Perfecting the machine: Instrumental rationality and the bureaucratic ideologies of the state

Bureaucracy represents the most consistent effort to apply science and instrumental rationality to the control of human behavior. Recent studies of the sociology of science have undermined the positivist distinction between science and ideology and revealed the role of human interests in the ‘social construction’ of all forms of knowledge. This provides a basis for understanding the ideological character of the discourses of science and expertise, discipline and control, anti‐politics and depoliticization which characterize the forms of professional knowledge practiced in modern bureaucracies. Such ostensibly objective and disinterested knowledge obscures the contradictions and conflicts of social structure and maintains existing distributions of wealth and power. Other accounts of reality, reflecting the experience of dominated groups, are silenced by the claims of scientific expertise. However, bureaucratic ideologies cannot comprehend or deal with the ‘great issues’ of politics which continue to disrupt efforts to control human institutions.