Exercising knowledge of costs: behavioural politics of economic restraint in French public service reform
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Exercising knowledge of costs: behavioural politics of economic restraint in French public service reform Marie Alauzen1,2 · Fabian Muniesa1 · Alexandre Violle1 Revised: 26 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract The tropes of restraint and remediation that accompany the reform of public services and public administrations often locate in efficient costing the key to the state’s economic fitness. Knowledge of costs does not feature in such reforms solely as information conducive to the strengthening of budgetary reform. It is also knowledge that needs to be practised and exercised in order to achieve a virtuous modification of the conduct of the state. The case of public hospitals and universities in France illustrates how knowledge of costs is made sense of by state practitioners as a behavioural lever. A Foucauldian angle on the narratives and policies that inform such exercising of knowledge of costs reveals the contours of a new paradigm of the state’s self-care. Keywords State reform · Public service · Costs · Behavioural paradigm · Governmentality · France
Introduction In his comprehensive analysis of recent reform rationales in public administrations in France, Philippe Bezes (2002, 2009) makes suggestive use, after Dominique Séglard (1992), of an expression that carries intriguing Foucauldian connotations. He locates in ‘the state’s care of the self’—‘le souci de soi de l’État’—the * Fabian Muniesa fabian.muniesa@mines‑paristech.fr Marie Alauzen marie.alauzen@telecom‑paris.fr Alexandre Violle alexandre.violle@mines‑paristech.fr 1
Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, CNRS, UMR 9217, Mines ParisTech, PSL University, 60 Boulevard Saint‑Michel, 75006 Paris, France
2
Département Sciences Économiques et Sociales, CNRS, UMR 9217, Télécom Paris, 19 Place Marguerite Perey, 91120 Palaiseau, France
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distinguishably reflexive condition that best characterizes the governmental focus on the regulation of public administration itself. The literal expression is in fact nowhere to be found in Foucault’s published work, as far as we can tell. This does not preclude it, however, from affording productive interpretive potentials. It connects indeed efficaciously the Foucauldian inquiry on the genealogies of contemporary forms of governmental technologies, or ‘governmentality’ (2008, 2009), to that on the art of the production of subjectivity (2005, 2010). The state—that is, the complex of administrative apparatuses, juristic identifications and political processes that go by that name—often appears in contemporary vernacular accounts as something whose prime act of government consists in reforming itself. This is certainly the case of France, as pertinently documented in the literature (Bezes 2009; Saint-Martin 2010). But the ‘reform of the state’ has been consistently displayed as a governmental motto in recent decades in countless other cases (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000; Hood et al. 1999). Following the interpretive trail opened by this idea means indeed analysin
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