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Bierschenk y Olivier - Studyng Bureacracies Ethnographically - 2019
Bierschenk y Olivier - Studyng Bureacracies Ethnographically - 2019
Critique of Anthropology
0(0) 1–15
How to study ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X19842918
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Thomas Bierschenk
Johannes Gutenberg-Universit€at, Germany
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 under-
standing ethnography as a form of grounded-theory production, to explore this ‘ratio-
nality 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.
Corresponding author:
Thomas Bierschenk, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg-Universit€at,
Mainz, Germany.
Email: biersche@uni-mainz.de
2 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)
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.
Keywords
State, bureaucracy, anthropology, ethnography, methods, epistemology
Introduction
This short postface focuses not on the anthropology of bureaucracy as such, but –
based on our own empirical experience in different settings in Africa and Germany
– on those aspects of bureaucracy which have a methodological implication for
anthropological research. In common parlance, bureaucracies are types of organ-
isations, be they public (e.g. government, administration or other public institu-
tions, e.g. universities) or private (like large enterprises and non-for-profit
organisations), devoted mostly to office (bureau) work. However, the term is
also applied to the public service as a whole, even if in many cases office work is
only part of the job. It is in this sense that, following the editors of this volume, we
use the term in this text, with a focus on public bureaucracies and their employees
(‘bureaucrats’).
There are different normative positions from which social scientists have studied
bureaucracy, often based on a critical positioning, either from the left or the right.
We propose that, in their empirical and analytical work, anthropologists should
try to bracket, as far as possible, these preconceived judgements. At the very least,
they should critically reflect their positioning in terms of the analytical bias and
empirical selectivity which it produces. An anthropology of bureaucracy (similarly
to the anthropology of modern law and more generally, the state) should take into
account the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression
as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this entails.
An anthropology of public bureaucracy can have two empirical foci: It can
focalise on the interface of bureaucrats and their ‘clients’, highlighting control or
the delivery of public services. This is dealt with by an important literature on
interface bureaucrats, taking its inspiration from Lipsky (1980) and his ‘street-level
bureaucrats’. However, an ethnography of public services can also (and if possible
simultaneously) focus on the ‘inside’ of bureaucracies, i.e. the internal dynamics of
public services, including the control of work of the bureaucrats themselves.
This can concern either the relations of street-level bureaucrats with their col-
leagues and their hierarchy, or the functioning of pure ‘backoffices’ which have
no connection to the general publics but only to other public organisations. It is in
keeping with the above, and in conformity with the objectives of this thematic
issue, that we place the focus on the inside of bureaucracies in the present paper.
Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 3
seemingly ‘absurd’ practices, once you understand the context in which they act, a
point forcefully developed by Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard and others. We can
call this ‘rationality in context’ (Gillies, 1988). Understanding ‘the native point of
view’ is a core objective of an ethnography of bureaucracy; interactions between
bureaucrats and other actors, be they other bureaucrats or the clientele, are an
inescapable entry point into enquiry (methodological interactionism); combining
methodological individualism i.e. an actor-centred perspective with methodologi-
cal holism (i.e. taking in account the various registers of social reality and the
embeddedness of actors in socially defined contexts), while remaining critical of
ideological individualism (which would mean reducing any social phenomenon to
individual actions) and ideological holism (regarding society as a coherent over-
arching totality).
From these basic postures, the anthropology of bureaucracy, to a large extent,
uses classical ethnographic modes of producing data. Studying bureaucracy eth-
nographically requires intensive fieldwork: participant observation, i.e. in-depth
insertion in the social context of actors studied, open (non-formal) interviews in a
mode close to ‘natural’ conversation, formal interviews, observations en passant as
well as focused and systematic observations, situational analyses, simple or extend-
ed case studies, the analysis of written sources, etc.
So roughly speaking, the ‘politics of fieldwork’ (Olivier de Sardan, 2016) is the
same as in other ethnographic endeavours. There are, of course, specific choices to
be made, in particular in respect to interlocutors and observational sites. What are
the relevant strategic groups (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1997) to take into
account within a bureaucracy and in its environment, i.e. among those interacting
with bureaucrats? What are the best observational sites? For example, in her sem-
inal study, Helen Schwartzman (1987, 1989) analysed official meetings as social
forms, whereas Novak (1994) chose the coffee machine and Waddington (1999) the
canteen as their favoured observational spots. The different forms in which
bureaucrats get together can be distinguished according to the degree of ‘officiality’
and ‘publicness’. Beyond this, the anthropologist would try to look for other types
of more private ‘meetings’ of office workers or to meet bureaucrats in completely
private settings where conversation is less (self-)censored. Goffman’s (1959) dis-
tinction of front-, back- and off-stage is a useful analytical device. His typology
should not, however, be confused with a typology of meetings – all gatherings of
bureaucrats have a front-, back- and off-stage element, even in a different mixture.
However, ethnographic methods are rarely enough on their own, in particular
as they cannot solve the problem of representativity. For a fuller understanding of
a phenomenon, they have to be complemented by other methods, in particular
quantitative and historical ones for contextualisation, and discourse analysis for
the analysis of written sources, an obviously important source in organisation
studies. As any anthropologist, those of bureaucracy also have to learn a particular
language even if in their case, that mostly means learning a particular bureaucratic
jargon (which is marked by the high prevalence of abbreviations). Any specialised
domain (health, education, law, police, tax administration) has its own
Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 5
constituent parts have close links to their environments which must also be taken
into account.
In any case, one defining characteristic of organisations is their strong boundary
management. Strict gate-keeping (often in the narrow sense of the term) creates a
particular access problem for the researcher. Research needs to be done in explicit
cooperation with the organisation, more specifically with its leadership, sometimes
also with higher hierarchical levels. For example, a study of a police unit might
require the permission of the Ministry of the Interior, a study of a public hospital
from the Ministry of Health. This is the case because research constitutes high
stakes for the organisation, as it might put the organisational ideology into ques-
tion. In fact, the reasons why research by outsiders is accepted, may vary: they may
reach from a genuine interest by the hierarchical top to learn about their own
organisation, in the perspective of improving its functioning, to impression man-
agement towards higher levels, say a ministry, or the public, in order to improve
the legitimacy of the organisation, or to other motives. Part of the research should
entail finding out more about these reasonings, as well as being attentive to the
neutralisation strategies towards the threat that the researcher potentially poses.
In practical terms, the researcher would need a formal acceptance letter by the
hierarchical top, which in turn he/she has to officially request. Some public insti-
tutions, such as the public health system or the police, are very hierarchical, while
others, such as universities, may have much greater autonomy in this respect.
However, these formal strategies of gaining access are not sufficient. In all cases
we are aware of, whatever the public service and whatever the country in question,
they need to be supported by informal contacts with gatekeepers to the organisa-
tion, preferentially contacts based on prior social connections. In some cases, these
supporting informal strategies are essential, because without them the formal
request would not even receive an answer. In any case, they considerably
smooth entry into the organisation for the researcher (Beek and G€ opfert, 2011).
Having gained official acceptance from the top does not mean having gained
consent from the rest of organisational members. After the first gate, there are
more to pass. As in most cases, the researcher is brought into the organisation
from the top, ideas about him/her are being formed in the organisation which influ-
ence the research possibilities and thus the results (Novak, 1994). On the one hand,
this raises the question of the independence of the researcher in the context of contract
research. On the other hand, the research may be overburdened with expectations by
management. In any case, the informants increasingly see the researcher as an infor-
mant himself. The researcher is thus in a reciprocity relationship with the informants,
and he/she is increasingly expected to give something back (e.g. information). People
further down the line may have their own expectations what they will get out of the
researcher, even if it is only in terms of sociability because the presence of the
researcher is a welcome break from daily routines (Roy, 1959).
The next step is to create the necessary rapport with actors which productive
fieldwork requires. The researcher will have to negotiate legitimacy with the people
who he/she encounters while he/she goes along, who might suspect him/her – not
Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 9
Coming from political sciences and the study of public policies, the specificity of
the implementation phases has been underlined as a crucial issue. During the
course of their implementation, public policies are submitted to the representations
and actions of various stakeholders with different objectives, agendas and strate-
gies. Among them are bureaucrats, at different levels, in charge of implementing
new policies. Implementation gaps, as well as unintended consequences, are
acknowledged by any implementation study. Similarly, drifts between a develop-
ment intervention and what happens in the field have been widely acknowledged
by development anthropology (Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Investigating the imple-
mentation gaps is a fruitful pathway for ethnographically studying bureaucracies
in action. Other gaps can also be documented, such as the behavioural gap
(between what a bureaucrat says publicly and what he/she really does), or the
normative gap between official norms and practical norms.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
ORCID iD
Thomas Bierschenk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2423-7358
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Author Biographies
Thomas Bierschenk is professor of anthropology and African studies at Johannes
Gutenberg University Mainz. From 2005 to 2013, he was one of the coordinators of
an international comparative research project on ‘States at Work: Daily Governance
and Civil Servants in Five West African Countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana,
Mali, Niger)’. With Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, he has edited ‘States at Work.
Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill, 2014). He is currently co-directing
a research project on ‘Police translations. Multilingualism and the Construction of
Cultural Difference in the every-day life of policing in Germany’.