Introduction

Sport as a global phenomenon is gaining a cultural and social centrality within countries in different ways and varying pace. Allen Guttmann (1978) defines modern sports as reflecting secularism, equality of opportunity, bureaucratic organization, specialization of roles, rationalization, quantification, and a quest for records. Sports may also be defined in more invested terms of what it does to a society, culture, politics, and economy and how it impacts social relations and economic landscape. Sports has an emancipatory potential that is realized in various ways. A multidimensional perspective on sports allows us to understand in microcosm the operation of embedded forces of patriarchy and capitalism, and of power and resistance in society....

Facility Managers Can Impact the Procurement Landscape by Modifying the Technical Requirements

A major problem for Facility Managers (FMs) is to get the procurement department to procure expert vendors. Hiring an expert is often neglected by a low-bidding vendor who seems to meet the organizations’ minimal technical requirements. A new approach has been developed and tested which changes the procurement landscape and ensures that the FM gets an expert vendor who pre-plans, identifies what they will deliver ahead of time in a simplistic fashion, and continually measures deviations as they perform their service. The new approach will automatically filter proposals that are not doable or deliverable and minimize risks that are caused by non-expert stakeholders’ decision making. Recent testing of this approach for a large bureaucratic organization led to 15% savings in cost, 50% savings in procurement time and elimination of extenuating and complex issues caused by stakeholders in a bureaucratic organization. This new approach is controlled by the FM professional. The approach eliminates major problems that procurement causes. The paper will review the case study and the method of application of this new approach.

Technocratic Organization: The Power of Networks

The new technocratic pursuit of an imperative but difficult transition to a network state in the ‘information age’ is analyzed. Focusing on the interplay between technology and organization, the chapter argues that the new technocracy is defined by a new commitment to the power of networks, in stark contrast to the earlier preoccupation with large- scale and vertically integrated bureaucratic organization. Three types of new governance particularly invested in this development are discussed in more detail: communicative governance, collaborative governance and multilevel governance.

A Handful of Gendarmes, Two Worlds, and the Frontier Between

This chapter provides a background of the gendarmerie brigade in Godiya, one of Niger's almost sixty so-called brigades territoriales, the gendarmerie's street-level units tasked primarily with criminal investigations. The particular case of the Nigerien gendarmerie sheds light on what may be in the dark but is nonetheless essential to any police and bureaucratic organization: fragile police legitimacy, the lag between les textes and le social, between official norms and human practices, bureaucratic formats and the complexity of lived life, and all of this in the context of multiple conflicting, often incompatible expectations and demands from within and without one's own organization. While enforcing the law, the gendarmes formatted stories about peoples' lives to fit the needs of the bureaucratic form. While producing arrangements, they kept these forms and lives apart, thereby allowing for mutually compatible forms of sociality and morality. The one produced separation through connection, the other connection through separation. This ambivalent coexistence of connection and separation is what this book wants to grasp with the notion of the frontier.

On Categories and the Countability of Things Bureaucratic: Turning From Wilson (Back) to Interpretation

The formulation and application of categories was the handiwork of frontier scholars of public management and remains the essential task of scholars of bureaucracy and regulation. These scholars, exemplified by James Q. Wilson, pioneered the development of categories in three domains: (1) the inductive assignment of observed objects to conceptual groups (a form of Weberian categorization), (2) the deductive assignment of incentives and styles to conceptual groups (type-dependent theorization), and (3) the empirical assignment of observed objects to applied analytic categories (behavioralist measurement). I find in Varieties of Police Behavior (1968) the origins of his enduring categories in Bureaucracy (1988). His classification of agency personnel into executives, managers, and operators remains perhaps his crowning achievement in administrative research. Yet Wilson examined these categories with greater care than is often demonstrated by his successors, as he was careful to condition his comparisons across and within categories. The extension of truly “Wilsonian” principles of analysis to bureaucratic organization requires not simply the development of conceptual structures and the careful consideration of bureaucratic incentives, but also a reappreciation of administrative routines, practices, concepts, and technologies. It may compel the admission that some quantitative and qualitative comparisons are literally, even mathematically, nonsensical.

Between ‘Freedom as Autonomy’ and ‘Freedom as Potentiality’

Contemporary cultural policy promotes the value of participatory practices, including participatory art. However, this emphasis renders cultural policy subject to the art community’s widespread and generalized suspicion that government initiatives instrumentalize artistic practices to serve purposes other than those pursued by artists themselves. This article addresses the relationship between participatory art, participatory culture and cultural policy, focusing in particular on notions of artistic autonomy. Specifically, the article uses organization theory’s discussion of freedom in work to frame art theory’s sustained, albeit differently conceptualized, preoccupation with notions of artistic autonomy in respect to the bureaucratic organization of life in modernity. Empirically, the article analyses an inspirational catalogue that promotes the use of participatory art and citizen involvement in public art projects as a way of challenging the art community’s generalized suspicion, while also suggesting that Danish arts policy is renegotiating the role of art in contemporary society by taking advantage of contemporary opportunities for seizing artistic freedom. Contemporary participatory culture, it is argued, conditions as well as promotes artistic practice, thus generating new artistic possibilities, although only to the extent that artists engage in collaboration with other organizations, including those affecting cultural policy.