Hidden Attractions of Administration

The Peculiar Appeal of Meetings and Documents

Malin Akerstrom author David Wästerfors author Katarina Jacobsson author Erika Andersson Cederholm author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:22nd Apr '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Hidden Attractions of Administration cover

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003108436, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book argues that the expansion of administrative activities in today’s working life is driven not only by pressure from above, but also from below. The authors examine the inner dynamics of people-processing organizations—those formally working for clients, patients, or students—to uncover the hidden attractions of doing administrative work, despite all the complaints and laments about "too many meetings" or "too much paperwork." There is something appealing to those compelled to participate in today’s constantly multiplying and expanding administration that defies popular framings of it as merely pressure from above. Hidden Attractions of Administration shows in detail the emotional attractiveness, moral conflicts, and almost magical features that administrative tasks often entail in today’s organizations, supported by ethnographic studies consisting of over 200 qualitative interviews and participant observations from ten organizational settings and contexts across Sweden. The authors also question and complement explanations in administration-related research that have previously been taken for granted, arguing that it is a simplification to attribute all aspects of the change to New Public Management and instead taking into account what the classic sociologist Georg Simmel called an Eigendynamik: a self-reinforcing tendency that, under certain circumstances, needs only a nudge in an administrative direction to get going. By applying ethnography to issues of bureaucratization and meeting cultures and by drawing on findings in emotional sociology and social anthropology, this volume contributes to both the sociology of work and the study of human service organizations and will appeal to scholars and students working across both areas.

'The theses presented in Hidden Attractions of Administration can be a mirror in which the actions of administration employees reflect in a real, attractive, and obvious way ... The book will certainly be interesting reading for all teachers, medical staff, social workers, managers, and so on, and students who will work in public administration institutions in the future.' - Beata Pawłowska, Symbolic Interaction

ISBN: 9780367622275

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 408g

162 pages