A story of toilets in street-level bureaucracies

Abstract

This article is a story about Finnish street-level bureaucracies. It deals with a small segment of a wider setting referred to as “the bureaucratic space and things”. The story focuses on a toilet for male clients in an Employment Service Agency. The research investigation, instigated by a missing sign indicating the sex of the users, leads to the conclusion that toilets in street-level bureaucracies are highly revealing artifacts, which cast some light on the separation of the roles of client and employee, on the clients' submission to the role of the controlled, and on the reproduction of gender and silence and culture.