Lecture 11 Flashcards
what is weber’s classic “ideal type” of the bureaucracy
Efficient
Dispassionate Specialized (criteria that you need to meet, people become specialized in the knowledge, positions and stuff)
Rule governed Hierarchical
what is contemporary bureaucratic rationalism
To be audited and inspected is now regarded as an axiomatic part of personhood: an inevitable and natural aspect of being a worker, student or company employee today. Our lives are increasingly governed by – and through – numbers, indicators, algorithms and audits and the ever-present concerns with the management of risk which, in turn, seem to require the ever more sophisticated systems of knowledge and power that indicators and rankings provide.
are we affected by contemporary bureaucratic rationalism
we are all affected by this; affected by this more and more (it seems)
one thing anthropologists have taken an interest in is the way that bureactratic rules are affecting the way we live and the way things are measured and influencing the way that our lives are governed through this
anthropologists curious about the systems of knowledge and power
Ethnographic attention to the everyday and the small-scale [can reveal] what
how participants in bureaucracies act to undermine efficiency, either by sticking blindly to the rules, or by secretly undermining them and the chain of command
Where does it come from? (contemporary bureaucratic rationalism )
when we look at the anthropology of organizations it isn’t just judicial process that is exclusive to anthropologists, we Andre Gide; he sat for 12 weeks and took notes in the court room
somethings you miss from this; he doesn’t talk to a wide variety of people (the actors in the process), he doesn’t braodly explore the institution as a space— he was only there for 12 days and that isn’t long at all in ethnographic process… you need to leave enough time for things to happen and for nights to be revealed without pursuing them
Laura Nader, on “studying up”:
“What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty?” (1972: 289)
who are the 2 people associated with the 2 accounts o the going of anthropology of UN institutions
Marc Abélès:
Birgit Müller:
what did Marc Abélès say
Globalization and the “shrinking world.”
talks about the impact of globalization shortening the distance between people
what did Birgit Müller say
Invasion (by institutional experts) and counter-invasion (by anthropologists)
what does Muller say about working/studying people
working in more than one place is necessary
what is the problem with many of the massive organizations
These organizations tend to have a disproportionate sense of mission, to be infused with their own peculiar kind of utopianism, a kind of piecemeal ambition for the betterment of the world, with goals that are sometimes not only hopeful and ambitious, but willfully and blindly impossible. They are driven by the typically utopian intention to construct a better world using only human ingenuity and agency, without reference to any form of divine intervention
peculiarities of the UN as an ethnographic subject
Excessive reliance on “indicators, ” producing “indicator culture.”
Piecemeal utopianism. Cosmopolitan
what is The debunking effect of ethnography
“[E]xpert knowledge [is] the product of semi- clandestine detective work, negotiating gossip, absent data and misinformation, wishful thinking or deliberate lying, not to mention dangerous driving, loneliness, alcohol and sex—a panoply of experiences, quick impressions and hunches stabilized as statistics and rational processes”
what are the challenges to institutional ethnography
Access (ethnography as a [frequently refused] tool of transparency)
Mobility (eg. ‘cosmopolitan’ elites, no ‘place’ to ground observation)
Dispersion (multiple ‘nodes’ of knowledge and action)
Secrecy (realms excluded from outsider observation)
Scrutiny and censorship (research ethics: the anthropologist as “researcher-perpetrator” and the agency as the “research subject in need of protection”
