First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

There are two simple errors that people have been making about bureaucracies for over a century. The first is that they are so successful in governing people’s behaviour, that they entirely oust any scope for human autonomy, and this is a bad thing. The second is that they are so successful in governing people’s behaviour, that they entirely oust any scope for human failure, and this is a good thing. Lets call these, respectively, the romantic error and the policy error.

If the Tories are serious in their quest for a ‘post-bureaucratic state‘, then they look set to make both errors at the same time. Let me guess - this ‘post-bureaucratic state’ will restore the autonomy of public sector professionals, but without risking any additional human failure? No wonder they’re known as the ’stupid party’.

Elsewhere, The Guardian reports that nurses will be assessed on their smile and affection output, as a means of delivering better value to customers of the NHS (sic). Plucked from a much larger policy package and stuck on the front page, the implication is that this is the new frontier in the drift towards a cold, routinised society. Now that even smiles are measured, what spontaneity is left? This must be what Max Weber intended when he wrote “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness”.

Between the romantic error and the policy error lies a truth that is surely obvious to anyone who has ever worked in a large hierachical organisation: bureaucracies can change behaviour, but they can not determine it. A rule will govern, but never completely. One lesson to take from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is that no rule can tell you how it should be obeyed. Or to put it in H L A Hart’s terms, any law is also dependent on the ‘rule of recognition’, a necessarily unwritten rule that the law be viewed as law.

The same is true of bureaucratic rules. The measurement of smiles will obviously not make nurses any happier. It probably won’t even make them smile more. But it will change behaviour, primarily to produce an economy of smiling, such that smiles start to be treated as part of the currency of nursing. The smiles that are produced might be made more public or more obvious. They will no doubt be summoned more frequently if there is the suspicion of auditting. Perhaps they will even become tradable in some way, and different categories of smile will develop, such that a ‘grin’ becomes neglected in favour of the full ‘beam’ that has more chance of penetrating the dosed-up patient’s gaze. It would be as wrong to claim that the nurses have been enslaved as it would be to say that their frostiness has been erradicated. Between the romantic error and the policy error lies the truth, namely that the nurse is free to find his or her own means of satisfying the auditor, then getting on with nursing.

This is being performed up and down the country. Successful academics now recognise that target-setting in higher education is not something that could feasibly be done ‘correctly’ or can realistically be abandoned, but offers a set of rules within which each individual must find space for themselves. Between romantic despair and policy sincerity, ironic professional engagement is the most honest way of dealing with an audit.

What the Tories are misunderstanding, therefore, is that ‘actually existing’ bureaucracies are already post-bureaucratic (at least in the sense the Tories intend). Only the person who spends his or her life in Whitehall surrounded by documents could have so much respect and distaste for bureaucracy as the Tories. As things actually take place, public services have always been a jumble of rules, judgements, successes and failures. Of course it’s more attractive to stress the judgements and the successes than the rules and the failures - and to call this ‘post-bureaucratic’ - but the overall mix will remain exactly the same as it was when Weber was writing.