When politics meets bureaucracy: Rules, norms, conformity and cheating

By Christian Lo

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526136701

Book preview

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 based chapters. Here I introduce the municipal organization and provide two illustrations of policy processes that will be further analyzed and discussed in the later chapters. I draw particular attention to the blurred borders of municipal organizations and to the complex intertwinement between the municipal organization and its surroundings during municipal policy processes. The chapter's illustrations of how processes of government and governance are intertwined in municipal policy processes are essential to the analytical perspective of this book, adding complexity to the conceptual isolation of the two as essentially distinct modes of governing found in parts of the network governance literature.

In Chapter 5 I apply an analytical framework largely inspired by F. G. Bailey's (1969) classical conceptualization of political structures as games in order to analyze the normative rules at play in municipal policy processes. I develop an understanding of these normative rules through numerous accounts from both administrative and political informants discussing their roles during policy processes. These accounts demonstrate how policy development is enacted in a dialectic interplay between political and administrative roles both within and beyond the borders of the formal organization. The relationship between politics and administration, as understood by my informants, strongly echoed the classical Weberian notion of a hierarchal relation in which the bureaucratic occupational ethos is defined in opposition to the role of the politician. Moreover, the normative emphasis placed on acting in accordance with the political and administrative roles functions as a barrier protecting the political arenas of the municipal organization from the dreaded role of the personal social being, which is perceived as illegitimate because of its multiplex social relations and particular interests. In this way, understanding the normative emphasis that is put on the division between political and administrative rules and roles becomes essential to understanding the enactment of government and governance in policy processes. The normatively prescribed roles function as a tool for vesting policy processes in the municipal organization's democratic and impartial legitimacy. However, the examples also demonstrate how the enforcement of rules can often seem arbitrary but are in some cases strategic.

The latter observation is further explored in Chapter 6, where I give attention to the more pragmatic rules at play during municipal policy development. By analyzing the tactics and strategies applied by my informants who were engaged in municipal entrepreneurship, I display how the aforementioned normative rules were enacted in tension with the pragmatic rules of political struggle. A central point is the paradoxical normative status of administrative entrepreneurship: that while administrators are expected to propose new policy developments, they are expected to await political initiatives before doing so and to refrain from engaging in a political fight. However, the cases also show how the emphasis on consensus and conformity puts normative constraints on the politician's ability to singlehandedly introduce political fights. Through a discussion of how different forms of relations within – and stretching beyond – the municipal organization were individualized, I argue that political struggle during municipal policy processes is characterized by the creation of pragmatic policy alliances that often operate within a sense of egalitarian-rooted pragmatism. These alliances, I further argue, create a system of cross-cutting loyalties and conflicts that exist in tension with the hierarchical command chain of the municipal organization. Toward the end of the chapter, I relate my findings to Chapter 3's descriptions of political culture. The objective here is to advance the understanding this political culture, and also some of its functions and consequences.

The latter discussion is carried into Chapter 7. Here I conclude my empirical analysis and summarize my main findings in a discussion of the wider implications for governance theory and the understanding of relations in municipal policy development.

Limitations

Before embarking on my description of the municipal organization and its inner workings, I will address some of the limitations of the study presented in this book.

The researcher can neither be everywhere nor speak with everyone, so the study's choice of sites limits its scope. While I argue that municipal policy development is carried out through a dialectic relationship between politics and administration, thus recognizing the administrative organization as a political arena, I also want to emphasize that my perspective does not in any sense claim to provide an exhaustive view of municipal policy development encompassing all the actors and factors affecting policy process outcomes. Nor does my perspective conform to a top-down, linear understanding of policy, casting it in terms of authoritative instrumentalism, as criticized by Shore and Wright (1997, 2011:4–15).

Rather, the present study seeks an understanding of policy processes based on the particular viewpoints of the administrative and political actors who occupy the municipal halls that served as my main field sites. While thus employing a sort of practitioner perspective (Shore and Wright 2011:4) in conceptualizing policy processes as the decision-making processes of the municipal organization, this book is written with an awareness that policy processes and outcomes do not remain objective entities outside the walls of the municipal hall. Furthermore, while this book should be read as a description of how policy processes and associated political struggles manifest themselves among the municipal organizations’ actors, it also pays particular attention to how external relations and resources affect political struggles. Despite the focus on the municipal organizations’ actors, the perspective here does not imply a closed-system model sealed off from its surroundings. Rather, it provides micro-level accounts of how the internal workings of municipal organizations connect to external (or environmental) surroundings, thereby attempting to gain an understanding of the wider system and its local manifestations. As such, the study does not reject assertions such as Stein Rokkan's (1987) famous statement votes count, but resources decide, which emphasizes the role and impact of actors external to the formal (democratic) political institutions; rather, it elaborates on how such resources are understood and strategically applied by policy actors within the municipal organization and, thus, how they affect policy outcomes.

Some commenters have suggested that my application of analytical concepts derived from classical anthropology about traditional societies to modern-day municipal policy development may seem irrelevant or even provocative. Surely, analytical frameworks such as Bailey's (1969) non-mathematical game theory, which was inspired by such violent organizations as the criminals in the American Cosa Nostra and exotic political systems such as the Swat Pathans, can hardly be relevant to the institutions of the modern-day democratic Norwegian municipality?

First, Bailey's own response to such a critique is relevant here, as he reminds us that, while societies managed by bureaucratic legal-rational principles are certainly different from traditional societies, such terms stand for concepts and ideal types. Mixtures, rather than such pure types, characterize the real world (Bailey 1969). The empirical analysis of the present book supports the latter point, as my findings conclude that municipal policy development is enacted in tension between ideal-type universalistic principles (associated with the modern state) and more pragmatic logics regulated through a sense of egalitarianism (more often associated with the traditional).

Second, as some observers have pointed out (see e.g. Torfing et al. 2012:49–55), the depoliticized view of collaborative arenas as pragmatic problem solving processes has caused a troubling neglect of power and politics in parts of the governance literature. The inclusion of anthropological perspectives that emphasize politics as the competition for power to implement political goals should, thus, be a welcome addition to the governance literature (see also the discussion in Chapter 2).

Finally, I also want to stress that analyzing political systems as competitive games does not necessarily imply a cynical view, reducing the enactment of politics to fights over resources and positions. Rather, I would argue that employing such frameworks to different political systems enables a juxtaposition that displays their similarities and dissimilarities. Suggesting that political struggle can be analyzed as a game still implies that the nature of the game remains an empirical question. The American anthropologist George Park provides an example when he argues that properly understanding functional institutions often requires analyzing them as competitive games (1998:94). In his descriptions of Norwegian local politics, Park also finds metaphors from the realm of sports to be the best fit:

Canadians, delighting as they do in the rough-and-tough game of professional hockey, may tolerate the same style in politics and even regret the absence of aggressiveness in a scrupulous leader. Norwegians make the most of their ice and snow in sports but go for racing or jumping not hockey. Neither is politics a contact sport for them. (1998:203)

All of the cases of policy development explored in this book entailed some degree of controversy and political struggle. However, I want to emphasize that my final impression is not one of municipal organizations riddled with conflict and quarrels that overshadow the task of providing services and developments for the local communities’ benefit. In a context of limited resources, the realization of political goals – altruistically motivated or otherwise – will usually contain an element of political struggle over what goals should be prioritized, how best to implement them and in what order. Having political leaders and administrators willing to engage in such struggles for what they believe to be in their local communities’ best interests is, in my opinion, a sign of the vitality of Norwegian local government.

2

From government to governance? Re-examining the transformation thesis

Some thoughts from today: it's obvious that my interpretations of what's going on are vastly different from those of, particularly, the leaders within the building. The terrain they are navigating within seems so intangible. During yesterday's meeting, the issue of geographical cleavages within the municipality seemed to be the elephant in the room. Yet nobody made a real issue of it (while many certainly commented on it). […] Why is there no open debate on the matter? Regardless, the whole landscape seems interrelated and the municipality is engaged in some kind of collaborative governance all around. The debate on the sporting arena demonstrates that they are constantly navigating between different but interconnected issues. Questions of centrality, cooperation with other municipalities, municipal structure, sustainability of the municipalities’ primary schools, the county's decisions on the structure of upper secondary education, state- and county-administrated founding schemes, the will (economic contributions) from trade and industry and local associations – it's all connected in an endless complexity surrounding the decision on the sporting arena.

The excerpt above concluded the field notes from my third day of fieldwork. The previous evening, I had attended a municipal council meeting for the first time as an ethnographer on duty, and I had spent the following day attempting to make sense of the experience by observing its aftermath from within the municipal hall. In the clichéd, emotional mixture of excitement and confusion characterizing the early stages of fieldwork, I was summarizing my first encounters with my predefined objects of study, namely processes of municipal policy development, in the wild. These early notions of complex interrelations and layered motives guiding political action were to become vital to the perspectives on policy processes developed in this book. Nevertheless, when interpreted in retrospect by the author, there are also signs of despair in the excerpt.

Prior to fieldwork, my initial sorting of the relationship between government and governance, based on (quite tenuous) readings of the network governance literature, was focused on the borders of the formal municipal organization. By differentiating between processes of decision-making that occurred within the borders of formal organization (government) and those occurring in collaborative arenas with relations crossing the borders of formal organization (governance), I planned to analytically separate processes of government and governance. Thus, by tracing how one sort of process affected the other, I imagined, the relationship between government and governance could be made available for exploration. I was naïve. Reality, as I encountered it during the first days of fieldwork, did not seem to conform to such an orderly distinction between policy processes and decisions taking place within or outside the borders of formal organization. As Chapter 4 discusses, the multiplicity of connections intertwining both policy processes and the actors involved, as well as the open system (Scott and Davis 2007) characteristic of municipal organizations, made any attempts at such analytical limitations impossible.

What I had discovered was obviously that such concepts, when applied as descriptive typologies of policy processes, are ideal types. There is no originality in stating that reality does not divide itself into such pure forms (see, particularly, Rhodes 1997a). However, the degree to which the mix of governing logics seemed to emulsify within each decision-making process still warranted further attention. With a network governance literature characterized by typologies and overarching theoretical arguments (see discussion in Rhodes 2017b), micro-level accounts describing of the interplay between hierarchies and networks are few and far between (see discussion in Kjær 2004). Moreover, as I go on to discuss further below, the tendency to embed the distinction between government and governance in a normative distinction between the traditional and the modern has also contributed to obscuring the understanding of how the two concepts relate to each other.

One purpose of this book is to narrow this apparent gap between the conceptual pair of government and governance through exploring how the two concepts coexist in practices of local government. However, this mission statement could just as well be inverted. By applying the two concepts as metaphors for describing different institutional logics at play, I argue, they become useful tools for explaining the duplicity I found to characterize the political practices I encountered during fieldwork (Chapters 5 and 6): more than demonstrating how real-life practices exist on a continuum between ideal types, they enable an analysis of how such practices are informed by both a tension and an interplay between different (and often competing) institutional logics.

In this chapter, I begin this effort by exploring how the relationship between hierarchal government and networked governance is intertwined with the claims of the so-called transformation thesis in the existing literature. As I will shortly go on to discuss, my own experiences are not the first to question the interpretation of the relationship between government and governance as a simplistic narrative of transformation. Other work, such as Jonathan Davies's (2011) seminal critique of governance theory, has also demonstrated the problematic implications of such claims: through portraying hierarchical government as an obsolete form of governing, incapable of managing