One AP news story on the front of the St. Pete Times today is the calving of a new giant iceberg off a Greeland glacier. In many ways, the consequences of the recession for public services is like the calving of giant icebergs, a separation of public agencies, counties, and states into chunks that will end the recession in worse but manageable shape and other chunks that will end the recession in horrific shape. California is one example of the horrific-iceberg scenario that was recognizable a few years ago, with an ungovernable system that would topple with the least pressure.
While one goal of ARRA was the prevention of procyclical (vicious-circle) contraction in local and state government spending, it appears likely that the long-term consequence will be the slowing-down of the public-sector calving process, not the prevention of it. As the Orlando Sentinel’s Dave Weber points out today in a blog entry and also in the paper’s story on the “edujobs” bill the House passed and Obama signed yesterday, it’s not clear what the requirements of the new funding for schools and FMAP (Federal Medical Assistance Percentages, or aid to states’ Medicaid budgets) are, precisely. Some district superintendents intend to rehire teachers and other employees who received layoff notices. Others intend to hold onto the money to plug part of the expected gap in the 2011-12 budget.
From a macroeconomic perspective, the money should go out now, because the economy is so anemic. From an organizational standpoint, districts that hold onto the money to spend next year are making better decisions. Florida’s legislature did the same with the FMAP, writing a proviso into the budget so that the millions that come in for the state’s health expenditures will replace other state funding, with the excess going into the state’s reserves. (Disclosure: the passage of the FMAP assistance plus the state’s decision continues the good luck of my university, which has thus far escaped the recession without faculty layoffs. If I were to follow only my own interest, I’d say we should stuff it all in reserves for 2011-12.)
In reality, what’s going to happen is short-term aid with a perverse triage process: some states and districts will spend all the money because they have no choice if they don’t want hundreds of teachers and other employees to lose jobs (such as in Broward’s schools), and others will put the money aside (okay, use it to supplant other revenues and put the freed revenues aside). Come summer 2011, the jurisdictions that have that extra cushion will be buffered from the effects of additional cuts, stabilizing public employment for those counties and states. They’re the jurisdictions that are in better shape now, and what this bill does is slow down the rate at which the gap between jurisdictions grows.
Metaphor caveat note: Yeah, I know–there was no giant American glacier of consistent public services before 2007. If you want to prettify the metaphor, maybe it’s the calving of icebergs from a number of glaciers, further fragmenting the condition of public services by jurisdiction. There: feel better?
The iceberg image of collapsing programs can be extended to organizations and even to social institutions.
When programs go away, the furniture is moved around some. And sometimes, they come back in slightly different form. Same thing for organizations. New organizational forms are generally cobbled together from taken-for-granted fragments and existing arrangements (social ties, exchange networks) that litter the organizational field; left-overs and failed companies.
But the problem of failed institutions touches on deeper issues, even reaching the problem of social reality itself.
Deinstitutionalization and delegitimization are constantly taking place, but I am beginning to think it is a common mistake to think that when they occur, they lead nowhere.
Collapsing or fading taken-for-grantedness and de-naturalization, are not the end of the road because the process only leads you into more naturalized routines, more taken-for-grantedness (cf. Tillich’s critique of Bultmann’s demythologization project), however contested they may be.
I might be wrong, but the only time deinstitutionalization and delegitimation *are* the end of the road is when the host population vanishes. Like Easter Island.
Look at the demise of apprenticeship (circa 1830/1840), a very important social institution in this country. Contested and replaced by dozens of alternatives — some of which survive even today.