Bureaucratic Labor Research Articles

The Duty of Water: Land, Labour, and the Racialisation of Waste in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab

AbstractIn our present changing climate, water governance is fast becoming a matter of concern everywhere, but especially in the Global South, which has long been the object of (mis)understandings of state failure and dysfunction. A common characterisation of “bad” water governance calls attention to the waste of water. In this article I show how contemporary development discourse and practice around the waste of water articulate conceptions of bureaucratic labour, farmer capability, and the suitability of irrigation practices, recalling a prior moment in colonial water governance. Examining the development of the “duty of water” in the context of canal irrigation infrastructure in colonial Punjab, I argue that seemingly “technical” measures and metrics of water governance are rooted in a colonial grammar, and show how the duty of water articulated racialised classifications of natives as wasteful, their places as waste, and of their labour, both agricultural and bureaucratic. While the tendency has been to view colonial irrigation as a battle with nature, I emphasise it instead as a battle of British with native labour to contribute to conceptualisations of environment and bureaucracy inseparable from, and incomplete without, an understanding of racialised labour. Today, figurations of labour have changed, but the underlying view of labour impeding, not enabling, governance, continues.

Bureaucratic Modernity: Huysmans as “rond-de-cuir”

By bringing together Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novella À vau-l’eau, his short story “La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran” (1888), and his personal writing, I argue that bureaucratic labor produces an affective atmosphere of ennui and disgust that defines both Huysmans’s œuvre and how he and his contemporaries understand and represent modernity. As Huysmans’s work suggests, the repetition and perceived meaninglessness of bureaucratic writing produces emotional and physical effects on the body of the bureaucrat by delimiting the patterns of his daily life. In representing the feelings of ennui and disgust that emerge from these effects on his literary bureaucrats, and himself, Huysmans reveals a larger cultural anxiety over the role of bureaucracy in modern life and its implications for non-bureaucratic writing in the modern age. In particular, these anxieties play out in the rampant anti-fonctionnarisme and broader affective crisis, the shared pessimisme, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Paperwork and fragmentation in Edgar Degas’s “Bureau Pictures”

ABSTRACT This article identifies a group of paintings by Edgar Degas as “bureau pictures,” representations of workplaces, creative or commercial, in which piles of paper are spread on desks. Through his depiction of paper, as well as his affective casting of the way in which human figures relate to their piles of paper, Degas explores the intertwined gestures of creative and bureaucratic labor. Paper’s tendency to offer a medium for fragmentation was represented in contemporary literature by Théophile Gautier and Émile Zola. In these texts and in Degas’s images, papery fragmentation takes two forms: either as a creative scattering symptomatic of an anti-classical aesthetic informed by Romanticism, or as an instrument of bureaucracy and administration, as in Zola’s representation of the stock market and the department store. Ultimately, in the bureau pictures, Degas does not take a definitive stance, but rather dwells on the way in which the two approaches intermingle, such that it is impossible to distinguish clearly between an artist’s or an author’s work and that of a clerk, at least at the level of the gestures and the handling of pieces of paper. In a move typical of Modernist aesthetics, however, paint and compositional choices strike back in order to submerge paper in the user’s coin (corner), as a “true fragment” impressed with the mark of artistic temperament.

Well-being and Ill-being at Work: Employee’s Representations in a Brazilian Public Company

Abstract The present work aims to identify the thematic cores concerning employees’ representations of well-being and ill-being at work in a Brazilian public company. Data were collected using open-ended questions from the Quality of Work Life Assessment Questionnaire. 5,833 workers participated in the study and were predominantly male (62%), with a mean age of 46.7 (SD = 11.61), married (58.7%), and with higher education (37.17%). We used the software Alceste for data treatment. The results revealed that the main sources of ill-being at work was bureaucratic labor organization (25%) and of well-being at work was importance and meaningfulness of work (24%). Organizational management is at the origin of ill-being at work and must be the object of corporate changes.

SEGUINDO AS MULHERES: NOVAS FORMAS DE ORGANIZAÇÃO?

O capitalismo neoliberal globalizado e o consequente aumento do trabalho precário têm chamado a atenção para o trabalho das mulheres, particularmente das mulheres migrantes. As mulheres enfrentam uma situação de precariedade e vulnerabilidade, exigindo maior proteção por meio da solidariedade coletiva e da organização sindical. Entretanto, os sindicatos majoritariamente ocupados por homens consideram que as mulheres – sobretudo migrantes – são de difícil acesso e organização. Na realidade, é a rigidez dos sindicatos burocratizados e masculinizados e sua insuficiente flexibilidade que impede a construção de respostas às necessidades e formas de trabalho de 50% da força de trabalho. Portanto, cabe às próprias mulheres encontrar outras formas de organização e, ao mesmo tempo, pressionar os sindicatos tradicionais a responder às suas demandas. O sindicalismo do movimento social, especialmente no Sul global, mostra como isso pode ser feito. E em nível local, há exemplos crescentes de mulheres se organizando em suas comunidades, a partir de enclaves étnicos e religiosos. Neste artigo, são examinadas questões-chave e alguns exemplos de organização de mulheres, como a International Domestic Workers Federation: a primeira organização sindical global do mundo dirigida por mulheres. A vanguarda feminina pode ser vista como líder em novas formas de organização.

Perception of nursing leadership on the fight against the precariousness of working conditions.

To describe and analyze gender and socioeconomic issues of category workers which interfere in the fight against the precariousness of working conditions within the perception of nursing leaders. A descriptive, exploratory study with a qualitative approach conducted at ABEn , Coren , Rio de Janeiro sessions and SindEnfRJ with leaders of work organizations, professionals in leadership positions, including directors or presidents. Individual interviews were conducted, and the data were treated using the content analysis technique. Seventeen (17) class entity leaders participated in the study. In the speeches, female predominance, double working hours, social and cultural origin, professional devaluation, reduced participation in spaces of struggle and bureaucratic labor issues were presented as justifications for the low involvement in labor disputes. There is a need for partnerships between the category and the work organizations to mobilize and combat this perverse process through changes in legislation, which is essential to enable maintaining employment, the worker's quality of life, and consequently excellence in the care provided to the population.

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration, digitisation and the recorded music industry

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.

Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front‐line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect‐neutral male bureaucratic work.

Global health enabling systems

This think piece argues for the importance of administrative and bureaucratic labor –‘mundane’ things – in maintaining US-African global health research partnerships and the power relations within them. The daily work of accounting, compliance, and risk management undertaken by global health ‘enabling systems’ created by US universities contrasts with global health’s heroic self-image and conjures up negative imaginaries of intransigent African bureaucracies, crumbling communication infrastructure, and corruption. These negative imaginaries help to authorize forms of US fiscal and administrative control that may contradict global health’s ethic of partnership and its related goal of ‘building capacity’ in low-income partner nations, as well as feed ‘creative accounting’ practices by both partner entities. Critiquing these inequalities may seem risky in an era of ‘America First’ and threatened cuts to global health funding. In fact, advocating for equity in global health partnerships and prioritizing the building of African institutional capacity are only made more urgent by the current political climate.

Social work as a bureaucratic professional labour: an empirical analysis in non-profit organizations in northern Portugal

In the last decade and a half, a new perspective on sociological analysis of professional groups has gradually emerged: professionalism and professionalization are no longer analysed as opposed to bureaucracies. In a previous article, we developed an analytical model in which we theorized a hybrid concept of Bureaucratic Professional Work (BPW), based on a theoretical hypothesis of association between various organizational forms (divisional bureaucracies, professional bureaucracies, neo-bureaucracies and post-bureaucracies) and different types of professional work in social work. Structured interviews were conducted with 63 social work professionals who work in 35 non-profit organizations of social services in northern Portugal. We questioned how these professionals perceive their own work in relation to the level of control and centralization of decisions, the routine of procedures and the predictability of results. We also study how social constraints, the tasks performed and work in multidisciplinary teams vary according to the type of BPW. This allows us to detail the modalities of the BPW and set out exploratory hypotheses for other more extensive quantitative studies as well as complementary studies of a qualitative nature.

Wasteaminute.com: Notes on Office Work and Digital Distraction

Wasteaminute.com: Notes on Office Work and Digital Distraction

José Saramago: Our Bodies, Our Places

Contemporary political theorists have focused increasingly on bodies and places, not the body politic around which private spheres may revolve, but the bodies of those who have been neglected and abused on the margins of this public sphere. Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben are among the most prominent theorists to treat bodies and places in this way. To do this, they have relied upon three critical metaphors: for Irigaray it is the cave, for Foucault the prison, and for Agamben the camp. I begin with some obvious differences between these metaphors. Then, using a political novel by Jose Saramago, The Cave, I show how caves, prisons, and camps may complement rather than compete with one another. Taken together, according to Saramago, these metaphors are not limited to the experiences of marginal groups. They tell us something important about the shared political responsibilities that arise more generally in the surprising interdependence of craftwork and bureaucratic labor.

Bureaucratic Job Mobility and The Diffusion of Innovations

In studies of innovation, policy entrepreneurs recognize latent demand for new policies and then expend resources to promote them. But studies of policy entrepreneurs have generally focused on the demand for innovation, while neglecting the supply side of policy entrepreneurship. This article argues that bureaucratic labor markets affect the emergence of policy entrepreneurs, and so affect the diffusion of policy innovations across local governments in the United States. Analysis of a survey of municipal police chiefs and water utility managers relates governments' hiring and promotion policies to their adoption of professionally fashionable innovations. Agency heads who advanced to their current positions diagonally (arriving from another organization) are more likely to initiate these innovations than are agency heads who were promoted from within. Bureaucratic policy entrepreneurs emerge where government demand for innovation meets a supply of mobile administrators, who carry the priorities of their professions into the agencies that they serve.

Hoccleve's Dangerous Game of Draughts

IN the early fourteenth-century De ludo scaccorum, Jacobus de Cessolis asserts that the game of chess was devised by a philosopher, Philometer, who was charged with advising the monstrous king Evylmerodach.1 Philometer realized that his life was endangered by this activity, and he developed a game that would amuse the king and simultaneously teach him morals and ethics. In order to accomplish this task, de Cessolis explains that Philometer identified each of the chess pieces with a social class or political office and invested it with moral and ethical traits. Evylmerodach enjoyed the game so much that he mended his ways, and he and his people lived happily ever after, thanks to chess and the manual that accompanied it, De ludo scaccorum. The premise for writing a manual for princely instruction or devising a new game are similar for Philometer and Thomas Hoccleve; Hoccleve's textbook of advice, Regiment of Princes, must reach the future Henry V without irritating him, just as Philometer had to avoid angering Evylmerodach. One way to attempt this was for both creator and author to maintain a light and playful tone. Although critics have noticed the verbal play with which Hoccleve stocks his stanza on chess, little research has been done on the way the poet cites not only de Cessolis's text, but also appropriates his game by using chess-puns to express radical social ideas throughout the Prologue.2 One of these ideas is that Hoccleve's practical experience as a clerk of the Privy Seal legitimates both his address to Henry, and also his repeated requests for payment for his bureaucratic labour, rather than for his poetry. Like Philometer, Hoccleve is aware of the danger this game poses to him, and in the end of the Prologue he implies that the process of writing can feel like judicial torture.

The Bureaucratic Origins of The Scarlet Letter

Official culture takes its paperwork very seriously. When Asok, the business intern on the syndicated comic strip Dilbert, finds a document marked Proprietary, he wryly asks his pointy-haired boss: If I were to spend my whole life searching, do you think I could find anyone who would care about this? (1) In fun at modern corporate culture's over-inflated sense of self-importance, the strip is making a larger point about the way in which bureaucratic culture fosters official meanings that nobody actually cares much about. More broadly, we can observe that proprietary or classified documents accrue power within a particular cultural sensibility, however pointless that power or meaning may be to those outside that sensibility. Somewhat paradoxically, bureaucratic orders of representation foster exclusive or private forms of meaning, even though it would seem that any theory of official representation would hold that the rationalized system through which official acts are executed, communicated, and certified be broadly, even universally, communicable within the public domain it serves. essay will consider the emergence of bureaucratic individualism in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Letter, a novel preoccupied with the sorts of individual derived from official forms of public meaning-making. One of the funnier moments of The comes when Hawthorne relates how he the Scarlet while poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the corner of an abandoned storeroom: the joke being, of course, that the narrative found is part of the discarded rubbish. (2) In lightheartedly equating the narrative of Letter with the forgotten paperwork of Salem's colonial import/export trade--dryly noting how such records refer to matters never heard of now on 'Change--Hawthorne brings literary and bureaucratic labor into close proximity to one another. This envelope, he goes on, the air of an official of some period long a reference that refers both to the historical novel, Letter, as a of the historical past, as well as to the documentary accumulation of the economic transactions overseen by the historical clerks of the Custom House. Thus the production of historian, narrator, and bureaucrat emerges together as the work of Hawthorne's predecessor, Surveyor Jonathan Pue, whose initial burrowing into America's Puritan past produced the affair of fine red cloth (31) that Hawthorne has just found: documents, in short, not official, but of a private nature, or, at least, written in his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand (30). In spite of the rhetoric of invoked here, The not only trades in the public language of record and account, but titularly proposes literature's simultaneity with civic productions. Although the private affairs of the heart are of a fundamentally different order of representation than those of trade and excise, they at least share a similar packaging. Moreover, the emphasis here falls on the privacy not exclusively of the affair, but also of the package; the of a long forgotten affair is itself an affair of private exertion. In his story of the Letter's origins in the precinct of bureaucracy, the Custom-House narrator trades on the presumptive difference between affairs of the heart and affairs of documentation, only to thin the line dividing them. proximity of literary to bureaucratic representation thus complicates the psycho-biographical history of the novel's creation, which tends to hold that Hawthorne's expulsion from the anti-literary precinct of the Custom House was the necessary prelude to his being able to write the novel. critical tradition has assumed a certain incompatibility between the work of the Custom House and the work of the Custom-House: that Hawthorne had to get out of the former before he could articulate the latter. …

British Imperial Literature, 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire

Introduction 1. Agents and the problem of agency: the context 2. Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley 3. Kipling's 'Law' and the division of bureaucratic labor 4. Agent, instrument, and novelist: Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character 5. 'Gladness of abasement': T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline 6. Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novels of imperial manners Conclusion: work as rule Bibliography.

Organizations, Internal Labor Market Policies, and Gender Inequality in Workplace Supervisory Authority

Typically, it is assumed that bureaucratic labor policies associated with internal labor markets (ILMs) both promote the efficient use of workers' skills and foster equality in the workplace by publicizing managers' decisions and increasing the accountability they face. This article uses data from a national probability sample of U.S. workplaces to test these assumptions about ILM policies with regard to gender inequality in workplace supervisory authority. The analysis also considers supply-side and occupational segregation as explanations for gender inequality in work authority, as well as several organizational characteristics emphasized in the organizational literature that have so far been left untested. Results indicate that occupational segregation accounts for most of the gap in supervisory authority, while purely human capital accounts are insufficient. Other results are consistent with an institutional interpretation—that organizations adopt ILM policies in order to “symbolically comply” with both regulatory bodies and public ideals about workplace opportunity.

The restructuring of the U.K. financial services industry in the 1990s: a reversal of fortune?

Whereas for much of the 1980s the financial services industry was characterised by growth and expansion, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a period of redundancies and financial losses. This paper seeks to explain this reversal of fortune and the responses of the financial services industry. The restructuring of the financial System at a global level, through a process of disintermediation, and at a national level, in response to financial re-regulation, led to an intensification of competition between financial institutions and helped produce a developed countries debt crisis, founded in personal and corporate indebtedness. In the wake of this crisis, the financial services industry has been in transition. Bureaucratic labour market models have been overturned in favour of more flexible variants, while at the same time many financial services firms have engaged in the wholesale spatial reorganisation of their activities. One important consequence has been a process of ‘financial infrastructure withdrawal’, by which services and operations are withdrawn from certain social groups and certain localities. This process, which revolves around a rubric of risk reduction and a ‘flight to quality’, has introduced an element of exclusion and closure to the operation of financial Systems within developed countries. In this sense, the reaction of the financial services industry to the developed countries debt crisis mirrors that which followed the less developed countries debt crisis of the early 1980s; that is, abandonment and retreat to a more affluent client base. As was the case during the less developed countries debt crisis, the current process of financial infrastructure withdrawal has serious social and economic implications for those social groups and localities abandoned by the financial community.

The Bureaucratic Labor Market: The Case of the Federal Civil Service.

The Bureaucratic Labor Market: The Case of the Federal Civil Service.

Book Review: Labor Economics: The Bureaucratic Labor Market: The Case of the Federal Civil Service

Book Review: Labor Economics: The Bureaucratic Labor Market: The Case of the Federal Civil Service