Third, the programme highlights the range of triggers for surveillance: “national security,” marketing, protection against dangerous technologies, provision of welfare. There is no evil agency that is responsible for all surveillance.
Undoubtedly, most surveillance is carried out with the very best of intentions: to protect the nation, to provide better products to consumers, to economise on government expenditure. Surveillance is not a product of evil schemers. The debate over surveillance concerns different conceptions of the good.
Fourth, a programme of radical solutions provides a
5. Free speech versus bureaucracy
Bureaucratic elites control information in order to help maintain their control. When employees speak out, this is a challenge to bureaucratic power and its corruptions.
Bureaucracy is a way of organising work. It involves hierarchy, in which people at higher levels are bosses of those below, and so on down the chain. It also involves the division of labour, in which some people do one thing and others do other things — cleaners, accountants, researchers, managers, etc. Other characteristic features of bureaucracy are rules which describe the duties of members, standard operating procedures and impersonal relations between members. Not every bureaucracy has all these characteristics. The most important features are hierarchy and division of labour. Another way of thinking about bureaucracy is as a way of organising work in which people are treated as interchangeable and replaceable cogs to fill specialised roles.
The word “bureaucracy” is popularly applied to government bodies, such as the taxation office and welfare agencies. Any sort of organisation can potentially be a bureaucracy: a corporation, a church, a trade union, an army, a political party, an environmental group. In fact, most large organisations in the world today are organised bureaucratically.[1]
There are a number of consequences of bureaucracy. Since control is exercised from the top, many at the bottom have a low commitment to work. Since knowledge can be used to exercise power, top bureaucrats are reluctant to reveal information to outsiders or to lower level workers. Since top positions in bureaucracies give power and privilege, preserving the bureaucratic structure can become a higher priority than accomplishing what the bureaucracy was set up for. Since bosses exercise control by insisting on following standard operating procedures, doing a job according to standard procedures can become more important than doing the job well.
Bureaucracy only became the main way of organising work in the past couple of centuries. It’s worth recalling some non-bureaucratic ways of organising work:
individual initiative
family
feudal estates
free market
self-managing collectives
automation.
From this list, it should be apparent that bureaucracies have both advantages and disadvantages, depending on what the alternative is. An individual can work alone without bothering about hierarchy or division of labour, but there’s a limit to what one person can do alone. Families can do more, but not everyone is happy with their position in a family. One of the great advantages of bureaucracy is that it promises to overcome the nepotism and favouritism that is common in enterprises dominated by family connections, which usually means dominated by a patriarch. In a bureaucracy, appointments and promotions are supposed to be decided on merit, not who your father is or where you went to school. That is a great attraction compared to feudal systems. Of course, few bureaucracies completely measure up to their promise of fair treatment.
Because bureaucracy is a system of power, it has a strong tendency to mesh with other systems of power — such as male domination. Most bureaucratic elites are men. Men get into top positions in bureaucracies and use their power to exclude women. This can be by blatant discrimination, subtle harassment or by fostering expectations of the style of a successful bureaucrat, which tend to be masculine characteristics. Male domination in a bureaucracy is then used to get other men to support the bureaucratic hierarchy. Bureaucracy and patriarchy thus engage in a process of “mutual mobilisation.”
The same process can work with other systems of power. Bureaucratic elites can be linked to:
family members;
religious groups;
ethnic groups;
ideological stands;
people from a particular background, such as certain schools, usually from the same social class;
personal networks of patronage, based on giving and receiving favours.
Thus, although bureaucracy is supposed to be based on merit, it is commonly “corrupted” by other systems of power. Rather than being an exceptional deviation from the norm, such corruptions are to be expected in any system based on highly unequal power. The result is that most bureaucracies seethe with rumours, power plays, upheavals, takeovers and changing organisational structures.[2] This reality is covered over by the rhetoric of efficiency, merit, competition, customer orientation or whatever is the latest buzz word.
Information and bureaucratic power
Information is a crucial part of any bureaucratic system. Normally, information about operations is passed up the hierarchy and orders from bosses are passed down. In practice, neither process operates according to the
