The absurdity of bureaucracy is a contemporary implementation study that unveil how organisational complexity and inefficacy is fed and sustained by employees well-meant attempts and almost primal ...instinct to compensate for malfunctioning bureaucratic systems by repairing them, short-cutting them, or surpassing them.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore and problematizes one of the oft-cited reasons why the implementation of public policy and other development initiatives goes wrong – namely that ...there is a mismatch or antagonistic relationship between street-level worker’s decisions and priorities on the one hand and on the other hand the policy-makers’ or administrators’ directives and priorities.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper builds on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork set in a Danish municipal unit which administered the sickness benefit legislation.
Findings
– Through the reading of an ethnographic example of implementation of labour market policy this paper suggests that when policy invariably is distorted at the administrative level it is not necessarily due to lack of will among street-level workers to comply with legislation or centrally devised directives but rather because: in practice, planning and implementation are concurrent processes that continuously feed into each other; and that the concerns and the “local knowledge and practice” that guide planning-implementation do not belong to individual people but are dynamic perspectives that individual people might take up in certain situations.
Originality/value
– This challenges conventional descriptions of street-level workers as a distinct group of people with distinctive concerns and attitudes to their work. The paper suggests instead the metaphor “vector of concern” to capture the way street-level workers’ changes of perspectives might cause interventions to disintegrate and evolve in potentially conflicting directions.
Brudflader mellem forskning og bureaukrati Det har i en årrække været en ambition i det danske embedsværk at kunne baserestadig flere indsatser på evidens. Hvor den evidensbaserede tilgang ...tidligereprimært var at finde på de sundhedsfaglige indsatsområder, har tilgangen nuogså vundet frem på det sociale område og i beskæftigelsesindsatsen. Dermedskriver Danmark sig ind i en bredere tendens, som også omfatter det amerikanskeog det britiske embedsværk. Bestræbelserne på at frembringe evidensbaseretpolicy er imidlertid blevet problematiseret både fra forskningsmiljøerne oginternt i statsadministrationerne. I disse analyser konkluderes det, at evidenskun sjældent, hvis nogensinde, bruges direkte i politikudviklingen, men oftere erenten håndplukket til lejligheden eller indgår som et blandt flere input. I denneartikel vil jeg på baggrund af feltarbejde i det danske embedsværk diskutere,præcis hvori udfordringerne ved at arbejde evidensbaseret består. Hvordan gårdet altså til, at evidens ikke anvendes direkte i udviklingen af politik? Via enanalyse af udviklingen og implementeringen af et dansk forsøg på at udvikleevidensbaseret policy på beskæftigelsesområdet vil jeg vise, hvordan detevidensbaserede paradigme grundlæggende er i konflikt med embedsværketstraditionelle håndværk og arbejdsbetingelser.Søgeord: evidensbaseret politik, embedsværket, policy, bureaukrati, Danmark
Brudflader mellem forskning og bureaukrati Det har i en årrække været en ambition i det danske embedsværk at kunne baserestadig flere indsatser på evidens. Hvor den evidensbaserede tilgang ...tidligereprimært var at finde på de sundhedsfaglige indsatsområder, har tilgangen nuogså vundet frem på det sociale område og i beskæftigelsesindsatsen. Dermedskriver Danmark sig ind i en bredere tendens, som også omfatter det amerikanskeog det britiske embedsværk. Bestræbelserne på at frembringe evidensbaseretpolicy er imidlertid blevet problematiseret både fra forskningsmiljøerne oginternt i statsadministrationerne. I disse analyser konkluderes det, at evidenskun sjældent, hvis nogensinde, bruges direkte i politikudviklingen, men oftere erenten håndplukket til lejligheden eller indgår som et blandt flere input. I denneartikel vil jeg på baggrund af feltarbejde i det danske embedsværk diskutere,præcis hvori udfordringerne ved at arbejde evidensbaseret består. Hvordan gårdet altså til, at evidens ikke anvendes direkte i udviklingen af politik? Via enanalyse af udviklingen og implementeringen af et dansk forsøg på at udvikleevidensbaseret policy på beskæftigelsesområdet vil jeg vise, hvordan detevidensbaserede paradigme grundlæggende er i konflikt med embedsværketstraditionelle håndværk og arbejdsbetingelser.Søgeord: evidensbaseret politik, embedsværket, policy, bureaukrati, Danmark
I want to begin this chapter with a premise: Policy implementation is doomed to fail, if by failure we mean failing to deliver the desired result in the prescribed way. But we must not despair, for ...if policy invariably fails to achieve the planned results, it fails to do so in predictable ways and for predictable reasons. And it does so in ways full of effects. In this chapter I will build on the analyses from the previous four chapters and answer the question I raised at the beginning of the book: How might we understand the self-generative character of
Mutations Vohnsen, Nina Holm
The Absurdity of Bureaucracy,
02/2017
Book Chapter
The following two portraits portray Active—Back Sooner as “it” starts to disintegrate. They show how upon arrival in one of the municipal units charged with the implementation of the trial, the ...original project design is undermined and recreated by the multiple local concerns to which it must adapt or defer. What we will observe in the following is the circumstance that people’s interests and intentions are situational; the goals they work towards might change significantly depending on the present task at hand. The text documents how contradictory decisions were being made from minute to minute, all generated by attempts
Multiplications Vohnsen, Nina Holm
The Absurdity of Bureaucracy,
02/2017
Book Chapter
The following two portraits will explore how the temporarily united interests and viewpoints that had found a common ground in the proposal for the trial continued to live on and produce new versions ...of Active—Back Sooner. Portrait 5 portrays Active—Back Sooner as its methodological requirements put it on collision course with national employment policy, legal principles, and local organizational attempts to ensure the quality of the general casework. Through attempts to rectify counterproductive or inexpedient practice the trial’s purpose begins to multiply. In portrait 6 Active—Back Sooner is portrayed against the backdrop of the legal controversy that
Epilogue Vohnsen, Nina Holm
The Absurdity of Bureaucracy,
02/2017
Book Chapter
On a Thursday morning in November 2009 you walk down the linoleum clad staircase leading from the 3rd floor canteen back to your ground-level office. You could have opted for the old squeaky elevator ...but after sitting still during the weekly team meeting you feel like walking. You have recently been employed in a Danish municipality as a caseworker. Your primary task is to make assessments of the right to sickness benefit in cases where people who are ill long-term cannot tend to their current job or apply for one in any meaningful way. When you cycled to work a
Anticipations Vohnsen, Nina Holm
The Absurdity of Bureaucracy,
02/2017
Book Chapter
The first two portraits will introduce the reader to the municipal and ministerial reality respectively. While introducing some of the central people in the book they will tell some stories of the ...genesis of Active—Back Sooner. Their central question is “Where does a policy come from?” The conclusion they will reach is that “it” comes from no one place, that “it” has from the outset no unity but rather is a container of discrete agendas, held momentarily together by means of the dissimilar materials of statistics and hopes. It is the hopes and statistics, then, which these portraits will
The quest for meaning Vohnsen, Nina Holm
The Absurdity of Bureaucracy,
02/2017
Book Chapter
Portrait 7 follows Active—Back Sooner to one of the private employment agencies. I have given this private employment agency the meaningless acronym ENGA to distinguish it from other private ...employment agencies. It was here at ENGA that the core delivery of the local version of the trial, the “activities” and the “close follow-up,” were meant to take place. We follow here the privately employed social workers as they do their utmost to make something sensible take place in the face of what they find to be utterly pointless referrals from the municipal caseworkers. The final portrait, portrait 8, takes
PDF
