A New World Order: Towards the Ideal-Type of Bureaucracy 2.0

Sammanfattning: In the ideal-type of bureaucracy, Max Weber outlined the creation of the modern state as an iron-cage of disenchantment and quantification. This thesis updates Weber’s ideal-type on the notion that the modern nation state is declining, and the large institutions with it. Based in an ideal-type of Michel Foucault’s Biopolitics, as Economization (a rational focus on quantitative measures), Individualization (focus on identity and repudiation of collectives), and Decentralization (multiplying competing actors and possible transactions), and the theory of Manuel Castells’ Network Society, the ideal-type of bureaucracy is updated to explain its role in contemporary Western society. On examples drawn from Swedish Government Official Reports an interpretation of bureaucracy as being transformed from an iron-cage into a VR-helmet emerges. This creates the interpretation that post-modernity is not the end of large narratives, but the naturalization of a market economy narrative, where the market is canonized from a perspective to a law of nature. This naturalizes the capitalist-liberal social, economical and political order of the market, and virtualizes or technologizes of control and domination in society. Over all, this thesis is a critique of the notion that contemporary western society experiences “post-bureaucracy”, which creates structures with more freedom and prosperity than the bureaucratic iron-cage of the modern age. Instead, an interpretation of contemporary bureaucracy as a possible means to the emergence of Weber’s “polar night of icy darkness” is advocated.