| |
Is bureaucracy the art of making possible impossible? Are all bureaucrats incompetent and soulless villains who never answer a phone? Is good policy unimplementable? Where did the rubber stamp fetishism came from? Is corruption and nepotism a universal problem? Is it a problem? This course will not give you a ready-made recipe to successfully navigate University Administration or Social Protection Services. It will not teach you how to fill out the forms and make successful claims in public and private institutions. However, it will help you to better understand the socio-cultural mechanisms that drive and shape modern bureaucracies. Using political and organisational anthropology we will unpack such issues as transparency, audit cultures, policy-making, corruption, conspiracy theories and bureaucratic utopias. In the classes we will discuss examples ranging from the ethnographies of street-level bureaucracies (for instance Northern Ireland security services) to the powerful transnational mega institutions (such as EU). We will also analyse bureaucratic manifestations of the commercial and non-profit sector.
|
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF BUREAUCRACY
