Bureaugraphies. Administration After the Age of Bureaucracy

Wider research context: Focusing on the German-speaking administrations in the FRG, Switzerland and Austria, the research project concerns the 'post-bureaucratic' state in administrative matters. In this context, the project understands ‘bureaucracies’ as agencies of decision-making whose rationality is essentially based on inscriptions mediated and recorded through files and invested with state authority.
Hypotheses: The project aims to show that the reforms of modern state administrations––carried out under the sign of ‘debureaucratization’, of streamlining and increasing efficiency––may have reduced long-standing circumstantial procedures within the authorities; but that, at the same time, formerly official communication procedures have been disseminated beyond state organizations, namely in the social and private spheres. We call 'bureaugraphies' those writing practices and techniques of originally bureaucratic work, which are no longer confined to and invested in the disposal power of state authorities but whose spread has resulted in an unprecedented level of micromanagement and control of social and private spheres without strictly formalized procedures of decision-making. Against this background, the project examines the conditions of modern de-bureaucratization throughout the 20th century: First and foremost the discourse critical of bureaucracy––in administrative agencies themselves, in political and public discourse and in literary writing. Secondly, the project turns to different programs of actual administrative reforms, ranging from scientific management to today’s outsourcing of public service duties. Thirdly, the project addresses the related distribution and transformation of official writing or communication procedures, particularly of specifically 'bureaucratic' forms of records keeping; to this end, it examines technical innovations within the administration, ranging from new practices of manual file management to the digital dislocation of public offices and government agencies in the present.
Methods: The project interweaves systematic, historical, and comparative perspectives and combines the theoretical means of organizational sociology with those of literary, cultural and media studies. Methodologically, it is committed to praxeology, systems theory and the research of cultural techniques.
Innovation: The project tries to explore that paradox which consists in the reduction of 'bureaucratic' routines and the simultaneous proliferation of 'bureaugraphic' proceedings on the level of the political and the technical, the aesthetic and the everyday.
Primary researchers involved: The four PIs have worked and published extensively on the cultural, literary and media history of bureaucratic writing and on theoretical and media paradigms of organizational sociology. The associated members of the project include renowned scholars of bureaucracy as well as experts from the field of contemporary administrative practice.