Abstract

Roe closes his half-hearted defense of affirmative action bureaucracies with a quote from Mannheim to the effect that “bureaucracy is the type of organization which renders all policy issues into administrative problems.” This must be his way of apologizing for his own reduction of the artificial negativity analysis of the changing character of advanced capitalism during its oligopolistic phase, i.e., following the New Deal/Welfare state reorganization of the socio-economic system between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s, to merely another relatively trivial elaboration of internal bureaucratic dynamics. Although an analysis of affirmative action bureaucracies as artificial negativity may help explain their dismal record of increasingly generating perplexing counterfinalities.