Technocracy

Knowledge and Power in the Information Age

The following is an excerpt from Paul O’Connor’s newly-published book Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age (Routledge, March 2026). The book argues that contemporary societies are structured by a symbiotic relationship between bureaucratic-managerial forms of organisation and a distinctive mode of ‘governmental knowledge’. Rather than treating expertise as neutral or merely instrumentally useful, it advances a sociological theory of the codetermination of knowledge and social organisation. It contends that in hypermodern societies, knowledge that attains authority must conform to a specific formal logic: it must render social life abstract, quantifiable, optimisable, and administratively legible.

Drawing on Weber, Foucault, Ellul and Scheler among others, the book traces the historical emergence of this modality of ‘trickster knowledge’ and examines how it operates through processes of problematisation, mediation, informationalisation, and substitution. These processes translate lived experience into fungible data and conceptual schemata, enabling bureaucratic-managerial institutions to regulate conduct and shape subjectivity. Technocracy is thus defined not simply as rule by experts, but as an epistemic infrastructure that stabilises contemporary regimes by narrowing the range of socially thinkable alternatives and institutionalising what Voegelin termed a ‘second reality’.

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We live in what is routinely described as a ‘knowledge society’ (Bell, 1973), which prides itself on affording its members access to unprecedented quantities of information at the touch of a button. Knowledge is the driving force of the economy, education and technical skill are viewed as indispensable to individual success, and supposedly apolitical expertise plays a crucial role in legitimising policy decisions. However, the dominant forms of contemporary knowledge are shaped and filtered by the requirements of the globally networked bureaucratic-managerial organisations that form the structural core around which hypermodern society is organised. The technical requirements and institutional interests of these organisations determine the formal qualities of the most prestigious, well-funded, and widely disseminated types of knowledge, as well as their specific foci of attention, research topics, and problems. Knowledge in turn plays an essential role in legitimising bureaucratic-managerial organisation and facilitating its day-to-day operation. Hence, rather than representing some new peak of human enlightenment, the ‘knowledge society’ is one where supposedly objective expertise is systematically warped and distorted by bureaucratic-managerial perspectives and priorities. The ascendant forms of knowledge serve to enable bureaucratic-managerial regulation and control, underpin systemic inequalities based on differential access to knowledge and knowledge-generating processes, reinforce forms of subjectification which integrate us into a globalised network that demands the commitment of our whole selves rather than simply our labour power, and systematically alienate us from concrete reality and localised, unmediated ways of life.

This symbiotic relationship between knowledge and bureaucratic-managerial power is what I term ‘technocracy’. Technocracy, as used in this book, means rule by technique and by those skilled in its application. ‘Technique’ is a concept developed by Jacques Ellul (1964), for whom it refers not just to technology but to any standardised method for attaining a predetermined result. The techniques with which we will be particularly concerned here are those designed to render social processes and behaviours standardised and predictable, although technology and society are today so intertwined that it is impossible to make any hard and fast distinction between engineering the hardware of social infrastructure and the software of social action. The technicians are managers, administrators of government agencies, and groups of experts. Technocracy aspires to render human behaviour and interactions algorithmic, so that they automatically follow preset procedures and lead to predictable outcomes, subject to open-ended optimisation. It is synonymous with the expansion of bureaucratic-managerial structures and the role of managers and experts. At its core is a type of governmental knowledge which encodes this algorithmic logic and serves to make the social world transparent and plastic to the operations of technique.

The rule of technique is everywhere around us. In the workplace, it has been potent since at least the opening of the twentieth century – in the factory as Taylorist scientific management and in the office as Weberian bureaucracy. These have since been supplemented and, in some ways, superseded by a variety of newer managerial techniques such as the quantification of performance and an ‘audit culture’ of reportage and accountability (Shore & Wright, 2015). Formerly ‘free’ professionals like doctors, teachers, and university professors have been demoted to cogs in a managerial machine, their work broken down and reconstituted as a series of mechanical procedures, just as Henry Ford and his peers adapted formerly skilled craft work to the assembly line. Beyond the workplace, the growth of an ‘administrative state’ (Hamburger, 2017; Pestritto, 2021; Postell, 2021) of self-perpetuating government agencies extends the rule of technique through the regulation of social and economic life. At the level of public policy, the desire to render individual conduct algorithmic manifests in the focus on ‘behaviour change’ in fields such as public health, climate policy, waste management, or the regulation of speech; in the popularity of concepts such as ‘nudging’ (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), which aims to manipulate the ‘choice architecture’ shaping people’s decisions to make them ‘better’ and less ‘irrational’; and in the hope that ‘big data’ can render social behaviour more predictable and controllable (Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2014). The subjection of human behaviour to algorithmic logic is hardwired into everyday life through the proliferation of digital interfaces, which force people to go through a prescribed series of steps in the correct order to access the services they require. Algorithmic logic also extends into the private sphere, for instance in the self-quantification movement, which involves recording data about one’s health and physical activity and automating personal behaviour through digital prompts and nudges.

Not only are managers, government agencies, and digital technologies working to make human behaviour conform to algorithmic logic: it has also invaded contemporary thought. That human behaviour is not just programmable but should be programmed, in order to optimise or improve it, is a foundational assumption within the episteme of digitalised hypermodernity. It is, for example, the taken-for-granted backdrop to most research in the social sciences, including economics, psychology, and sociology, especially in their quantitative and applied iterations. The public funding of research in these disciplines is almost invariably justified in terms of its potential to promote ‘behavioural change’ and optimise the conduct of individuals (but according to whose standards? In whose interests?). The classically liberal anthropology of the rationally choosing individual is morphing into a post-liberal anthropology of the irrational individual whose choosing needs to be directed through the deliberate engineering of the ‘choice architecture’ in which it takes place. According to Yuval Noah Harari, Silicon Valley guru and darling of the World Economic Forum, ‘The basic insight which unites the biological with the electronic is that bodies and brains are also algorithms. Hence the wall between machines and humans, between computer science and biology, is collapsing and I think the next century and probably the future of life itself will be shaped by this algorithmic view of the world’ (quoted in Bell, 2016). Or, more simply: ‘organism is algorithm’ (quoted in Bell, 2016).

Technique implies technicians, in this instance concerned with engineering not only the physical universe but the social world. The spread of algorithmic logic has coincided with the efflorescence of expertise. ‘Experts’ of different kinds have insinuated themselves into ever more spheres of human life on the grounds that they alone can instruct us in the proper implementation of various forms of technique. It is in the field of government and policy formation that this has attracted the most discussion in the context of highly politicised topics such as public health, the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, environmental safety, or climate change, among others (Jasanoff, 1990; Turner, 2003; Eyal, 2019). A key focus of debate has been the degree to which the influence of scientific or other expert advisers over policy formation and government decision-making poses challenges for democracy (Brint, 1990; Turner, 2003, 2014; Fischer et al., 2014; Holst & Molander, 2018; Grundman, 2018; Christensen, 2021). But the phenomenon is much wider than this. Studies of managerialism, in both the business sector and public organisations, demonstrate how control over knowledge is central to its operation. Knowledge about the work process is appropriated from employees and translated into managerial languages that are esoteric and opaque, and this provides the basis for a transfer of power from those with hands-on experience of an organisation’s core business or the services it provides to experts in generalised managerial technique (Locke & Spender, 2011; Hanlon, 2016; Kilkauer, 2015; Postell, 2021). Even at the level of personal life, matters previously decided by individuals or families have increasingly been handed over to experts. A case in point is the explosion in counselling services and therapeutic interventions within schools, accompanied by a massive increase in the diagnosis of mental-health issues and learning difficulties among children (Shrier, 2024). Such expert overreach has in turn fuelled a ‘crisis of expertise’ (Eyal, 2019), a breakdown of public trust in experts whose authority is routinely deployed to legitimise regulations and policy interventions and bolster the claims of professionals to guide individual conduct.

The insinuation of experts into an ever wider array of social relations and fields of activity, and the expansion of bureaucratic-managerial structures and procedures, are related and mutually reinforcing processes. Neither would be possible without the spread of a certain form of knowledge, built around a series of epistemic translations enabling the reduction of social processes and behaviour to technique, which is the focus of this book. This is what I term ‘governmental knowledge’ in a nod to Foucault’s (1991, 2007, 2008) concept of governmentality, which refers to how governments and other organisations produce citizens who align with their objectives not only through formal laws and institutions but through the production of knowledge, the generation of norms, and the inculcation of self-discipline. Today, governmentality characterises not just the activities of the state, but those of corporations, international bodies, NGOs, universities, and other large organisations which produce knowledge, shape norms, and regulate behaviour.

At the foundation of governmental knowledge is the normalisation and routinisation of a previously atypical epistemic stance – that of the radical, permanent outsider to all human community, whose mode of living embodies liminality, as exemplified in the anthropological figure of the trickster (Horvath & Szakolczai, 2020; Szakolczai, 2022). On the basis of this underlying posture of detachment and non-participation, governmental knowledge institutes a number of interconnected operations. First, problematisation: the transformation of something that was previously taken as given into a problem to be solved by the application of specific kinds of expertise, technical procedures, and managerial interventions. Problematisation goes hand in hand with mediation, as experts, managers, and regulators insert themselves into a relationship or situation in order to reorganise, reform, and ‘improve’ it, while drawing off resources and authority for themselves. This is accompanied and enabled by informationalisation – the process of translating social life and individual experience into abstract information, substituting a simplified, legible, and manipulable informational reality for concrete reality. This provides the basis for the elaboration of a domain of equivalence, within which incommensurables such as concrete persons or things are rendered commensurable and mutually substitutable by being transposed into abstract categories or fungible data. Within the hyper-reality constituted by such a domain of equivalence, groups of experts manufacture, circulate, and manipulate quasi-objects (Serres, 1982; Latour, 2005) – conceptual and statistical entities which claim objective reality, shape social expectations, and are internalised as norms, thereby becoming actants that shape social life and individual conduct.

Finally, the retrojection onto social life of such constructs through the regulatory and bureaucratic-managerial institutionalisation of quasi-objects facilitates the assimilation of social processes and individual conduct to a technological model: their algorithmic reduction, or conformation to a programmed set of steps leading to a predetermined end, which must be followed automatically and which are open to ongoing optimisation through the measurement and improvement of performance. The algorithmic logic of bureaucratic-managerial procedure is hardwired into institutional structures and regulations, software applications, and physical spaces and internalised by individuals so that it becomes their automatic way of conducting themselves. Algorithmic reduction therefore involves not only the extension of bureaucratic-managerial forms of organisation but a refashioning of human subjectivity: the creation of a managerial subject who leans on expert guidance, set procedures, and institutionally certified ‘best practice’ to optimise their personal life while internalising the demands of managerial organisations. Moreover, it involves a process of ‘epistemic filtering’: only certain types of knowledge – those which embody the decontextualised, reductive, and instrumentalised qualities of algorithmic logic – can readily enter and circulate within institutional arenas dominated by bureaucratic-managerial types of organisation. The result is the creation of a ‘second reality’ (Voegelin, 1968), which systematically excludes the dimensions of meaning and participation, and blinds those subjected to it to vast ranges of human expression and experience.

How is it that contemporary institutions from multinational corporations to universities and from government agencies to NGOs have become permeated by algorithmic logic and work to perpetuate it in society? How did it become normal to treat complex issues of human existence and social organisation as engineering problems? At the level of underlying anthropologies, how did the self-governing individual of free markets and liberal democracy give way to a digital update of La Mettrie’s l’homme machine? This book aims to understand a particular form of knowledge which is simultaneously a mode of power that has colonised and reshaped the contemporary world.