How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?

Abstract

We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you understand the context in which they act. Based on intensive fieldwork and understanding ethnography as a form of grounded-theory production, to explore this ‘rationality in context’ of bureaucrats should be a major research objective. As in day-to-day intra-organisational practice and in internal interactions between bureaucrats, state bureaucracies function largely as any other modern organisation, the anthropology of bureaucracy does not differ that much from the anthropology of organisations. One of the major achievements of the latter has been to focus on the dialectics of formal organisation and real practices, official regulations and informal norms in organisations ‘at work’. This focus on informal practices, pragmatic rules and practical norms provides the main justification for the utilisation of ethnographic methods. In fact, it is difficult to see how informal norms and practices could be studied otherwise, as ethnography is the only methodology to deal with the informal and the unexpected.