ABSTRACT
This book is about the appeal of administrative tasks. It deals with the pulls and powers of today’s expanding administration and tries to explain this dynamic, not in terms of top-down directives but by something relatively neglected: the everyday attractions and contingencies that keep people’s appetite for administration alive. We present Georg Simmel’s concept of Eigendynamik, his term for autonomous interaction processes that create their own momentum, which has inspired our understanding of how administration spins around itself in a way that is self-preserving and self-strengthening. Suggestions of a working group or a checklist represent efforts for organizational clarity, transparency, and coordination—i.e., orderliness—but they also involve more or less vague formulations of things yet to be ordered. The combination of high formality and high variability that breeds Eigendynamik is characteristic of modern societies in general. We use ethnographic data from a variety of settings, mainly from people-processing organizations. We find moral as well as emotional attractions in doing and expanding administration, to the point that clients are left behind or sidestepped, along with, as we will show in a later chapter, the somewhat magical aspects, i.e., the enchanting and seemingly marvelously transforming qualities of administration.
