A Taste for Change: Evaluation ‘Culture’, Expertise, and Struggle to Reform the Mexican State

• In Event: 1531 - Sociological Approaches to Corruption

Abstract

Despite ubiquitous talk of “culture” as a way to explain both the problem and solution for various political problems, political sociologists have paid little attention to the meaning of ‘culture’ in specific state settings and what work reformers do, in practice, to change, reshape or introduce bureaucratic or administrative ‘cultures’. As a corrective, we draw insights from cultural sociology, pragmatism and the sociology of organizations to examine how actors involved in state reform aimed at decreasing corruption and improving accountability deploy narratives of culture as a way to explain the challenges of introducing a new state practice, and craft meaningful practical strategies to bring about change. Examining the case of monitoring and evaluation reforms in Mexico and drawing on participant observation and 120 in-depth interviews we find three distinct ways in which culture is evoked by Mexican state reformers: i) to rescale and redistribute failure; ii) to enact jurisdictional and epistemological boundaries; iii) to promote bureaucratic enlightenment and stress the moral imperative of change in the absence of legal obligation. We argue that these are politically productive narratives that at once diagnose the object of reform, work to stabilize the meaning of evaluation as a solution and suggest practical courses of action to create a taste for change among state officials. This work takes two forms i) ‘capacity building’; and ii) institutional celebrations that prefigure cultural change. We argue that although training state officials in the nuts and bolts of policy evaluation function as a way of creating an appreciation and taste for evaluation inside the state, rather than making the objects of these training agents of that reform these enhance the points of contact between policy evaluation “experts” and state officials, which helps experts maintain or expand their jurisdiction inside the government.

Authors

• Diana Graizbord, University of Georgia

• Luciana de Souza Leao, University of Michigan