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This chapter focuses on the modern organization as a unit of life experience that is taken for granted yet little understood, showing how organizational culture shapes and sustains integrity (or doesn't). Considering a number of root metaphors for the organization, including machine, organism, person, and family, the chapter looks at the various ways ethics are cast in each case. Reviewing the typical ways that organizations engage ethics, including through codes of ethics, ethics officers, and the movement toward corporate social responsibility, the chapter concludes that all of them are valuable yet limited in scope. By showing how ethics can be woven into the entire fabric of messages and interactions in an organization, the chapter advances a wider perspective on virtue and culture in organizational life.

Chapter 3 studies Johnson’s and Mann’s handling of Latin American policy in the first full year of the new administration. Beginning with a major international crisis in the Panama Canal Zone in January, the year 1964 was a challenging one that would also see military coups in Brazil and Bolivia, Mann’s attempts to reshape Alliance bureaucracy, and former Kennedy aides continually challenging the legitimacy of Johnson’s leadership and Mann’s liberal credentials. Particular attention is given to the skillful manner in which the Panamanian crisis was resolved and the improvements in the performance of the Alliance for Progress, challenging standard interpretations of Johnson’s diplomatic abilities. The controversy of the Brazilian coup is not overlooked, with the complex relationship between the Brazilian military, the US ambassador in Brasilia, and State Department and National Security Council officials in Washington representative of the increasingly problematic and intertwined nature of security and development goals.

This chapter describes the cultural techniques of interrogation, registration, and licensing on the boundary between land and sea, that produced in sixteenth century Spain the legal passenger to “The Indies” in contrast to the illegal passenger, the vagabond, the parasite. The invention of a bureaucratical apparatus and notational techniques of state control over the migration of individuals across the border between Europa and America, land and sea, made those who otherwise would have disappeared without a trace into historical darkness speak of themselves. The chapter analyzes the discourse of the interrogations of witnesses, the petitions of the passengers, and the passenger registers in the Archive General de Indias in Seville, and demonstrates how the bureaucratic procedures that produce the legal passenger prdicue at the same time the problematic difference between fact and fiction, truth and fake. It demonstrates, too, how closely the problem of distinguishing between fact and fiction in the registers and the problem of producing fictitious identities by what Foucault called governmentality is connected to the early modern problem of distinguishing between true and false poor and the emergence of a discourse on a parasitic ecomomy of false beggars and vagabonds.

This chapter introduces Nathaniel Bowditch first as contemporaries celebrated him, and then as we should understand him: a man whose mathematical sensibilities transformed the world of practical affairs, pioneering the impersonal procedures and institutions associated with modern capitalism and modern life. Insistent on order and exactitude, Bowditch instituted new systems to organize information and execute business, including filing and cataloging systems, printed blank forms, and inflexible due dates. Inspired by the regularity and predictability of the solar system, he forwarded a vision of the corporation as a clockwork mechanism. The chapter sketches out the main features of Bowditch’s life and character; considers the provincial and cosmopolitan impulses, and the vertical ties of patronage and horizontal ties of elite privilege, that operated over the course of his lifetime; and briefly considers the place of the impersonal institution in the historiographies of the state and of capitalism.

This chapter examines one of the oldest and most basic problems of governance: how to pay the bureaucracy. Following the 1994 tax reform, China’s local governments, even the relatively prosperous county of Zouping, face heightened budgetary pressures. Agencies and public service providers are therefore compelled to “self-finance”—that is, generate a portion of their own income and staff benefits. Contrary to popular opinion, practices of administrative self-financing are not arbitrary and lawless; rather, they are bound by rules, specifically, rules made by an intersecting matrix of vertical and horizontal authorities within the state. More broadly, this account illustrates a key condition of adaptation—which this chapter calls “directed improvisation.”

This chapter first examines the many biographical representations of Bowditch, most notably as the self-made man, and the cultural and social forces that shaped those representations. It then considers where Bowditch in fact made his most significant impact—as a pioneer in the creation of impersonal institutions and bureaucratic practices. His life points to the role of the mathematical sciences in shaping the ways capitalist institutions operated and legitimated their operations; steers us away from considering the emergence of bureaucratic machinery as associated solely with either the state or with the business corporation; underscores how business, cultural, charitable, educational corporations worked together to extend the strength, reach, and longevity of elite power; and complicates the narrative of capitalist transformation as a straightforward transition from a personal to an impersonal world.

This chapter moves beyond firm level attributes and economic motivations to consider the impact of host country institutions on investment models of multinationals in developing countries. It adopts a comparative institutionalist perspective, and utilizes country and firm level variables to measure governance. These measures are then employed to predict innovation outcomes. This chapter demonstrates that host country institutions affect the likelihood of local innovation taking place, and its intensity. A variety of measures of institutional coherence are developed, and address such diverse concepts as intellectual property protection, corruption, democracy, and bureaucratic quality. In addition, firm surveys are used to convey firm perceptions of institutional quality in host countries. The chapter includes a discussion of the literature on firm entry modes, and considers how other host country attributes, such as education and human capital, may influence innovation outcomes alongside institutions.

This introduction outlines the rationale, arguments, sources, focus, and architecture of the book. It also explains the author’s involvement with the Goulding Archive and reviews the promises and perils that such a primary source offers, including in terms of potential bias (both internal and external). The introduction also identifies three explanations for the Secretariat’s fragmentation in the early 1990s—bureaucratic, power-political, and conceptual—and argues that these pathologies still affect the UN organization today. Through a ‘micro-history’ of the Rwandan crisis as seen from New York, the introduction further explains why and how the events of 1994 provide the contours of a ‘macro-history’ of the UN Secretariat as a whole.

This chapter explores the origins of the bureaucratic confrontation between DPA and DPKO in the early 1990s. It argues that while both Pérez de Cuéllar and Boutros-Ghali wanted to strengthen their role as Secretary-General, they used different bureaucratic tools to achieve it. Pérez de Cuéllar kept peacekeeping and peacebuilding under the tight control of his Executive Office, whereas Boutros-Ghali created DPA and DPKO. In October 1993, Boutros-Ghali also abruptly redefined the roles of these two departments, so that DPA was charged with substantive decision-making responsibility, whereas DPKO was to be downgraded to ‘operational’ tasks. Fresh documents also suggest that the DPA–DPKO competition was partly the result of the Secretary-General’s attempt to disenfranchise himself from the UN membership through what Boutros-Ghali saw as a powerful ‘political’ office to be opposed to the ‘operational’—and, in his view, US-dominated—DPKO.

The Catholic Church’s episcopal polity often did not ensure that statements issued by the hierarchy against racial discrimination and segregation were implemented, or implemented effectually, at the diocesan or parish level. Many of the factors that inhibited evangelical southern white Protestant denominations from taking action, or stronger action, against segregation also influenced Catholic prelates and clergy in the South, sometimes considerably. The privatization of religion and an emphasis on personal regeneration, bureaucratic concerns and decentralized polities that allowed ordinaries to run their dioceses as they saw fit acted as inhibiting factors that limited the adoption and enactment of desegregation.

The 1970s saw a growing challenge of assimilationist policies at the root of dispersal. Despite that, the hurdles to an efficient movement against it were many: the necessity to make a living among Asian immigrants, difficult access to information about dispersal schools, the fact that immigrants faced a bureaucracy which was opaque to them, etc. The Race Relations Board as well as the Ealing Community Relations Council proved instrumental in generating a growing awareness of the problems around and of the discriminatory nature of dispersal. For many Asians, the struggle against dispersal was primarily about equality and the recognition of a common human dignity, as is attested in some testimonies of former militants. In this chapter, the Kogan Report (commissioned by the RRB) is also analysed in depth, as well as the way dispersal illustrated in its last years a form of Welfare roll-back, rather than a policy of immigrant assimilation.

George I. Sánchez was a devotee of the intellectual tenets of the Progressive Education Movement, particularly its social reconstructionist wing, and of the New Deal. The GEB funded a small division within New Mexico's state educational bureaucracy for Sánchez to give him the opportunity to preach reform for the state's schools. A crusading bureaucrat, Sánchez generated a great deal of controversy over his advocacy of studying racial prejudice and for proposing a restructuring of school funding mechanisms that would take initial steps to equalize New Mexico's poorest and wealthiest schools. Sánchez's schemes to turn New Mexico into a hotbed of educational progressivism and research on Mexican Americans generated dangerous controversy.

The chapter documents the development of the Kosovo civil service under UN administration. It discusses ideas about the role of civil service bureaucracy in economic development and describes the processes of recruiting Kosovar civil servants, their salary arrangements, and their terms and conditions of employment. Assessments of the current day performance of the public administration in Kosovo are largely negative and the chapter argues that this can be traced to initial failure by the UN to take steps to control civil service recruitment and establish merit based employment.

The actual activities, strategies, and processes of how law enforcement officials work with and manage confidential informants is explicated in this chapter. Here the processes of working within (and around) bureaucratic requirements for establishing and maintaining a relationship with an informant is examined. So too are the many ways that relationships between individual officers and informants are structured and maintained, the costs, benefits, and dangers (personal and professional) of creating a “too close” relationship are outlined and the ways in which such relationships are authentic or manipulative presented. Management of the relationship with an informant, while keeping them motivated, honest and reliable are underscored through reports of relationships, both successful and not.

This chapter charts how aid accountability in Christian aid partnerships selectively combines neoliberal and biblical reasoning on what it means to be morally accountable, creating an emerging, religiously-informed medical audit culture. In the Madagascar-Minnesota medical aid program, aid workers interestingly bring together both bureaucratic accountability’s emphasis on transparency in the use of aid resources and a biblically-based ideology that being accountable means invisibly accompanying fellow Christians elsewhere, as Jesus did on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35. While American Lutherans predominantly view their own immobility as the most ethical position, sending medical relief objects and not people or missionaries to Madagascar, accountability requirements certainly travel and have been increasingly woven into each donation of medical relief, financial support or equipment. Moving in the chapter from the Midwest U.S. to Madagascar, the chapter builds a multi-sited portrait of accountability work as a “mobile” or traveling form of humanitarian governance (Pandolfi 2010), understood and enacted in culturally distinct ways. Audit procedures lay bare a vexing set of questions for both Malagasy and Americans: What does it ultimately mean to be accountable, and how is it assessed? Do accountability requirements between fellow believers contradict contemporary principles of global religious communion?