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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.