Back in Office
We’re back! As the season of out-of-office replies drifts further behind us, the rhythm of office life resumes, and so does the ongoing work of thinking and writing about administration in all its forms.
Making its way through an overflowing inbox, the return brings its own kind of momentum: what lies ahead is a busy stretch of new publications, from the just-printed to the just-planned. This issue also brings fresh calls that invite contributions to the field, and a series of events that remind us that bureaucracy may move slowly at times, but it doesn’t idle.
New Publications
Poetry anthology: Byråkratpoesi (Bureaucrat Poetry), a collection of poems by public sector officials in Sweden.
This collection is the result of a long-standing course component in the Public Sector Management Program at Stockholm School of Economics, in which senior Swedish state and municipal administrators are tasked with writing and performing poetry. Edited by Susanna Alexius and Pernilla Petrelius Karlberg, who also lead the aforementioned poetry program, the book is both a celebration of work produced by course participants and a call for further work in this vein.
“The poems of the bureaucrat poets function as reflexive artifacts: they show how senior managers in the public sector think about themselves, their mission and their society. This poetic material thus functions as a mirror of contemporary bureaucracy and its ideals, where the role of the manager is in constant tension between ideals and realities. Through a sociological lens, the poems can be read as affective documents, testimonies of complex organizational logics, and as expressions of a deep quest for meaning. In the poems of the bureaucrat poets, anguish and pride live side by side, and when the seriousness subsides, humor and self-irony become a much-needed vent to relieve the pressure and dare to say it like it is.”
“The collection of poems can be understood as a poetics of bureaucratic leadership in the public sector – not only in an aesthetic sense, but as a way of formulating a lived practice. Through the poems, we get to share the personal testimonies of the managers, not least when it comes to their own responsibility for the most vulnerable in our society.”
Edited volume: Jens van de Maele (ed.): Behind Office Doors: Use and Users in the History of Office Buildings (Leuven UP, Open Access, coming up in 2026).
A transdisciplinary history of the 20th-century office, exploring how its spatial forms, technological systems and managerial ideologies were constructed, challenged and lived with.
Throughout the 20th century, office buildings became central to the organisation of modern societies – yet what went on inside them has remained remarkably understudied. Behind Office Doors explores this history by focusing on users and everyday practices. It examines how office spaces were conceived by architects, designers and managers, and how they were inhabited, experienced and sometimes contested by workers. From filing cabinets and air-conditioning to EU offices and colonial bureaucracies, the chapters trace how design, technology and organisational thinking shaped office life. Alongside new case studies on Europe, Asia and colonial Africa, the contributing authors reflect on how the office has been approached in historiography.”
Devoted to the role of uses and users in the configuration and appropriation of the space of administrative work, this book opens up a new perspective on the history of the office, inviting us to move away from linear narratives based on the analysis of the architectural canon and on a reductionist vision of the dynamics of power and control that have often marked the historiographical tradition on the office.
- Gianenrico Bernasconi, Université de Neuchâtel
Behind Office Doors brings welcome attention to the often overlooked inhabitants of architectural history: users. This interdisciplinary collection shows how office inhabitants across many contexts, from Japanese corporations to European bureaucracies to Congolese colonial administrations, navigated their environments. Each chapter opens another door on the unwritten rules, hierarchies, and adaptations that defined office life. Like the flexible workspaces it examines, the collection offers varied perspectives that together illuminate the rich terrain between architectural intention and practical adaptation that defined twentieth-century professional life.
- Joseph L. Clarke, University of Toronto
Contributing authors: Ruth Baumeister, Nicola Bishop, Joeri Bruyninckx, Andreas Fickers, Shaun Fynn, Bernd Holtwick, Martin Kohlrausch, Johan Lagae, Ana Mehnert Pascoal, Tatsuya Mitsuda, Marco Ninno, Craig Robertson, Petra Seitz, Amy Thomas.
Book Review: Alexandra Irimia reviewed Daniel Jenkin-Smith’s The Rise of Office Literature for Critical Inquiry
“The book resonates with particular urgency in an era marked by evolving modes of office work and the wielding of antibureaucratic rhetoric as an instrument of political warfare.”
Calls for papers
1) Edited volume. Deadline: Nov 15, 2025
Bureaucratic Modernism (eds: Jonathan Foster and Alexandra Irimia)
This edited collection will be the first sustained comparative investigation of bureaucratic modernism across national traditions, administrative regimes, and literary forms. The editors seek contributions that help understand:
how bureaucratic textuality and organizational culture influenced modernist aesthetics
how modernist techniques (fragmentation, circularity, deferral) resonate with bureaucratic forms of knowledge and control.
how colonial, postcolonial, and global bureaucracies shaped—and were shaped by—modernist writing.
By situating modernism within the wider history of administration, the volume aims to shed light on our own moment, marked by the digitization of bureaucratic processes and the resurgence of bureaucratic themes in contemporary literature and art.
2) ACLA seminar proposal. Deadline: Oct 2, 2025
Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers (Alexandra Irimia and Karolin Schäfer)
The mundane objects of office life—typewriters, filing cabinets, rubber stamps, corridors—function as more than mere background in literary representations of bureaucracy. From the “ronds-de-cuir” of Georges Courteline’s 1893 satirical bureaucrats to the “chupatintas” of Latin American administrative fiction to be found in Roberto Mariani’s Cuentos de la oficina (1925), writers across cultures have deployed office paraphernalia as both material reality and metaphorical framework for exploring the dehumanizing mechanisms of modern administrative systems.
This seminar investigates how authors worldwide use workplace objects to critique, reimagine, and resist bureaucratic power structures, transforming clerks into “pen/paper pushers” and reducing human agency to the mechanical repetition of administrative tasks.
The organizers invite papers that examine office paraphernalia through multiple theoretical and cultural lenses including, but not limited to material culture and administrative power, spatial politics of the office, transnational bureaucratic aesthetics, and the clerk’s body as capital.
3) ACLA seminar proposal. Deadline: Oct 2, 2025
Documents (Scott Kushner)
“This seminar welcomes participants eager to take documents seriously and enter colloquy about how documents figure into the stories people tell, the lives they lead, the world they co-create, and the record they leave behind. Papers may bear upon the ways that documents drive literary narratives across genres and national traditions, the ways they set the terms of cultural production, the ways they fuel the cultural industries, the ways they structure everyday experience, the ways they articulate a relation to the past or present or future.
Of particular interest are presentations that trouble existing notions of what counts as a document, how documents function, where documents exist, who or what acts with or upon documents, and/or who or what is acted upon by documents.”
4) ACLA seminar proposal. Deadline: Oct 2, 2025
On (Not) Hating the State (Rebecca Oh)
“This seminar invites papers that show how particular objects, methods, or histories can help us see beyond the quagmire of state negativity. […] What genres and narratives have dominated how we imagine the state, and what limits have they placed on the ways we conceptualize it? How can literary scholars see the state newly with different forms? When and how does literature convey the complexities of the state - at local, regional, or national levels? What genres and modes do we have for reading the state in more positive or at least in contradictory ways? […]
Rather than homogenizing the state into a singular bad form – the settler state, the necropolitical state – or ceding it to the puppeteering of corporate capital and right-wing repression, can we resuscitate those versions and aspects of the state that we want, that support community, democratic participation, material needs, and robust forms of citizenship? To do so we must expand the narratives, tropes, and genres through which we view the state. The seminar thus also seeks papers that explore how particular forms, narratives, and texts reveal the state anew, as a site of complexity, intervention, or desire.”
Events
Sept 2, 2025, Stockholm (in Swedish)
Book launch for the anthology Byråkratpoesi (Bureaucrat Poetry)
During the book launch in the tightly packed lecture hall at the Stockholm School of Economics, the editors spoke at length about how poetry and literature can be “used” within administrative institutions. They emphasised the value of affording civil servants the opportunity to articulate professional concerns in a different register than the formal language of administration, especially as a means of warding against a culture of “silent administration.” In such a culture—and here the editors not only raised concerns about developments in Swedish politics, but also referenced the ongoing clampdown on the civil service in the US—the room for critique and independent thought dwindles amid political pressures and increasing demands on efficiency. In short, the editors made a strong case for the pedagogical goal of fostering bureaucrat-poets through the Public Sector Management Program at SSE.
The editors also raised the question, “what does it mean to be a bureaucrat poet?” In the views of the editors, and of SSE’s bureaucrat-poets themselves, this form of poetic practice represents a fruitful means of challenging and rethinking the rational paradigm of bureaucratic organisation by accessing other forms of knowledge. Moreover, since the poetry contributed to Byråkratpoesi was composed collaboratively and in an educational context, it also created a space for collegial self-exploration. When asked about the collaborative aspect of the writing process, the poet-bureaucrats compared the experience of workshopping the poems to the administrative practice of engaging in reflection sessions. However, they were sceptical about the possibility of actually incorporating poetry into institutional praxis.
The editors’ presentation of the book was followed by readings of selected poems by the bureaucrat-poets. A variety of styles were on display, ranging from theatrical poems with classical refrains voiced collectively by the poets (“we are the public service,/ we are the guards of democracy” [our translation]), to more soft-spoken and private meditations on the experiential side of bureaucracy, with poignant, understated lines such as “We do what we can,/ and then we go home,” and musings on paperwork that had been signed “with a heart of graphite” (our translations). While the poems in the collection generally thematise the gravity and trials of public administration, there was also a lighter side to the readings, particularly in terms of playful incorporations of bureaucratic jargon and references to various administrative systems, which produced a great deal of perhaps cathartic mirth in an audience which consisted mainly of SSE alumni employed in public offices.
When interviewed by the editors on stage, the bureaucrat-poets observed that presenting their poetry offered a welcome contrast to their usual reports on institutional targets and results. Here, they were evaluating and presenting those targets and results in a different manner. “Do you feel like a bureaucrat-poet?” one of the administrators on stage was asked, to which they responded, “Yes, but with an emphasis on ‘bureaucrat.’”
9-10 October, 2025, Cologne (in German and English)
With regard to the relay function of bureaucratic practices between administrative systems and their environment, the workshop organized by Nicolas Pethes and Livia Kleinwächter places at its center a category from Niklas Luhmann’s early work in organizational sociology that has so far received little attention: “boundary posts” (Grenzstellen). The focus is on how organizations represent themselves at their edges and to what extent they must reveal their assumptions about the environment.
16-17 October, 2025, Bonn (in English and French)
Symposium Files, Forms, Fictions
The international symposium brings together 18 scholars from 7 countries exploring the intersection of bureaucracy and literature across various cultural and historical contexts. The main goal is to open a space for the circulation and exchange of ideas on the literary uses of bureaucratic forms and themes, as well as to sketch synchronic and diachronic comparisons.
Fostering a productive dialogue between researchers at various stages of their careers, with expertise in a variety of national literatures, specific themes, or individual authors, the event doubles as an opportunity to develop or consolidate frameworks for understanding literature’s complex relationship with bureaucratic power, documentation practices, and institutional acts, forms or tools of writing.
At the heart of our exploration lies, therefore, the complex interplay between bureaucratic machinery and aesthetic imagination. The participants will illustrate their own approaches to how bureaucratic structures, languages, and logics have shaped fictional tropes (visual, textual, affective) while also considering how literature and the arts critique, reimagine, or reproduce administrative systems.
Of particular interest is the study of evolving bureaucratic structures and processes—with their intricate webs of political authority, computational technologies, symbolic markers, embodied experiences, and affective dimensions—which leave unmistakable imprints on contemporary aesthetic forms.
We are currently witnessing a moment in which AI, platform capitalism, and data-driven systems reshape both bureaucratic structures and their cultural representations. As the early 21st century continues to accelerate the transition from paper-based recordkeeping to digital governance, we deem it important to look back at the fictional instantiations of 19th- and 20th-century models of administration for a better grasp of emergent forms of bureaucratic imagery and imagination.
The full program and the presentation abstracts are available at filesformsfictions.com.
The printers hum again, the memos pile up faster than anyone can read them without AI, and bright post-its stage their quiet comeback on the edges of screens. Meanwhile, the world grows stranger, sharper, more aggravated by the day - proof that the mismanagement of public office has real consequences.
All the more reason to keep at this work: somewhere in the shuffle, there’s a kind of poetry that sneaks through as bureaucracies – the real as the imagined – go on with their balancing act between compliance and resistance. Thank you for staying with us and helping to document part of it!
Until our next dispatch,
Bureaucritically,
Alexandra and Jonathan