Bureaucratic Settings Research Articles

Who captures the state? Evidence from irregular awards in a public innovation grant program

AbstractResearch summaryThis study utilizes the administrative data of an innovation grant program in a major emerging economy to study which firms are best positioned to capture the state and access resources beyond what their rule‐complying merits command. We trace the grant allocation process and directly observe occurrences of rule‐violating funding. We show that firms vary in capability to secure irregular awards, depending on factors such as geographic proximity and the social and bureaucratic setting within which entrepreneurs and officials interact. Furthermore, by comparing the actual allocation of irregular awards with the counterfactual scenario in which recipients were evaluated solely based on grant rules, we conclude that crony capitalism, rather than bureaucratic heroism, is the primary driver of irregular awards.Managerial summaryGovernments often use innovation grant programs to promote firm innovation, but these programs sometimes fail to achieve their objectives due to grant officials violating policy rules to provide resources to undeserving firms. We study a public funding program in a major emerging economy to analyze the bureaucratic structure and the social dynamics within which entrepreneurs and bureaucrats interact to identify the sources of state‐resource misallocation. We find that geographic distance, intragovernmental checks and balances, and the lack of direct social intermediary connecting entrepreneurs with bureaucrats help reduce the likelihood of collusion for state‐resource misallocation. Our results generate insights to help guide the (re)design of public funding programs, particularly in countries with low levels of transparency and public accountability.

Scaling up policy entrepreneurship strategies from the local to the national level: the unlikely rise of basic income from agenda universe to decision agenda

ABSTRACT Introducing Universal Basic Income (UBI) at the official agenda-setting is rare, although not a completely unlikely occurrence. Although policy entrepreneurs can strongly push this agenda, whether their efforts are successful depends on their specific strategies as well as the contextual institutional features where their actions take place. This study aims to investigate why UBI proposals have risen to the point of becoming a national-level presidential pledge in South Korea during the 2022 elections. Using the theoretical frame of Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) in agenda-setting, we identify three levels of scaling up in agenda-setting relevance, ranging from the ‘agenda universe’ to the ‘decision agenda’. We argue that policy entrepreneurs at the local policy level have an advantage in navigating the institutional settings with innovative, change-triggering ideas, but that on a larger, national-level scale, and with higher complexity of the policy field, their initially successful strategies might suffer setbacks. Our analysis shows that a progressive presidential candidate made shrewd use of the institutional bureaucratic settings offered by local governments in policy innovation. However, as the political arena shifts from the local to the national stage, the personal initiative of the policy entrepreneur might not suffice in scaling up policy innovations.

Perspectives and Opportunities for Learning Analytics Integration

The adoption of learning analytics (LA) in higher education institutions (HEIs) in Mexico is still at an early stage despite increasing global interest and advances in the field. The use of educational data remains a challenging puzzle for many universities, which strive to provide students, teachers, and institutional administrators with information and insights to better understand their performance. The objective of this study was to identify the perspectives of teachers, students, and administrators about the use of educational data to explore opportunities for the adoption and integration of LA in three different Mexican universities. A qualitative approach was used, adopting instruments and guidelines previously developed in the framework of Learning Analytics for Latin America (LALA) project, adapting them to the Mexican context. Methods included 1) structured interviews with high-level institutional administrators and 2) focus groups with students, teachers, and other educational administrators. Results showed that perceptions are oriented toward improving school performance through data-based feedback, with ethical responsibility. Emergent categories were physical and mental health, development of healthy relationships and well-being, feedback style, and governance in a bureaucratic setting. The specific modern construct of LA still needs to be internalized and disseminated to Mexican universities’ educational stakeholders to increase the likelihood of successful adoption.

Between life course regimes and biographical orientations: labour market trajectories of refugee mothers in Germany from a gendered perspective

Abstract After arrival, refugees face the challenge of reordering their biographies in new social contexts that are framed by certain life course policies, institutionalised bureaucratic processes and norms. How do processes of adherence to and adaptation of familiar routines and orientations take shape among refugee women with care responsibilities in Germany? Following on from existing literature on life course, refugee and biographical research, this article enriches current research by adding a gender-sensitive analysis of the labour market trajectories of refugee mothers in Germany. Based on biographically oriented interviews with 22 women with children who fled to Germany from predominantly Arab countries between 2015 and 2020, two findings are presented and discussed: a) different phases of arrival framed by different life course policies and norms unfold in various bureaucratic settings, and b) three different labour market orientations and strategies depending on the women’s biographical orientations, their renegotiation in unfamiliar environments and the life stage the women currently find themselves in. The results provide new insights into the biographical trajectories of refugee women’s labour market participation and challenge a predominantly static view of this group as homogeneous in terms of qualifications, care responsibilities and employment aspirations.

Performance Prospects of Remote Work in Street-Level Bureaucratic Settings: Insights From Teachers and Caseworkers in Denmark

What are the prospects of remote work—working from home—in the context of street-level bureaucratic work? This article explores how remote work relates to performance in public service settings. Focusing on the push toward remote work induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and using survey responses from Danish frontline workers ( n = 1,578) in two types of public service organizations, we find that remote work is associated with a loss in self-reported performance. The loss is greater for frontline workers in people-changing relative to people-processing organizations—and appears driven by lacking motivation, work tools, and coworker interactions.

Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

AbstractHow do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

Problematising access: reflections on ethnography in a bureaucratic organisation

PurposeThe article aims to explore the methodological implications of gaining access into a bureaucratic organisation for an ethnographic research project. It broadens the understanding of this crucial part of ethnographic research and problematises the notion of access by questioning the view of access as an official, singular and straightforward moment prior to fieldwork.Design/methodology/approachThe article is based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the office of a Dutch health insurance company.FindingsIn this article, the author shows that research in a bureaucratic setting requires a deep level of reflexivity especially in order to maintain access and deepen the relationships in the field.Originality/valueThe study of bureaucratic organisations is a relatively new field of investigation for anthropologists and is becoming more popular. The question of how to study these types of organisations in terms of access has not yet been fully addressed through an ethnographical lens.

Planned meetings: Multiplicity, boxed-in dialogues, and deliberative bureaucracy as social form

In what ways are meetings a social form? How are meetings organized and how do organizations structure meetings to produce consensus around visions of the future? In this article, planning meetings, which gather representatives from the regional Public Transport Authority and the municipalities involved in public transport planning in Stockholm, Sweden, is probed as a social form. By structuring the meetings as collaborative planning processes, the Public Transport Authority’s ambition is to draw on the municipalities’ multiplicity of experiences and views but then arrive at a consensus, on which a strategic document is produced. However, these meetings are perplexing as a social form. While expectations of their outcomes vary, dialogues in the meetings are boxed-in as they follow standardized protocols for agendas, discussions, and decision points. Planned meetings, as this article shows, are an undertheorized aspect of attempts at future-making among formally independent bureaucracies. The article concludes by proposing that deliberative ideals in bureaucratic settings allude to deliberative bureaucracy through the social form of planned meetings.

Professionals in Public: Challenges to Professional and Frontline Work in Public Organizations

This symposium aims to present research that analyzes some of the current challenges professionals and frontline workers face in public organizations. Public organizations, from large organizations to small agencies, perform key tasks for the functioning of government and society. To do so, they employ workers with specialized skills and knowledge that face challenges on the way their work is understood, managed, and assessed. Some of these challenges involve interacting with different audiences; managing conflicting expectations, criteria, expertise, and mandates; interacting with citizens; and conducting expert work in bureaucratic settings. This symposium aims to identify common concerns and insights across this research and to provide avenues for future scholarship in this area. Presenters have conducted research on professional identity, expert work, accountability, and conflicting mandates in police departments, public hospitals, emergency management services, and regulatory agencies in different countries. From Brave Enforcer to Trusted Protector: Role Evolution and Procedural Justice Training in Mexico Presenter: Rodrigo Canales; Yale U. Presenter: Jessica Zarkin; Cornell U. Presenter: Lluvia Gonzalez; Innovations for Poverty Action Routinization of Expertise: Experts and the Entry of Less-Credentialed Workers into Organizations Presenter: Jillian Chown; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Presenter: Carlos Inoue; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Social Media Scrutiny of Front-line Professionals in Emergency Management Organizations Presenter: Arvind Karunakaran; Stanford U. Managing Conflicting Mandates: Wielding Procedural Expertise in a Government Agency Presenter: Samantha Orlena Ortiz Casillas; EMLYON Business School

Bureaucratic squires: A critical analysis of the construction of charismatic top-leaders

Top-leaders continuously struggle to cultivate their image and duly face a challenge in fulfilling their role: establishing authority among their senior followers, while maintaining productive social distance to enhance charismatic appeal. Considering this challenge, rather than focusing on leader–follower relationship, this study critically spotlights the workings of top-leader assistants, referred to as squires (Weber & Moore, 2014). Accordingly, we inquire how squires construct the charisma of top-leaders within a bureaucratic setting. Through an extensive ethnographic study in Israeli military headquarters, alongside 28 semi-structured interviews with Generals, staff officers, and personal assistants of Generals, we identified two primary strategies by which squires enhance their top-leader’s charismatic appeal: daily aggrandizing rituals and wrapping. Daily rituals that occur in meetings and visitations enhance the leader’s aura as the embodiment of authority. Wrapping is diverse acts in which squires broker the leaders’ environment and access to subalterns, thus allowing leaders to focus on their primary agenda, while elevating their perceived status. These strategies allow dyadic performance of top-leaders and squires. They intricately utilize formal and informal interactions to sustain effective distance from followers, to foster disciplined selves among senior followers. Implications of the findings regarding the role of squires as power brokers and their equivalent roles in contemporary organizations are discussed, alongside implications regarding leadership and bureaucracy research.

Race matters at the DMV? Public values, administrative racism, and Whiteness in local bureaucratic settings

This paper explores the tension between the formal values of public administration, administrative racism, and Whiteness in the context of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). It asks: (1) Which values—if any—are being promoted and/or hindered at DMV offices? and (2) How the values of equity and equality, as well as racial power dynamics, maybe reinforced by street-level bureaucrats, or by the physical space of bureaucratic settings? Findings from document analysis and observations in a Midwestern state suggest that efficiency is the dominant value, with equality supported through colorblindness, and security as an emerging value. Formal colorblindness and the focus on security, however, allow for the reinforcement of administrative racism and Whiteness through the social construction of White people as “the norm,” ultimately undermining social equity.

Bureaucratic Sociability, or the Missing Eighty Percent of Effectiveness: The Case of Diplomacy

ABSTRACT This paper examines and theorises sociability–‘the play-form of association’–in diplomatic settings. I highlight the workings of sociable interaction in diplomacy and I explain how we can better discern its broader role in bureaucratic processes. Empirically, I use virtual diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the difference that in-person sociability makes in diplomatic practice. The second half of the paper title references a comment by Michael Clauss, Germany’s ambassador to the European Union. Asked about virtual diplomacy, Clauss said that Zoom diplomacy is ‘20% as effective’ as the in-person kind. Conceptually, I use contemporary political geography and international relations as well as two thinkers of earlier decades–sociologists Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman–to theorise sociability. Methodologically, I advocate a more playful approach to sources in our study of professional practice. My objective is to prompt further study of sociability in bureaucratic settings.

Super-bureaucracy in climate adaptation governance in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT State bureaucratic settings and associated governance patterns have an enormous impact on the planning and implementation of a country's climate development policy. Contextually, a typical superior bureaucratic framework with its decision-making power centred on climate adaptation projects funding prevails in Bangladesh. This paper deploys the concepts of Weberian bureaucracy and super-bureaucracy and its governance pattern to explore the power attributes of climate bureaus and associated bureaucratic practices and decision-making behaviour regarding adaptation funding in climate adaptation governance. The study employs all climate adaptation development projects (n = 573) financing in Bangladesh. The analysis finds that the general administration cadre employees rather than technical professionals are involved in multiple decision-making processes, including appraisal and approval and monitoring and evaluating projects holding powerful pivotal positions both centrally and locally. These super bureaus also expand their power resources in climate adaptation policy by governing big adaptation projects, keeping the project director position, and approving the said position. The power capabilities and interests of the super-bureaus accrue by creating new climate institutions too. The decision-making behaviour and governance pattern underpin a state of super-bureaucracy, which are not supportive enough of innovative policy-making through inclusive participation and collective decision-making for governing dynamic climate adaptation policy.

Differential discrimination against mobile EU citizens: experimental evidence from bureaucratic choice settings

ABSTRACT EU citizens have rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination undermines the operation of these rights. We go beyond extant research on bureaucratic discrimination in two ways. First, we move beyond considering mobile EU citizens as homogenous immigrant minority to assess whether EU citizens from certain countries face greater discrimination than others. Second, we analyse whether discrimination patterns vary between the general population and public administrators regarding attributes triggering discrimination and whether accountability prevents discrimination. In a pre-registered design, we conduct a population-based conjoint experiment in Germany including a sub-sample of public administrators. We find that (1) Dutch and fluent German speakers are preferred, i.e., positively discriminated, over Romanians and EU citizens with broken language skills, that (2) our way of holding people accountable was ineffective, and that (3) in all these regards discriminatory behaviour of public administrators is similar to behaviour of the general population.

Flourishing in Social Work Organisations

ABSTRACT Bureaucratic settings pose particularly daunting problems for social workers trying to flourish as professionals, among others because the practice circumstances can be adverse. Flourishing in an Aristotelian sense requires that social workers act with skill to fulfil the goals of responsiveness (honesty and openness), fairness (justice) and compassion towards clients, as well as efficiency for the bureaucracy. Responding to the ethnographic work of Bernardo Zacka, we will outline the particular kinds of tensions these goals pose for social workers in bureaucratic settings and then will provide some proposals for mitigating these tensions. We disagree with Zacka that virtues are largely irrelevant to social workers trying to respond ethically to bureaucratic demands, but rather will propose that his ‘mechanisms of the self’ and others that we have developed in our work with students and practitioners, can strengthen social work virtues, enable social workers to flourish and foster a critical examination of one's organisation.

Affective bureaucratic relations: File practices in a European deportation unit and criminal court

Indifference has long been acknowledged as a crucial affect to the continuation of bureaucratic practices. Recently, the production of more diverse and layered affective modes in bureaucratic institutions is increasingly highlighted. However, how affects differ within and between sites saturated with ‘paper work’ remains an understudied terrain. In this paper we focus on the relations that are formed in daily file-work within two state institutions: a Deportation Unit and a Criminal Court. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork in order to show that a) affects are locally produced in the relations that are mobilized in file-work b) these affects are unevenly produced within and between different bureaucratic practices. By comparing two different bureaucratic settings yet related in the subjugation they demand of the bureaucratic referent of their practices, we aim to put forward how differences in bureaucratic practice come with their own specific affective modes, showing that bureaucratic practices are saturated in, and thrive on, diverse affects of varying intensity. Bureaucratic action is a deeply affective practice, within which the relationship between caseworker, casefile, and the file’s referent is carefully calibrated. With this intervention we position ourselves within scholarship that complicates perceived dichotomies between rationality, still often associated with bureaucracy, and affect. Developing sensitivities towards such variety of bureaucratic affect offers nuanced perspectives on file-work and what kind of sovereign power the relations that are made through file-work subsequently allow to be reproduced.

Beyond Persecution: Exploring Alternative Refugee Narratives in Jenny Erpenbeck

In bureaucratic settings, complex refugee narratives are often converted into stereotypical accounts of persecution guided by questions asked by protection officers. This article explores potential room for improvement in these administrative dialogues on displacement through literary text analyses. I argue that literature does not only operate as a platform to contest laws and policies, but also as a powerful source of alternative modes of narration in the context of asylum and migration. This point is demonstrated in a first case study of the dialogues on refuge in the European Union embedded in Jenny Erpenbeck’s acclaimed novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015).

Knowledge and legitimacy in asylum decision-making: the politics of country of origin information

ABSTRACT State institutions engage in the production of knowledge and representations about the countries of origin of asylum seekers. Building on science and technology studies (STS), critical migration studies and critical citizenship studies, this article analyzes the alignment of government Country of Origin Information (COI) with the public. We examine the different processes through which public legitimacy of asylum knowledge is fostered in three bureaucratic settings. The case studies highlight the variable legitimacy-constructing technologies and practices of publication (Norway), evaluation (United Kingdom) and consultation (European Union) vis-à-vis asylum-relevant information. We demonstrate how this shifting style in the knowledge-based governance of asylum does not consistently enhance legitimacy and stabilization of asylum-relevant information, and can provoke new forms of contestation in this environment of high-stakes policymaking. Finally, we highlight the lack of political subjectivity of asylum seekers to intervene in the production and possibly contest the legitimacy of this information about themselves and their country of origin.

Emotions as method: Obtrusiveness and participant observation in public bureaucracies

Based on a case-study of the governance of health facilities in Niger, the paper examines how emotions can be used as a method to explore meaning-making activities in bureaucratic settings where public servants’ behaviours follow practical norms that deviate from both official norms and social norms. As a supplement to other techniques associated with long-term field research, the use of obtrusive participant-observation is arguably a relevant and fruitful methodological tactic. The author argues that giving space to the ethnographer’s empathy while doing participant-observation enables a deeper understanding of bureaucratic behaviours by bringing emotions back into the analysis of empirical findings and deepening reflexivity. Whereas the paper examines some ethical issues associated with this method in contexts where the ethnographer is confronted with abuse of power in health bureaucracies, the author suggests that emotions as method can be a fruitful approach to bureaucratic ethnography at large.

Theterroirof bureaucratic practice: Everyday life and scholarly method in the study of policy

This article seeks to connect political geographic scholarship on institutions and policy more firmly to the experience of everyday life. Empirically, I foreground the ambiguous and indeterminate character of institutional decision-making and I underscore the need to closely consider the sensory texture of place and milieu in our analyses of it. My examples come from the study of diplomatic practice in Brussels, the capital of the European Union. Conceptually and methodologically, I use these examples to accentuate lived experience as an essential part of research, especially in the seemingly dry bureaucratic settings. I do so in particular through engaging with the work of Michel de Certeau, whose ideas enjoy considerable traction in cultural geography but are seldom used in political geography and policy studies. An accent on the texture and feel of policy practice necessarily highlights the role of place in that practice. This, in turn, may help us with communicating geographical research beyond our own discipline.