ABSTRACT
This chapter ends the book with a discussion of our studies of the increasing administrative involvement in people-processing organizations. We have focused on the inner dynamics of administration, especially its everyday attractions and spirals of activities. These are typically hidden but possible to specify with the help of ethnographic data from inside organizations: interviews, participant observations, and informal talk with field members, as well as documents and previous research. In this chapter, we discuss the moral, emotional, and magical dimensions of the Eigendynamik of today’s administration society as a way to review crucial themes that we have analyzed throughout the book. This chapter summarizes our findings and provides an overview of our theorization of the field, particularly in terms of self-propelling mechanisms, or Georg Simmel’s Eigendynamik. Members of organizations get caught up in a self-perpetuating spiral of administration and take initiatives from “below,” and they also enjoy showing their skills and professionality in administrative terms, as well as enjoying its aesthetics. The Eigendynamik is tied into top-down forces so that the processes that repeat themselves are integrated with wider processes in the society.
