La revue ADMINISTORY. Journal for the History of Public Administration lance un appel à contribution pour son onzième volume, consacré au thème : « Administration et disruption ». L’objectif est d’explorer, dans une perspective historique large et interdisciplinaire, les formes, effets et significations des phénomènes disruptifs dans les pratiques et structures administratives, de l’époque moderne à nos jours.

Editors

• Kolja Lichy, Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Universität Wien (Vienne)
• Peter Collin, Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie (Frankfurt am Main)

Argument

ADMINISTORY. Journal for the History of Public Administration is a platform for publishing and discussing advanced current research on administrative history. The annually published journal is interdisciplinary, trans-epochal, transnational, and methodologically open. Volume 11 deals with the topic of “Administration and Disruption.”

Disruption is now a ubiquitously established term. For a long time, its use was mainly characterised in the context of disasters, pandemics, traumas or far-reaching technical and economic changes. Recently, it has also made a new career as a description of the political handling of state institutions and administration. In this context, the question arises as to the extent to which targeted political disruptions and the assertion and implementation of constant novelty point to techniques of rule that can be characterised as « charismatic » according to Max Weber. However, it is not clear whether in present political contexts this is a description of a political strategy, its consequences or both. This interpretative openness in turn corresponds with the observation that has been made for some time in sociology, for example, that a more precise definition of the concept of disruption has hardly been presented to date.

It can be assumed that disruption refers to « an episode of intense change » (Oliver Ibert), meaning that significant changes can be observed in a short, possibly clearly definable, period of time. The extent to which the change in question is a disruptive change is equally a question of perception and interpretation on the part of those involved. In this respect, disruption also means questioning established assumptions and world views, which in turn can generally lead to increased uncertainty. In this context, the question of scale dependency arises accordingly. Disruptiveness can occur or can be understood as being limited to individual social groups and segments as well as a phenomenon that transcends individual groups. This in turn leads to the question of the extent to which disruptiveness can be analysed as a micro, meso or macro phenomenon.

Administrative action consists of routinised procedures that are always subject to contingent influences. The procedural autonomy of the administration that tends to be assumed for modernity can hardly be assumed for the early modern period, for example. This implies the question of how administration reacts to disruption under such conditions and to what extent disruption can even be meaningfully categorised under such conditions. It has also been discussed for modernity how administration processes disruption, under which conditions disasters, but also radical technical changes are systemically processed and integrated.

On the other hand, in the same context, it has been pointed out how explicitly disruptive political measures towards the administration dissolve procedural routines in favour of, for example, hierarchical centralisation of decision-making processes and thus provoke uncertainties in principles of action and orientation. The extent to which legal and administrative rules anticipate their breakage as part of their normative structure and are thus able to integrate disruption systemically is fundamentally laid out in the classic debate on the state of emergency.

With these considerations in mind, we welcome contributions that deal with the problem of disruption and administration from a historical approach in a broad diachronic view. The topic can for example be analyzed from the following perspectives:

1)  Disruption and types of political rule

Can Max Weber's typification of rule (legal, traditional, charismatic rule) be used fruitfully when it comes to the connection between disruption and administration? Is charismatic rule reliant on (permanent) disruption in order to avoid the trap of “Veralltäglichung”? Is legal rule particularly legitimized to initiate disruption because (modern) legal rationality is not bound to tradition and faith?

2)  Revolution and regime change

How is disruption perceived by administrative actors and within institutional administrative structures under the conditions of regime change and territorial reconfigurations, and what are the options for action associated with such changes?

3)  Reforms

To what extent were the changes traditionally categorised in historiography as ‘administrative reforms’ for various periods perceived as disruptive by the actors concerned and conceived or implemented as disruptions by their initiators. 

4)  Disruption and administrative differentiation

To what extent do administrations differ in terms of their “disruptive capacity”? Are certain administrative branches particularly offensive or can they be instrumentalized for disruption more than other administrative branches? Are certain administrative branches particularly “disruption-resistant”? To what extent does a disruptive political agenda lead to organizational changes in the administration?

5)  Disasters and epidemics

How are exogenous disruptions within the administration dealt with in the governance and political system or how do the administrative actors deal with disruptive influences that make routinised procedures impossible or call them into question?

6)  Technical disruptions

What disruptive influence on administrative behaviour and structures is attributed to technical changes and the resulting practices at their contemporary time or can be ascertained from an analytical perspective?

7)  Narrating disruption and continuity

What implications does a perspective on disruptive processes in administration have for the historiographical narration and analysis of bureaucratisation processes, or in what way might contemporary actors have conceived disruption in terms of ideas of administrative development?

Submission guidelines

If you want to propose an article (in English, French or German) for this volume, please submit an abstract (max. 2,500 characters) including a title and a short CV

by 15 September 2025

at the latest to: Kolja.Lichy@univie.ac.at and collin@lhlt.mpg.de.

The selected authors will be notified in October; the deadline for submission of articles (max. 10,000 words, including footnotes) is 31 March 2026, after which the articles will be peer-reviewed.

For more information on ADMINISTORY.