The Ascendance of Technique

This chapter theorises the simultaneous growth of bureaucratic-managerial knowledge and governmental organisation in terms of the autonomous and self-propelling development of technique in modern societies. As already noted, for Jacques Ellul, technique refers not just to technology but to any standardised method for attaining a predetermined result. The argument of the chapter is that the long-term trajectory of bureaucratic-managerial organisation is to reduce all social action to a matter of technique. This manifests in the dominance of contemporary society by managerialism, both as an ideology which insists that all social processes can be controlled and optimised through the application of technique and as a practice involving the propagation of managerial techniques across every area of social life.