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Accepted Paper:
Negotiating with the state, negotiating in the field: an ethnography of social work in Serbia
Marina Simic
(University of Belgrade)
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.