Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stefano Harney is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

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"There is a growing need for a socially critical understanding of corporate management and government. Stefano Harney's book is a timely contribution in this regard. This is a painstaking analysis of the complexity of political and administrative processes."--Tony Tinker, Editor, "Critical Perspectives on Accounting"

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STATE WORK

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................ixIntroduction: Hands of a Government Man............................................................11 Yes, Minister: The Rise and Fall of the Ontario Antiracism Secretariat..........................132 Reengineering Immaterial G-Men..................................................................563 Reinventing Statolatry: From Nicos Poulantzas to Al Gore........................................864 Generalizing Social Terror: Public Management and Performance by Objectives.....................1215 The Administration of Motivation: Any Cook Can Network..........................................151Notes..............................................................................................189Select Bibliography................................................................................217Index..............................................................................................225

Chapter One

It may well be that a thorough analysis of the state would demonstrate its difference from government and define it in relation to the agencies of capital.-Michael E. Brown, The Production of Society

If the popular images of conspiracy suggest there is more to government work than meets the eye, and if the muteness of those same images direct the investigator to disciplines that might say more, those disciplines do their part to fan the embers of suspicion. Whatever is lurking in daily government work seems to invite investigation, but such investigation soon takes on the atmosphere of the conspiracy images that prompted it. If there is a socialism hidden in government quotidian, no one, it soon turns out, is going to make it easy to unveil. This is nowhere more evident than in the discipline supposed to be about daily labor in the government.

The discipline of public administration has spent a century distinguishing itself from other bodies of knowledge and practices. Many scholars have worked hard in recent years to justify this separation by building the discipline's theoretical integrity. Yet for all this, public administration is neither about government, a topic left to political science with dire consequences, or labor, a topic once relegated to industrial sociology and then more recently to labor process theory. Asking public administration to explain what in government work generates such popular dreaming therefore yields no answer. But the investigator is left with a good lead: Why is public administration not what it appears to be? Why does it claim to be about government labor when as this book will show, its presence ensures that government and labor will be treated not just elsewhere but separately? Hunches swirl around this lead. Could there be something to hide in the combination of government and labor? Could there be some connection between this separation and several other notorious separations in scholarship? At the same time, such an investigation cannot help but begin quixotically. After all, are not government and labor old windmills on the landscape of globalization? Do not both finance capital and new social movements hurl past these history-bound edifices in a blur? If so, it would be hard to find a more quixotic place to start than the socialist government of Ontario, Canada in the 1990s-and a more quixotic figure than me.

WORKING IN THE GOVERNMENT

In 1992, I had completed my doctoral dissertation on Caribbean nationalism and converted it into a book manuscript as evidence of my labor power. I was living at home in Toronto again after a peripatetic path of graduate training, preparing to compete with a reserve army of academic wageworkers in selling this labor power, when I received an offer of work in the Ontario Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs. In 1990, the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Ontario had won an unexpected majority in the province's parliament-a province that is the most populous and prosperous in Canada. Most of Canada's welfare state is administered at the provincial level, by a system of civil service based like most in the empire on the Whitehall model. Now this province and its welfare state were in the hands of a party that called itself democratic socialist, even if once in office it would refer to itself as social democratic. The change in signifier was not unimportant but either way it could be argued that it was the most genuinely Left-oriented government to hold an industrial and financial center in North America any time in the last fifty years. The year 1990 was another cold one for parliamentary social democracy around the world and an especially harsh one for the Left in general, with the "collapse of the Soviet Union" already commonly narrated as a "foundational image" in a story about somebody else. In this context, the NDP victory carried a kind of popular front appeal, not least because the party itself offered such repetitions of difference in its daily life. It was good news, and like most good news, it was the goodness and not the news that got most of the attention. If it was not much remarked in the United States, Canada's Left was quick to recognize its own exceptionalism in this moment.

PLEASURES OF THE MONDAY MORNING MEETING

I spent over three years working for the NDP government. I began as a policy analyst on constitutional issues and finished as a campaign manager for one of the parliamentary candidates in the government's bid for reelection, moving from the civil service to the party proper in this last position. In the middle, I rose as far as manager in the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, within the Ontario Antiracism Secretariat, and most of my experience during these three years was as a bureaucrat officially without party affiliation. I had a lot of ambivalence about working for a social democratic government, about working as a manager in a government bureaucracy, and about working generally. It was not so much the limits of social democracy or problems of state power that preoccupied me, however, but the more immediate and everyday experience of my work. I wanted to understand it better, especially its mysterious pleasure.

An account of my experience begins in the countless professional development seminars, retreats, and workshops where I sat thinking about why I was working in government, my preempted career as an academic, and the growing difficulties my friends in the NDP seemed to be having. And I thought about why I was sitting through all those sessions listening and talking about what we were supposed to be doing and how we should arrange ourselves to do it. At the same time, I enjoyed the sessions, even looked forward to them. This entire book comes out of this moment, in a way, sitting enjoying something I felt was completely unsatisfactory. At the superficial level, the sessions were enjoyable because they broke the routine, and unsatisfactory because they used private sector language and models to talk about my work. But if I had stopped the analysis there I would probably have been moved to write a book about labor relations in...