A Tangled Web: A network approach to the documentary practices of bureaucracies

Keywords: bureaucracy, the state, policy, networks
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Wednesday
Session Start / End Time: 4/7/2021 08:00 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/7/2021 09:15 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 53

Abstract

Existing research on the documentary practices of bureaucracies has focused on the substantive and discursive content of these documents, their material characteristics, and the process by which they are produced and circulate across the various tiers of government. In this paper, I propose a network methodology that extends existing concerns with process while also examining the structure of policy as an emergent property of relations between these documents. I focus on a particular type of bureaucratic document, the “Government Order” (GO). GOs are “subordinate legislations” periodically issued by Indian bureaucracies to guide the implementation of statutes and policies. A defining feature of GOs are their citational practices, which I use to form a citation network. Here the core analytic unit is neither policy as an undifferentiated whole nor individual documents, but rather the relations between documents and the patterns that emerge from these connections. I analyze the network that has emerged from over 2000 GOs issued by Department of Water Conservation in the western Indian state of Maharashtra between 2010-2020. As a representation of policy in the making, I examine the structure of this network and the changes that it has undergone to explore the changing dynamics of policy.