The Absurdity of Bureaucracy - (Political Ethnography) by Nina Holm Vohnsen (Paperback)

About the Book

The absurdity of bureaucracy is a contemporary implementation study that unveil how organisational complexity and inefficacy is fed and sustained by employees well-meant attempts and almost primal instinct to compensate for malfunctioning bureaucratic systems by repairing them, short-cutting them, or surpassing them.

Book Synopsis

The absurdity of bureaucracy offers a humorous ethnographic account of policy implementation set in contemporary Danish bureaucracy. Taking the reader deep into the hallways of governmental administration and municipal caseworkers' offices, the book sets out to explore what characterizes policy implementation as a mode of human agency. Using the notions of absurdity and sense-making as lenses through which to explore the dynamic relationship between a policy and its effects, the book reclaims 'implementation studies' for the qualitative sciences and emphasizes the existential dilemma that any policymaker and implementer must confront. Following step-by-step the planning and implementation of the randomized controlled trial, Active - Back Sooner, the book sets out to show that 'going wrong' is not a question of implementation failure but is in fact the only way in which implementation may happen.

From the Back Cover

In The absurdity of bureaucracy, Nina Holm Vohnsen offers an ethnographic portrayal of the Danish labor market system. The point of departure is her puzzlement that the civil servants she met during her research would maintain a double stance towards their work: on one hand they were convinced they were in the process of constantly improving the welfare system, on the other they routinely found the outcomes of their decisions deeply absurd.

Focusing on the randomized controlled trial Active--Back Sooner, a central component of the Danish government's Action Plan on Sickness Benefit, Vohnsen tracks the continuous planning and disintegration of this scheme and the myriad decisions made in relation to it, providing both empirical portraiture and theoretical discussion. She draws on twelve months of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing at the Danish Ministry of Employment and one of the implementing municipalities to document how rejected ideas and paths of action return to haunt the decision-makers--be they caseworkers, the government administration or politicians--creating an absurd world of contradictions and dilemmas. Ultimately, Vohnsen demonstrates that 'going wrong' is built into the very nature of decision-making and suggests that the analysis of absurdity is central to any understanding of how policy develops and how implementation works.

Review Quotes

The Absurdity of Bureaucracy is a rich and valuable work. The book's main quality is its extraordinary ethnographic richness. It is quite unique in its depth, scope and ethnographic sensitivity. [...] An important and welcomed contribution to the anthropological study of bureaucracy and policy.'
Halvard Vike, Ethnos

About the Author

Nina Holm Vohnsen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University