Performance bureaucracy functions as discipline, not efficiency improvement

Evidence

Given that this clearly does not increase efficiency, we need to see it as a disciplinary mechanism, an ideological, ritualising system. If you are a teacher sitting at home filling in lots of forms full of quasi-business rhetoric, you are not going to teach a better lesson the next day. In fact, if you just watched TV and relaxed, you would probably be better equipped in that regard. But the authorities are not idiots: they know this; they know they are not really increasing your performance. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1659

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the professional-targets critique also found in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. — connects to: Surveillance-based grading audits bureaucratic compliance, not actual performance — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 104; Bureaucracy expands through technical superiority over other organizational forms; Managerialist bureaucracy works as intended by weakening labour and worker autonomy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1493 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern discipline differs by fine-grained task specification, not by punishment severity #expands (0.85) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 150
• Bureaucracy replaces moral language with loyalty-duty-discipline vocabulary #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 457
• Modern bureaucracy reimagined citizens as regulated particles in a machine #expands (0.80)
• Disciplines function as machinery for capitalizing and accumulating time #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 239
• Bureaucratic killing efficiency requires emotional neutrality, not enthusiasm #qualifies (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 698
• Bureaucracy expands through technical superiority over other organizational forms #complicates (0.75)
• Managerialist bureaucracy works as intended by weakening labour and worker autonomy #expands (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1493