The Virtual State:
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          Politics, Governance, Technology: a Postmodern Story
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                   by Prof. dr. P.H.A. Frissen
                   ---------------------------

        (Professor of Public Administration, University of Tilburg,
                        the Netherlands)


Friday September 27 at 5 p.m. in room L210 (building L)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus Oefenplein.


                        About the lecture:
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The lecture deals with developments in public administration, 
technological developments (in particular in the field of information- 
and communication technologies), and the interconnections between these 
developments. In general we witness trends as fragmentation, 
horizontalization and anarchism. The Internet can be seen as a metaphor 
for administrative and organizational configurations of the (near) 
future. These trends pose serious problems for the existing political 
system, which is hierarchical and pyramidal in its nature. The cleavage 
between technology and administration on the one hand and politics and 
the political system on the other hand will be put in the perspective of 
more general societal developments towards fragmentation, flexible 
specialization and cultural relativism. In other words a perspective of 
postmodernization, which will be sketched more fully. This perspective 
calls for a new interpretation of politics and public administration. Key 
concepts then are: public irony, fragmentation, contingency, aesthetics 
and hedonism. The virtual state, already visible in the complex 
interdependencies of technological and administrative developments, is an 
infrastructural state, beyond ideological content, compatible with 
fragmentation and contingencies, striving for the intelligent and the 
agreeable.

                          About the speaker:
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Prof. Dr. Paul H.A. Frissen is professor of public administration at 
Tilburg University, the Netherlands and an independent public 
administration consultant. He received his PhD at Tilburg University for 
a thesis on 'Bureaucratic Culture and Informatization'. The thesis was 
awarded several scholarly and professional prizes. He is head of the 
joint Tilburg/ Rotterdam research program 'Informatization in Public 
Administration', a group of 20 researchers who do both fundamental and 
contracted research. His research focusses on the interdependencies 
between politics, governance and information and communication technology 
within a postmodernist perspective. He published and co-published books, 
chapters in books, articles, papers and reports on a wide variety of 
subjects in the field of public administration.