kirak67@univie.ac.at

University of Vienna – University of Cologne – University of Basel – Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, Lake Constance

The project concerns the consequences and functions of administrative modernization in the 20^th century, in particular the promise of a ‘de-bureaucratized’ or ‘postbureaucratic’ state administration. It focuses on the German-speaking administration in the FRG, Switzerland and Austria and follows recent discussions on the ‘digitalization’ of administrations. However, instead of exploring the putative increase in efficiency related to the introduction of ‘eGovernments’ with their paperless records and virtual office hours, it examines the new rationality of governance and the new divisions between the public and the private that accompany the ‘de-bureaucratization’ of classical administrations. The project opens up new perspectives of discourse history, of praxeology, of media studies and of organizational theory by examining the demands for public ‘de-bureaucratization’ articulated throughout the 20^th century, by taking into account recent conceptions of administrative reform, and by addressing the related technical dimensions.

With this in mind, we call ‘bureaugraphies’ those writing practices and techniques of originally bureaucratic work, which are no longer confined to and invested in the disposal power of state authorities but whose spread has resulted in an unprecedented level of invasive micromanagement and control of social and private spheres without strictly formalized procedures of decision-making. Against this background, the project examines the conditions and outcomes of 20^th century’s de-bureaucratization from three different angles. First, the criticism of ‘bureaucracy’, its mode of action and its scope shall be scrutinized. Second, the research project turns to those new approaches in the study of public administration and political planning that responded to the reform pressure built up by criticism of bureaucracy and from which instances of concrete restructuring of public administrations were initiated. Third, the project addresses the distribution and the concomitant reconfiguration of official communication procedures from a technical or praxeological point of view.

The project is divided into four sub-areas, the first two of which describe the discourse and literary history of bureaucratic operationality, critique and reform, the third and fourth the administrative evolution from the perspective of media history and social theory:

1. The first sub-project (‘Protocol Cultures’) examines Austria’s state ‘bureaucracy’ from the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century, its specific ‘protocol culture’, which shaped and preoccupied the entire society, as well as its reflection in social, journalistic and literary contexts.
2. The second sub-project (‘Office Novels’) focuses on the analytical as well as critical description of the transfer of bureaucratic techniques into post-war business administrations in West Germany within empirical studies of organizational sociology as well as literary office novels.
3. The third sub-project (‘Discrete Information Machines’) studies the history of the Swiss State Protection (Staatsschutz), whose technically specific state intelligence file management has provoked demands for data protection and, at the same time, for transparency in official procedures.
4. The fourth sub-project (‘Organization as Social Level and Social System’) elaborates a history of the systems theory concept of formal organization and addresses its continuation in more recent network theories, thus focusing on the successive dissolution of ‘bureaucratic’ administrative concepts since the postwar period.

Within this field of research, the four PIs have worked and published intensely on the cultural, literary and media history of bureaucratic writing (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Burkhardt Wolf), on literary references to paper technologies, archival practices, and everyday routines (Prof. Dr. Nicolas Pethes), on the media technologies of administrative institutions and on tools of knowledge (Prof. Dr. Markus Krajewski), and on theoretical and medial paradigms of organizational sociology (Prof. Dr. Maren Lehmann).