Neoliberal Bureaucratization and Feminist Movement Organizations

Abstract

Neoliberal bureaucratization of the feminist movement refers to the way norms, rules, and practices stemming from the management and the market are proliferated within feminist organizations and to the way they are enforced, through accountability mechanisms. The managerial language proliferates within feminist NGOs and is co-produced through interactions with other fields and intermediary bodies, such as public or private donors, establishing a common modus operandi based on rationality, good governance and good practices, efficiency, and impartiality, evaluated through criteria and indicators, through auditing mechanisms, that ultimately monitor the institutional life of organizations. This contributes to the creation of new subjects—feminist NGO professionals and NGO beneficiaries and new markets—the NGO market, for gender experts and consultants. The feminist logic clashes with the neoliberal bureaucratization logic and feminist activists in NGOs reflect about ways to counter the market logic, its norms, and rules and to resist to the extension of a management inspired modus operandi in their work, often brought by subsidizing bodies or state institutions with whom they collaborate. Neoliberal bureaucratization is a kaleidoscopic process, in which new moves of actors, new norms and procedures, refined rules or new arrangements, create shifting configurations in a multidimensional and dynamic space, mediated by power, resistance, and language that bring together heterogeneous practices, domains, and actors, into a mode of functioning based on a common framework, stemming from the market and management world.