administrative frameworks and clients || introduction: the idea of bureaucratic organization

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INTRODUCTION: The Idea of Bureaucratic OrganizationAuthor(s): Don HandelmanSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 9,Administrative Frameworks and Clients (December 1981), pp. 5-23Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23159536 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS No. 9, December 1981

INTRODUCTION: The Idea of Bureaucratic Organization

Don Handelman

Taxonomy: Classification, esp. in relation to its general laws or

principles... Oxford English Dictionary

Is it surprising that prisons resemble

factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Foucault (1979: 228)

This issue of Social Analysis is devoted to interpretive studies of bureaucratic

frameworks whose officials offer various services to persons defined as clients. In

this preface I want to reflect on two directions for a general consideration of the

notion of bureaucratic organization in contemporary Western culture. This should

antedate analyses of particular bureaucratic forms, to which the remainder of this issue is given over. The first direction, to be taken up in the following section, concerns the explication of the internal logic of that ideational construct often

termed "formal organization" in Western social-science. The second places this

idea, as a device which frames perception and behaviour, within a set of

corresponding framing devices — consisting of ritual, play and charisma — to which that of bureaucracy is compared and contrasted. Thus the preface shifts,

from a consideration of certain assumptions which are embedded in the idea of

bureaucracy, to a more comparative external evaluation of the status of this idea in

relation to others which oppose and complement it. With these assumptions and

comparisons in mind, the third section asks whether anthropology may have any particular contributions to make to the study of bureaucratic organization in social

life. To date, anthropological perspectives have added little to our comprehension of this powerful and pervasive device that affects the routine life of so many persons who dwell in the Western world, and who can be encompassed loosely as members

of Western culture. These discussions should help to contextualize the succeeding

studies, where the contributors are concerned with the complicated workings of

certain administrative-frameworks in daily life.' I will return to these studies in the

final section of the preface.

Much, perhaps most, of what I say in the following section will be readily

evident to numerous members of Western society, be they social-scientists or

others. For information about bureaucracy is an integral part of the discourse of

many persons, not themselves officials, who routinely participate in a wide variety

of administrative set-ups as clients. Why then collect yet another group of studies

on service-oriented administrative frameworks? Hypothetically, perspectives which are more anthropological concern the culturally-strange, to us, and so

should heighten also our awareness to, and make more accessible to us,

assumptions which we take for granted as "natural", and hence which need not be

5



questioned. Made problematic, they are exposed as contributors to the ideational

constructs of our own culture. *

More difficult to keep in mind, since it is so embedded in routine life, is that the

very idea of formal organization in the West, of what we think of as bureaucracy, is

itself an ideational construction of culture; and one which is as strange in its

assumptions, and their figuration, as those of distant times and places. The idea of bureaucratic organization is hardly an invention of Western social-science (indeed, the reverse may be closer to their convergence). Yet numerous social-scientists treat

this idea as if it were. This even though so many people can readily identify, generally describe, and intelligently discuss the presence of bureaucratic

organizations in social life. Bittner (1974:70) notes that, "... the idea of formal structure is basically a common-sense notion" which people invoke to

circumscribe, and to explain to themselves, certain repetitive patterns of conduct in

particular fields of social action. Should the social-scientist borrow such notions for use as theoretical concepts without qualifying their common-sensical status, and their contextualization in daily life, then he commits the logical error of"...

having borrowed a concept from those he seeks to study in order to describe what

he observes about them" (1974:69). The following section, then, seeks to bare some

basic assumptions in the notion of formal organization with a view, in the subsequent section, to thinking about how such assumptions may contribute to the

bureaucratic-framing of perception in the West.

The Idea of Organization: A Logic of Assumptions

In his discussions of the crystallization of particular ways of perceiving the world in early modern Europe, Foucault provides a logical perspective (see Sheridan 1980:209-214; Fabian 1979:17) on notions which came to inform what we recognize today as bureaucratic organization. In contrast to the Renaissance, Foucault writes, the sciences of the Classical Age, roughly the seventeenth century, were informed by ways of seeing the world which can be glossed as "rationalism".

Through such perceptions, ... comparison became a function of order ... progressing naturally from

the simple to the complex. ... The activity of the mind ... will therefore no longer consist in drawing things together ... but, on the contrary, in

discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities ... [and] the inevitability of the connections with all the successive degrees of a series [of things] (1973b:54-55).

Rationalism used the idea of taxonomy to accomplish order: to discriminate, to divide, to locate, to name, and to connect things living and dead according to the

natural characteristics thought to be inherent in them, to make them visible. The phenomenal world surrendered and made explicit the essence of things thought to

be inscribed within them. Foucault notes that:

What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre [the

Renaissance] and that of the catalogue [the Classical Age] was not the

desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. ... The ever more complete preservation of what was

written, the establishment of archives, then of filing systems for them, the

reorganization of libraries, the drawing up of catalogues, indexes, and

inventories, all these things represent, at the end of the Classical Age ... a

way of introducing into the language already imprinted on things ... an

order of the same type as that which was being established between living creatures (1973b: 131-132).

6



Although our interest is in the organization of people, it is necessary first to

consider assumptions inherent in the idea of taxonomy, and in its relationship to

the phenomenal world. As an idea of science, taxonomy provided for the naming and placement of all things, living and inert, by contrast and comparison. With

reference to one another, all these were classified and categorized on horizontal

planes and vertical axes. This was done in accordance with general principles: in concordance with an explicit logic of classification, which emphasized certain attributes of that which was categorized, permitting it to enter the discourse, and

the phenomenal reality, of the classifier.

To belong to a taxonomy, every element had to be located within the scheme

by assignment to its appropriate category. Such categories had to be mutually

exclusive, so that no element would be simultaneously a member of two or more

categories at the same level of abstraction. Implicit in the idea of taxonomy was that

of priority or hierarchy. Even a wholly horizontal taxonomy — all of whose

categories would be classified at the same level of abstraction — would have to be

arranged and read in some linear fashion: in European languages, commonly from

left to right. Thus certain categories would have priority or primacy over others in

the linear series. Therefore verticality is implicit in a horizontal taxonomy.

Commonly, taxonomy was constructed vertically, in accordance with a principle of

hierarchy, where location embodied different levels and categories of abstraction, and of subsumation. Such levels of abstraction and subsumation imply a dictum of

the Theory of Logical Types: that a class cannot be a member of itself, or more

simply, that the name is not the thing named (cf. the discussion of Strauss

1969:18ff). Thus any given category in a taxonomic scheme is defined with reference to a higher-order distinction which subsumes the former.

To construct a taxonomic scheme, there must be explicit rules for the

delineation of categories, which specify attribution and inclusion; for the

aggregation of categories into higher and lower-order levels; and for the resolution

of anomalies created by an element whose attributes fit more than one category at

the same level of abstraction, or fit more than one level of abstraction without

subsuming part of the lower. Therefore there should be rules also for the creation of

new categories, through division or addition. Such decision-rules of scientific taxonomies were understood as the conscious and secular constructions of people, without divine inspiration, regardless of whether they discovered a pre-existing

order, or one reconstituted as if it had existed naturally, prior to human discovery. The closure of such a scheme again was secular work, accomplished when a domain

of elements was fully exhausted, categorized, and subsumed by its highest level of

this-worldly classification. The idea of taxonomy is of a static form, rule-governed but empty of content,

from which certain attributes of organization likely follow. The organizational form would be vertical: in cultural terms this could be likened to a hierarchy, of

classes and categories of unequal value, of an unequal distribution of power, and of

recourse to a higher level of subsumation, should clarification be necessary at a

lower one. One would expect explicit definitional criteria for categories, to enable

their classification in accordance with general principles. Acceptable rationales

would inform the entire scheme of classification, the delineation of its categories, and its criteria for the evaluation of phenomena and their assignment to categories. In Western terms, these are again the modes of thought collectively termed

"rationality". To the extent that the decision-rules of a taxonomic scheme do their

work of comparison, contrast, attribution, and distribution, one could also speak of the "efficiency" of the taxonomy. That is, in cultural terms, one could discuss the

capacity of the taxonomy to discriminate, and so to create and store information, if

not to process it.

7



More tacit, although relevant to such a taxonomic organization, is the notion

of "boundary". In order to maintain the overall consistency of the scheme, the

phenomenal domain which the scheme encompasses must be separated from

external elements that are potentially intrusive and disruptive. Within the scheme,

categories of the same level of abstraction must be kept separate, as must levels

from one another. Boundaries not only separate elements which should not be

mixed, but they also provide a sense of logical coherence and integration within the overall conception of the scheme, or within any of its parts.2 The alteration of

boundaries affects the integration of content contained within them, and perhaps also the character of the taxonomy. Therefore the power to shape boundaries is a

key to controlling relationships among categories and levels (cf. Collmann, Hazan, this issue), and so to commanding the entire taxonomic scheme, its degrees of

permanence and change, its rigidity and flexibility, and so forth. The idea of taxonomy in Western thought, according to Foucault, hardly was

restricted to science. Mapping and situating, naming and classifying, were

pervasive to the thought of the period. The taxonomy was a conception of cultural

and social stasis: the rendering of all phenomena as visible and known, yet

immobile, since it was without the conscious knowledge of social devices,

mechanistically analogous to fulcrums and levers, which could produce such

arrangements with little investment of energy (cf. Sheridan 1980:138). Therefore, to

render social-life taxonomic required the visible application of great power and sizeable force: this was as much the presentation of strength, as its exercising. A

classification of things social was more an exact inscription of their taxonomic

location and value in the world. In one of Foucault's striking though extreme

examples, instructions to control an outbreak of plague in seventeenth-century

France, the taxonomic map is the territory.

In response to the tendrils of infection, of disorder and chaos, the town is

sealed. Within, it is divided into sections and streets, each under the authority of an

official in-place. Dwellers are locked within their houses; bread and wine reach their doorsteps via small wooden canals which branch out from more central ones.

The only people to move between houses and territories within the town are the

higher officials, and persons of no status who carry corpses and the sick from place to place, from category to category. Thus the boundaries of this "frozen space"

(Foucault 1979:195) are controlled by officials, themselves largely fixed in-place; while those who move across boundaries are the anonymous and polluted carriers

of plague-victims. Surveillance within the town is pervasive. Every day each of the inhabitants of a house appears before his allocated window, to answer the roll-call

of officials: name, age, sex, death, illness, irregularity, are all recorded. "The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on

it" (1979:197). The penalty for deviation is death. The application of such extreme social-taxonomies, where the scheme is

inscribed, quite to scale, on social space and person, is proto-bureaucratic in the

modern Western sense. The minute, visible, forceful application of classification is

living proof of its validity: the town has become, "This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which

an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is

exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure ..."

(1979:197). In the Classical Age, such taxonomic perception and application is also the political vision of the perfectly-governed society: "... power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible ... it separates, it immobilizes, it



partitions; it constructs tor a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society ..." (1979:205).

In the twentieth-century, Weber's conception of rational-legal authority, with

an administrative staff, is the cornerstone of modern studies of bureaucracy. My interest is not in the status of this concept

— whether it is understood as a

normative-idealization (Bittner 1974) or not (Collins 1975:289ff) — but in whether there may be logical connectivity between the seventeenth-century idea of

taxonomic-organization and Weber's depiction of modern bureaucratic

organization. My suggestion is that certain of the assumptions of taxonomic

organization are integral to Weber's conception. The rational-legal bureaucratic-type (Weber 1964:329-340) has, for the time

being, the following characteristics. It requires a classification of "offices". Offices are defined by "rules" ("a consistent system of abstract rules, intentionally

established"). All offices are regulated by a "continuous organization" of rules, which inform the overall scheme of classification. In other words, the organization of offices, as categories, is regulated by general principles of classification. The

contents of a category of office are defined by the boundary-rules of that category: such contents concern spheres of authority, of competence, of technical knowledge, of procedures for making decisions, and of the logical inter-relationships among such components. Offices/categories are situated in a hierarchy of levels of

abstraction and subsumation. The overall scheme is recognized intentionally as a

secular construction, whose closure is accomplished by edicts or promulgations which logically exhaust the phenomenal domain to which the scheme is thought to

apply. One should add that offices, as categories, often inscribe themselves in the

phenomenal world through the production of written-materials: through texts that, over time, may remain the most substantive phenomenal evidence for the existence

of the office or organization. Finally, one can say that "rationality" is embedded in this idea of bureaucracy; in its abstract, intentional, principles of definition, of separation, of integration, and of subsumation.

The above characteristics again constitute a form of organization: a taxonomy of hierarchy, authority, and control, which is devoid of content. A form which awaits instructions to name, to place, to exhaust, and to classify virtually any

phenomenal domain to which it is attached, through discrimination, precision, stability, and discipline. As an idea of organization, Weber's conception of a rational-legal bureaucracy bears a strong logical resemblance to the ideas of social

or scientific taxonomy of the Classical Age. The point here is self-evident: that the idea of taxonomy, as this came to be

constructed in Western culture, is embedded in the idea of bureaucracy, whether as

one of social-science (cf. Fabian 1979:14-15), or as one of common-sense. The

cultural raison d'etre of the bureaucratic form is systematic taxonomic work: not

because the form is a normative idealization, but because this is the kind of work it is designed to do so well. Yet this is only the static, immobile, integument of the idea, as we experience and know it in modern times. That is, the systematic aspect of

the bureaucratic idea is intentionally present, but not the systemic.

During the eighteenth century, Western thought found the threshold of what

we recognize as the modern age. Scientific taxonomic accumulations of the

catalogue, the archive, the table, of the stasis of nomenclature, were altered by

assumptions of taxonomy rendered as "organic structure":

... the general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and

differences ... of a general taxonomia ... but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality

performs a function ... the link between one organic structure and another

can no longer ... be the identity of one or several elements, but must be the

9



identity of the relation between the elements [a relation in which visibility no longer plays a role] and of the functions they perform ... (Foucault

1973b:218). Rendered as an organic structure, a phenomenon performed a function in relation

to other structures, as did each of its constituent parts in relation to one another.

This complex division of labour turned taxonomy into what we can recognize as the idea of a functional system: a hierarchic assemblage of levels and categories, which are thought to belong more together than apart, and which each contribute

what we term specialized functions to the existence of the whole assemblage. The

assemblage is dependent on the functions of each of its parts, as they are on one

another. Interdependent functions and functioning informed the assumptions of

taxonomy with purpose and direction; and so also informed social life with the

levers and fulcrums of power — of altering the ratio of force to social control. But

the assumptions of taxonomy were not disposed of: instead they were incorporated into the idea of systemic-organization.3 The taxonomy which depicted persons and

things as "objective" (since classification incorporated the phenomenal world) was superceded by the organic system: this not only treated persons and things

objectively, but also gave them life and movement through their interdependent relationships — but of course, within the system. While taxonomic organization classified the phenomenal world in order to know it, systemic organization could

both know and manipulate the world by modelling it, and by operating on such analogues.

Modelling the phenomenal world enabled one to influence it, not piece by

piece or part after part, as the idea of taxonomic organization required, but

holistically. Should some small, yet vital part (and specialized function) of an organic structure be altered, the repercussions would affect the functioning of the whole system. As a depiction of organization, the table-of-contents was to be

replaced by the flow-chart, while Spencer and Maine, Tonnies and Durkheim, waited at the threshold.

I suggested that certain of the characteristics of rational-legal authority bear a

strong resemblance to assumptions of taxonomic organization. To the latter,

systemic assumptions should be added now. In the modern age, the idea of

organization is purposive and directional: whether organism or institution, the

construct of organization is put together to accomplish intentionally some goal; and for this purpose the relationship between means and ends is made explicit and

rationalistic. The functions of offices or categories are specialized and specific in

their complex interdependence; while the entire systemic-scheme is infused with a social power whose focused intensity is evident on any of its levels, and in any of its components.

Weber's conception of modern bureaucracy, which he termed "a power instrument of the first order — for the one who controls the bureaucratic

apparatus" (Gerth and Mills 1958:228), appears to encompass both taxonomic and systemic assumptions, regardless of whether one attributes their synthesis to

modern social-science, or to cultural ways of perceiving phenomena which are

integral to modern Western thought. More likely, each is the complement of the

other.

For Foucault, the ideational synthesis of taxonomic and systemic ideas of

social organization in the eighteenth century is epitomized by innovative designs like that of Bentham's Panopticon: a circular, tiered building, composed of

individual cells with windows facing toward the centre of the circle and outward, but sealed from adjoining cells, with a tower in the centre of the circle. In the tower a

supervisor, and in each cell a single worker, schoolboy, prisoner, madman, and so

forth, all interchangeable depending on the purpose of the social organization; each

10



doing what is required of him, each separated from all others, and each under

continuous surveillance. Gone are the networks and multiple exchanges between

persons. Present are, as it were, the "clients" of the social organization: separated,

numbered, supervised, and put to productive tasks with rational intentionality. Who exercises power, and with what motive, is not of relevance: whomever

occupies the tower, the centre, the office, the apex of the hierarchy, wields power. The Panopticon, writes Foucault, is a "marvellous machine" (1979:202); a "generalized model of functioning ... a figure of political technology that may and

must be detached from any specific use" (1979:205). Panopticism, as one generic version of the synthesis of the taxonomic and the

systemic, did not require the application of great force to keep its components in

functioning order: instead, the exercise of power was intended to be "lighter, more

rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come" (1979:209). Hypothetically, such an organizational design would require comparatively little fiscal expenditure; would be politically discreet; would be relatively invisible; would arouse little resistance; and would raise the effects of social power to

maximum intensity, specificity, and extension, by mastering "anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions" (1979:219). Such renditions of taxonomic individuation, of the asymmetrical yet relatively invisible but systematic implementation of power and coercion, of systemic regulation and control, are the

ideational forerunners of what we know today as total-institutions (Goffman 1961a; Mitford 1977), service-organizations (Blau and Scott 1962), people processing organizations (Hasenfeld 1972), and other similar rubrics. Such administrative-frameworks are manned by officials, and by members of what are

called the helping-professions and semi-professions (Etzioni 1969), who use techniques of social, psychologistic, educational, and bureaucratic intervention in the lives of persons defined as their "clients" (cf. Piatt 1969; Scott 1969; Handelman 1976).4

Western culture is striated by taxonomic and systemic assumptions, by a logic, as Wagner writes of the United States, "... where 'culture' is a conscious and

deliberate thing, where life subserves some purpose, rather than the reverse, and

where every fact or proposition is required to have a reason" (1975:29). We recognize that there are degrees of validity in this. Yet we also intuit, feel, and know that the experiencing of daily life is not composed solely and redundantly of a calculus of classification, calculation, rationalization and manipulation. We

experience and appreciate what we recognize as love, friendship, altruism,

morality, belief, pretense, entertainment, and so forth. Much of daily life is a complicated admixture of emotions, thoughts and actions, which oppose and

complement one another and those of other persons. Still, if so much of living is like

this complex, uncertain, and indeterminate weave, we also intuit or know that there

are aspects of living in which, and through which, different threads of experience are more sorted out, are more simplified, and are made more homogeneous. During such times, and in such locations, our perceptions are keyed more to certain

dominant ideas, whose terms of reference inform our attention, mood, and

behaviour. The problem of evaluating the conceptual status of the rational-legal

bureaucratic type, in relation to the practices of administrative-frameworks, is not

of the variety of the ideal versus the real, or of ideation versus action. Instead, the

questions are whether we recognize cultural-locations within which "bureaucratic"

assumptions cluster, and whether there is some shift in our perception when we

enter such a phenomenal domain. Once within, our emotions, thoughts, and

motives are intact; but we arrange their priorities and relevancies differently. Life is as before, but otherwise. Officials and clients behave in recognizable ways, yet

11



otherwise. The point of the rational-legal type is that it is informative, not

normative. Then one can accept both the position that, "... organizations are

nothing but repetitive behaviour within a group of people ..." (Collins 1975:301), and the position that a rational organizational scheme is, "... a generalized formula ... a scheme of interpretation that competent and entitled users can invoke in yet unknown ways" (Bittner 1974:76)

— so long as one recollects that such behaviour, and such a scheme, are themselves orientated and focused by taxonomic and

systemic notions which cluster more in certain locations and contexts than in

others. There, these assumptions and perceptions, more obscured by the

diffuseness and indeterminacy of much of daily life, are made more explicit and determinate.

The Bureaucratic Frame: Comparative Perspectives

The notion ot trame, cognitive and affective, should be located between the

abstract idea of a phenomenon and its perception in reality. It re-presents the idea

to the phenomenon, the phenomenon to the idea. An idea of bureaucracy exists in

the minds of persons; and an administrative-framework exists through certain

more-or-less bounded social relationships among persons: while the frame points to the nexus or conjunction of the two, permitting each to enter the discourse of the

other.

My suggestion is that the assumptions and premises of organization that

strongly inform the idea of bureaucracy in the West constitute modes of framing

experience and provide guidelines for its interpretation. In analytic terms, framing is predicated on the assumption that one is predisposed to feel and think in particular ways, perhaps in terms of different logics, when one is within particular locales or settings which are relevant to the frame. One may argue that all behaviour

is framed (cf. Goffman 1974); or that social reality is as much a property of emergent behaviour as it is of predispositions to behave in certain ways (cf. Handelman 1977a). Still, there is the likelihood that, in different cultures, some kinds of feeling, thinking, and perceiving the phenomenal world are more framed than others; and that the phenomenal world contains domains of phenomena which respond to such frames, by yielding information which is understood as relevant. Such domains, for want of a better term, are denser, more intense, and

more focused loci of certain kinds of perception and experience; and they are

socially organized to encourage and to precipitate such experiences. So as not to reity the notion of frame, since it is not a "thing" but an analytic

concept, one can note that it probably is composed of meta-messages to attend

differently to what is framed, in comparison to what exists outside the frame

(Bateson 1972). Such meta-messages are keyed to numerous phenomenal markers

or boundaries of time, place, context, language, and so forth. As persons move

through their various rounds, as individuals or in concert, they pass through, or

bring into being, phenomenal boundaries and activate cognitive-framing. Then

they are exposed to concentrated configurations of information, which may be

known in more muted, leavened, or idiosyncratic fashion outside such loci. The

notion of boundary is then the phenomenal counterpart of frame: we recognize and

know boundaries through our senses since in the main these are taken-for-granted markers of transition, but we are aware of frames mainly through self-reflection, by

being aware consciously of such alterations.

The discussion ol the idea ot organization, in the first section of this preface,

implied two major axes of comparison in terms of which attributes of a

bureaucratic-frame could be delineated and contrasted with other devices of

framing which appear to have prominence in Westen culture. These, together with

2



the bureaucratic-frame, may form an analytic set of opposition and

complementarity. Such a set of comparisons would provide some baselines for an

evaluation of the sorts of messages upon which the bureaucratic-frame is

predicated, and which it transmits to everyday life.

The assumptions of the idea of organization were described as primarily secular in orientation. This suggests the distinction between the secular and the

sacred, as the basis of an axis of coordinates which range from that which

emphasizes this world to that which emphasizes another world. As well, the idea of

organization stressed the centrality of taxonomy and classification. This suggests a

second axis, based on coordinates of order, and its opposite, disorder. Together these two axes produce a simple typology of four sets of coordinates, within which

the bureaucratic-frame occupies those of this-world/order; while the ritual-frame

occupies those of other-world/order. With reservations, the charismatic-frame is

located within the coordinates of other-world/disorder, while the play-frame

occupies those of this-world/disorder.

ORDER DISORDER

OTHER-WORLD ritual charisma

THIS-WORLD bureaucracy play

The strength of such a scheme is that it brings into conjunction four quite different, but elementary, modes of perceiving the world. Such a conjunction is of value if one assumes that, generally speaking, each of these ways of framing phenomena has its

own measure of communicative specialization, and that each contributes

information of import to the existence of the social life of Western culture. It should be clear that, in the modern intellectual traditions of the West, conceptions of ritual

and bureaucracy have been awarded pride of place in explanations of the coherence

of social life, while those of play and charisma usually are accorded the status of residual categories (Fabian 1979; Schwartzman 1978). Yet I would maintain

strongly that all four are integral to the interface of idea and action in Western

culture; and that our understanding of messages of the bureaucratic-frame is

enhanced when these four framing-devices are counterposed to one another.

In the following paragraphs I will discuss briefly certain of the attributes of these four frames and their likely messages for social life — beginning with those of

ritual and play, for these have been discussed extensively elsewhere, and continuing with that of bureaucracy and then charisma, perhaps the most problematic of these

frames.

The great religions of the West, and many of their offshoots, recognize the

ideational distinction between the sacred and the secular, between "ultimate truth"

and the mundane reality of routine life. The sacred can be limned as a ritual-frame,

predicated upon meta-messages of sanctity (Rappaport 1971), which mediate

between the idea of sacrality and its phenomenal presence. The sources of such

meta-messages are transcendent and revelatory, devolving from other-worldly referents. The transition from routine perception to that of ritual is based on

inexplicable paradoxes (viz. the Eucharist and the Trinity in Christianity), in terms of the premises of secular reality. That is, the ritual-frame is composed of meta

messages which radically alter the logic of attention and perception of

13



communicants with regard to phenomena defined as belonging within the frame.

Yet the ritual-frame cannot be acknowledged as such by believers, since its

paradoxical premises of sanctity and ultimate truth emanate from other-worldly

sources, and have their resolution there. But, among the messages which such a

frame transmits to communicants is that of an ideal order which transcends this

world; and which will be attainable only at the time of salvation, when the division between sacred and mundane will be erased.

Western culture recognizes the ideational distinction between "play" and the

serious, between pretence and the real. In relation to serious reality, the frame of

play is predicated upon meta-messages of "make-believe". The transition from

what is perceived as real to the make-believe is again paradoxical: that which was attended to as unreal becomes real, and the converse (Bateson 1972). The play frame is composed of meta-messages which radically alter the logic of perception with regard to phenomena defined as belonging within it. The sources of such meta messages may lie in any domain: for the make-believe is, par excellence, a playing with foundation, form, and meaning — with anything commonly accepted as "true" or as "real" (cf. Handelman 1981). The messages it sends back to the foundation it plays with are those of possibility, non-necessity, deconstruction, and disorder (cf. Douglas 1968; Handelman 1977b; Handelman and Kapferer 1972). Its metier is tinkering with, and at times dissolving, the accepted and the acceptable. The play-frame can come into existence only if it is indeed acknowledged as such, as artifice. Otherwise its potency for dissolution would endanger whatever serious foundation its particular form derived from.

In the West, one recognizes that the idea of bureaucratic-organization is

somehow different from one's perception of the everyday, and yet the same. It derives from the everyday; its referents are those of the mundane; and its loci are a

thickening of particular themes and patterns of everyday serious behaviour. It often

appears as a selective distillation of mundane constructions of reality, in which redundancy is highly elaborated; in which "process", common-sensically, is equivalent to procedures of classification and re-classification; and in which practical uncertainties (themselves often bureaucratic creations) and ambiguities are meant to be clarified. It has no mysteries, only complications of a logic of the

mundane, largely understood, if not appreciated, once explained. But there is no

shift in logic that one experiences in the transition to ultimate truth of ritual mystery, or to the possibilities of make-believe. Here there is no recourse to the

transcendent as the fount of ideal order, nor to the amoral plays-upon-form of

make-believe —the antithesis of order.

The form that complements the bureaucratic idea is one which does taxonomic

work systematically and systemically, in relation to the mundane. A grid to reify the most minute distinctions, and a lens to focus the power of classification, its immense strength does indeed lie in its form, not in the ends to which this is applied. Weber clearly recognized this attribute when he said:

The great question is therefore not how we can promote and hasten it

[bureaucratic organization], but what we can oppose to this machinery in

order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the

soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life (quoted in

Katz and Danet 1973:12). In its most elaborated form it is no longer a focus of the bureaucratic idea, but

a microcosm, a model of social life, in which "order" systemically regulates all

aspects of living — where the administrative form engulfs human beings. This is the total-institution, in which "clients" become inmates or prisoners, in which persons are taken-apart and put-together in the image of the microcosm which, as it were,

14



has become for itself the reflection of the macrocosm, which itself is made over in

the image of the former.5

The very "matter-of-factness" of the bureaucratic idea, which Weber (Gerth

and Mills 1958:244) noted, suggests that the meta-message which defines its frame

may be straight-forward and pragmatic: here is order, and here order is made, in

this world. Here is order as a stable foundation, and here is the "process" of ordering as a fount of further classification. Here everyone has his place, as one or

another persona. Here one searches neither for transcendent truth nor for the

subversion of order, but one discovers and re-discovers one's own

compartmentalized personae, through metonyms of social-order and control. Here

is a man-made construction, that is accorded such status, whose prime function is

the conservation of itself as if it were the image of social-life as social-order. The term, charisma (literally, "gift of grace"), borrowed from the theologian,

Sohm, was introduced into social-science discourse by Max Weber as an antithesis

to the this-worldly and mundane routines of bureaucratic and traditional

organization (Gerth and Mills 1958:58). Its impact is on this world, but its powers, Weber emphasized, stem in the main from other-worldly referents. As he noted:"...

charisma lives in, though not of, this world" (1958:247). Its phenomenal presence is marked by what are termed miracles, revelations, heroic feats and baffling successes. According to Weber, it is a "creative" power which is perceived of as supernatural (1958:262) and as divine (1958:249). Because it is "foreign to all rules" (Weber 1964:361) it is opposed both to the ruled domains of an other-world (for example, ritual) and to those of this world (for example, bureaucracy). Moreover, this opposition, like that of play, has the capacity to dissolve ruled domains. But, unlike play, the power of charisma, like that of ritual, tends to be attributed in the

main to the sacred, and to depend on belief, faith, and truth (Gerth and Mills

1958:249). And, while the powers of dissolution of play are limited, since they depend on pretence, those of charisma are acknowledged as such, enabling it to

endanger the coherence of ruled domains. Furthermore, and of signal importance, unlike the messages of the play-frame, those of charisma do offer genuine alternatives to ritual and bureaucratic messages of the conservation of social order.

It is in this sense that Weber termed charismatic leaders as "truly revolutionary forces in history" (Gerth and Mills 1958:58).

The messages of charisma differ in another major respect from those of ritual,

bureaucracy, and play. These latter messages are to a large degree comparatively

impersonal, and perhaps diffuse, whether they emanate from this-worldly or other

worldly sources. By contrast, the messages of charisma flow strongly from

particular individuals who are restrained, first and foremost, only by themselves

(1958:246). Such individuals open gaps and create discontinuities in social order, into which they and their believers insert themselves: in effect, they help to create

conditions for prophetic discourse (Fabian 1979:11). Yet charismatic powers are not wholly in disjunction with the forces of ritual

messages. Charismatic individuals often are analyzed in terms of their personality structures. To my mind this is misleading, for it virtually insists that charisma be

explicated wholly in terms of the psychological and social conditions of this world,

and that it is not, after all, such a mysterious quality. Instead, we should give credence to the perceptions of believers that charismatic messages, as discourse, flow from the mysterious, perhaps unfathomable, soul, spirit, or psyche of the

charismatic individual. Then it is likely that, at some nexus, attributes of soul and

the sacred will have strong affinities with one another; and that their relationship to

one another, and their logic of closure (or lack of it) should be sought in terms of

other-worldly referents, as these are understood and felt by believers.

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The messages of ritual, charismatic, play, and bureaucratic-frames help to inform social life with quite different kinds of knowledge and sentiment.6 In summary, the messages of the ritual-frame construct an ideal reality by validating the foundation of truth for social order. They sacralize conventions, and they

project a high value of certainty, that often depends on a transformation of the logic of perception. The messages of the charismatic-frame, given their often other

worldly referents, deconstruct all conventions of reality, but often replace these

with serious alternative constructions of an ideal reality: these contain a high truth value that depends on a transformation of the logic of perception in relation to the mundane. The messages of the play-frame deconstruct reality by doubting the truths of social order. They question conventions, and place a high value on

indeterminacy. These too depend on a transformation of logic. The messages of the

bureaucratic-frame construct, as it were, a "real" reality, by ordering convention

and by conventionalizing order. They place a high value on certainty — but this depends on a concentration of the logic of perception of the mundane rather than

on its transformation. The bureaucratic-frame can be thought of as a metonymic

operator on the texture of mundane life.7 The idea of organization in the West, and

its bureaucratic-framing, is essentially that of systemic taxonomizing: the making of order in accordance with general principles of this world. Thus it is not surprising that administrative-frameworks are institutionalized schemes for the production and reproduction of labels and categories, whether for things or for persons-as

things.8

In closing this section, I should note that probably the most interesting problems for the analysis of social life, which such frames raise, lie less in the neat separation of their respective messages, but rather in the ways such frames and their

messages often are embedded or encapsulated in one another, overlap with one

another, erase one another, and control one another to help to weave the complex patterns of human existence (cf. Handelman 1981; Handelman and Kapferer 1980; Schwartzman, this issue).

Some Approaches From Anthropology

The perspectives of anthropology can be used to raise questions and issues that are pertinent to the study of bureaucracy, and service-bureaucracy, but that are less

likely to come from other of the social sciences.9 The following are intended as examples of such issues, but hardly as a program of work.10

Earlier I argued that an administrative-framework is a systemic taxonomy which produces social categories and things. Then questions directed to such categories, the procedures and conditions of their production, application, and boundariness, may be important. In other societal contexts, anthropologists have worked intensively on the logics of various folk taxonomies, and on the form and function of boundaries (cf. Barth 1969; Cohen 1969; Ross 1975; Douglas 1978; Selby 1974). Among the most insightful studies to come from the "labelling" approach in sociology are those which have examined how administrative frameworks define persons, and assign them particular identities, in order to

process the characteristics signified by such labels (cf. Scott 1969, 1970; Emerson

1969; Cicourel 1968; Scheff 1966). As well, some of the more biting of contemporary social polemics have been written in reaction to such "processes" (cf. Mitford 1977; Gaylin et al 1978).

One potentially fruitful area of inquiry, for example, would concern the elicitation of taxonomies (both official and "folk" — cf. Emerson 1969) of categories of clients of a particular administrative-framework, as well as the attributes which signal boundaries of separation and conjunction among

16



categories. Then issues like the following come to the fore: the conditions under

which categories are maintained or changed; the modification of existing

categories, and the creation of new ones; the kind of logic which informs

connections among categories, and the ways in which it is invoked, either explicitly or tacitly, in the interpretations which officials use to name and categorize persons

as clients (cf. Handelman 1978b, n.d.; Smith 1974; Edelman 1977); and the

emergent social-contexts of the administrative-framework, within which such

interpretive work is done, and in which it acquires significance (cf. Glaser and Strauss 1967).

Anthropologists would do well to consider whether certain pervasive

dilemmas in the relationships between state and citizen, between officials and

clients, may not be surface manifestations of "deep" structural anomalies in

particular Western cultures. Positivist-oriented social-planners frequently

maintain that social problems can be solved through the application of

instrumental solutions: larger budgets, more expertise, the rationalization of

service and delivery systems, a more "humanistic" approach to clients, better

defined techniques of intervention, and so forth. But one should ask, for example,

whether the state and its "organs" can substitute for members of what is understood

as a family unit (cf. Gaylin et al. 1978) — as surrogate parent for a child removed from a family, or as a monetary compensator for a family-member killed in the

service of the state — or whether such intervention brings to the fore major cultural

disjunctions, of value and substance, between relationships perceived as "natural"

and those which are brought into existence by man-made edict (cf. Schneider 1968). Tacit structural anomalies may well have no "solution" in terms of bureaucratic

work. But, if treated as solvable, they contribute substantially to the reproduction

and expansion of the systemic-taxonomization of social life. Questions of the

substance of equivalency in reciprocity — of what can be exchanged for what, and with what consequences — between officials and clients should be of particular concern to anthropology.

One should think more of likely dialectical relationships between

administrative-frameworks and the social orders in which they are embedded.

Bureaucratic orders are not simply the reflections of society, as Britan and Cohen

(1980) would have it: they are both its product and producer. In Western culture, I

suggested, the idea of bureaucracy stands opposed to those of ritual, charisma, and

play, which also are opposed to one another: one would want to know much more

about the conflicts and/or syntheses which such ideas, in relation to one another,

help to create in the phenomenal world through, for example, the interplay among

the reification of structure (via bureaucracy), its critique (via ritual, cf. Turner

1969), and its dissolution (via messages of play or charisma). One might also

consider, for example, whether there is any relationship among the following phenomena in segments of Western society: the supposed anonymity of the person in mass society; the massive bureaucratic enumeration and identification of

individuals; the significance of the rights of the individual; the individuation and subtle coercion of persons by bureaucracies.

Social scientists have paid little attention to the symbolism and aesthetics of

bureaucratic order, to the ways in which the most mundane exercises of power and

authority are presented to clients —through the semiotics of spatial and proxemic

arrangements in waiting-rooms and offices (cf. Goodsell 1977); through the lines

and texture of furnishings; through the colours of walls and ceilings; and through

turn-taking by queuing (cf. Schwartz 1975; Rew 1975; Schaffer 1972), by numbering and by loud-speaker announcement. Also largely ignored are files,

protocols, instruction manuals, memos, and other official paper, as "narrative": as

bureaucratic folk-tales, tall-tales, sagas and epics — to pirate Geertz, perhaps as

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"stories" which officials tell themselves about themselves, even when the overt

object of such discourse is the client. Absent too are evaluations of metaphors

commonly applied to officialdom. One is struck by the absence of stimuli of smell, taste, touch, and visual vistas, in terms like cold, sterile, dusty, grey, empty, and

computerized. How do such descriptors contrast with those that cluster about other

contexts?

Minimal work exists with regard to the semiotics of ceremonials which are

produced by, and in the name of, administrative-frameworks. Such ceremonies exhibit the affective and public aspects of bureaucratic order. In format they are

highly presentational, often spectacular, intending to express quite what they do and say. Their presentational mode depends on a selection and integration of

themes and symbols that, in this case, reflect with visible precision and discipline the correct place and pinnacle of power, which is often more diffused in the reality of the everyday. Such ceremonies neither re-present nor question social order by

temporarily bringing to the fore its undergrowth or shadow-side and, through reversal, validating the order which was inverted. Nor do they temporarily create a "model", or microcosm, of social life, whose dynamic properties can be

manipulated for pre-figured cultural ends, like those of the transformation of

personal-status or of a social-unit (cf. Turner 1969; Handelman 1982). Bureaucratic ceremonies commonly are the parade, the march-past, the

procession, and the pageant (cf. Da Matta 1977; Warner 1961:89-154; Binns 1979, 1980). Their form tends to be linear, moving in space from one fixed-point to another, often past a mid-point (a reviewing-stand or dais) which presents the apex of the human hierarchy. Distinctions of hierarchy are marked clearly throughout such events, in stable fashion, whether in spatial arrangement, through temporal

sequencing, or on the living bodies of the participants themselves in their states of uniform dress and accompanying accoutrements. Throughout there is an emphasis on the anonymity, sameness, and interchangeability of participants (whether men

or machines), and on their functional coordination and synchronization of rhythm and movement. If onlookers express enthusiasm and passion, they too behave

largely as a uniform mass of anonymous individuals." In short, the signifiers of such ceremonials are "over-determined" (see Babcock 1978:297) in the logic of their invariant hierarchical arrangements, which are man-made, and whose

redundant messages of social order are to be accepted by others.

This discussion of the idea of bureaucracy, of its assumptions and its framing, has been formalistic. Nonetheless, I hardly think that administrative-frameworks

themselves are simple figurations or reflections of this idea; nor that informal

organization necessarily is either the antithesis of this, or a set of adaptive strategies which enable formal organization to cope with itself and its environment. But I am

stressing that administrative-frameworks are loci where the idea, the assumptions, and the framing of bureaucracy, are especially marked; and that this is what sets

such loci apart from others. Within such loci the formal/informal distinction has

validity primarily because officials and clients recognize, explicitly or tacitly, that there is something there against which the informal can be limned, contrasted,

made real. Actual administrative-frameworks are informed by the idea of

bureaucracy to a greater degree than are other loci of social life. This should be a

point of beginning for analysis.

The Studies

The studies are in counterpoint to the preface, for they move away from an

ideational emphasis to one which counterposes idea and action. Although the

authors pursue their own theoretical and analytical concerns, there are degrees of

convergence between certain of the lines of thought taken in these papers and those

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expressed in the preface. One such interest is a concern with administrative

categories of classification and with the ways in which boundaries of categorization are created, manipulated, and effaced, through interaction. Secondly, certain of the papers begin to bring into focus the ways in which administrative-frameworks may be affected by deeper, less visible, structural ambiguities and disjunctions, whether

within the organization itself or within the larger social order in which it is embedded. In general, organizational adjustments to the surface contradictions

generated by such deep disjunctions fail to resolve the latter, thus creating the

conditions for the generation of further dilemmas whose causes remain

unrecognized. Together the studies point to the potential value of combining interactionist and more structuralist-oriented approaches to bureaucracy. This, of course, is my interpretation of trends which are present in these papers to a greater or lesser degree.

Lea Shamgar-Handelman offers a richly documented and contextualized

account of how the social category of war-widow came into existence in Israel

between the 1948 War of Independence and the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Days War. On the surface the definition of the war-widow for administrative purposes

appeared clear-cut. Yet, in practice, the criteria of definition were ambiguous, the reactions of officials to the widowed clients were ambivalent, and the category to a degree was anomalous within Israeli society. In particular, the state had major difficulties, over a lengthy period, in establishing parameters of compensation, of equivalences in exchange for sacrifices made in its name by the soldier-husbands of the widows. The problem was how to compensate a category of client, to whom

compensation should be made on moral grounds, but who did not fall neatly into the accepted rubrics of clientship, for a loss for which no equivalences could be found. Such categorical anomalies, as Shamgar-Handelman notes, "raise to the surface hidden societal assumptions of a moral, social and organizational character".

Shamgar-Handelman discusses the problematic emergence and crystallization of the war-widow category, over time, from various perspectives: those of

parliamentary debates and the promulgation of legislation, that of a voluntary association to whom the war-widows belonged, that of the influence of the mass

media, and those of the perceptions of the widows themselves and of the officials who were delegated to serve them. The heart of the paper analyzes how the

boundaries and substance of the category were altered, shifted, and strengthened in

response to pressures external to the administrative-framework; how officials

adapted to these changing conditions by redefining the war widows so as to protect their own self-images and to continue to place the onus for clientship on the widows

themselves; and how this process of re-labelling affected the widows emotionally, and in terms of practical benefits. Shamgar-Handelman closes on a tentatively pessimistic note, asking whether the continuing administrative ambiguities in dealing with war widows can be resolved so long as the "deep" structural problems of equivalency and commensurability help to mould such bureaucratic

relationships between state and citizen. The following two papers, by Collmann and Hazan, explicitly deal with the

definition and manipulation of boundaries of clientship, and their at times ironic outcomes. Collmann analyzes the cooptation of Australian Aborigines into white

social-service frameworks intended to serve the former. He conceives of cooptation

primarily as "a play upon the significance of boundaries" which may bring into existence an anomalous condition of clientship in which, "People who are

conventionally not members of a structure are recruited into it; but, on the basis of

characteristics which effectively define them as non-members." He goes on to argue that such an anomaly is not the product of a simple disjunction between

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administrative ideology and practice, but is more a matter of the contradictory character of cooptation itself. In the case he discusses, the "as if' erasure of

boundaries between officials and clients robbed the coopted of their capacities to

negotiate with officials as clients while, subjected to bureaucratic control, they did not acquire the status and rights of officials.

Aborigines who were perceived as capable of helping themselves were thought not to be Aborigines any longer, were encouraged to assimilate, and werecoopted; while others were insulated and treated fully as welfare clients. However, those

coopted still conceived of themselves as true Aborigines, and so as entitled to welfare benefits. Still, once they were coopted into an administrative-framework they lost much of their negotiating power as clients while, as Aborigines, they in fact were not members of such frameworks. Thus, in order to maintain their identities as

Aborigines, in relation to welfare-frameworks, the coopted re-created boundaries

between themselves and officials, and so re-emphasized their status as welfare

clients. Like Shamgar-Handelman, Collmann ends on a pessimistic note: for such demonstrations of defiance and apparent independence placed these Aborigines back into the welfare system as dependent clients. His analysis shows the

pervasiveness of welfare-frameworks in aboriginal life, since these Aborigines returned to the very welfare ideology which, in no small measure, had constituted

them as helpless and congenital clients.

Haim Hazan's paper is in counterpoint to Collmann's. He considers the

consequences of the dissolution of boundaries between categories of powerless clients: this permits resources, previously compartmentalized, to flow between

different contexts, and to be used freely for different purposes. This situation, of the

liberation and concentration of resources, Hazan terms "totality". The conditions

of totality efface boundaries between clients and form new ones around that

emergent alignment of clients which is itself based on the sharing of new combinations of resources. Within relevant client populations, totality erases

internal boundaries and strengthens external ones between such populations and

other clients or officials. What is commonly termed administrative-totality, in the sense of the total institution, is often equated with the compartmentalization and

the individuation of clients. This is one of the lessons of Foucault's work. Hazan goes further in positing, and in demonstrating, an opposite but complementary

process initiated by clients themselves — that of client totality — through which they develop novel modes of discourse which largely exclude officials, and which provide themselves (clients) with new sources of relative power with which to

survive in institutions and through which they can garner self and group esteem.

Hazan develops his argument through two case studies. In the first, centred in

an old-age home in Israel, inmates on the verge of expulsion for "malfunctioning" learned to maximize a synagogue-setting and its religious symbols in order to prove their capacity to function, although both they and the more secure inmates of the

home were largely non-religious. Their tacit cooperation in patronizing the synagogue effectively separated them from the other inmates and, within this secure

boundary, they were able to maintain an appearance of functioning in accordance

with the criteria of the institution. In the second case, located in a day-care centre

for the aged in London, members who felt they were unable to rely on the outside

world negated virtually all distinctions amongst themselves, whether these were

based on kinship, friendship, or status. In place of such internal boundary markers

they created an ideology of egalitarianism and extremely strong and generalized commitments to the collectivity that were expressed through looking after one

another in almost impersonal terms. The result was the creation of a highly resilient

external boundary, that largely excluded staff and deviant members, and that

permitted the creation of radical modes of behaviour which denied the value of any

20



substantive distinctions among members. Hazan closes by suggesting that in the

face of insecurity, uncertainty and anxiety, "cultural heritage and sets of social

norms have little bearing on a system of classification". Of all the contributors, his

point of view here is likely the most situational. Helen Schwartzman examines a playful mode of interaction among staff

members in the context of meetings in an American community mental-health

centre. She describes the organization of the centre as "organized anarchy":

ambiguities in the centre's goals, techniques, and operations, unclear relationships among personnel, and pressures from numerous interest groups, produced a

situation of pervasive conflict. Within this situation the playful mode of interaction she terms "dancing" emerged to frame and to contextualize certain meetings of

personnel. Dancing was likened by one participant to a "theatre matinee', and

appeared to be concerned with process and form in interaction, rather than with its

contents and products. These meetings ostensibly were instrumental occasions of

decision-making, but often nothing was accomplished. Instead, the interaction of the participants consisted of meta-commentaries on, and critiques of, personnel and social relationships in the centre. Participants were said to have "hidden agendas"

— a metaphor for organization in terms of organization — which could

be revealed through the dance. Thus the seriousness of a problem was transformed

into the as-if unreality of the dance, which itself consisted of commentaries on the realities of life at the centre.

According to Schwartzman, dancing should be regarded neither as a simple release from individual and collective tension nor as deviation from the goals of the organization. Through dancing the organization created structural and semantic

space within which it could comment on itself to itself, without personnel taking such comments as serious expressions of disaffection or as commitments to action.

She writes that, in meetings, "one thing can always be talked about in terms of

something else. It is in this way that meetings are like metaphors." And, like metaphor, dancing extended the possible meanings of phenomena, and

relationships among them, by playing with boundaries that ordinarily would distinguish them from one another. Dancing neither created new social categories and meanings nor dissolved existing ones: instead it temporarily rearranged or

broke down boundaries and distinctions, enabling participants to experience and to view one another in terms of novel perspectives of the possible. The outcomes of

dancing-meetings, unlike decisions taken in earnest, allowed participants the

choice of either returning to existing arrangements or altering these. Under

conditions of organized anarchy, of pervasive ambiguity, the play of metaphors in

dancing allowed participants to connect loosely the formal structure and goals of

the centre to informal concerns and interests. Thus, in cybernetic-like terms,

Schwartzman likens the meeting format to a homeostat for the organization.

Although she does not use the terminology of boundaries, her analysis clearly shows how play modes can manipulate the experiencing of these, without the

necessity of providing actual alternative arrangements. Moreover, her discussion

highlights a point I made earlier: that probably the most challenging of analytic

questions, with regard to framing, is how different frames are embedded in one

another to constitute social life. In this case one can argue, as does Schwartzman, that the playful meta-commentaries of dancing were crucial to sustaining the

bureaucratic organization of the centre.

Judith Goldstein delineates an Iranian cultural pattern, which she terms "the

paradigm of protection", and describes its continuing resilience over a lengthy

period. The paradigm revolves about the protection afforded to categories of

population or to communities, whose primary defining characteristics are religious, on the part of "big men" who represent the former to the authorities, and who gain

21



the intercession of the latter in local matters. Goldstein focuses in particular on the

role of such mediators with regard to Iranian Jews, one of the People of the Book, who are recognized as legitimate religious minorities by Islam.

In Jewish communities different types of persons have filled the role of big man. Folkloric-historic sources tell of miracle-working rabbis while, in modern times, the role has been filled by community representatives, foreign educators, and

locally-prominent persons. To a degree, each type has complemented the kinds of

leadership prevalent in the larger society. Thus Jewish religious and quasi-religious mediators predominated when majority-minority relationships in Iran were structured essentially in terms of the Muslim/non-Muslim distinction. When this distinction temporarily receded in significance, during the reign of the Pahlavis and their promulgation of constitutional reforms, foreign educators and locally

prominent personages came to the fore, although these too were to some extent cast

in a religious idiom. Today, under the Islamic Republic and the resurgence of the religious distinction, one can expect further modifications in the types of persons who represent Jewish communities to the authorities.

Goldstein argues convincingly that the need for Jewish big-men, as mediators, has remained quite constant primarily because the Muslim/non-Muslim

distinction, given its form and coherence by the dhimma pact between Muslims and People of the Book, was never fully displaced, and was built into even the reforms of the Pahlavis which pledged equality before the civil law for all citizenry in the modern nation-state.

Goldstein argues further that even when categories of persons had no desire or

intention to fill the roles of political intercessors and protectors, as was the case with

the foreign educators of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, local Jewish communities virtually forced them into accepting this structural slot within this paradigm. In effect, she argues that the particular types of persons who fill the slot of big-man are adaptative responses to changing situational conditions in Iran, but

that all of these "surface" variations are the products of an embedded cultural

paradigm which will continue to create a structural need for such intercessors so

long as the Muslim/non-Muslim boundary remains a primary signifier of personhood and community, whether in more tacit or overt form.

Goldstein s delineation of an enduring social category closes the circle of

discussion about categories and boundaries that began with Shamgar Handelman's exploration of the creation and crystallization of an administrative

category of person, and that was pursued further by Collmann, Hazan, and

Schwartzman in their studies of how existing administrative boundaries and categories are manipulated, guarded, erased, and played with, and of the

consequences of these processes. Together these papers strengthen my conviction

that it is an anthropology of administrative-frameworks that may well have the

greatest potential for explicating the ambiguities, anomalies, and ironies of bureaucratic ideas and phenomena that together constitute some of the most

puzzling, but central, features of modern life.

NOTES

!. The contents of this preface have in no way bound the contributors: they each have pursued their

analyses in their own way. For their comments on an earlier version of this preface I am indebted to Bruce Kapferer and, in particular, to Dick Werbner. 2. It is likely that such boundaries are both a product of the internal coherence of the contents they encompass, and a device which enables coherence to exist in such a scheme. 3. One should note that there is no universal logic of taxonomizing. But it is argued here that in

22



Western culture one logic of taxonomy, in particular, pervades social life. Other cultures (and particular

disciplines) may well create (and be created by) other kinds of logic which, as in the case of certain folk taxonomies (cf. Morris 1976; Bulmer 1967), may depend on overlap and indeterminacy in classification.

So-called segmentary societies may have, up to a point, an affinity to the assumptions of taxonomy

suggested here. Yet one could hardly maintain that members of these societies explicitly conceive of such

assumptions as systemic. By way of contrast, the term "system" has become part of the jargon of English

language usage. Still, one should add that Western common-sense perceptions of systemic taxonomizing, as this is used here, are linear: therefore such perceptions are quite distinct from other Western conceptions of "system" which depend on notions like feedback for their coherence (cf. Wilden

1972; Bateson 1972). On alternative scientific taxonomies, see Gray (1978). 4. Sheridan (1980:156), rephrasing Foucault, writes concisely that in the modern age of disciplinary regimes, "... individualization is 'descending'; as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have the 'norm' as reference ..." The individual becomes a "case" who is "... at once an object for

knowledge and a site for the exercise of power ...", while individuation "... is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use" (1980:155). 5. Clients also expect a heightening of "order" in their contacts with administrative-frameworks and, when this appears to be absent, they miss it and may question the validity of procedures they are

subjected to. 6. The placement of frames is a heuristic device intended to bring out affinities and contrast among the

messages such frames transmit to social order. Therefore such devices can be reorientated to evoke other kinds of distinctions. For example, the coordinates of other world-this world/order-disorder can be

collapsed to highlight a distinction betwen existential and phenomenal concerns. The ritual-frame

appears primarily to be involved with the human condition, fate, and salvation — in other words, man's existential state of being in the domain of order. The charismatic-frame is concerned with much the same

problems of existence, but in the domain of disorder: for it is preeminently a play-upon-existence, upon questions of belief, being, and truth. In contrast to the above, the primary concerns of the bureaucratic frame are with orderliness of form in this world. That is, with phenomena more than with the

epistemological premises of their existence. Complementing this, the primary concern of the play-frame is with the subversion of the ordering of phenomena: in this world it is preeminently a play-upon-form. These kinds of orientations re-establish an opposition between other-worldly and this-worldly domains in terms of the contrast, existential/phenomenal.

If one uses the dichotomy of the serious and pretence, then the play-frame is opposed to the other three. On the other hand, if all these frames are related to properties of collectivity and to those of

individualism, then it is likely that the charismatic-frame will be opposed to the other three: for charisma is often understood to issue forth from the distant reaches of the soul or psyche, and not from the social

person. 7. Ironically, forms of organizations which depend on the bureaucratic frame are especially vulnerable to the wider social contexts in which they are embedded. For they are legislated and promulgated explicitly in this world — and so their particular forms, hierarchies, means and ends, are comparatively negotiable, internally and in relation to external factors (cf. Shamgar-Handelman, this issue). 8. See, for example, Wagner's (1975) contention that one focus of American culture is on "things", their collection and itemization, rather than on social relationships. For comparison, in this regard, see also Marriott's (1976) discussion of interpersonal relationships in Hindu culture. 9. Useful overviews of sociological studies of service and public bureaucracy are found in Danet

(1980), Katz and Danet (1973), and Sherriff (1976). 10. Recently, Britan and Cohen (1980) outlined a different perspective on the kinds of contributions

anthropologists can make to the study of formal organizations. They distinguish between formal

organization, informal organization, and relationships between an organization and its environment. This "model", they claim, enables them to build a typology of organizations, based on three "theoretical"

possibilities: one type in which the formal is dominant, one in which the informal is dominant, and one in which the formal and informal share dominance (1980:15-16). Their argument is strongly reminiscent of the kind of social science cogently criticized by Bittner and Wagner: one which inscribes itself as if it had invented distinctions of the formal/informal variety. Britan and Cohen (1980:23 ff) conclude that

anthropology can contribute to the study of formal organizations by providing ethnographic detail, by making cross-cultural comparisons, by showing the informal dynamics of organizations, and by demonstrating the broader hierarchical contexts which organizations reflect. These topics are relevant, but their banality is better left to introductory textbooks. 11. In the case of the pageant, where greater diversity is present, its modern version usually consists of a series of floats, each of which presents a scene or story made up of fixed components. Although each float moves in procession, and is integral to itself or forms a chapter in a story-line, its internal

composition is doubly-framed as stasis: first, because its components lack movement; and second, because in its very own fixity each component also frames once more its own singular immobility.

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administrative frameworks and clients || introduction: the idea of bureaucratic organization

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