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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 voguish 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}} 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. | “Performative” is a voguish 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}} 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-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. | ||
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 | 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]].<ref>Thinks: ''waaaaaaaait a minute.''</ref> | ||
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, on | |||
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