The Two Bodies of the Bureaucrat

• Author: Bernardo Zacka
• Published date: 01 March 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02509.x
• Date: 01 March 2012

302 Public Administration Review • March | April 2012

 e Two Bodies of the Bureaucrat

Vincent Dubois,  e Bureaucrat and the Poor:

Encounters in French Welfare Of‌f‌i ces (Burlington,

VT: Ashgate, 2010). 228 pp. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN:

9781409402893.

The Bureaucrat and the Poor is an ethnographic

study of bureaucratic encounters at two

French welfare of‌f‌i ces. Drawing on six months

of participant observation and extensive interviews,

Vincent Dubois describes meticulously the everyday

interactions that take place, across the reception desk,

between frontline bureaucrats and the clients they

are meant to serve.  e result is a fascinating and

theoretically incisive “bottom-up” study of public

administration that sheds light on how institutional

roles and identities come to be shaped and transformed.

 e book has garnered considerable atten-

tion in France ever since its publication under

the title La Vie au Guichet (Dubois 1999), and I

believe that its translation will prove equally valu-

able to English-language scholarship on street-level

bureaucracy and policy implementation.  e translated

volume comes with a foreword by Steven Maynard-

Moody and a new introduction by the author that

provides helpful background on the specif‌i c welfare

institutions that are studied—the Caisses d’Allocations

Familiales.

Dubois seeks to challenge a common conception of

the bureaucratic encounter as a quasi-mechanical

interaction between two parties who lack individuat-

ing features—the impersonal and distant bureaucrat,

on the one hand, and the standard client who can

be routinely processed, on the other. To the extent

that such “anonymous” roles are adopted, they are,

he argues, the result of strategic adaptation by the

two parties to the context and constraints of their

encounter. As Dubois puts it, “neither impersonal

bureaucrats nor standardized clients exist: only social

agents with individual personalities who, within

certain conditions and limits, are required to play

Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors

Bernardo Zacka

Harvard University

Bernardo Zacka is a doctoral candidate

in political theory in the Department of

Government at Harvard University. He

is writing a dissertation on the role of

moral discretion in the everyday work of

street-level bureaucrats. He is currently

a graduate fellow in the Edmond J. Safra

Center for Ethics.

E-mail: bzacka@fas.harvard.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 72, Iss. 2, pp. 302–305. © 2011 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2011.02509.x.