Politics and Bureaucracy in the Norwegian Welfare State: An Anthropological Approach PDF
Preview Politics and Bureaucracy in the Norwegian Welfare State: An Anthropological Approach
POLITICS 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 The book series contributes a wealth of new perspectives aiming to denaturalize ongoing social, economic and cultural trends such as the processes of ‘crimigration’ and racialization, fast-growing social-eco- nomic inequalities, depoliticization or technologization of policy, and simultaneously a politicization of difference. By treating naturalization simultaneously as a phenomenon in the world, and as a rudimentary ana- lytical concept for further development and theoretical diversification, we identify a shared point of departure for all volumes in this series, in a search to analyze how difference is produced, governed and reconfigured in a rapidly changing world. By theorizing rich, globally comparative eth- nographic materials on how racial/cultural/civilization differences are currently specified and naturalized, the series will throw new light on crucial links between differences, whether biologized and culturalized, and various forms of ‘social inequality’ that are produced in contempo- rary global social and political formations. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14775 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 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948306 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Holger Hill/GettyImages Cover design by Akihiro Nakayama Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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
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