Haunted by the State: Diverse Imaginations of an Authoritarian State in Organizational Life

• In Event: State Interventions and Cultural Production/Resistance

Abstract

How does an authoritarian state shape organizational life even when state officials are absent? Drawing on nineteen months of full-time participant observation in three NGOs in different locations in China, this paper argues that authoritarian power operates through what I call the imagined state—shared ways organizational members picture the state’s authority, hierarchy, and relationship to society. I identify three common imagined states: the hierarchical state, the multi-faced state, and the paternalistic state. The hierarchical state imagines the state as a vertically ordered system; the multi-faced state views it as a fragmented bureaucracy with competing agencies; and the paternalistic state constructs it as an overarching, father-like authority.
These imagined states are not merely perceptions but practical cultural schemas embedded in everyday interaction of non-state organizations like NGOs. Crucially, access to them is uneven. NGO leaders and experienced staff are more likely to enact empowering versions of the state, particularly the multi-faced state, using perceived bureaucratic fragmentation to maneuver strategically. In contrast, newcomers and ordinary staff more often inhabit paternalistic and punitive versions of the state, generating self-discipline and anticipatory compliance even in the absence of direct repression. Routine organizational practices—such as compartmentalizing state-related work and circulating tacit warnings—normalize this patterned distribution.
By integrating the state effect approach of political sociology with cultural approaches to interaction, this paper demonstrates that authoritarianism is reproduced beyond formal control of state actors but through the cultural organization of meaning inside civil-society institutions. Authoritarian rule, in this sense, persists as an everyday custom that “haunts” organizational life.

Author

• Shang Liu, University of Southern California