Summary
Ilana Feldman’s term for the way Gazan civil servants’ habits of belief were formed and consolidated: not an absence of reflection, but deeply embedded contemplation on the nature of service — good and bad work, respectability and duty — that itself produced bureaucratic authority (Governing Gaza, PDF p.82-84 / printed p.65-67).
Details
- The bodily practices of bureaucratic work, such as filing and scripted interactions with the public, and its reflective practices, such as developing a sense of oneself as a public servant, are profoundly interconnected (PDF p.84 / printed p.67).
- Feldman follows Weber on habit permitting bureaucracies to persist through a change in regime and even the loss of files, and C. S. Peirce on habit as “either a habit of action or a habit of thought”, belief being a habit that shapes and provokes actions (PDF p.83 / printed p.66).
- Reflective habit was flexible: civil servants made different senses of their work as conditions changed, and such internal tensions could make habits adaptive rather than undermining them; doubt arose when tensions became crises (PDF p.107 / printed p.90).
- Civil servants managed the doubt politics produced through subterfuge and disassociation — distinguishing their service work from the government and its policies — which contributed to the consolidation of governmental authority and held questions of legitimacy in Abeyance (PDF p.99-101 / printed p.82-84).
Related pages
Governing Gaza, Reiterative authority, Bureaucratic competence, Abeyance, Gaza