Organizing States: The continuing relevance of formal organization within political administration

Abstract

In this paper, we argue for the continuing relevance of formal organization. We do so by examining contemporary challenges to ‘formality’ in one particular sphere of organizational existence: that of political administration. We deploy the latter term to refer to those formal organizational activities involving the constitution, maintenance, projection and regulation of governmental authority. Political administration, we argue, maintains its distinctive character because of the singularity of its purpose or ‘core task’ – namely, the activity of governing in an official capacity through and on behalf of a state. We begin by outlining how formality has regularly been opposed to substance in the social sciences, and how this has led to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings concerning the status of ‘formal organization’. We then turn to show what it means to serve a state in a formal capacity. Here the concept of office is of crucial import and we seek to indicate its key components and their relation to classical organizational theorizing concerning formal organization. Having established the centrality of office to the organizational conduct of the work of the state, we proceed to examine two different but linked developments in politics and public management that have compromised or undermined formal official conduct in political administration and highlight the organizational, political and ethical problems they raise. These problems are not inconsequential but rather go to the heart of debates concerning intense political partisanship and radical scepticism towards public institutions. In taking this route, the paper makes two overall contributions. First, against the ongoing problematization of formality within organizational theorizing, we seek to revive the relevance of classical conceptions of formal organization for organization theory as a practical science. Second, we argue that formal organization within state, government and political administration remains practically crucial to navigating the ‘extreme circumstances’ that confront us in the here and now in what has been termed the ‘New Era of Tragedy’.

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