The Bureaucratization of the Word in the Neoliberal Era ― International and Comparative Perspective

Contemporary bureaucracy should not be understood as a hierarchical apparatus proper to the state, but as a set of norms, rules, procedures and formalities which includes not only the state administration, but also business, the voluntary sector and indeed the whole of society.

At the point where Max Weber meets Michel Foucault, Beatrice Hibou analyzes the political dynamics underlying this process. Neoliberal bureaucracy is a vector of discipline and control: even more, it produces social and political indifference. Under the pretext of depoliticization, this trend cannot hide the exercise of a normalizing and excluding power. Bureaucratization is not something external to society: it unfolds through the very same actors who are its target and who, consciously or not, play an essential role in this process. Operating as it does through individuals, bureaucratization does not come 'from above': it is a much wider process of 'bureaucratic participation', a response to the need to voice material and vested interests and give answers to legitimate demands, as well as expressing the quest for efficiency, but it also reflects day-to-day conflicts and negotiations between actors. In this way, bureaucratic participation is constructed through power relations, and paradoxically relies on informalities that alone make the neoliberal art of government possible.

Beatrice Hibou is director of research of the CNRS at CERI-SciencesPo, Paris, France. Her comparative research in political economy focuses, from a Weberian perspective and a foucaldian conception of power, on the political significance of economic reform, on state trajectories and on the exercise of domination, based on cases from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and Europe. Her most important publications include Anatomie Politique de la Domination (2011), The Force of Obedience, Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (2011); ed. Privatising the State (2004).