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Digitalisation of adult education management
and hyper-bureaucracy
Digitalización de la gestión de la educación de adultos y
hiperburocracia
Licínio C. Lima
Instituto de Educação da Universidade do Minho (Portugal)
llima@ie.uminho.pt
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0899-7987
Abstract: Resumen:
This essay problematises the digitalisation of
adult education management, including
elements such as digital learning,
technological applications for teaching and
learning, management, evaluation, electronic
platforms of various kinds, as well as software
aimed at inscribing the universe of adult
education in digital world. In terms of
governance and management, one of the
promises of digitalisation is to reduce
bureaucracy. New post-bureaucratic
educational organisations would guarantee
more freedom, flexibility and choice for adult
learners. However, this scenario will be
analysed based on a working hypothesis that
associates the use of digital machines to
govern and organise adult education with the
emergence of processes of high
rationalisation and formalisation, in an
interpretation based on the Weberian theory
of bureaucracy. Although it is accepted that
the platformisation of adult education contains
democratic potential, the text focuses
Este ensayo problematiza la digitalización de la
gestión de la educación de adultos, incluyendo
elementos como la aprendizaje digital, las
aplicaciones tecnológicas para la enseñanza y
el aprendizaje, la gestión, la evaluación, las
plataformas electrónicas de diversos tipos, así
como el software destinado a inscribir el
universo de la educación de adultos en el mundo
digital. En términos de gobernanza y gestión,
una de las promesas de la digitalización es
reducir la burocracia. Las nuevas
organizaciones educativas posburocráticas
garantizarían más libertad, flexibilidad y
capacidad de elección a los estudiantes adultos.
Sin embargo, este escenario será analizado a
partir de una hipótesis de trabajo que asocia el
uso de máquinas digitales para gobernar y
organizar la educación de adultos con la
emergencia de procesos de alta racionalización
y formalización, en una interpretación basada en
la teoría weberiana de la burocracia. Aunque se
acepta que la plataformización de la educación
de adultos contiene un potencial democrático, el
This work is funded by CIEd – Research Centre on Education of the Institute of Education of the University of
Minho (UID/01661), through national funds of FCT/MCTES-PT, namely the Pluriannual Program for the
Funding of R&D Units.
Recibido: 26/12/2024 | Revisado: 31/01/2025 | Aceptado: 25/02/2025 |
Online First: 01/06/2025 | Publicado: 30/06/2025
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18
attention on the processes of digital
domination and rational-informational
authority. Formal rationality has the capacity
to produce algorithmic decisions,
unprecedented forms of control and
surveillance, typical of what the author calls
hyper-bureaucracy. The dilemma is that
without digitalisation processes we can hardly
move forward in adult education as in other
fields, but with it we run the risk of moving
backwards in human, democratic, and
emancipatory terms.
Keywords: Adult education; Governance;
Digital platforms; Bureaucracy; Hyper-
bureaucracy.
texto centra la atención en los procesos de
dominación digital y de autoridad racional-
informacional. La racionalidad formal tiene la
capacidad de producir decisiones algorítmicas,
formas de control y vigilancia sin precedentes,
propias de lo que el autor denomina
hiperburocracia. El dilema es que sin procesos
de digitalización difícilmente podremos avanzar
en la educación de adultos como en otros
campos, pero con ella corremos el riesgo de
retroceder en términos humanos, democráticos
y emancipatorios.
Palabras clave: Educación de adultos;
Gobernanza; Plataformas digitales; Burocracia;
Hiperburocracia.
Introduction
The perspective adopted in this essay is one of problematisation of the process
of digitalisation of adult education, starting from an initial position that rejects the
demonisation of new information technologies, digital management, automatic
decision-making machines, and generative Artificial Intelligence. These are all
amazing human creations, many of which have been available and in use for some
time, without which it would no longer be possible to operate and solve problems in
certain areas. In some fields, advances with enormous potential for human
development, for example in medicine are expected.
That said, if this text does not demonise the so-called ‘digital revolution’, it never
naturalises it through a naïve position, accepting without critical examination the epic
and grandiloquent discourses of a new digital marvel that supposedly would float in
the clouds, beyond specific agendas and interests, out of power relations and political
choices. What it is affirmed here, without ignoring the democratic potential of digital
machines, is that machines that impact on adult education, subordinated to technical
reason, to the control and surveillance of pedagogical practices, with the capacity to
extend these actions to all areas of educational practice, rationalising and formalising
all processes - pedagogical, relational, curricular, evaluative, didactic, organisational,
and managerial - will be hyper-bureaucratic machines without parallel in the history of
adult education. At this point in time, even without considering the future impacts, for
example in the classroom, of facial recognition technologies, among others of sensory
recognition and tracking of movements and actions in different digital environments,
hyper-bureaucratic machines and new forms of digital domination present
unprecedented risks for democracy and for the education of adults as a practice of
freedom and a process of humanising human beings (Freire, 1967; 1997).
To paraphrase Shoshana Zuboff, (2019) we may be facing an era of
surveillance adult education, with the aggravating factor that we will not even be talking
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about education, but more plausibly about changes in behaviour associated with skills
considered to be of high instrumental value. A context in which the training,
conditioning, inculcation and programming of human beings would result from
processes of personal optimisation and isomorphic adaptation by new ‘machine
appendages’, now digital machines infinitely more intelligent than when that
expression began to be used as a critique of capitalist production.
It is crucial to start by observing that the fall of bureaucracy as a type of
organisation that “gradually penetrated all social institutions”, according to the
expression of Nicos Mouzelis (1975, p. 18), was prematurely announced. The
discourses guaranteeing the emergence of post-bureaucratic organisation and
governance, as an alternative capable of overcoming many of the characteristics that
Max Weber (1964) brought together in the constellation of dimensions that he called
‘bureaucracy’ (as a sociological concept), have also proved premature. In its purest
form, the “bureaucratic administrative framework” is made up of appointed officials
who act according to ten criteria (Weber, 1964, pp. 333-334): 1) officials are
individually free and are only subject to authority as far as the impersonal exercise of
their official duties is concerned; 2) they are organised in a clearly defined hierarchy
of posts; 3) each post has a clearly defined sphere of competence, in the legal sense;
4) the post is filled through a free contractual relationship, and there is, in principle,
free selection; 5) candidates for the post are selected on the basis of their technical
qualifications and, in the most rational case, through examinations or the guarantee of
diplomas certifying technical training, and are appointed, not elected; 6) they are
remunerated through fixed salaries in cash, in most cases with the right to pensions,
and salaries are differentiated according to category, and may also include the criteria
of the responsibility of the post and social status, and the official is free to resign; 7)
the post is treated as the only, or at least the main occupation carried out by the official;
8) the post is part of a career path, with a system of promotion according to seniority
or performance, or both, depending on the assessment of superiors; 9) the official
works entirely separately from the ownership of administrative resources and without
ownership of his/her post; 10) his/her performance in the post is subject to strict and
systematic discipline and control.
The radicalisation of some of the organisational dimensions of bureaucracy -
according to the theorisation of the German sociologist - and particularly of its power
and speed, through informational flows, are signs that justify admitting hyper-
bureaucracy as a working hypothesis. In this case, it will be a question of an increase
in bureaucracy, the result of a process of hybridisation that sometimes loses,
sometimes maintains, certain features of Weberian bureaucracy, eventually
associating new dimensions to the original ‘ideal type’, which acquires new and
broader dimensions; complex properties of extension and control, among others,
induced by a digital bureaucracy, or cyber-bureaucracy.
The hypothesis of hyper-bureaucracy, especially reinforced by technological
changes capable of providing it with greater intensity and scope, greater reliability and
capacity for rational calculation, greater speed, proves to be compatible with the logic
of modernisation and the respective valorisation of technical-instrumental rationality.
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Studied and criticised by Weber, the rationalisation inherent in modern society
and in public and private organisations of all kinds - companies, states, churches,
political parties, clubs, trade unions (Weber, 1964, p. 330) - would imply an
“irreversible expansion of bureaucracy” (Beetham, 1988, p. 86) or, in the words of
Martin Albrow (1970, p. 45), the certainty that “rational bureaucracy was bound to
increase in importance”. The hypothesis of an increased and radicalised bureaucracy
in some of its dimensions, favoured by the use of new technologies, is entirely
compatible with the thinking expressed by Weber, for whom capitalism – “modern
rational capitalism”, as he called it in his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (Weber, 1983) - constituted the most rational economic basis for the
development of bureaucracy, and for large-scale bureaucratic management, further
served by conditions of communication and transport that would increase its precision
and efficiency in terms of operation, requiring for this purpose “railway, telegraph and
telephone services”, and becoming increasingly dependent on them (Weber, 1964, p.
339).
The technical-instrumental superiority of bureaucratic organisation - which will
lead the author of Economy and Society to declare that he knew of no real alternative
- “In the field of management, there is only a choice between bureaucracy and
dilettantism” -, as he stated (Weber, 1964, p. 337) - is associated with an axiological
framework that rejects subjectivity, feelings and emotions, in order to subordinate
everything to rational calculation.
In any case, the association so common today, between state or public
management and bureaucracy, and between business or private initiative and
innovation that overcomes bureaucratic organisation, does not make sense from a
sociological perspective, as well as in the light of empirical research on industrial
bureaucracy (Gouldner, 1964). For Weber, both spheres shared the incessant search
for the ‘optimum’, the optimal relationship between means and ends, within the more
general framework of an economic rationality which is, after all, an indelible mark of
modern capitalism and of ‘Americanisation’ as processes of economic, managerial and
organisational rationalisation and formalisation.
The digitisation of adult education and the machines for its governance and
management
As far as adult education is concerned, the process of its digitalisation, which
will be related here to the Weberian concept of bureaucracy, started a few decades
ago, including, in particular, distance education and digital learning, technological
applications for teaching and learning, management, evaluation and inspection,
electronic platforms of various kinds, as well as software specifically aimed at
inscribing the universe of adult education in the so-called digital world.
International organisations refer, most of the times in epic tones, to the digital
revolution, as well as to the demands of the digital transition, with adult education and
vocational training systems responsible for producing digital skills that are seen as a
driver of economic and social development. This is the case, for example, of the
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European Union (2020), which in its action plan for digital education (2021-2027)
draws attention to the urgency of applying digital technologies to education, learning,
and leadership, through applications, platforms and software, an urgency that was
reinforced by the pandemic. The OECD (2024, p.3) highlights the benefits of Artificial
Intelligence to “improve the welfare and wellbeing of people, contribute to positive
sustainable global economic activity, increase innovation and productivity, and help to
key global changes”. However, it does not refer to the risks inherent to Artificial
Intelligence but only to “challenges”, even when referring to outputs, such as
“prediction, content recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or
virtual environments” (OECD, 2024, p .7). UNESCO (2019, p. 6) also focuses more
on solutions than on problems, mentioning the creation of learning solutions, the
improvement of learning outcomes and its personalisation, intelligent tutoring systems,
education management. Teaching English to 600,000 students “at the cost of a single
teacher” and developing a “superteacher capable of answering million simultaneous
questions from students”, are some of the examples presented from the Chinese
experience. UNESCO also highlights the role of the EdTech industry as a main
innovation actor, mentioning several companies such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill, IBM,
Knewton, Smart Parrow, Cerego, Coursera, which “are advancing in the introduction
of adaptive learning through intelligent algorithms that use Big Data to personalise
learning” (UNESCO, 2019, p. 26). These policy documents tend to assume a certain
technological determinism, from training and skills instruments to the macro level
reform of the state, the network global governance, and the strategic role of public-
private partnerships.
The critical study of generative Artificial Intelligence implications for adult
education, including teaching strategies, learning materials, assessment of students,
assigning tasks to individual students, personalized feedback to teachers and
students, curriculum design (Milana, Brondi, Hodge and Hoggan-Kloubert, 2024)
appears in other studies under the logic of the skills deficits of adult educators and the
urgent need to “replace the traditional andragogical model of adult training” in order to
take all the advantages of Artificial Intelligence and of machine learning, natural
language processing, data mining, neural networks, algorithms, and other typical
elements of the “intelligent society” (Storey and Wagner, 2024, p. 2), again based on
technological determinism (formal rationality) over the substantive thinking and the
practices of adult education (material rationality).
The fourth industrial revolution is underway and affects all human activities and
institutions, from the digital state and e-governance to e-management, ensuring the
modernisation and dematerialisation of the administrative phenomenon, promising its
de-bureaucratisation, greater democratic openness to citizens, transparency, high
efficiency and quality, greater access, decentralisation and participation of the
administered. The uses of generative Artificial Intelligence and robotics, 5G, the
Internet of Things, and even facial recognition technologies, will change, and are
already changing, institutions and social relations, organisations and modes of
governance, the exercise of power, and certainly also schools and universities,
research centres, and adult education institutions. School textbooks, students’
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notebooks, teachers’ reports, tests and assessment processes, individualised
teaching materials, technologically mediated courses and materials, financial and
people management, career development, lifelong learning programmes and
continuing education, are some of the most visible examples.
The benefits claimed are considered, and will be much more so in the future,
formidable, especially concerning generative Artificial Intelligence. What apparently
more rigorous and rapid objectivity could exist today, in the information society, than
that which proves capable of replacing, at least partially, professionals specialised and
subject to rational rules, with new computer machines produced by the hyper-industrial
society and economy (Harris, 2001, pp. 693-697)?
The line of work adopted here criticises managerialist promises of de-
bureaucratisation, admits the continuing relevance of rational-legal authority and its
possible transmutation into rational-informational authority, served by information and
communication technologies and their respective instruments of digital control and
surveillance. In other words, it seeks to draw attention to the need to study new forms
of digital domination of adult educational organisations and management, which may
result in an augmented bureaucracy.
Why should we abandon the Weberian idea of the superiority of bureaucratic
organisation in purely technical terms, precisely when its intensification is
computationally possible? There are sufficient reasons to admit, following the German
sociologist, that if a bureaucratic mechanism was for large-scale organisations and
management what the machine was for manufacturing by non-mechanical methods,
so it will also be for digital management in the information society. In both cases we
will be facing the predominance of instrumental values and technical reason (which
Weber called formal rationality), with greater risks of dehumanisation, of the eventual
replacement of the dictatorship of the bureaucrat by the dictatorship of the platform,
or of facing a new bureaucracy in which the iron cage criticised by Weber could now
give way to an electronic cage. The technologies of speed and acceleration,
calculation and measurement, recording and management of large masses of data
allow for new instruments of regulation and control, the erosion of democracy, the
recentralisation of heteronomous educational and administrative decisions.
New Public Management, digitalisation and de-bureaucratisation
Now considered to be slow and costly, typical of the state and of public
organisations and management, bureaucracy could only be overcome by adopting
market principles and private management. Ignoring the fact that the market and
companies were, to a large extent, the cradle of bureaucratic domination in the
Weberian sense, just as they are today the propitious contexts for its projection and
exponential intensification. But the enterprise, apparently uncontaminated by
bureaucratic dimensions, began to present itself as an archetype of innovation and
modernisation of public management, a reformist vector that resulted in the critically
designated “managerial state” (Clarke and Newman, 1997, p. 65): the new
management would defeat the old regime of power, which was based on bureaucracy,
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professionalism and political representation. Thus, although syncretic and fragmented,
the new rationalisation of public management, including educational management,
was proposed paradoxically on the base of the assimilation of practices of private
management and of an entrepreneurial spirit presented as capable of regenerating the
public domain. As if private organisations constituted a rational, efficient and effective
universe in terms of economy and optimisation of resources and, at the same time,
free of bureaucratic dimensions or synonymous with post-bureaucracy.
Theories generally known under the ambiguous designation of New Public
Management (Hood, 1991), have influenced reforms of the state, public management
and its organisations, presenting regulatory alternatives, modes of delivery, new
instruments of action, public-private partnerships and other forms of contractualism.
In the case of education, the quality of public organisations could only be achieved
through the modernisation of schools, universities, adult education centres, etc. The
solution would lie in new management and new leaders to reform education,
rationalise the organisations and guarantee their quality and performativity, in the
image of private companies. Reinventing Government, New Public Management, New
Governance (see, among others, Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Gore, 1996; Salamon,
2000) have become important references for educational reforms, critically called
managerialist reforms, given the centrality attributed to companies and management
instruments presented under the sign of post-bureaucracy (see, for example, the
critiques of Smyth, 2011; Verger and Normand, 2015; Ranson, 2016).
The work of John Chubb and Terry Moe (1990), published in the United States
of America, is considered as a seminal work of the new managerialism in education.
There, democratic control is associated with bureaucracy and the loss of autonomy by
schools; autonomy and competitiveness with high performance; leadership of
principals with school success; choice and vouchers with decisive reform against
school bureaucracy. The replacement of state control and the role of professional
educators by control exercised by families, who can express their free choices as
customers, represents a key management proposal in neoliberalism.
The promise to reduce bureaucracy, one of the central themes of New Public
Management, was associated from the beginning with the digitalisation of governance
and management. Indeed, digitalisation has had a major impact on public
management and has led to the dematerialisation of its processes, in terms of e-
governance. However, it would be fallacious to conclude that such dematerialisation
has guaranteed the promised reduction of bureaucracy or the emergence of post-
bureaucratic organisations Firstly, because domination of a rational-legal kind is
institutionalised, having resulted from long-standing socially constructed processes of
rationalisation, historically and culturally embedded, articulated with the development
of capitalism, moulded in the legal and normative structures of liberal democracies.
Bureaucratic organisations as modern instruments, and especially in sectors such as
education and health, have proven to be inescapable, as they do not do without
specialised professionals, even when they are subject to widespread criticism and
intense scrutiny (Lane, 2000, p. 21). Secondly, dematerialisation, the use of computer
platforms and other digital devices have realised several dimensions of bureaucracy
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that only fast and reliable devices could achieve, aiming at universal rules, uniformity
and standardisation, objectivity, calculation and measurement, surveillance and
remote control over actors. Finally, technical and instrumental rationality is expanding
without precedent, making use of information technologies, of flattened organisational
structures, of centralised planning and decentralised operations, of the use of written
and formal rules digitally inscribed on platforms, of digital modes of supervision which,
in global terms, are hybrid and apparently contradictory, but which, nevertheless, have
not prevented research from refuting the thesis of a break with organisational
bureaucracy (e. g. Dellagnelo and Machado-da-Silva, 2000). The complexity and
hybridisation of political and administrative reforms suggest that the new
managerialism has proved to be quite influential, although subject to different
appropriations, never independent of the contexts of reception, and that is why the
concept of “neo-Weberian state” was developed by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011), and
that Farrell and Morris (2003) refer to the “neo-bureaucratic state”.
Bureaucratic organisation and management have changed considerably, it is
true, but they are far from extinction. The widespread digitalisation and the
dematerialisation of administrative processes did not guarantee the reduction of
bureaucracy. Electronic platforms were included in the process of increasing
regulation of adult education by digital means (what could be called digital regulation),
and it can be admitted that rational-legal authority was not dethroned but is expanding
and possibly transforming as a form of rational-informational domination. Digital
platforms as “policy instruments” (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007) are also defining
problems and solutions in adult education through mechanisms such as datafication,
commodification, and governance, in search of new education imaginaries and the
optimisation of learning experiences (Karges and Kalenda, 2024, pp. 104-106).
Electronic platforms and rational-informational authority
Indeed, platforms have progressively penetrated the field of education
organisation and management practices. The research by Catalão and Pires
inventoried around two dozen computer platforms made available by the Portuguese
Ministry of Education, tools that the authors considered as instruments for regulating
school organisation and management. Several respondents in that study did not fail
to refer to “instruments of bureaucratic intensification”, including adult education
programmes located in regular schools (Catalão and Pires, 2020, p. 101). Regular
schools whose principals considered that the prominence of electronic platforms
functioned as an instrument of control and as an obstacle to the exercise of pedagogic
autonomy (Lima, Sá and Silva, 2020, p. 45).
The digital management of schools, adult education centres, and higher
education institutions is in an accelerated process of implementation, through the use
of platforms that, more than simple instruments or tools, emerge as management
machines and non-organic actors, endowed with automated decision-making capacity
in various areas, with regimes of rules, with the ability to exercise active surveillance,
to monitor actions, to issue alerts and warnings, to produce calculations and perform
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evaluations, to present statistics and represent them graphically in a variable way. All
this in a constant and uninterrupted manner, with the systematicity and calculability of
a machine, as well as with specialisation, with greater objectivity and impersonality
than a specialised employee in a bureaucratic organisation would be able to do.
The organisational programme thus becomes, in large part, the digital
programme, served by an algorithmic technology, generalising a bureaucratic habitus.
Research has also highlighted new processes of centralised control, which hinder the
exercise of autonomy, including “increased educational documentation and
bureaucracy” (Schmoelz, 2023, p. 737). The digital reconfiguration of educational
management, studied by Neil Selwyn (2011), made it possible to confront discourses
on openness, democratisation, transparency and decentralisation, with practices of
bureaucratic control, i.e. through forms of managerial control over the curriculum, the
pedagogical work process, the accountability procedures.
In the case of online education platforms, a study by Grimaldi and Ball (2020)
that included the global EdTech market, composed of well-known platforms such as
Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas, observed that these and other ‘learning solutions’
are not only industrial and market products, but also relevant educational actors,
changing the character of education: changing its concept, the meaning of being
educated, and the educational experiences.
Rationalisation and formalisation, with their empirical dimensions, can
contribute to situations of rational-informational domination that, in the limit, can
escape the exercise of legal and democratic authority. This is increasingly possible
through real-time analytical platforms with automatic feedback, inducing the
management of distance education, compressing time, producing graphical forms of
world representation, predictions, scenarios and even pedagogical prescriptions
(Williamson, 2016, pp. 132-133).
Situations, among others, in which the rational-legal domination theorised by
Weber can come to be articulated with new standards of rationality, giving way to
hybrid modalities of rational-legal-informational domination or, at the limit, undergoing
processes of transformation towards a formal rationality already digitally imposed,
especially because it is inscribed in the core, in the interstices, of cyber-bureaucracy,
i.e. an informational rationality that expresses itself through the production,
management and representation of large-scale data, in search of continuous
optimisation, favouring evidence, enumeration and quantification of facts, to the
detriment of contextualised narrative and hermeneutic dimensions which are central
to adult education. One indicator of this is the loss of meaning of reports that narrate
and interpret actions, largely replaced by the uploading of objective data onto
electronic platforms, which then produce conclusions and clusters of new data.
Associated with this, the perspectives of management and personal optimisation
emerge as principles of human capital formation, from an individualised digital
perspective (Han, 2015 p. 39), in search of individuals in a process of continuous
updating, abandoning the idea of an educational process as individual and social
improvement, slow and uncertain, aimed at the humanisation and transformation of
the social world.
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Conclusion: digital domination and hyper-bureaucratic adult education
The old bureaucracy based on rules and governance through formalisation will
have been transformed into a bureaucracy based on numbers and governance
through competitive performance and respective measurement processes. This has
resulted in a more powerful, more intelligent and faster digital bureaucracy, capable of
algorithmic decision-making in various areas of adult education and vocational
training, in certain cases without human intervention, in other words, an educational
hyper-bureaucracy (Lima, 2012).
Meanwhile, post-bureaucracy represents a promise that remains unfulfilled
and, more than that, does not seem easy to achieve in education under “contemporary
capitalism in its digital age” (Saura, Peroni, Pires, and Lima, 2024). To link the
neoliberal management of organisations, under the sign of the company, the market
and contractualism, with the fight against bureaucracy as a rational-legal authority
represents, on a theoretical level, a fallacy.
At least since the 19th century, modern business has emerged from the
application of the rules of modern bureaucracy to the private sector.
David Graeber (2015) drew attention to the fact that bureaucracy and
competitive markets are not incompatible and, instead, observed how bureaucracy
tends to increase under market conditions, i.e. by creating new forms of regulation and
administrative processes, increasing a certain type of government employees. As he
states, “any market system requires an army of employees” (Graeber, 2015, p. 11).
Even deregulation will not reduce bureaucracy, as it will tend to replace some rules
with others, varying interests. For all these reasons, he concludes, perhaps
hyperbolically, that we are observing a phenomenon of the extension of bureaucracy
to all fields, speaking in this sense of the ‘era of total bureaucratisation’.
Digital domination increases the possibilities of obedience to rules, to chained
procedural details, to automated decisions, which are no longer only, and above all,
inscribed in voluminous codes and repositories of education legislation, but are
implicitly present, sometimes invisibly, in complex digital devices that every
educational actor is forced to use, in most cases without alternative. A new coercion
takes place in the context of a digital culture that imposes itself as a culture of
rationalisation and domination of education institutions, again largely subjected to
compliance with routines, albeit now, electronic ones. Adult education platforms tend
to show “an emphasis on standardisation and homogeneity” (Perrota and Pangrazio,
2023, p. 5), translating educational practices and learning experiences into numerical
data typical of digital governance. The result is “a new form of bureaucracy that ushers
in new literacies, new pedagogies, and new implications for adult education research
and practice” (Smythe, 2018, p. 198).
Bureaucracy was not only neither fought nor dethroned but increased from the
moment it dematerialised. Hyper-bureaucracy represents one of the most
extraordinary processes of heteronomous governance in adult education, of loss of
autonomy and freedom of actors, although, paradoxically, adopted in the name of their
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27
autonomy, freedom and choice. Subjugated to an intensified formal rationality, adult
education is both more irrational in substantive terms (ends) and more rational in
formal terms (means). It is with the increasing bureaucratisation of adult education,
made possible by digitalisation and by machines to manage education, that the ethical
and aesthetic, relational and emotional, democratic and participatory dimensions of
the humanisation of human beings, among others, are potentially diminished and
eventually may become impossible in the future. Adult learners may then become
objects of hyper-rationalised and highly individualised programmes of skills
optimisation, human resources at the service of other powers and interests but hardly
subjects of their own education and destiny.
But despite the crucial role of digital machines and their increasingly intelligent
and autonomous status, it makes no sense to personify them and endow them with
anthropomorphic attributes, as they are objects of human creation, objects used in the
service of interests and agendas, projects and competencies, which have a more
intense and systematic impact on educational processes.
Anyone familiar with Max Weber's sociological concept of bureaucracy - far
beyond managerialist and common sense receptions - as well as with his critiques of
formal rationality, will conclude that there is no significant break in theoretical terms;
simply a question of greater intensity, complexity and hybridisation of dimensions,
which can best be understood through the concept of hyper-bureaucracy, an
interpretation compatible with the core of the Weberian ideal type.
The dilemma we face today is that without digitalisation processes and
management machines we hardly can move forward in adult education as in other
fields, but with it we run the risk of moving backwards in human, democratic, and
emancipatory terms. A problem that certainly requires new problematisations.
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