Table Of ContentPOLITICS AND
BUREAUCRACY IN
THE NORWEGIAN
WELFARE STATE
An Anthropological
Approach
HALVARD VIKE
APPROACHES
TO SOCIAL
INEQUALITY AND
DIFFERENCE
Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference
Series editors
Edvard Hviding
University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway
Synnøve Bendixsen
University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway
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Halvard Vike
Politics
and Bureaucracy
in the Norwegian
Welfare State
An Anthropological Approach
Halvard Vike
University College of Southeast
Norway
Porsgrunn, Norway
Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference
ISBN 978-3-319-64136-2 ISBN 978-3-319-64137-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64137-9
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A
cknowledgements
The current book draws on my ethnographic research in Norway car-
ried out over a time span of almost three decades. My experience is that
this research, involving participation and observation in a large number
of political and bureaucratic settings have been very rewarding, not only
in terms of getting access to relevant and interesting empirical material,
but also at a more personal level. I have become involved in many inter-
esting people who have been generous enough to open their worlds to
me, very often even in situations where they could easily have kept me
at a distance. To me, this seem to reflect a genuine sense of taking part
in similar projects—trying to share experiences, interact, seek insight and
develop knowledge for the sake of caring for the common good. Thus,
I thank all those who have generously shared with me during my field-
work project, without whom a book like this of course would have been
unthinkable.
Numerous colleagues have greatly inspired my research and the
ideas developed in this book. They are too many to list here, but it is
of great importance to me to mention the intellectual environment in
which I have been a part since 1990 (until 2014)—the Department of
Anthropology, University of Oslo. Most of my work has been strongly
inspired by colleagues there. Also, I want to thank the one per-
son who more than anyone else has contributed to forming me as an
v
vi ACkNOWLEDGEMENTS
anthropologist: David B. kronenfeld. My wife and colleague Heidi
Haukelien has provided invaluable inspiration and has been my main
professional collaborator for more than two decades. Without her, I
would not have been able to write this book.
Skien Halvard Vike
20 August 2017
c
ontents
1 Setting the Stage: In and Out of Institutions 1
2 No Direction Home? Doing Anthropology in Norway 31
3 The Politics of Universalism 51
4 The Welfare State and the Possibility of Solidarity 69
5 The Politics of Resistance 91
6 Borders, Boundaries, and Bureaucratic Reform 111
7 The Welfare Municipality: Universalism, Gender, and
Service Provision 133
8 Egalitarianism and Individual Autonomy in the Northern
European Periphery 157
9 Conclusions 177
Bibliography 183
Index 187
vii
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Stage: In and Out of Institutions
IntroductIon: the Problem And the PersPectIve
The present book explores how political mobilization from “below”
may influence the distribution and dynamics of power in the context of
a thoroughly bureaucratized, democratic state. The main case is Norway,
but the larger Scandinavian context is also analyzed in some detail.
My main objective is to try to understand the potential of horizontally
organized social relations for cutting across and challenging hierarchi-
cal chains of command and centralization of political and bureaucratic
power. This potential, I argue, is closely related to how motivations,
identities, and social relations formed in contexts where social agents
control largely informal resources that can be used to influence formal
institutions, and to some extent shape them. The “institutional ecology”
of the Norwegian welfare state, and the Scandinavian model more gener-
ally, seems to be characterized by a relative openness—or perhaps “insti-
tutional vulnerability” is a more apt expression—that to some extent
has made it possible to prevent elite seizure of political and bureaucratic
power. It seems to me that this phenomenon must play an important
role in any attempt to explain how and why the welfare state emerged in
the first place (Vike 2012, 2013; Stenius 2010).
In my perspective, two aspects stand out. First, political activity in
local politics in Norway is heavily influenced by the morality and prac-
tice of membership commitment in formal organizations. As I show in
this book, this seems to inspire an egalitarian social dynamic that imposes
© The Author(s) 2018 1
H. Vike, Politics and Bureaucracy in the Norwegian Welfare State,
Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64137-9_1
2 H. VIkE
limits on the autonomy of political and managerial elites, whose interests
are very often driven by the felt need to seek to establish more and bet-
ter control over what they tend to see as inefficient and/or unruly insti-
tutions. Second, the welfare state’s universalist orientation, the idea that
rights to entitlements and services are founded on citizenship rather than
on some highly specific criteria implying extensive means testing (kildal
and kuhnle 2005), seems to make it natural and easy to make strong
and legitimate claims on “the state,” and to challenge the autonomy and
rationality of elites. Universalism contributes heavily to make public ser-
vices “the heart of the state” (Fassin et al. 2013), and because so much
of both political legitimacy and trust in public institutions depends on
responsiveness to needs, the actual responsibility of public institutions
is very hard to define and delimit. And, because public institutions, the
municipalities in particular, “lack” clear-cut boundaries, they are rela-
tively open and, consequently, accessible to many interests other than
those of institutional elites that are supposed to control them from the
top. At the same time, this logic seems to provide the local, democrati-
cally controlled institutions of the state—municipalities—with much
more agenda-setting leverage than one would expect.
In sum, I call the unintended effects of these dynamics and conditions
“the low center of gravity state,” and argue that it is not some form of
“Scandinavian” cultural disposition that generates such effects, but rather
political mobilization and struggle of a particular type. By exploring such
processes ethnographically within their proper social, cultural, and his-
torical contexts, I seek to contribute to explaining why the Norwegian/
Scandinavian version of the welfare state experiment has not (yet) collapsed.
This endeavor has some analytical worth, as I see it, in the light of the
fact that welfare states of the type that defined the utopian post-World
War II horizon, and the vision of egalitarianism that formed part of it,
today seems to be deemed unattractive, unrealistic, or impossible. The
“low center of gravity state” metaphor seems appropriate insofar as it
denotes both public institutions as centers of political gravity (Iversen
and Soskice 2006), and the relatively decentralized and “messy” distribu-
tion of power within the institutional system. When the center of gravity
is relatively low, maneuverability increases.
My perspective is anthropological, and does not focus primarily on
how institutions ought to work according to some imaginary norma-
tive standard of rationality, but on how they are socially organized and
work in ways that tend to differ distinctly from such standards. In order
