What do you think?
Rate this book
State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality
An innovative contribution to political theory, State Work examines the labor of government workers in North America. Arguing that this work needs to be theorized precisely because it is vital to the creation and persistence of the state, Stefano Harney draws on thinking from public administration and organizational sociology, as well as poststructuralist theory and performance studies, to launch a cultural studies of the state. Countering conceptions of the government and its employees as remote and inflexible, Harney uses the theory of mass intellectuality developed by Italian worker-theorists to illuminate the potential for genuine political progress inherent within state work.
State Work begins with an ethnographic account of Harney’s work as a midlevel manager within an Ontario government initiative charged with leading the province’s efforts to combat racism. Through readings of material such as The X-Files and Law & Order , Harney then reviews how popular images of the state and government labor are formed within American culture and how these ideas shape everyday life. He highlights the mutually dependent roles played in state work by the citizenry and civil servants. Using as case studies Al Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government and a community-policing project in New York City, Harney also critiques public management literature and performance measurement theories. He concludes his study with a look at the motivations of state workers.
State Work begins with an ethnographic account of Harney’s work as a midlevel manager within an Ontario government initiative charged with leading the province’s efforts to combat racism. Through readings of material such as The X-Files and Law & Order , Harney then reviews how popular images of the state and government labor are formed within American culture and how these ideas shape everyday life. He highlights the mutually dependent roles played in state work by the citizenry and civil servants. Using as case studies Al Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government and a community-policing project in New York City, Harney also critiques public management literature and performance measurement theories. He concludes his study with a look at the motivations of state workers.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
2 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 28, 2024
Well, look. Sometimes you see something on a search for something obscure and you read a paragraph out of it and you think "this is it! This book addresses exactly what I was thinking about! I can't wait to dig in!" Then you order it and get out your knife and fork and bib and sit at the table, mind full of dreams.
This book is useless, myopic, repetitive, parochial vacuity. Harney firsts takes us through the, I'm sure, thrilling (sorry, I skipped most of this chapter) first-person experience of being a junior employee at the Ontario NDP [socialist] Government's Provincial Antiracism Secretariat in the early 1990s, and then spends the other two-thirds of the book with his hand out like the John Travolta meme, desperately looking for someone else to have written something about his job.
Despite finding no one with anything specific enough for his tastes to say on the matter, Harney spends the whole remaining time more or less on that survey of the literature. A few times he approaches the question of how to define the sort of psychological shadow cast by the concept of The State from a few different angles but never actually ventures any opinions on it, instead mostly doing a vague sort of nice-nice lamenting about the impossibility of really bridging the gap between Marxist theory about workers and the fact that when you work for the state, you really are working, you guys, I promise, even when your work is just the abstracted reshaping of speech practices.
It's not that I don't agree that intellectual work is real work! I just wish he had anything, anything at all to say. There is almost a spark when he mentions that perhaps if we educate more and more individuals to take on the functions of the state, this gets us inadvertently closer to Marx's withering away, which I thought might lead to (please, anything) some discussion of the tension between for-profit privatization of state functions and the sort of abstract desire to have an inherent self-motivation to make the state not suck, a question which sort of haunts the whole book. But then he sees a squirrel, i.e. someone else to quote, and the thought train once again aborts its departure.
So what's left is this sort of self-satirizing time capsule of Clinton-era social theory, tons of quotes of Negri, Hardt, Deleuze and Guattari, all the old standards, along with a constant sprinking of superficial Star Trek and X-Files references, and nothing to say about any of them. And especially nothing about the Bush-era state.or September 11th -- despite the publication date being 2002 I don't think a word was written after 2000. (Weirdly, Marxist and Marxism were spelled with a lowercase "m" consistently. Was that a thing once?)
Minus a star for being so convinced that Antonio Gramsci invented the word and concept of "statolatry" that he named a whole chapter after it, and then, like everything else, did nothing with the idea anyway except quote it and point.
This book is useless, myopic, repetitive, parochial vacuity. Harney firsts takes us through the, I'm sure, thrilling (sorry, I skipped most of this chapter) first-person experience of being a junior employee at the Ontario NDP [socialist] Government's Provincial Antiracism Secretariat in the early 1990s, and then spends the other two-thirds of the book with his hand out like the John Travolta meme, desperately looking for someone else to have written something about his job.
Despite finding no one with anything specific enough for his tastes to say on the matter, Harney spends the whole remaining time more or less on that survey of the literature. A few times he approaches the question of how to define the sort of psychological shadow cast by the concept of The State from a few different angles but never actually ventures any opinions on it, instead mostly doing a vague sort of nice-nice lamenting about the impossibility of really bridging the gap between Marxist theory about workers and the fact that when you work for the state, you really are working, you guys, I promise, even when your work is just the abstracted reshaping of speech practices.
It's not that I don't agree that intellectual work is real work! I just wish he had anything, anything at all to say. There is almost a spark when he mentions that perhaps if we educate more and more individuals to take on the functions of the state, this gets us inadvertently closer to Marx's withering away, which I thought might lead to (please, anything) some discussion of the tension between for-profit privatization of state functions and the sort of abstract desire to have an inherent self-motivation to make the state not suck, a question which sort of haunts the whole book. But then he sees a squirrel, i.e. someone else to quote, and the thought train once again aborts its departure.
So what's left is this sort of self-satirizing time capsule of Clinton-era social theory, tons of quotes of Negri, Hardt, Deleuze and Guattari, all the old standards, along with a constant sprinking of superficial Star Trek and X-Files references, and nothing to say about any of them. And especially nothing about the Bush-era state.or September 11th -- despite the publication date being 2002 I don't think a word was written after 2000. (Weirdly, Marxist and Marxism were spelled with a lowercase "m" consistently. Was that a thing once?)
Minus a star for being so convinced that Antonio Gramsci invented the word and concept of "statolatry" that he named a whole chapter after it, and then, like everything else, did nothing with the idea anyway except quote it and point.
Displaying 1 of 1 review