The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era
The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era

Author: B. Hibou

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-05-06

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1137495286

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Contemporary bureaucracy is a set of norms, rules, procedures, and formalities which includes administration, business, and NGOs. Where Max Weber meets Michel Foucault, Béatrice Hibou analyzes the political dynamics underlying this process. Neoliberal bureaucracy is a vector of discipline and control, producing social and political indifference.

The Insecure American
The Insecure American

Author: Hugh Gusterson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-11-24

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0520945085

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Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, The Insecure American demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History
Empires and Bureaucracy in World History

Author: Peter Crooks

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-08-03

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 131672106X

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How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so help explain why some empires endured for centuries while, in the contemporary world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with 'modernity' and the so-called 'Rise of the West'.

International Bureaucracy
International Bureaucracy

Author: Michael W. Bauer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1349949779

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This book applies established analytical concepts such as influence, authority, administrative styles, autonomy, budgeting and multilevel administration to the study of international bureaucracies and their political environment. It reflects on the commonalities and differences between national and international administrations and carefully constructs the impact of international administrative tools on policy making. The book shows how the study of international bureaucracies can fertilize interdisciplinary discourse, in particular between International Relations, Comparative Government and Public Administration. The book makes a forceful argument for Public Administration to take on the challenge of internationalization.

The Utopia of Rules
The Utopia of Rules

Author: David Graeber

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1612193757

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From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.