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P090a


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Revisiting street-level bureaucrat encounters: from discretion and authority to emotional labour and moral contingencies I 
Convenors:
Jeremy Morris (Aarhus University)
Anne Sophie Grauslund (Aarhus University)
Borbála Kovács (Babeș-Bolyai University)
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Format:
Panel
:
Main Site Tower (MST), 02/009
Sessions:
Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London

Short Abstract:

The panel focusses on ethnographic accounts of street-level bureaucrat encounters; how encounters animate social worlds and relationships beyond their arenas (Brown et al. 2017), articulate contingent processes within organisations, and elucidate emotional labour and moral agency.

Long Abstract:

Michael Lipsky’s classic insight into the discretion of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) tends to founder in anthropology because of its implicit methodological individualism (Kjaerulff 2021). This has had the unfortunate effect of anthropologists not always taking seriously enough the political and economic processes embedded within state-society interactions at the micro level and the potential for ethnographic understandings of microregulation. Instead, despite the unprecedented intervention that SLBs make today in social reproduction, anthropologists have often preferred instead to stop short, satisfied with a discursive and imaginary (de)construction of the pluralist state (Marcus 2008). In this panel, we invite papers from ethnographers who are alert to SLB-encounters, as ‘quotidian and ubiquitous procedures’ (Brown et al. 2017) where we take seriously the bureaucrat as interpretive agent (Bierschenk and Sardan 2019). Further, we are interested in how encounters animate social worlds and relationships beyond their arenas (Brown et al. 2017), articulate contingent processes within state organisations, and elucidate the emotional labour and moral agency (Fassin 2015) of both sides of the ‘desk’, as much as they ‘reproduce [social] atomization’ (Dubois 2010). Finally, we call on colleagues to respond in this panel to Marilyn Strathern’s proposal (2017) to uncover ‘doubled’ and ‘curtailed’ roles and processes, formal and informal, written into or acted out of bureaucratic procedures and materiality (Carswell and De Neve 2020). We welcome papers on all aspects of the bureaucratic encounter but particularly in welfare, workfare, and the contracted-out competition state (Shore and Wright 2015).

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates