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- Convenors:
-
Jeremy Morris
(Aarhus University)
Anne Sophie Grauslund (Aarhus University)
Borbála Kovács (Babeș-Bolyai University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 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, -Paper short abstract:
This research focuses on the contested and unequal relationship between private bailiffs and poor rural households in Northern Hungary. We look at bailiffs as street-level bureaucrats and uncover their formal and informal practises and the ways households bureaucratically contest their debts.
Paper long abstract:
Creditor-debtor relationships are understood as either universal moral relationship (Graeber, 2011), or as particular and contextually embedded in specific legal environments and practices (Riles, 2011; Gregory, 2012). We look at the organisational and institutional context of debt by applying the street-level bureaucracy framework to the legal-financial field (Ortiz, 2021), and specifically examining the practices and their contestations of contracted-out bailiffs as part of the state bureaucracy in Hungary. Bailiffs are are semi-autonomous state-appointed legal professionals acting as street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), and actually administer and enforce debt payments through coercive deduction from debtors' savings account, wage garnishments and/or the auctioning of movables or immovables. The formal operation of bailiffs is organised and prescribed by the procedural 1994 Laws of Debt Enforcement, yet their actual operations are based on informal practices and their own morals and logic common to the interpretive agency of SLBs (Bierschenk and Sardan, 2019). The tension between the formal and the informal has resulted in nationwide scandals and an unequal but contested relationship with debtors. Our research focuses on micro-contestations of poor household debtors in rural Northern Hungary by analysing official documents, interviewing debtors and bailiffs, and accompanying debtors to bailiffs' customer service bureaus, which are the primary sites for such contestations. Debtors encounter bailiffs - or rather their assistants - to contest their debts and such encounters can be treated as "meetings" (Brown et al, 2017), which allow debtors to negotiate and question the debts, the amounts, and the legality and fairness of debt enforcement.
Paper short abstract:
Using ethnography from Romania, this paper shows how on both sides of the "window" claimants and bureaucrats manage demeanour, negotiate knowledge (& ignorance) of rules and procedures to successfully accomplish what is best described not as a streamlined interaction, but a "cultural disjuncture".
Paper long abstract:
The workings of street-level bureaucracies have typically been studied empirically from an insider perspective, i.e. through the subjectivities of bureaucrats, with an emphasis on constrained agency, e.g. discretion. An ethnographic approach that incorporates the experiences and narratives of both claiming citizens and bureaucrats around streamlined claims-making encounters is rare. This paper hones in on claimant-bureaucrat encounters in two urban contexts in Romania concerning family entitlements and old-age pension in order to explore how claimants and bureaucrats accomplish their respective goals: the application for an entitlement akin to legitimately earned property in the case of claimants and the verification and collection of application files in the case of street-level bureaucrats. The paper shows that instead of being routine, habitual(ised) interactions akin to those one experiences daily in the public domain, claimant-bureaucrat encounters often unfold as "cultural disjunctures", requiring the 'deployment' of various tools to ensure the successfully finalisation of the encounter. On both sides of the "window", claimants and bureaucrats manage their demeanour, negotiate knowledge and ignorance of the rules and bureaucratic procedures to arrive at a satisfactory outcome, albeit each one in different ways and to a different extent. The intensity of what can be demanding (emotional) labour for both parties is often criticised by both citizens and civil servants as unpalatable manifestations of "our" state, "our" society, "our" public bodies, revealing that claimant-bureaucrat encounters are and permit a study of the welfare state and (colliding) social worlds in contemporary society.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers an ethnographic account of the work of social workers in a Serbian town. It reveals the ways in which the usual twofold embeddedness of street level administrators creates a paradox that seems impossible to resolve in the current framework of policy reforms in the country.
Paper long abstract:
The paper looks at the work of social workers in the Center for social work in a Serbian town. An anthropological approach to political changes and state politics requires researching the mutually constituting relationship between social policy and its somewhat self-generating practices. Anthropologically focusing on both practices and representations of the state ensures understanding of the mechanisms enabling legitimization of the "state idea" (Abrams 1988) and helping the reproduction of current (or emerging) power relations. This should not mean a simple acceptance of the idea that the state is an abstraction with its concrete manifestations. Rather, it implies an attempt to create an analytical model that can articulate the concrete and abstract character of the state. The aim is to understand the effects of this construction and the ways in which state emerges as a specific institutional form. Twofold embeddedness -- in both state administration and local community -- characterizes social workers. This creates a paradox of street level administration that may be resolved only if social workers have room for manoeuvring, which, peculiarly, also requires abiding by the rules. Recent changes in the structure and regulations of welfare provisions in Serbia, coupled with the privatization of the public sector, created certain ambiguity that caused social workers' navigating the muddy waters of public administration that perpetuates their living in the constant paradox of street level bureaucracy that seems impossible to resolve.
Paper short abstract:
Street level bureaucrats who counsel victims of fraud face the task to navigate complex situations of trust and mistrust in which personal, institutional, and cultural dimensions overlap. The paper invites to reflect on this broader context of affective and emotional relations in counseling.
Paper long abstract:
Scams and fraud are not uncommon in informal settlements in Argentina. Especially newcomers from other countries fall victim to this type of crime. Legal counselors who operate in these neighborhoods are usually unable to offer a legal solution to such cases. Instead, they urge the migrants to become aware of different cultures of (mis)trust and suggest developing a sense of suspicion and generalized mistrust to prevent further abuses.
At first glance, it seems as if they thus also undermine an important goal that street level bureaucrats usually pursue: building trusting relationships between citizens and public agencies.
It shows however that mistrust is not necessarily conceived as a socially disruptive feature but is understood by street level bureaucrats as a basic prerequisite for survival in the Argentinian society. Still the legal counselors propose to rely on formal contracts and to put trust in the Argentinian legal system. This suggestion seems paradoxical since the rule of law is particularly fragile in these informal settlements and the justice system does not provide adequate solutions for problems of legal plurality.
Analyzing the different dimensions of trust and mistrust in such counseling situations this paper discusses the affective and emotional relations of street-level bureaucrats with their clientele and the challenges they face when navigating between informal and formal principles and often contradictory cultures and requirements of (mis)trust that relate to the personal encounter, the local community, and the state.