A Review of the Anthropological Literature on the Civil Service

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Proving participation: vocational bureaucrats and bureaucratic creativity in the implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage

“…At the same time, DMCH staff must also provide their higher‐ups with ‘accountable results’ (Hoag and Hull : 8). This usually consists of generating a quantifiable number of inscriptions in the national and international inventories.…”

“…This focus allows to emphasise the moral and affective components of bureaucratic worlds (Bear and Mathur ; Billaud ; Navaro‐Yashin ) and the ‘anxieties and dreams’ of the people who populate them (Hoag and Hull : 8) vis‐à‐vis representations of bureaucracies as rational, disinterested and impersonal (Weber ). In considering the emotional dimension of bureaucracy (Graham ; Kafka ), we shed light on the dilemmas experienced by vocational bureaucrats in coming to terms with the most utopian of UNESCO’s hopes: the participation of communities in heritage safeguarding.…”

Let the right one in? On European migration authorities’ resistance to research

“…Moreover, it protects the state‐agent and enables decision‐making without much negotiation with their ‘clients’ (Mayntz 1965: 94). Secrecy further enables ‘the state’ to appear as an entity with a coherent purpose, agenda and mode of operation (Hoag and Hull 2017), a depiction which contrasts with the inconsistent, ambiguous, contradictory nature of bureaucratic practice (Aretxaga 2003; Das 2004; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017). To explain this contradiction, we draw on Das and Poole's (2004) concept of the ‘margins’ of the state, which draws attention to the ways in which the state comes into being through the production of borders, boundaries and marginalised subjects, while also highlighting the margins as sites where the assumed homogeneity, fixity and boundedness of ‘the state’ become destabilised.…”

“…A commonly stated function of state bureaucracy is its ‘legibility effect’ – the process through which it produces knowledge about populations and social phenomena and renders them available for government action, discipline and control (Scott 1998). At the same time, as anthropologists studying ‘the state’ have highlighted, state power also operates through the unreadability or ‘illegibility’ of its own practices (Das 2004; Hoag and Hull 2017). Indeed, state bureaucracies have an interest in retaining a certain level of obscurity vis‐à‐vis the public.…”

Do Estado ao Empreendedorismo Social: Burocracias cotidianas, risco moral e gestão da vulnerabilidade em uma empresa de regularização fundiária em São Paulo

“…Nos últimos anos, a literatura antropológica sobre burocracias tem crescido e se destacado como um campo de estudos prolífico e profícuo para o exame de procedimentos, materialidades e documentos como artefatos de produção da modernidade (HOAG;HULL, 2017;HULL, 2012a;RILES, 2006). Uma abordagem etnográfica dos funcionamentos empíricos de burocracias concretas, das vidas e ideias de burocratas, e da circulação pública dessas pessoas e conceitos ajuda a revelar os elementos não-formais e não--racionais desses aparatos, para além das representações oficiais de seus atores (HEYMAN, 1995;2004;.…”