Bureaucracy, creativity and discernment: lessons from a missing coffee maker

Abstract

Based on the description of the administrative proceedings ensued by the disappearance of an electric coffee maker from a federal public institution, I argue that the thoughtful and creative transposition of the distance between the schematism of bureaucratic formulas and the complexity of the situations they address is as constitutive of bureaucracy as its more bizarre expressions, which often produce violence and injustice. On the one hand, normative prescriptions endow the process with its own impulse, foreshadowing sanctions to the servants formally responsible for the good. On the other, and at the same time, the proceedings unleash a careful investment to contain a blind movement towards undesirable results. These conditions problematize discretion in public service - which I call discernment, approaching a native use of the term - as an expression of individual autonomy. Instead, ethnography highlights the intrinsically collective character of bureaucratic discernment, essential to the sensible implementation of institutional norms.

Keywords:
Anthropology of bureaucracy; Administrative proceedings; Civil servants; Discretion; Discernment