How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?

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 organisations, be they public (e.g. government, administration or other public institutions, 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 colleagues 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.

The ethnography of bureaucracy and general anthropology

Ethnography means intensive fieldwork research, mostly of a qualitative type, done by the researcher himself. In the social sciences, such a method has been identified with ethnology/anthropology as a specific discipline, because, in the wake of Boas and Malinowski, it was first ‘invented’ and then widely used for studying exotic societies by Northern ethnologists. But the method has soon been expanded to the study of Northern societies. This was done either under the label of sociology (the research of the Chicago school on United States cities from the 1920, with the ‘re-invention’ of participant observation). However, anthropologists themselves also soon turned their ethnographic gaze to Northern Societies, for example in the context of organisational ethnography in the 1920s, North American city studies in the 1930s or the so-called Manchester shop-floor studies in the 1950s and 1960s. Ethnography more recently became a methodological tool (although a minor one) in other disciplines than anthropology and sociology, for instance political science. In the following text, we use the terms qualitative methods, anthropology and ethnography interchangeably.

Ethnography in general, and investigating bureaucracy ethnographically in particular, is a form of grounded theory production (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). This means not applying and testing ready-made theories, but discovering the unknown, theorising from the data and developing concepts which stay close to experience.

Furthermore, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take the bureaucrat as the ‘native’, and acknowledge his/her agency. This goes somewhat against a widely shared penchant among anthropologists for the periphery and the margins. Many anthropologists of bureaucracy have concentrated on the control of populations by bureaucrats and have politically and morally sided, so to speak, with the ‘client’, in a self-stylisation as ‘critical’ and ‘antihegemonic’ anthropology (Comaroff, 2010). We call this position, according to which the dominated, the deprived, the marginalised, the poor provoke the particular, if not exclusive interest of the ethnographer, ‘ideological populism’; it sometimes turns research into a political project. Ideological populism needs to be distinguished from methodological populism, according to which people’s practices and representations are the entry point to any anthropological analysis (Olivier de Sardan, 2016). Here, we argue for epistemological equity (Lavigne Delville, 2011), which requires that the social scientist pays attention to all the strategic groups of a given social arena (for instance interface bureaucrats, bureaucratic hierarchy, clients) and not only to those who he/she is sympathetic with. Methodological populism grants any bureaucrat agency, whatever his/her place in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Public servants, as any social actors, command practical knowledge and deploy skilful strategies, continually testing and redefining their room for manoeuver.

Therefore, the anthropologist of bureaucracy needs to adopt basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their 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 methodological 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 overarching totality).

From these basic postures, the anthropology of bureaucracy, to a large extent, uses classical ethnographic modes of producing data. Studying bureaucracy ethnographically 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 extended 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 seminal 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) distinction 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 professional dialect, or jargon that needs to be mastered by the researcher. This is a key issue in order to access local semiology, emic discourses and social representations of actors under study.

In conclusion, the anthropology of bureaucracy is not so different from any other topic more familiar to anthropologists, i.e. the ethnographic study of village politics, of kinship or of religious symbols: it requires doing (as good as possible) ethnography, and interpreting (as appropriately as possible) data.

Ethnography of bureaucracy as a particular form of the anthropology of organisations

State bureaucracies differ in one major respect from non-public organisations: they participate in the sovereignty claim of the state. Referring to ‘the state’ (or 'the law') is one card that the public bureaucrat can always draw in his/her relation to clients, and participants in an interaction sequence with street-level bureaucrats, e.g. the police, mostly are well aware that the card is there. However, in day-to-day intra-organisational practice and in internal interactions between bureaucrats, this link is very indirect and rarely evoked. That is probably true even for particular public services at the core of state functions, like the police. When public bureaucrats refer to ‘the state’, it is often as if it was an external entity about which they complain or seek to vindicate (Bierschenk, 2014a; Lentz, 2014). In other words, in their day-to-day activities, state bureaucracies function largely as any other modern organisations. Consequently, an anthropology of bureaucracy does not differ that much from the anthropology of organisations.

Right from their beginnings in the 1920s, organisation studies were ethnographically grounded, and heavily influenced by ‘classical’ anthropologists. In many respects and for a long time, organisational anthropology has been epistemologically advanced relative to mainstream anthropology. In particular, it was one field where the discipline opened itself to the modern world, when many anthropologists still defined traditional society as their exclusive object of study. (The other avant-garde field in this respect was development anthropology.) Furthermore, in their research methodologies, organisational anthropologists have often been well ahead of the canons of mainstream anthropology, something that the latter has not always acknowledged. This advance was due because organisational anthropologists mainly worked in interdisciplinary teams, which put pressure on them to be more explicit about their research methodologies than mainstream anthropologist who, well into the 1960s, relied on a common-sense ‘I-was-there’ epistemology. Likewise, the anthropology of organisations, from early on, developed a research approach of working in teams – for example in the famous Hawthorne studies, or the Yankee City studies – when in mainstream anthropology, the very individualist ‘anthropologist-as-hero’ format was still dominant.

Bureaucracies as arenas made up of strategic groups

Another empirically productive perspective on bureaucracies is rather provided by an actor-centred anthropology of development, inspired in turn by the political anthropology of the Manchester School (Bailey, 1969; Bierschenk, 1988; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1997; Olivier de Sardan, 1988). Any bureaucracy can be considered as an arena in which different actors, networks and strategic groups pursue their strategies in cooperation and conflict. An ethnographic study of bureaucracies which focusses on actors and practices, as we propose here, will necessarily highlight bureaucracies as heterogeneous social fields of contention and thereby deconstruct overly coherent forms of the bureaucracy-idea.

In such a research perspective, arenas and strategic groups are above all exploratory concepts, not explanatory ones. An arena, in the sense proposed here, is a place of concrete confrontation between social actors interacting on common issues. It is, of course, a notion of variable geometry whose extension and form vary according to the social issues involved. And a larger organisation is made up of different sub-arenas – which empirical research needs to define – and is never made up of one consistent set of rules. Thus, large bureaucracies are ‘archipelagos’ (Copans, 2001) of different bureaucratic and social logics.

‘Strategic groups’ consist of actors who can be assumed to share the same position in the face of the same ‘issue’. The range of possible attitudes and patterns of behaviour adopted in the face of a given ‘issue’ in a given social context is not infinite: rather, we observe a finite number of attitudes and patterns of behaviour which would appear to be linked to the respective relationships through which the actors associate with this issue. Contrary to classical sociological definitions of social groups, strategic groups (virtual or real) are not formed for once and for all with a universal relevance for all problems: they vary according to the specific problems involved, i.e. according to the local issues. Even within a specific bureaucracy, the strategic groups may vary. Sometimes they reflect statutory or socio-professional characteristics, sometimes they reflect affiliations of solidarity based on extra-professional interests, or clientele networks, and sometimes they reflect biographical backgrounds and individual strategies.

Bureaucrats, professionals and experts

Professions in the public service have received very unequal treatment. There is a huge literature on the police, on teachers and on health personnel, and, to a lesser degree, on judges, impossible to cite here for lack of space, to name only the quantitatively most important ones. In comparison, professions in general administration – tax services, social services, ministerial administration, etc. – rather seem to have been understudied. What is particularly lacking is a comparative perspective – studies on particular corps of public servants constitute largely autonomous fields of knowledge, with their own publication outlets and their own specialists, with little connection between them (for an exception, see Oliver de Sardan, 2001). For example, the rich literature on health professionals is almost always embedded in a public health perspective, while sociological or anthropological research on education remains within educational studies. It is, more often than not, not linked to an anthropology (or sociology) of public institutions or the state.

The ethnography of bureaucracy is often a form of studying up, in the sense proposed by Nader (1972): high-level actors in ministries and other government agencies, or in multi-lateral organisations. In many cases, it is a form of studying sideways, or across (Ortner, 2010). In public and private organisational settings, the anthropologist encounters persons whose status is, like his/her own, based on the formalised acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, and who share his/her middle-class background (Bierschenk, 2018).

In other words, the anthropologist of bureaucracy encounters a type of ‘local knowledge’ which profoundly differs from that of the Azande or the Trobrianders in that it is highly structured expertise acquired over many years of formal training. While this expert knowledge is particular in its content, it actually does not differ from the disciplinary knowledge of the anthropologist in its formal properties. It was acquired in the same institutions. This means that in contemporary anthropology, the dialectics of the known and the unknown differ from what they were in the times of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard.

This situation poses the challenge of how to gain respect from people who (e.g. jurists, health specialists or economists) consider anthropology rather a soft and marginal science (if for them it is science at all). In bureaucratic settings, the obsession of quantification and the hegemony of benchmarking may result in contempt for qualitative research.

The bureaucratic environment: Isomorphism, travelling models, sedimentation and implementation

Bureaucracies exist in larger organisational contexts and their constituent parts may have stronger links to this environment than to other intra-organisational units. For example, Quarles van Ufford (1988) has argued that in national donor organisations, the links of top management to the political environment where funds have to be mobilised, are at least as strong as with people at the implementation interface. We can link this observation to another one by organisational researchers (Meyer and Rowan, 1991): organisations in modern societies are characterised not only by internal considerations of efficiency, but also by adaptation to the norms, expectations and models of their organisational environment. This is usually called isomorphism. In the language of organisations themselves, this is often indicated nowadays with the term of ‘best practices’ which ‘we’ should learn from. This logic of isomorphism is, more often than not, independent of an internal logic of efficiency. It facilitates the dissemination of ‘traveling models’.

Bureaucracies are an almost paradigmatic case of travelling models, or travelling blueprints (Behrends et al., 2014; Bierschenk, 2014b; Olivier de Sardan, 2017). They are made up of elements which were invented somewhere else, standardised, exported, end then locally adapted and adopted. This can concern individual elements which make up a bureaucracy – e.g. special forms, uniforms, the shape of buildings, types of hierarchy and their nomenclature, particular bureaucratic processes like financial accounting, procedures such as logical frameworks, reporting norms, types of training, etc. It can also concern state bureaucracy as a whole which can be considered a ‘macro’ travelling model – invented in France in the 18th, adapted in Prussia in the 19th, and globalised from the 19th century onwards. A more recent example would be the organisational ideology of New Public Management, which on closer inspection is made up of various particular blueprints like performance-based payment, outsourcing, private–public partnerships, rankings and benchmarking. In an ethnographic perspective, bureaucracies then appear as an assemblage of many travelling blueprints with different origins, while the ‘bureaucratization of the world’ (Hibou, 2015) can be considered the results of the successful travel of not only the general idea of bureaucracy, but of many particular bureaucratic blueprints.

Very frequently, bureaucratic innovations do not simply replace existent arrangements but rather accumulate, as geological sediment does. This has been called ‘sedimentation’ (Bierschenk, 2014a). Looking at the individual elements of bureaucracies, we may discover cumulative ‘time layers’, which had been deposited over time. One may also consider these different layers as a legacy of various bureaucratic ideal-types. The heterogeneity of intra-bureaucratic segments is particularly visible in postcolonial bureaucracies.

Most of these segments have been implemented within bureaucracies as ‘public policies’ or ‘reforms’. Policy studies, emanating from political sciences, have for long analysed the different stages of a public policy, from defining a political agenda to impact evaluation. One of these stages is particularly relevant for a dialogue with anthropology and a recourse to ethnographic methods. This is the implementation process. Studying the implementation process as an arena, where different strategic groups compete, is a fresh perspective developed by the anthropology of development since the 1980s (Bierschenk, 1988; Olivier de Sardan 1988). It re-joins the political anthropology approach of a Manchester school scholar, Bailey (1969), some years before.

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 strategies. 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 development intervention and what happens in the field have been widely acknowledged by development anthropology (Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Investigating the implementation 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.

Conclusion: The practical usefulness and the ethics of research

Ethnography of bureaucracy is confronted with a particular nexus between basic research and its impact on reality. The realisation by early organisational anthropologists of how much an organisation is shot through by informal processes has led to the rise of the idea of engineering corporate culture, in fact an attempt to control these processes (Kunda, 1992). On a different level, research results revealing implementation gaps or elite capture may help to improve the quality of the services delivered to the clients of state bureaucracies.

In any case, the bureaucracy, or its management, when granting access, will expect a particular utility from the research, e.g. it wants to learn from it. Another implication is that in organisational research, rendering research results, at least to the ‘bosses’, is almost obligatory. Thus, the anthropology of organisations and of public bureaucracies, in many cases has an applied dimension, at least in the eyes of the leaders of the organisation. This applied aspect must often be inserted into the research approach itself, and from the beginning, even if the main objective of the research is academic, and may lead to a ‘complicit positioning’ of the researcher coming from the outside on which he/she needs to reflect (Sedgwick, 2017).

Thus working at the interface of basic and applied research, from very early on, anthropologists of bureaucracies have been confronted with ethical problems (‘who do we work for’), well ahead of the crisis of representation of mainstream anthropology. The anthropologist of bureaucracy has to assume that the people under study will actually read it – a situation which mainstream anthropology only encountered much later in the context of postcolonial anthropology. Thus, there are serious problems of anonymity for informants, self-censorship, euphemisations and understatements to be solved. The ethnographer of bureaucracies, not unlike the mainstream anthropologist, must try to avoid several risks at the same time. The first is ‘getting caught’ in cliques and networks (Olivier de Sardan, 2005), that it being adopted by one faction or group of people. This could be higher management, the staff representatives, the trade unions or more informal networks within an organisation, for example a particular generation of reform-minded bureaucrats. The second is ‘going native’. The growing realisation that the bureaucracy’s claims are inconsistent with reality might unsettle the researcher. Even though this observation should not surprise him/her as an anthropologist, he/she has most likely undergone a process of identification with the bureaucracy, and has internalised the ideology of the bureaucracy. In this situation, it is especially necessary to maintain analytical distance, and not become a spokesperson for the institution. Nor should he/she fall into the opposite trap, which might be considered a compensation strategy for this unsettling experience: i.e. become a moral prosecutor and adopt a posture of denouncing.

The ambition must be to learn to think like a native, while keeping the necessary distance needed for a social science analysis and developing a competence in handling multi-accountabilities towards different factions and hierarchy levels in the bureaucracy. This is the limit of the ‘native’ metaphor: in bureaucracies (as, in fact in any social setting), there are different types of ‘natives’, with different resources, constraints, logics and agendas. The anthropologist must try to think like all of them. This obviously is a difficult objective to fulfil; in our experience, it is considerably facilitated by teamwork of several fieldworkers. However, anthropology has not given much thought to the epistemology of comparative ethnographic fieldwork, in general, and especially within bureaucracies. That is why this special issue is particularly welcome, as a first step in this direction.