Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Drawing on the Hobbesian image of the state as Leviathan, Erin Metz McDonnell argues that many seemingly weak states actually have a wide range of administrative capacities. Such states are in fact patchworks sewn loosely together from scarce resources into the semblance of unity.
McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness.
Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail—and how they can do better.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the EGOS Book Award, European Group for Organizational Studies
Erin Metz McDonnell is Kellogg Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Her award-winning work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Comparative Political Studies.
"An excellent and refreshingly new look at state capacity that should be a must read for scholars
of political sociology, development sociology, comparative politics, public policy, and good governance in less developed countries."—Peter Ward, American Journal of Sociology
"A rich interdisciplinary study of bureaucratic effectiveness in developing states. This interdisciplinarity distinguishes [Patchwork Leviathan] from earlier studies of effective pockets and makes it a fascinating read for a wide range of scholars and organizational leaders.—Martha C. Johnson, Political Science Quarterly"
"Patchwork Leviathan belongs on the bookshelf of every sociologically inclined student of non-Western states. . . . From empirical depth to theoretical breadth, [it] showcases best practices in comparative sociology, moving the disciplinary discussion of state capacity multiple steps ahead.—Marina Zaloznaya, Social Forces"
"Patchwork Leviathan is a fantastic piece of scholarship. Rather than accept the stereotype of bad government, McDonnell reverses the telescope used to study bureaucracies by asking why some good governance practices exist and succeed. She demonstrates that successful bureaucracy is not a purely institutional or a structural creation but one originating in cultural practices and beliefs."—Miguel A. Centeno, coauthor of War and Society
"McDonnell offers an important contribution to the sociology of the state and state capacity. Patchwork Leviathan will have a major influence on the way social scientists understand and study bureaucratic practices and ethos, especially in developing countries."—Nitsan Chorev, author of Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa
"Compelling. McDonnell insists that scholars go beyond facile macro-level explanations of poor performance, corruption, and other characteristics of failed or failing states to look within the state to understand why some organizations are able to escape a general fate."—Merilee S. Grindle, author of Jobs for the Boys: Patronage and the State in Comparative Perspective
