regularly and coordinated by a committee with its own meetings and protocols, as well as a digital system designed for this purpose.

This scenario is not mere invention. In our data, we have seen such sequences unfold again and again. When the administration society expands, the very point of people-processing organizations—or, at least, their formal points—weakens or dissolves. This fade does not happen dramatically or explicitly but subtly, step by step, in an almost unstoppable and self-reinforcing manner. Instead of helping out clients, staff carefully and firmly build up time- and energy-consuming palaces with few if any rooms reserved for concrete clients and their concrete lives. The structure they create is a palace of administration.

A glimpse into everyday dynamics

We walk through the corridors of a big and modern multi-storage housing complex, eventually coming to a quite small conference room with ten chairs around an oval table. Here in the managing section of a public psychiatry practice, a meeting is about to take place. Six unit managers arrive, greeting each other and the chairman, Paul, a district manager. They chat a little bit and start arranging their meeting props: papers, calendars, binders, and laptops. “I usually write my memos directly on the computer,” Paul says to our fieldworker Joakim, “so that I don’t have to do it afterwards.”

The meeting is about psychiatric care. The managers are supposed to exchange information and experiences from their respective patient-treating units once every second week. This meeting starts with Paul’s turning it over to a new unit manager, who talks about the tough situation at her ward right now, where they have a heavy workload. Another manager talks about a similar situation at her ward, with staff members quitting all the time. “All right,” Paul says after a while, “it’s a tough time now.” He starts talking about the need to recruit a new secretary, and the others agree. They talk about other ongoing recruitments (among them, an occupational therapist) and their work situation again. They talk about young patients in care who have used narcotics and developed psychiatric problems as a result. Eventually, all participants have reported their situation in their respective unit—they all refer to a heavy workload—and Paul starts talking about the meeting’s other issues.

Paul reminds the participants of the “working groups” they had established previously. These groups had meetings on their own to “work actively” with things that concerned them, things that needed to be discussed more “deeply.” Paul addresses the assembly as a whole: Wouldn’t it be wise to start these working groups again, with a new series of meetings? His suggestion is initially met with some resistance:

Beth responds immediately: “We do have quite a lot of other things to take care of, I think [instead of meeting in groups].” Others nod and say “uhum.” “Well, that’s a fact,” says Nick, “but if I could say something now ….” “You’re talking all the time,” says Anne and smiles. “Yes, I hear your voice,” Hilma adds. Nick also smiles but goes on: “I think it would be a good idea anyway to have a working group about what we talked about before, namely patients who both abuse drugs and have a psychosis.” The others nod, and they all talk about this for a while. Also, Beth says something about such a working group possibly being “sensible.” Paul takes a note on his laptop and rounds off the discussions by saying that he has noted the interest and will get back to this.

The meeting then revolves around other things: the documentation of patients taking more than three prescription drugs, whether a physician should be present at their meetings, vacation distribution during an upcoming holiday, and new latch bolts for the patient rooms in the buildings.

Paul’s suggestion of renewed working groups is not a blunt or drastic bureaucratization. Rather, it is subtle. It is seemingly trivial in relation to other issues taken up and is just a detail compared to larger problems and more urgent tasks in the workplace, and it is introduced in a delicate and nice way. Paul does not demand new working groups or insist on having any particular manager as a member. He just suggests it, and he refers to the fact that working groups did exist before. Another participant, Nick, helps to anchor Paul’s suggestion in a topic that obviously engages his colleagues: patients taking drugs and having psychosis. The clear implication is that the working groups should deal with such things.

Indeed, nothing in our data indicates a hidden agenda here, for instance in terms of Paul’s trying to manipulate the managers into accepting working groups even though they do not like them. Our point is different—and sociological. There is an administrative Eigendynamik set in motion when Paul articulates his suggestion, and when Beth’s spontaneous objection (“We do have quite a lot of other things to take care of”) is overruled, there is a spiraling sequence of events that seems hard to stop, despite the initial hesitancy.

When our fieldworker reports from another meeting six weeks after the one described here, with the same participants, Paul’s first point on his agenda is the appointment of a working group. Now, the working group unquestionably comes into existence. It will consist of staff within the psychiatry unit as well as the local municipality, and its purpose will be to improve “cooperation.” The group will produce a document describing how this cooperation will function, stated “as clearly as possible,” as a manager puts it during this meeting. What does this mean?

This means that another administrative forum is created within this organization, with its own series of meetings and associated texts. Another schedule for meetings is emerging, with a plethora of emails, agendas, and protocols. Managers—this time also from the municipality—are drawn into another chain of administrative activities, with merely abstract and very remote significance for patients or the workload in the clinics. The participants still have “quite a lot of other things to take care of,” to quote Beth from the first meeting, but they will nonetheless spend time in new meetings and pinpoint new things in new texts that will circulate digitally and require more reading.

The pull and power of the administration society are activated, and implicit ideals of rationality and participation nurture the process. Why not a working group? It does seem sensible and hard to object to, and many should participate. It seems accountable and democratic, it invites knowledge and participation, it counts as an example of really accomplishing something, and it is defined as a new and inclusive arena for important discussions. All in all, these are self-evident justifications.

In an idealized and perfect bureaucracy (Weber 1978:956-1005), meetings would be unnecessary because everybody would know what to do according to given rules and regulations. In this light, frequent meetings and ideas about indispensable benefits coming from meetings suggest anything but a perfect bureaucracy in today’s organizations. We include both meetings and documents in the administrative tasks we aim to investigate in this book because they are often contrasted to hands-on activities or “core activities” in a profession: for example, education when it comes to teachers, treating patients when it comes to nurses and doctors, interacting with clients and their relatives when it comes to social workers, and investigating or patrolling when it comes to the police. We are interested in the social character and conditions for those meetings where professionals gather to sort out the staff schedules, discuss a new routine, collaborate with other organizations, or take part in the monthly workplace issues. We are especially interested in all of the documentation that goes along with such gatherings—i.e., those ongoing regulating activities that people innovate, cultivate, and spread in organizations that already are regulated, often in quite a detailed manner.

Momentum and resistance

One way of spinning the administration wheel is, as in the previous example, to use a meeting to set up a new working group with its own meetings. We will soon turn to many others. What these tactics have in common is Simmel’s Eigendynamik, i.e., more or less autonomous processes of interaction that create their own momentum. There are ambivalences inherent in today’s administrative actions that make them repeat themselves, and if they take place in certain cultural environments, they also easily start to multiply.

Fashion provided one of Simmel’s (1904/1957) illustrations of such processes. Fashion is driven by people’s need to imitate others and conversely by their need to differentiate. People want to dress in “the latest” way, imitating what is deemed avant garde in terms of style and trends, and in doing so, they spread the very fashion they copy. As soon as something has been generally adopted, it can hardly be described as fashion anymore because its growth undermines diversity. Imitation will then be replaced by innovation, and then imitation will rise anew, and so on. The two poles of fashion—imitation at one origin point and innovation at the other—unleash a process that continues indefinitely because the tension between them is basically irresolvable. Within a suitable setting—in Simmel’s view, the money economy and the city—the cyclical process of fashion takes off and takes its hold on people. In modern times, fashion expands and proliferates (Simmel 1904/1957, 1978; Nedelmann 1990:251).

Transferred to the administration society, there is an equivalent Eigendynamik, we argue, or “construction–destruction mechanism” (Nedelmann 1990:254) that reproduces the very constellation that initiated the original momentum. People in organizations want order, yes, but they also want freedom. The more ambivalences become an integral part of the fabric of society, the greater opportunities will be for the initiation of eigendynamic (autonomous) processes. Democracy is highly valued, and people want to have a say, accepting workplace meetings but not endless meetings. They also want decisions and formal rules, but these may be opposed or offer some leeway, leading to new workplace discussions. The combination of high formality and high variability that breeds eigendynamic is characteristic of modern societies in general (Nedelmann 1990).

People want to structure things carefully and coordinate them with others, but they also want space to maneuver independently and solve things more spontaneously. A step in one direction creates a pressure towards the other, which in turn creates a pressure toward the first, and on and on, like a pendulum movement. Suggestions of a working group or a checklist represent efforts to achieve organizational clarity, transparency, and coordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Eigendynamik
• 2 The administration society
• 3 Seductive gatherings
• 4 Sneaky work and aways
• 5 A spark of magic
• 6 Beauty and boost
• 7 Spirals of meetings and documents
• 8 Dramatizing administrative skills
• 9 Muddy transparency
• 10 The devotion to teaching
• 11 Magic, emotions, and morality
• Appendix
• References
• Index