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Critique of Anthropology
0(0) 1–15
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X19842918
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Thomas Bierschenk
Johannes Gutenberg-Universit€at, Germany

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

LASDEL: Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les
Dynamiques Sociales et le Développement Local, Niger;
EHESS: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

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

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 meth-
ods, 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 bureau-
cracy 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 con-
centrated 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 practi-
ces 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 redefin-
ing their room for manoeuver.
Therefore, the anthropologist of bureaucracy needs to adopt basic anthropo-
logical postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their
4 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

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

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 represen-
tations 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 prob-
ably 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 bureau-
cracies 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 ethno-
graphically 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 anthropolo-
gy.) Furthermore, in their research methodologies, organisational anthropologists
have often been well ahead of the canons of mainstream anthropology, some-
thing 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 main-
stream anthropology, the very individualist ‘anthropologist-as-hero’ format was
still dominant.
6 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

The tension between formal structures and informal practices

One, maybe the, foundational theorem of organisational anthropology was that
you cannot understand organisations on the basis of their official structures only;
the actual workings of an organisation are largely based on informal practices and
practical rules. Thus, one of the major methodological achievements of organisa-
tional anthropology has been to focus on the dialectics of formal organisation and
real practices, official regulations and informal norms in organisations ‘at work’.
At the same time, the focus on informal practices, later developed with the terms
pragmatic rules and practical norms (Bailey, 1969; Olivier de Sardan, 2016), has
provided the main justification for the utilisation of ethnographic methods; in fact,
it is difficult to see how informal norms and practices could be studied otherwise.
These informal practices of the bureaucratic world are not random. They are
widely shared among actors, highly structured and relatively predictable for
anyone familiar with the daily routines of a bureaucratic unit under study. Even
when they are non-compliant, or even outright illegal, they correspond to certain
social logics and moral economies (Olivier de Sardan, 1999; Blundo and Olivier de
Sardan, 2006).
Official rules and norms of an organisation, and the disciplinary knowledge
which organisation members need to do their job, are learned mainly through
formal training. This may be in prior study at educational institutions, or through
in-house training. The ethnographer needs a good grasp of this formal knowledge.
Informal norms and practices, on the other hand, are learned on the job, in the first
years after entry into the respective organisation, or organisational unit. This is
why the process of professional socialisation needs to be one important focus for
an ethnography of organisations/bureaucracies.
One major competence which organisational men (and women) learn during
their informal professional socialisation, is how to pursue personal interests
beyond the objectives defined by the job description. The anthropologist Mars
(2001) has called this ‘occupational fiddles’. To find out about the personal objec-
tives which people pursue in their respective jobs, beyond the job description,
seems a productive line of enquiry which, again, can only be pursued through
an anthropological approach.
While formal accountability has been widely documented (see for instance in
economy and political science the ‘principal/agent’ pattern, or the relations
between foremen and workers in the sociology of work), informal accountabilities
have been only recently put on the agenda, thanks to the ethnography of bureau-
cracy (Blundo, 2015): a bureaucrat is not only accountable to his/her superior (or
to his/her clients in some contexts), he/she is also accountable to the ‘big man’ who
has intervened for his/her appointment, to the village chief or to a merchant with
whom he/she has developed corrupt transactions, the political party which has
proposed him/her for a job, or other more informal networks and personal con-
nections which have helped him/her to gain employment. The real world is a world
of multi-accountabilities.
Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 7

The essential role of ethnography in the study of organisations at work

This is where ethnography comes in – the only methodology to deal with the
informal and the unexpected. The latter are outside the scope of audits, quantita-
tive indicators, questionnaires, etc. Mainstream tools of organisational evaluation
are designed to assess and measure how far expected results have been achieved,
whether and how planned activities have been carried out, whether procedures
have been followed, or whether formal rules have been complied with or not.
These planning and control approaches, which become increasingly frequent in
modern organisations, at least the larger ones, cannot grasp informal and unex-
pected practices, adverse outcomes, perverse effects, ‘invisible’ or even explicitly
hidden ways of doing things, latent regulations, rules of the thumb, informal
routines, power games, or ‘occupational fiddles’. On the contrary, anthropology,
or more generally qualitative methods, are perfectly fitted for such an undertaking:
observations, informal chats and long-term insertion in the organisation studied
are required tools for investigating cunning strategies and non-compliant practices.
Private contexts and informal chats are favourable to open and (largely) unguard-
ed speech. When the interaction with the informants is located in a private
context, and if the anthropologist knows how to put at ease his/her interlocutor,
the register of the conversation turns to be a private one, open to confidences and
personal anecdotes.
In the same perspective, the advantages of participant observation and focused
observation should also be underlined. In the framework of a long-term insertion in
a bureaucratic department, the presence of the anthropologist is more often than not
forgotten, at least concerning routine practices, and he/she is in a position to observe
the daily functioning of the department, sometimes far away from official regula-
tions end organigrams. On the other hand, anthropologists are always threatened by
their own different biases, varying according their personal situations, their ideolog-
ical orientations and the complex relations they may develop with their bureaucrat
peers. In the anthropological literature, this has been discussed under the label of
positioning. In any case, the ethnography of bureaucracy should not be conducted
as a nine-to-five job. The role of public servant is only one role among many others
for the bureaucrat as a person, and these other roles reflect back upon professional
practices (see Goffman’s notion of membrane). This is why it is also important to
engage with bureaucrats in their private environments. Similar considerations also
make retired public servants a privileged group of interlocutors.

Organisations as bounded objects and entry from the top

There exists a tremendous variety of organisations and bureaucratic units.
However, in all cases, bureaucratic units have clear and ready-made borders and
functions: the ‘object’ of study is already there, already delimited, unlike many
objects of anthropology which are abstractions to be ‘constructed’ by the research-
er. This may be partly a ‘naturalistic’ illusion as, in fact, organisations and their
8 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

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

necessarily unreasonably – to be a spy for the bosses. Or a researcher who develops

close relations with unions may create suspicion in the eyes of the hierarchy. In other
words, legitimacy has to be negotiated with different audiences within the organisa-
tion, in some cases more formally, in others rather on an informal basis and through
daily interaction. The researcher himself is always involved in the power games of the
organisation and the corresponding coalitions. In any case, negotiating, and gaining
access to the organisation to be studied, and, once in, to different segments of it, is not
a preliminary to fieldwork, it is already part of it. It reveals to the researcher impor-
tant dimensions about how the organisation functions (Lentz, 1989). In this perspec-
tive, the ex post reactions of the field to the published research results are an integral
part of the research process itself and need to be incorporated into the analysis.

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 bureaucra-
cy 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 explor-
atory 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 bureau-
cracy, 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.
10 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

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 quan-
titatively 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 – stud-
ies 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 exam-
ple, 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 anthro-
pology, 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
Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 11

implementation interface. We can link this observation to another one by organ-

isational 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 environ-
ment. This is usually called isomorphism. In the language of organisations them-
selves, 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 ‘travel-
ing models’.
Bureaucracies are an almost paradigmatic case of travelling models, or travel-
ling 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, report-
ing 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 partner-
ships, 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 par-
ticularly 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 anthro-
pology 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.
12 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

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.

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 anthro-
pologists 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 reveal-
ing 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 research-
er 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 manage-
ment, the staff representatives, the trade unions or more informal networks within
Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 13

an organisation, for example a particular generation of reform-minded bureau-

crats. 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 intern-
alised 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 com-
pensation 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 han-
dling 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 con-
siderably 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.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

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’.

Jean-Pierre OLIVIER de SARDAN is Professor of anthropology at the Ecole des

Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France) and Emeritus director of research at
the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). He is among the found-
ers of LASDEL, Laboratory for Study and Research on Social Dynamics and
Local Development, in Niamey (www.lasdel.net), and associate Professor at
Abdou Moumouni University, Niamey (Niger). He’s currently working on an
empirical anthropology of public actions and modes of governance with a focus
on implementations gaps, informal regulations (practical norms) and travel-
ling models.