Robotic Bureaucracy: Administrative Burden and Red Tape in University Research

This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as “robotic bureaucracy.” The rise of regulations and their contribution to administrative burden on university research have led university administrators to increasingly rely on robotic bureaucracy to handle compliance. This article draws on the administrative burden, behavioral public administration, and electronic communications and management literatures, which are increasingly focused on the psychological and cognitive bases of behavior. These literatures suggest that the assumptions behind robotic bureaucracy ignore the extent to which these systems shift the burden of compliance from administrators to researchers.     

Network of Networks: Preliminary Lessons from the Antwerp Port Authority on Crisis Management and Network Governance to Deal with the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this article, the authors describe and illustrate what they call a “network of networks” perspective and map the development of a lead network for the Antwerp Port Authority that governed organizations and networks in the port community before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that setting a collective focus and selective integration are crucial in the creation and reproduction of an effective system to adequately deal with a wicked problem like the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings on crisis management and network governance are used to engage practitioners and public policy planners to revisit the current design and governance of organizational networks within organizational fields that have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Belgian civil servants in the European Union: A tale of two cultures

This article analyses the performance of Belgian civil servants in the working groups of the European Council of Ministers. If one takes the evaluation by their peers and the success of their networking efforts as criteria, one has to conclude that they perform comparatively well. This is all the more surprising because these ‘Euro‐Belgian’ civil servants have been recruited and socialised into the vertical (bureaucratic) networks of the Belgian civil service before being transferred to the horizontal (negotiation) networks of the working groups. Their professional routines are of little use when making the transition and neither is their political culture, which proves to be ill adapted to their new work setting. In spite of these cultural and organisational handicaps they perform as well, sometimes even better than other civil servants in the working groups. Why? This question might be of some relevance to the functioning of the growing internationalised administration of the European Union.     

Email Fraud: Language,Technology, and the Indexicals of Globalisation

This paper investigates a corpus of email messages known as “419 scams”: a form of financial fraud in which huge offers of money are being made to people provided they pass on bank details and other personal information to the perpetrators. This kind of message presents us with a typical instance of “globalized” communication: they are produced in the margins of the world (the term “419 scam” is Nigerian) and sent to other places; they are electronically mediated; and they are written in varieties of “world languages”, mostly English. In the messages, authors claim particular identities and relationships, and have to do so using specific, generically regimented forms of communication. Investigating such forms yields a complex view of what it takes to communicate in a globalized environment: at least three different forms of communicative competence seem to be blended. First, authors require technological competence, the capacity to control, explore and exploit the communicative opportunities offered by global email systems. Second, they require cultural competence: they need some awareness of genres and genre expectations among their addressees in order to stand a chance of success. And thirdly, they need linguistic competence: the capacity to actually produce linguistic messages that are congruent with the projected identities and relationships in the transaction. We see that whereas the first two forms of competence appear to be well developed, the third is often problematic, yielding rich indexical signals pointing towards fraud. The genre of email fraud thus yields insights into the changing nature of communication in the age of globalization.     

The socio‐economic structure of European democracies

The article presents the findings of a factor analysis concerning socio‐economic structure and socio‐economic development in sixteen European democracies. The socio‐economic structure of these nations consists of three dimensions: level of affluence, level of industrialisation and degree of urbanisation. A prominent feature in the change of the contemporary social structure of Western Europe is the weakening of the relationship between affluence and industrialisation. Statements about the implications for political life of socio‐economic structure and socio‐economic development entering into theories about modernisation and social mobilisation may be clarified and tested only if socio‐economic concepts are made operational in terms of a set of indicators, the interaction between which can be stated by means of factor analysis and used in the construction of indices.     

More Money,Fewer Problems? Cross-Level Effects of Economic Deprivation on Political Representation

While equal political representation of all citizens is a fundamental democratic goal, it is hampered empirically in a multitude of ways. This study examines how the societal level of economic inequality affects the representation of relatively poor citizens by parties and governments. Using CSES survey data for citizens’ policy preferences and expert placements of political parties, empirical evidence is found that in economically more unequal societies, the party system represents the preferences of relatively poor citizens worse than in more equal societies. This moderating effect of economic equality is also found for policy congruence between citizens and governments, albeit slightly less clear-cut.     

Beyond ‘Terrorism’ and ‘State Hegemony’: assessing the Islamist mainstream in Egypt and Malaysia

International networks of Islamic ‘terrorism’ have served as the most popular explanation to describe the phenomenon of political Islam since the 11 September attacks. This paper argues that both the self-proclaimed doctrinal Islam of the militants and Western perceptions of a homogeneous Islamist threat need to be deconstructed in order to discover the often ambiguous manifestations of ‘official’ and ‘opposition’ Islam, of modernity and conservatism. As a comparison of two Islamic countries, Egypt and Malaysia, which both claim a leading role in their respective regions, shows, moderate Islamic groups have had a considerable impact on processes of democratisation and the emergence of civil society during the quarter century since the ‘Islamic resurgence’. Shared experiences like coalition building and active participation within the political system demonstrate the influence and importance of groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Youth Movement of Malaysia (abim) or the Islamic Party of Malaysia (pas). These groups have shaped the political landscape to a much larger extent than the current pre-occupation with the ‘terrorist threat’ suggests. The gradual development of a ‘culture of dialogue’ has rather revealed new approaches towards political participation and democracy at the grassroots level.     

The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: fantasies and realities

Most expert and public discourse on Middle Eastern water politics holds that water scarcities are of great, if often under-recognised, geopolitical importance. Pessimists and optimists alike tend to assume that water has, or soon will have, profound geopolitical implications. In this paper I argue to the contrary. Specifically, I contend that water problems should neither be understood in naturalistic nor in liberal?–?technical terms, but instead as questions of political economy; that water is structurally insignificant within the political economy of the modern Middle East; that in consequence water is generally unimportant as a source of inter-state conflict and co-operation; and that, notwithstanding this, water supplies are a crucial site and cause of local conflicts in many parts of the region. I submit also that given the worsening state of economic development within the Middle East, these local conflict dynamics are likely to further deteriorate.