The New Public Good: Affects and Techniques of flexible Bureaucracies
Friday, 23 March 2012 to Saturday, 24 March 2012
CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road
CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road
Cambridge CB3 9DT
Fees:
- Full: £50.00 (includes teas/coffees and lunches)
- Students: £25.00 (includes teas/coffees aand lunches)
Conference summary
In making bureaucratic formations and their reconfigurations on the premise of 'new public goods' a subject of academic investigation, this conference will draw attention to a largely neglected but central feature of modernity. Bringing together leading social scientists working on and around the theme of bureaucracy, straddling regions and organisational forms, it is envisaged that this conference will be the first of its kind to draw attention to the unanalysed global trend of what we term ‘flexible bureaucracies.’
Specifically, this conference asks what exactly is new about newly declared public goods such as transparency, accountability, devolution of power, efficiency, the offering-up of ‘choice’, the introduction of new technologies or the raising of measurable happiness? How do they manifest themselves through transformations in mundane administrative technologies? What sorts of affectivities are engendered by them? What, indeed, are the unintended consequences of the profoundly political and moral alterations in the practice of rule that are being introduced in the name of new public goods? This conference shall creatively bring together academics working on a diversity of bureaucratic structures ranging from large public sector undertakings (PSUs) and development bureaucracies in South Asia, higher educational and local government reforms in the UK, health organisations in Australia and hospitals in the Netherlands, large multinational corporations such as Microsoft or oil companies, worker co-operatives in Argentina, human rights organisations in southern Africa, to customs offices in Ghana. Theoretical interventions on the penetration of neo-liberal political rationalities and technologies of governance as well as the gendering and insidious violence of bureaucratic organisations will be brought into conversation with ethnographic accounts of the quotidian practices of bureaucracies. The conference aims to be inter-disciplinary. It will draw in anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, historians, and gender specialists. It will be transnational in its orientation not only by including researchers who work in different parts of the world but also in its very foundational act of identifying a common theme that crosscuts diverse regions: the alterations being effected in variegated bureaucratic formations via new and contested definitions of the public good.