Ordinary The Extraordinary by Pieke

Author:Pieke [Pieke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136167546
Google: lpUrBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-12T03:41:14+00:00

In the longer term, this development may very well lead to a gradual breakdown of the monopolies held by actors in the bureaucratized and personalized spheres. Cadres and patrons will have to compete with each other to offer their services to market sphere actors who have the money to pay for them. Bureaucratic services will be for sale more and more openly. The monopolies controlled by bureaucratic actors will be interesting mainly because they are equivalent to a certain amount of money, obtained through bribes, special perks, and privileged access to scarce goods which can be sold on the market. Everybody who has money will be able to buy bureaucratic or personal favours, because it is no longer necessary to be able to offer other favours in return. Opportunities will therefore not be limited any more to people who are willing to offer themselves as permanent clients, or to those who control scarce resources or favours thanks to their bureaucratic status or position in a guanxi network. Money will have provided corruption and favouritism with a universal currency.

Gradually, the market sphere is penetrating the bureaucratic and personalized spheres, making them more transparent and accessible to insiders and outsiders alike. Corruption, official profiteering, smuggling, using the black market and the like are therefore only aberrations from the perspective of the bureaucratic and personalized spheres. Viewed from the angle of market sphere actors, it is an important development in the growth and surreptitious emancipation of the market sphere in a situation where the bureaucratic sphere is unwilling to yield its monopolies and ideological dominance.

It is not just by increasing the scope of the abuse of position that money has devastating effects on the morality of the personalized and the bureaucratized sphere. People who are for sale lose face because they perform services for somebody without any moral obligation compelling them to do so, for instance because it is their job or because the other person is a friend or relative. Such an official helps somebody else not out of a sense of duty or the acknowledgement of a moral debt, but simply out of greed. Money is shattering the moral discourses of official duty and impartiality, and of reciprocity and gift-giving. There is no other discursive basis for action than sheer greed. In this sense, widespread corruption has made the entire bureaucratized sphere lose face collectively, changing the communist party’s socialist ideology and principled particularism into a very transparent excuse for self-serving behaviour.

The intention of the reforms was to provide a long-term solution for the chronic problems of a bureaucratized society by selectively allowing a market sphere to occupy the gaps the plan could not fill. However, I hope to have demonstrated that such a ‘third road’, as the Hungarian sociologist Ivan Szeleny has called it (Szeleny 1988), is fraught with contradictions.

By fragmenting life into three very different spheres, the reforms have created a profound sense of moral crisis. Old patterns of behaviour increasingly come under attack from the party and the

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