The Social Life of Regulation in Taipei City Hall: The Role of Legality in the Administrative Bureaucracy

Abstract

This article explores the role of legality in conceptions of state and society among bureaucrats in the Taipei, Taiwan city government. When administrators confront the global arena, the existence of law emblematizes modernity and the ability to participate in the international system. In interactions among administrators, law is laden with impossible ideals and fraught with assumptions of hypocrisy. In dealings with people outside the government, legality often signals the breakdown of other, more valuable social norms. Far from legitimating administrative action, legality itself is legitimated by reference to the same values as other social action: it is held up to an ideal of consensus and cultural coherence and judged by its ability to fulfill obligations and nurture relationships. Law does not hegemonically structure administrators’ conceptions of state and society. Rather, it defines one aspect of governance at the margins of legitimacy, dependent on justification through other ethical norms.

Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy

“…The city administrators I worked with identified the return of popular mayoral elections to Taipei in 1994 as the turning point for their profession (Bernstein , 944) . As an appointed official, one section head explained, “you don't care whether [the public] supports you, [but those who] depend on the public for votes … have to listen to it.”…”

“…My coworkers compared our department favorably to departments in other cities and other times, whose administrators were said to be more “bureaucratic” ( guanliao 官僚), meaning lazy, obstructionist, and hierarchical; “harder” ( ying 硬), meaning nitpicky and legalistic; and more “traditional” ( chuantong 傳統), meaning corrupt. The need to show the public that the department had moved beyond these martial‐law‐era traits came up regularly in discussions of policy implementation, which was universally understood to require negotiation and consensus‐creation (Bernstein ).…”

“…Members of the emerging opposition often pointedly spoke Taiwanese in public settings, strove to increase people's awareness of Taiwanese (rather than Chinese) history and culture, and generally tried to reverse the KMT-imposed value hierarchy, which valorized indexes of the mainland, like Mandarin. In keeping with this push, increasing avenues for popular participation in state institutions have gone hand in hand with the promotion of localism as both a goal of, and a legitimating basis for, political action (Bernstein 2006;Chuang 2005;Huang 1995). The history of Taiwan is now taught in schools, and Taiwanese is allowed in all settings, sometimes taught in schools, and often used in political proceedings.…”

“…88For the importance of cooperation and consensus to political action in Taiwan, see Bernstein (). In a related vein, Jeffrey Martin describes one aspect of political legitimation in Taiwan as “self‐consciously … organized by values of intimate solidarity defined in explicit opposition to abstract legal principles” (, 616).…”

The Magic of the Populace: An Ethnography of Illegibility in the South African Immigration Bureaucracy

“…But while an understanding of the polymorphous and mysterious nature of the state opens up exciting possibilities for future scholarship, I offer here a reminder that localized practices of the state are not inherently magical or unknowable. Because relatively few ethnographies of the state have been methodologically situated to depict its internal functionings, students of the state have been left with little appreciation for how state functionaries perceive their actions or the public with which they interact (see Hull 2003 and Bernstein 2008 for exceptions). In what ways does this perspectival bias color our interpretation of the state?…”