Preemptive Adaptation

Abstract

The two cases presented in this final empirical chapter explore the limits of the notion of “programmatic elite” put forward in chapters 4 and 5. In both cases, the elites central to policymaking are inside the state—within the Ministry for Social Affairs in the case presented by William Genieys, and in the Corps des Mines in the study by Laura Michel. Unlike the cases in chapter 5, the events described in the final pair of studies are not directly linked to an external shock triggered by the intervention of elected leaders into a previously insulated policymaking sector. Rather, what we see here are established programmatic elites attempting to preempt a challenge to their authority by adapting to a more gradual change in external conditions. In the vocabulary borrowed from evolutionary theory in this volume’s first chapter, what we have here are attempts at “preemptive adaptation”—impossible in a biological setting but not, we will argue, in an organizational one.