Recasting Patronage: Merit

Abstract

Merit and programmatic policies also describe the formalization of patronage. Merit – along with friendship, kinship, school, university, gender, social background, and a host of other experiences – is a kernel around which like-minded actors are brought in to populate the service and strengthen the position of incumbent political appointees (both career and non-career civil servants). A commitment to draw up and implement programmatic policies is included amongst these qualities or kernels. This marks particular civil servants out from ‘traditional’ bureaucrats, ‘traditional’ politicians, and the ‘traditional’ citizenry. Wider government organizations, too, describe patronage, and this is not simply because they are involved in appointments (however peripherally) or in dispensing welfare. Just as informal knots and strings of dimensional relationships make up the search committee and commission on appointments in which competition can be moderated, so other agencies comprise bundles of relationships. New modes and patterns of informal behaviour (in which patronage is an important aspect) are constantly emerging as competitive actors are brought together, compromises made, different ideas discussed, and support for policies, methods, and careers are stitched together and only later ‘written’ into formal organization and process.