“…The last decade, however, has seen a renewed interest in bureaucrats and their micropractices as objects of ethnographic study (Bernstein and Mertz ). Recent scholarship has looked at government policies as social forces that affect both their objects and their creators, and scholars have become increasingly interested in the interpenetration of government bureaucracies and the social worlds in which they function (Shore et al.…”
Section: Bureaucracy Democracy and The Taipei Bureau Of Urban Develmentioning
“…The last decade, however, has seen a renewed interest in bureaucrats and their micropractices as objects of ethnographic study (Bernstein and Mertz ). Recent scholarship has looked at government policies as social forces that affect both their objects and their creators, and scholars have become increasingly interested in the interpenetration of government bureaucracies and the social worlds in which they function (Shore et al.…”
Section: Bureaucracy Democracy and The Taipei Bureau Of Urban Develmentioning
“…He describes, in joyful terms, the outcome of his long‐term liaison with Vincent Bartlett, a planner from the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), which was the organization tasked by city and central government with planning and delivering an Olympic legacy for London from the 2012 Games. Mark's account complicates the typical story of a straightforward Olympic land grab, and the intimate life of the state (Bernstein & Mertz ) is revealed in the articulation between allotment society and city government, which transforms the local scale of allotment cultivation into a larger story about London's economic growth. Once they [the OPLC] had come up with the first designs I went back to them, and I set out a plan of action, and sent it to Vincent, saying, ‘We've done really well so far and we're really pleased especially with …’, you know, it was still up in the air, they didn't want to talk about Eton Manor, but Pudding Mill Lane they wanted to talk about, and I said, ‘We were really pleased that we seemed to be moving in a direction that's really positive, people are starting to get excited about it.…”
Section: Pudding Mill Lane November 2014mentioning
Inspired by Latour's aim to restore balance to the anthropological project by exoticizing the artefacts and procedures of so‐called ‘modern knowledge’, this essay gives an ethnographic description of emergent processes of knowledge production in the context of the planning and development of urban regeneration in London. Bureaucratic meetings are described as part of the organizational infrastructure that enables the crafting of new urban futures, and it is argued that, because the making of reality is always seen to be forward moving, there is a need, as in navigation, to plot a course. The essay focuses on the subversive potential of informal meetings, and argues, more generally, that meetings are the materially social, and affectively technical, manoeuvres that make possible direction‐finding and contestation about the way forward.
“…Recent interest in bureaucracy and bureaucratic forms and practices goes beyond Max Weber's (1978, 225) foundational definition of bureaucratic administration as domination through knowledge to consider the everyday procedures and practices that are often neither rational nor neutral. Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz note that bureaucratic administration, far from being the mere implementation of established rules, involves “ongoing linguistic and social processes of negotiation” (, 6). Many recent accounts have considered how bureaucrats make decisions, and how they evaluate clients in order to make judgments about their worthiness.…”
This article considers the evasion of mandatory military service in Israel. Exemption from service is granted on a number of grounds at the discretion of military bureaucrats. Each year, many young people seek to obtain such an exemption for a wide variety of reasons, both ideological and pragmatic. At their disposal is a body of knowledge, collectively assembled by young recruits who have previously encountered the bureaucracy; that is, a best practices guide to navigate the exemption process. This article examines the creation and deployment of this body of knowledge. These best practices include information about legitimate exemptions and evaluation criteria, bureaucratic procedures, a typology of bureaucrats who a young recruit will encounter, advice about the type of persona to present to the military bureaucrats, as well as the key elements of the performance of this persona. Many ethnographic accounts describe the ways the bureaucratic gaze controls, disciplines, and frustrates clients attempting to accomplish their goals. This article considers the ways clients return the gaze of the state through their own surveillance and knowledge production, and in doing so flip the script on bureaucratic control.
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