2.1Defence and the front line
The defence of bureaucracy that du Gay mounts is a defence of an ethos. Its claims, as the study's notes summarise them, are three. The bureaucratic ethos of office is impartial and procedural. Its critics call it inhuman, and its reformers would replace it with enterprise. Against both, following procedure is an ethical conduct of its own, which protects citizens from arbitrary power (du Gay 2000). The book's subtitle names Weber, and the word impartial in the summary answers to Weber's unparteiisch, as Section 4 shows.
Lipsky's study begins at the other end of the same hierarchy, in public services such as schools, police and welfare offices. Front-line workers there make policy through the discretion they use under rules and scarce resources, and the people they serve bear its costs (Lipsky 1980). The summary says nothing of Lipsky's view of impartial procedure as such. What it gives is a place, the front line, and a direction of cost, towards those served.
Side by side, the two positions look at different moments. du Gay looks at the official as a bearer of an ethic, and asks what the ethic protects. For du Gay the danger is arbitrary power, and procedure is its restraint. For Lipsky, front-line workers make policy through their discretion under rules and scarce resources, and those served bear its costs.
What neither position, on the summaries available here, addresses directly is the cost that falls on the front-line worker. Weber's official, who carries out an order he thinks wrong, bears something too: Weber calls it Selbstverleugnung, self-denial. Whether that self-denial is the whole of what the official bears, or whether there is also work, is the question this article puts to the text.
2.2Answering and avoiding
The second debate concerns the relation between those who decide and those who must give an account. Bovens defines accountability as a relationship between an actor and a forum. The actor must explain and justify conduct; the forum may question and pass judgement; the actor may face consequences (Bovens 2007). Read as a set of parts, the definition lets one ask, of any case, which parts are present and who occupies each place.
Hood's argument is set here against that observation. Much of the organisation and procedure of government is shaped by the avoidance of blame, through presentational, agency and policy strategies, and rules and procedures can serve to spread blame or to shift it (Hood 2011). Set beside Bovens, the argument suggests that the places in an account are not simply found but can be arranged.
Weber's passage belongs to both. It is, on its face, a rule of accountability: the commander answers, not the official. It is also an arrangement of where blame can go, and its own verb for the forbidden move, abwälzen, is the verb of shifting.
2.3Signs of completion
Two further works frame the record. Power described audit as a ritual of verification that checks systems of control more than the work itself and produces a comfort that may be decoupled from what is done (Power 1997); Meyer and Rowan, earlier, had argued that organisations adopt formal structures because they are taken for granted as legitimate, and often decouple them from the work actually done (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Neither is about Weber; both are used below because the record's subject is a success indicator that shows normal while the work has stopped.
2.4The debates side by side
The table sets out the positions as the article uses them.
| Question | One side | The other side | What Weber's passage contributes |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is the official's ethos? | An ethical conduct that protects citizens from arbitrary power (du Gay 2000) | A site where discretion under scarcity makes policy, and those served bear its costs (Lipsky 1980) | Honour as executing an order on another's responsibility |
| What is accountability? | A relationship of actor and forum: explain, be questioned, face consequences (Bovens 2007) | A field shaped by blame avoidance, where procedures can spread or shift blame (Hood 2011) | A rule that responsibility goes to the commander, and a prohibition on shifting it for the leader |
The column on the right is the subject of Sections 4 and 5. The gap the article explores runs across both rows: none of the positions, as summarised, says who does the work that follows when an accepted order fails. Weber's text comes nearest to naming that gap, and turns away from it.