The Bureaucrat and the Poor : Encounters in French Welfare Offices.
Welfare offices usually attract negative descriptions of bureaucracy with their queues, routines, and impersonal nature. Are they anonymous machines or the locus of neutral service relationships? Showing how people experience state public administration, The Bureaucrat and the Poor provides a realis...
| Формат: | Електронна книга |
|---|---|
| Език: | English |
| Публикувано: |
Ashgate Gower
2010.
|
| Предмети: | |
| Онлайн достъп: |
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=389805 |
Съдържание:
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Preface to the English Edition
- Introduction
- Analytical framework and research methods
- Bureaucratic encounters: from the social problem to the sociological object
- Roles, identities and institutions
- Bureaucratic relationships and power relations
- Fieldwork and methodology
- Part I The Social Conditions of the Administrative Relationship
- I. The public
- Dealing first-hand with social transformations
- Social differences in the relationship to the institution
- Diverse institutional careers
- Expressing social discontent
- II. Organising face-to-face encounters
- Organising the reception
- Of spatial and human divisions
- III. An unequal relationship
- Producing deference
- Institutional answers to ordinary demands
- Surrendering to the institution
- IV. Administrative exchanges, normative exchanges
- Identity control
- From administrative to social goodwill
- Part II The Agents Two Bodies
- I. The post and the role of the agent
- An isolated post
- A loosely defined function
- Disputes on the definition of the agents role
- II. On becoming an agent
- Integration by accident
- Reception work as an escape
- How to learn what cannot be taught
- III. The agents as individuals
- Personal dispositions, relationship to the job and definition of the role
- Of 8216;instinct in reception work
- IV. Facing misery
- Suffering of the client, suffering of the agent
- Individual involvement and social vocations
- V. Managing social inequality
- Adapting to the public
- The social conditions of compassion
- VI. The agents separate identities
- The ambiguity of personalisation
- A necessary self-division
- When self-division fails
- Self-division strategies
- Part III Questioning the Institutional Order
- I. Flaws in the system
- Irregularities
- Injustice
- The uses of discretion
- II. Putting up with the institution
- A strategic docility?
- Silence: between deprivation and self-protection
- Distance, defiance, distrust
- III. The return of the repressed individual
- When visitors get personal
- Deterioration of the exchange
- The difficulties in dealing with violence
- IV. Adapting the institution
- A place to talk
- New uses of the institution, new institutional roles
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Biographical Notes on the Reception Agents
- Appendix 2 Glossary of Acronyms
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index.