Abstract
In the famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the sovereign is shown to be a colossus composed of many people (see Gorski 2003). Erin Metz McDonnell’s key contribution in her impressive Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States is to show how the modern state—and especially, bureaucratically effective “pockets” within it—is constituted by ethical and practical variations in the bureaucratic lives of state agents. In so doing, she stands at the leading edge of one of the most promising lines of research in organizational sociology, the sociology of development, and the study of public administration. 1 This intellectual outlook shifts along multiple dimensions: away from states as homogeneous units to viewing them as organizational fields with more-or-less distinct internal and external boundaries; from discipline as a matter of policing principal-agent relations to creating positively selected organizational niches; and from thinking of bureaucracy as a set of self-enforcing rules to a flourishing ethos growing out of carefully cultivated micro-foundations.
The book avowedly undertakes “mid-level theorizing”; McDonnell carefully circumscribes an account of how pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness emerge. This emergence begins with a cadre of officials possessing a “dual habitus” (made in the “Goldilocks zone” [p. 169] of an elite indigenous university education coupled with a western secondary degree or professional experience) finding enough institutional shelter from neopatrimonial elite interference to gain control of an administrative unit’s hiring and firing capability. Given this power, the cadre is then able to aggressively recruit like-minded individuals (“clustered distinctiveness”), and if they reach a critical mass, they can crystallize a bureaucratic ethos. The perpetuation of this ethos takes ongoing protection of the organizational niche within the administration, as well as the reinforcement of the sense of pride and distinctiveness of its accomplishments. But if this is successful, the ethos may endure and even (eventually) diffuse elsewhere.
McDonnell sustains this theory by the careful, in-depth analysis that tacks between John Stuart Mill’s comparative methods of similarity and difference (p. 14) but enriches it through nested comparison. The empirical bulk of the book is made of deep fieldwork in four Ghanaian “success” stories: the government’s Policy Analysis and Research Division; its Commercial Courts; the Bank of Ghana; and Ghana’s National Communications Authority. To validate her analysis of Ghana’s administration, McDonnell pairs each of these successful cases with shorter fieldwork in less-effective units of the administration; and to test her theory’s generalizability, she extends the model to similar pockets of effectiveness in Kenya, Nigeria, (late-Qing) China, and Brazil. In a book that clocks in at a little over 200 pages, it is a wonder that Patchwork Leviathan provides a clear and insightful analysis of so many cases, while also showcasing outstanding ethnographic fieldwork.
No book can do it all, and neither does Patchwork Leviathan. For one thing, it takes largely for granted the existence of a coherent western, modern bureaucratic ethos that acculturates half of the dual habitus possessed by reformers (this is most directly addressed in Chapter 7, pp. 168–78). There are two extensions that might be worth pursuing here: first, to investigate the origins and distribution of this ethos (it seems likely that even in the West, this ethos is probably itself clustered in particular educated, professional, and middle-class institutional fields and positions); and second, to investigate the geopolitical order that allows such socialization to be salient, as opposed to, say, affiliation to one or another camp of geopolitical competition (as in the Cold War).
Another extension involves the suitability of the book’s theory to the analysis of current events. Patchwork Leviathan is explicitly and self-consciously a theory of the creation of bureaucratic effectiveness (and limited to developing states), and this embeds within its analysis an emphasis on the success or failure of pathways of organizational change. 2 By consequence, however, the theory is comparatively silent on how these pockets might survive moments of sustained attack on state administration. 3 One wonders, for instance, how the excellent analysis in Chapter Six might be repurposed to understand the dynamics of authoritarian populists in at least one powerful western state putting its administration through a demoralizing buzz saw.
Patchwork Leviathan is an exceptional book to think with. Indeed, because of its breadth of theoretical synthesis, perspicacity, and fine-grained empirical work, it will take a central place on the bookshelves and syllabi of anyone researching or teaching development, political sociology, the sociology of organizations, or the sociology of culture.