Performative governance: Difference between revisions
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Just as well this kind of thing could never happen in a corporate environment. | Just as well this kind of thing could never happen in a corporate environment. | ||
“[[Performative]]” is a vogue word, and if the learned author thinks she’s discovered something new — that administrators manage [[second-order derivative]]s and [[Proxy|proxies]] of their political problems rather than engaging in the political problems themselves — she would do herself a favour by reading {{author|James C. Scott}}, {{author|Jane Jacobs}}, {{author|W. Edwards Deming}}, {{author|Jane Jacobs}} and others who have been articulating these ideas for seventy or more years — but ''since'' it’s 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-dimensional<ref>Yes: ''four'', and I don’t even need to exceed Euclidean geometry to get there: governance propositions mutate over ''time''.</ref> reality which is genuinely ineffable: with social systems there is never the necessary information, nor boundaries, for any simplistic representation to work. | With — perhaps — a spin. You “perform” governance, generally, by ''approximating'' it: creating crude, two-dimensional stick-figure illustrations of a four-dimensional<ref>Yes: ''four'', and I don’t even need to exceed Euclidean geometry to get there: governance propositions mutate over ''time''.</ref> reality which is genuinely ineffable: with social systems there is never the necessary information, nor boundaries, for any simplistic representation to work. It is literally boundless and indeterminate. | ||
Modern administration is not “performative” in the sense of being ''fictional'', but irresponsibly ''representational'': the [[modernist]] sees calamity as a function of low-level human failure: as ''[[The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations|operator error]]''. | Modern administration is not “performative” in the sense of being ''fictional'', but irresponsibly ''representational'': the [[modernist]] sees everyday calamity as a bug, not a feature: a function of low-level human failure: as ''[[The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations|operator error]]''. | ||
The contrary view is | If the errors, inconstancies and misapprehensions of human frailty could only be removed, then — on this view — 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? This kind of administration is easy: you just have to weed out the bad apples, and blame the ones you missed. Your administrative role is reduced to one of [[human resources]].<ref>Thinks: ''waaaaaaaait a minute.''</ref> | |||
The contrary view is that 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. You had one job, and that was it. | |||
Curiously, management orthodoxy leans to the former view. For the life of me I can’t think why. | |||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} |