HOW ‘NATIVES’ WORK: POLITICAL JUDGEMENT AND COHESION THROUGH RITUAL INTERACTION AMONG MINISTERS
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12205 |
| Author | PERRI 6 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12205
HOW ‘NATIVES’ WORK: POLITICAL JUDGEMENT AND
COHESION THROUGH RITUAL INTERACTION AMONG
MINISTERS
PERRI 6
How do political administrations sustain whatever kinds of cohesion they do, over their time in
ofce? Although recent research emphasizes institutions, sometimes institutions also weaken cohe-
sion. Informal institutions are more important than formal ones in shaping styles of political judge-
ment in governing administrations. But how can institutional processes explain both weakening
and strengthening? This article develops a neo-Durkheimian theory.It proposes that informal insti-
tutions should be understood as operating through very particular kinds of practices, which are
enacted in a limited number of basic kinds of ritual interaction order.The article innovates by show-
ing how written ritual in government interacts with face-to-face ritual in cultivating styles both of
thought and of emotions to sustain positive and negative feedback dynamics. The argument is illus-
trated by analysing negative rites of blame and accusation and positive rites of self-assertion during
positive feedback in the individualistic interaction order in Harold Wilson’s 1960s Cabinet.
INTRODUCTION
This theory-development article presents a novel neo-Durkheimian institutional account
of how informal institutional processes weaken but also sustain cohesion within politi-
cal administrations, as they cultivate styles of political judgement. Relations between two
registers of ritual interaction order are, it argues, critical. To illustrate (but not fully test)
the argument, the article uses archival data to examine what some regard as a ‘hard’ case
for neo-Durkheimian arguments – namely, an administration that was both institution-
ally individualistic and ideologically social democratic. The article addresses two linked
questions.
First, how do political administrations sustain such cohesion as they do, over their
time in ofce? Here, cohesion means social relations of whatever form, notwithstanding
inevitable conicts, allowing sufcient mutual reliance to sustain minimally effective
collective action in governing. Maintaining cohesion is challenging. Throughout political
history, administrations have lost cohesion, sometimes so seriously as to weaken their
capacity to govern.
Second, how does cultivation of styles of political judgement by informal institutions (6
2011,2014a) shape capacities for cohesion? Research has shown that selective incentives for
equilibria, emphasized by collective action theory,are insufcient without institutions sus-
taining commitment among actors to particular ways of organizing (Lowndes and Roberts
2013). Institutions providing material incentives are often formal, explicit ones. Yet,when
selective incentives matter, informal institutions make this possible, by buttressing incen-
tives’ importance in ways that people are cultivated to think (Wildavsky 1994). Although
institutionalist research has shown informal institutions’ general connection with cogni-
tion (Thornton et al. 2012; Lowndes and Roberts 2013), and styles of cohesion, exchange
and power (Farrell and Héritier 2003; Helmke and Levitsky 2006), researchers have yet
adequately to theorize precise institutional dynamics that cultivate particular styles of
Perri 6 is in the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (1005–1022)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
1006 PERRI 6
thought and judgement and how, in turn, these reinforceinstitutions or elicit countervail-
ing processes to undermine cohesion.
Neo-Durkheimian institutional theory offers dynamics for explaining trajectories in
which contrasting types of cohesion are sustained or may be lost. Moreover, it argues
that particular institutional processes reinforce styles of thought which help both to
sustain and to undermine forms of cohesion. Three Durkheimian elements underpin
the argument. First, following Douglas (1982, 1992; Gross and Rayner 1985; Hood 1998),
Durkheim’s (1951) two dimensions of institutional variation – social regulation and
social integration – are cross-tabulated to identify distinct elementary forms of cohesion.
Second, Durkheim’s (1995) central argument that all social organization is fundamentally
ritual in its causal mechanism is extended, using Goffman’s (1967) and Collins’s (2004)
Durkheimian concept of ritual interaction orders in quotidian exchange. Third, con-
trary to the misconception that Durkheimian theory emphasizes normative consensus,
Durkheim (1957) argued that conict is a ritually ordered process by which institutional
pressures clash (Alexander 1988). Thus the power of functional explanations for con-
ict can be retained while avoiding structural-functionalism (Douglas 1986; 6 2014b).
A neo-Durkheimian conception of informal institutions as sets of practices enacted in
ritual is developed and recast as ritual interaction order. In government, these practices
are conducted through written exchanges as much as in face-to-face meetings, and so
documentary sources must be examined to understand how cohesion is institutionally
sustained.
INSTITUTIONS AND ELEMENTARY FORMS
Neo-Durkheiman arguments distinguish two levels of institutional analysis. Empirical
institutions vary vastly over history and geography. Elementary forms (Durkheim 1995),
by contrast, represent generic universal imperatives of institutional organization which
furnish basic structures for organizing and disorganizing in any setting (6 2014b). They
are rarely made explicit, unless practitioners adopt social scientic vocabularies.
Durkheim (1951) distinguished two basic organizing imperatives – namely, social regu-
lation, or the degree to which institutions constrain by roles, imperatives and constraints;
and social integration, or the degree to which institutions organize around bonds or mem-
bership in bounded groups. Douglas (1982) cross-tabulated these dimensions to dene the
neo-Durkheimian typology’s well-known four elementary forms (Douglas 1982; Thomp-
son et al. 1990) – namely, hierarchical (strong regulationand integration, where inequality
takes the form of superior and subaltern bound together in integrated rule-based status
systems: 6 2015a); individualistic (weak regulation and integration, where inequality takes
the form of patrons and claques of clients only bound together by transactionally driven
exchange); isolate (strong regulation, weak integration, where inequality may be between
structurally despotic gures, if any, and those in structural serf positions: 6 2015b); and
enclaved institutions (strong integration and weak external regulation, although regu-
lation is generated voluntarily from within – Rayner 1988 –where inequality is between
members and non-members). In loose mixes or settlements or in conict but in contrast-
ing relative weights of which the theory enables comparative analysis, combinations of
elementary forms will be found in most empirical settings, resulting from dynamic feed-
back processes whereby each form elicits counter-assertion from people reaching for other
forms. Moreover, in hybrids, rhetoric cultivated by one form may be ‘borrowed’ to serve
another’s institutional imperatives (Thompson et al. 1990).
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (1005–1022)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
To continue reading
Request your trial