Discussion

By Elaine Glaser:

"Serendipitously, a book of essays on bureaucracy by David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, appeared in March. Titled The Utopia of Rules, it’s a fascinating elucidation of an ostensibly unpromising topic. Bureaucracy is traditionally associated with the public sphere. But as Graeber demonstrates, this association is far from natural: it is the result of bureaucratic controls being forcibly applied to the public sector. Meanwhile, the private sector appears lean only because the regulatory apparatus has been all but stripped away: in the public sector, bureaucracy is called “accountability”, in the private sector, it’s “red tape”.

Shielded, therefore, by an illusory opposition between the market and bureaucracy, the new university management imposes systems of audit, evaluation, assessment and accreditation in the name of increased value for money. Yet this is deeply ironic, because the infinite regress of online forms and email chains leads academics directly away from productivity. In a related, widely read article for Strike! magazine titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, Graeber asks why it is that in advanced Western economies, saturated in the rhetoric of austerity, and supposedly reaping the rewards of modern technology, administrative labour has proliferated. “In a world ever more in thrall to the imperatives of profit, competition and market-driven efficiency,” Graeber observes, “it is bizarre for employers in the public and private sector alike to be behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they do not appear to need.” Graeber’s explanation is that long-hours pen-pushing – or mouse-clicking – is imposed on employees as a form of social control: it’s a way of ensuring that we are too monitored, busy and tired to raise questions or revolt.

The “moral and spiritual damage” resulting from the fact that “huge swathes of people…spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed” is, Graeber claims, “a scar across our collective soul”. Likewise, bureaucracy has become a ubiquitous cliché of modern academia, and to call it out seems naive, as if not accepting the “real world”. Yet it produces a disjunctive sense of playing along with a fiction.

If accounting measures applied to academia to make it more efficient actually have the opposite effect, what is their real purpose? Is the impulse to count and assess all activity via “performance indicators” and “quality assurance” a quixotic yet sincere attempt to increase productivity; the application of a belief that things are not real unless delineated virtually; a simple failure to grasp that the more time one spends trying to “capture” academic “output” via bean-counting and online systems of representation, the more it slips away? Since the financial crash of 2008-09, we have seen ample evidence of misguided faith in marketisation to suggest that this explanation is credible. Yet it does not account for the moralising and punitive manner in which bureaucratic demands are formulated. They are derived from private sector managerialism, yet while they have been largely flushed out of business itself, they are applied to academia in a correctional spirit, as if it is not behaving in a sufficiently businesslike manner.

There’s a simple explanation for the drive to quantify everything: the replacement of the horizontal self-government of university departments with the vertical hierarchy of departmental heads and senior management. Academics used to document their output on their CVs; now, managers have to find ways to justify their existence. “Everyone knows the results are absurd,” Graeber tells me via email. “We all spend more and more hours of our day discussing, analysing and assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours actually doing it, and all of it, just to give these high-level administrators who aren’t really needed something to do for their gold-plated salaries.”

But this is more than just a power shift, Graeber notes. “It represents a transformation in our basic assumption about what a university is…Thirty years ago, if you said ‘the university’, people assumed you were referring to the faculty. Now if you say it, people assume you’re referring to the administration.” The corporate bureaucrats who now run universities are “often more interested in real estate speculation, fund-raising, sports, and ‘the student experience’ than anything that has to do with learning, teaching, or scholarship at all”.

Through a curious inversion, to insist that knowledge should be valued in and of itself, and that universities should be places of learning, has come to seem morally suspect. Just as public sector employees are repeatedly reminded that their salaries are funded by “hard-working taxpayers”, academics feel increasingly beholden to fee-paying students. The result is guilt for having a nice job, for being able to stare out the window thinking interesting thoughts about subjects that have no obvious, tangible “application”. It’s almost as if it would be better if academics spent the bulk of their time filling out forms for the sake of it, because at least then they wouldn’t be enjoying themselves on the public, or the students’, purse – even if that resulted in fewer books being written.

One acknowledged that bureaucracy ‘can become addictive and/or act as a means of avoiding other activities’. Is this an awkward truth - that form‑filling provides convenient relief from taxing intellectual labours?" (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/bureaucracy-why-wont-scholars-break-their-paper-chains/2020256.article)

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Utopia of Rules

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