The Post-Bureaucratic Age

Today I shall be attending the conference on the Post-Bureaucratic Age organised by Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov. The so called Post-Bureaucratic Age is one of the most important, but also most complicated for the doorstep and the grass roots in particular, aspects of the modern Conservative Party ideology and manifesto.

Quoting from the briefing paper for the conference:

In the Pre-bureaucratic age, before the emergence of mass communications, power was held locally. The central state simply lacked the means to reach into distant communities. The invention of the telegraph helped to bring about the bureaucratic age, when power shifted to the centre. Government no longer merely fought wars and set strategic directions, but began to command and control broad aspects of daily life. The genesis of the post-bureaucratic age lies in another technological leap forward: the internet. Society has moved from no mass communications to centralised mass communications to decentralised mass communications. Citizens can access information once limited to a centralised political class and enjoy a power to public that was one confined to an equally centralised media.

David Cameron focused on this idea in his talk to TED, where to steal someone else’s description, he effectively says that if knowledge is power and knowledge is now distributed then so should power be. I strongly recommend you watch his talk below.

 Programmes such as data.gov.uk and the Conservative pledge to publish all contracts over £25,000 are the beginning of this brave new age, but much more is needed. The conference today aims to develop a greater definition to what the PBA will look like and how it will work replacing some of the fuzziness with practical policies and approaches.

I’ll hopefully be tweeting and blogging throughout the day so keep an eye out.

Related Content