Bureaucracy, creativity and discernment: lessons from a missing coffee maker
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/1678-9857.ra.2020.178843Keywords:
Anthropology of bureaucracy, administrative proceedings, civil servants, discretion, discernmentAbstract
Based on the ethnographic description of the administrative proceedings ensued by the disappearance of an electric coffee maker from a federal public institution, this article proposes 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, whose anecdotal stupidity often produces violence and injustice. In the case in question, whose analysis integrates a broader research on bureaucratic practices and disciplinary procedures in Brazilian public administration, two aspects stand out: on the one hand, normative prescriptions endow the process with its own impulse, foreshadowing sanctions to the servants formally involved in the good’s disappearance; on the other, and at the same time, the proceedings unleash a careful investment by different actors and instances to contain a blind movement towards undesirable results. These conditions make it possible to problematize discretion in public service – which I call discernment, approaching a certain native use of the term – as an expression of individual autonomy or choice. Instead, ethnography highlights the intrinsically collective character of bureaucratic discernment, without which the sensible implementation of legal and institutional norms would not be possible.
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