This chapter illustrates the rise of automated decision-making and surveillance technologies in government, alongside the growing political inequality within Western liberal democracies. It examines the historical development of the use of technology in government, from paper-based systems to increasingly networked electronic systems, culminating in the extensive use of automation and AI in government. It demonstrates the effect of new technologies on vulnerable populations, honing in on social security as a case study. It shows that since the 1970s, the rapid advancements of technologies, combined with the “new public management” ideology, have effected fundamental changes in the processes, structures, staffing levels, and operations of government to an unprecedented extent. To illustrate the significant issues relating to the use of automated government decision-making, the chapter focuses on the government’s use of automation in social security as a case study.

‘Language policy’ is a highly diverse term, encompassing all attempts to purposefully influence language use. Government language policy is broadly considered to have originated as a distinct field of research and policymaking in the 1970s, but we begin the chapter with a historical review of its precursors dating back several centuries. We trace the roots of contemporary language policy to two broad historical developments: Bible translation and universal education. These laid the foundations for what would become language policy. In the contemporary language policy period, we divide our discussion across three fields: modern foreign languages (MFL), indigenous languages and community languages. These categorisations come from policy, not linguistics or sociology. These groups of languages are treated differently in policy, so we divide them accordingly and trace their origins and developments in three political eras from the 1970s onwards: neoliberalism (1970s–80s), New Public Management (1990s–2000s), and austerity (2008 onwards). We show how each field of language policy has been indelibly shaped and contoured by changing political conditions and priorities. Lastly, we consider forms of language that tend to fall outside the scope of government policy, and what extra this reveals about language policy.

Most ICC commentators are enthusiastic about the promise of management as a way to optimise the court’s performance. Yet few are as eager to historicise the practices they advocate. Chapter 2 seeks to read the court’s managerial present through its past deployments, journeys, and consequences for other institutional projects long predating the contemporary Rome Statute system. The chapter begins by tracing the uses of management in such institutions as the plantation, war, and the nineteenth-century factory before following them as they entered the practice of early international institutions. Beyond these spaces, a major part of management’s pre-history lies in its invocation at the United Nations after decolonisation. The chapter demonstrates that two of management’s key assumptions – regarding its lack of history and its claim to political neutrality – are only the ‘truth effects’ of protracted expert and political struggle within various institutional spaces. The most important of these for the ICC has been the United Nations, where management formed part of a counter-strategy against the democratisation efforts of newly decolonised states. Whilst purportedly neutral today, the management practices taken up at the ICC continue to bear the scars of these earlier political wins and losses.

This chapter reflects on how both Soviet and neoclassical economic doctrines impose a practice of ‘organised forgetting’: the omission and rejection of knowledge that does conform to the presumed ontology. In adopting the language of science, both Soviet and neoliberal ideologies would attack their political opponents as primitives, unschooled in their singular methods of reasoning. Neoliberalism, in particular, is neverthless more accurately understood as working against the scientific method, depending as it does on argument from abstract, de-historicized assumption, as distinct from evidence-based justification, theoretical review and adaptation. The chapter traces how neoclassical theory was translated into a political agenda for the New Right through the 1970s. It closes by introducing the neoliberal governmental toolkit of the New Public Management, and explains why, following the isomorphism in their forms of reasoning, NPM would recreate the Stalinist toolkit of quantification, output planning, targets and managerial ‘correct lines’, only now in capitalist form. The analytical foundations are thus set for the policy chapters that follow.

Contemporary educational reformers strive to balance education for some (elite knowledge workers) with education for all. British and Danish policymakers resolve this conflict in different ways that resonate with long-term cultural frames. British politicians applaud vocational education but devote few resources to it. Efforts to equalize schooling focus on rewarding winners from the working class, but these interventions do little to develop skills for nonacademic learners. Denmark devotes more resources to vocational education, yet reformers have problems meeting the contradictory needs of high and low-skill workers, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poorly educated. Cultural legacies echo in young people’s views of education in an internet survey of 2100 British and Danish young people. British respondents support national quality standards and uniform curricula more than Danish ones, who prefer individualized learning experiences. Danish students are happier with their educational experiences, support educational investments to strengthen society, and appreciate practical, real-life skills. Upper-secondary vocational education students are more likely to report obtaining useful skills than their British colleagues. Yet Danish NEETs feel shut out of the core economy and their exclusion may be more agonizing because it goes against the historical commitment to a strong society.

Opening with a brief sketch of the evolution of research evaluation is followed by a description of the publication-oriented nature of academia today. The Introduction provides the necessary contextual information for investigating research evaluation systems. It then defines two critical blind spots in the contemporary literature on research evaluation systems. The first is the absence, within histories of the science of measuring and evaluating research, of the Soviet Union and post-socialist countries. This is despite the fact that these countries have played a key part in this history, from its very inception. The second relates to thinking about global differences in studies of the transformations in scholarly communication. It is stressed that the contexts in which countries confront the challenges of the publish or perish culture and questionable journals and conferences should be taken into account in discussions about them. Through its overview of diverse histories of evaluation and its identification of core issues in the literature, the chapter introduces readers to the book’s core arguments.

This chapter examines the role of the administrative arm of government known as the bureaucracy, public service or civil service. The first section of the chapter charts the origins and development of bureaucracy as a model of organisation, which contrasts with the popular, and largely negative, understanding of the term. Turning to the Australian context, the chapter then provides an overview of the Australian federal bureaucracy, the Australian Public Service (APS). In explaining the bureaucracy’s role, the chapter outlines a key activity: policymaking. It examines definitions and stages of public policy, noting that in practice these stages represent an idealised understanding of the policy work of the bureaucracy. In reality, the world of policymaking is often chaotic, ad hoc and subject to opportunities and political leadership.

New public management reforms and modern policymaking are then placed in a broader context of a shift from government to governance that has taken place in recent decades. The chapter concludes by discussing the challenges the public service faces in the 21st century.

The introduction sets the scene for Articulating Security, providing a snapshot of post-Millennium global security under the aegis of the United Nations, and focusing on the organization’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. It explains that the principal intervention the book makes is to show that, even though this managerial security strategy has not been very effective in countering security threats, it is not without effect: specifically, it is affecting the ability of law to speak out against injustice. The Introduction sets out the three key interventions made in the book. First, it transplants Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power to a globalized and flexibilized twenty-first-century context. Second, it introduces the book’s key idea of infra-law, a concept that makes sense of the relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. Finally, it presents law with a stark choice between articulating security and articulating justice, arguing that law must relocate its force from authority to anger if it is to serve those rendered insecure by security measures.

A value reinforcement hypothesis expects that governance structures reinforce the values of the representative governments they serve.If a political system embraces pluralism and collective rationality as process values, its governance structures will enhance those process beliefs.If a government faces strong electoral accountability, its governance structures will emphasize accountability values, making identifiable managers likely to face sanctions for their performance.Correlations such as these would be observed if the hypothesis has potential for guiding a positive research agenda.The value reinforcement hypothesis has both institutional and behavioral mechanisms behind it.