Entering the Offices of Bureaucracy: Ethnographic Perspectives

The IRISSO-CSI Study Day Entering the Offices of Bureaucracy: Ethnographic Perspectives was held on June 12, 2017 at Paris Dauphine University. Organized jointly for IRISSO and CSI by Quentin Dufour and Marie Alauzen, it aimed to publicize and discuss the research work of young researchers in social sciences on these ordinary government spaces, namely offices.

While the theme of bureaucracy has been extensively studied by the social sciences since Max Weber, the underlying issues of the work of the offices and of the specific government from the offices have been less explored. In many respects, a lot of studies refer bureaucracy to a social organization that produces a certain rationality for which the operations of ordinary work still need to be described and which open up a vast field to ethnographic inquiries. The study day was an invitation to focus on the work done in offices, in order to clarify what we understand of the specificity of bureaucracies by ethnography.

In his opening address, Jean-Marc Weller recalled some of the challenges encountered by an ethnographer of offices: tracking files rather than persons, tracing circulations, in particular when the law is activated, paying attention to the thickness of the artefacts taking part in the work… Once these obstacles are overcome, the vigilant ethnographer can describe how the bureaucracies know, think and operate along the sociotechnical chains. Pierre-André Juven describes how at the hospitals doctors negotiate the accounting categories of care with the financial controllers. In the same vein, Elsa Forner-Ordioni shows how psychiatry, in hospitals or in private practices, accommodate the treatment of patients with cognitive and behavioral therapies. On other objects, Valentina Grossi proposes to follow photo-journalistic production within Agence France Presse; Alexandre Violle takes us to the offices of the Banque de France to observe the rise of a European banking diplomacy; still about regulation by the European Union, Henri Bouillier focuses on the bureaucratic elaboration of lists of toxic substances. Sylvaine Tuncer explains how office ecology fosters certain types of interaction, while Adeline Denis depicts the ordinary formalism of civil service directors.

 

Photo: “Workshop 5 – Alexandre Violle & Elsa Forner-Ordioni”, June 12, 2017. Photo credit: Quentin Dufour & Marie Alauzen