Performative governance

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“I define performative governance as the state’s theatrical deployment of visual, verbal, and gestural symbols to foster an impression of good governance before an audience of citizens”

—Iza Ding

Just as well this kind of thing could never happen in a corporate environment.

“Performative” is a voguish word, and if the learned author thinks she’s discovered something new — that administrators manage second-order derivatives and proxies of their political problems rather than engaging in the political problems themselves — she would do herself a favour by reading James C. Scott, Jane Jacobs, W. Edwards Deming and others who have been articulating these ideas for seventy or more years — but since its fashionable, and since it is bang-on the money, let’s go with it.

With — perhaps — a spin. You perform governance, generally, by approximating it: creating crude, two-dimensional stick-figure illustrations of a four-dimensionalreality which is genuinely ineffable: with social systems there is never the necessary information, nor boundaries, for any simplistic representation to work.

Modern administration is not performative in the sense of being fictional, but irresponsibly lazy: the modernist disposition is to see calamity as a function of low-level human foible: as operator error. If the errors, inconstancies and misapprehensions of human frailty could only be excised, then orderly good governance would surely follow. Thus; administrators are never to blame: it’s the meatware. But then, why pay the big bucks to middle managers? Administration is easy: you just have to weed out the bad apples. If you don’t you’ve failed; if you do, your administrative role is reduced to one of human resources.

The contrary view is this: administration is hard. Avoiding system accidents, designing processes and products; aligning incentives, reacting to subtle, and sudden, shifts in the business environment; fixing conflicts of interest: these are ongoing tasks that need constant attention, interaction and adjustment, and these are solely the responsibility of management. If there is a calamity at the coal face, that is prima facie indication that management has failed, because it has put the wrong person, with the wrong tools, in the wrong place.

See also

• Seeing Like a State
• The map and the territory
• Box-ticking