Formal rationality and constructing credibility in the public administration

The phenomenon of formal rationality in the practice of public administration has been analyzed in the article. It is proved that the formal rationality as a transformed form of rationality is characterized in public administration by the elimination of values, the dominance of adhocratic relation to reality, ritualization and the carnivalization. The corporate bureaucracy, who seeks to implement this setup in a very wide range of social practices, acted as embodiment of formal rationality in the modern administration. So far as mass public consciousness often conflicts with the formal-rational worldview, the bureaucracy tries to avoid conflict by means of constructing ideologemes of likelihood. In this context, likelihood is interpreted as a special kind of simulations in which values are replaced by their symbolic displays, appealing to the values of the object that has the property to be similar to the social realities in details, but differ with them in their meaning.