Que voit-on de l’action publique en se situant "au guichet", c’est-à-dire en intégrant à l’analyse l’expérience de ses destinataires en même temps que le rôle de ses agents subalternes ? C’est à cette question que cet article propose un ensemble de réponses : les effets des réformes de l’Etat et du recrutement des fonctionnaires ; les transformations de modes de gouvernement par le recours à la casuistique individuelle ; mais aussi ce qu’on se propose d’analyser comme "les ruses de la mise en œuvre".

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 realistic view of French welfare policies, institutions and reforms and, in doing so, dispels both of these myths. Combining Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy theory with the sociology of Bourdieu and Goffman, Vincent Dubois analyses face-to-face encounters and demonstrates the complex relationship between welfare agents, torn between their institutional role and their personal feelings, and welfare applicants, required to translate their personal experience into bureaucratic categories. Placing these interactions within the broader context of social structures and class, race and gender, the author unveils both the social determinations of these interpersonal relationships and their social functions. Increasing numbers of welfare applicants, coupled with mass unemployment, family transformations and the so-called ‘integration problem’ of migrants into French society deeply affect these encounters. Staff manage tense situations with no additional resources – some become personally involved, while others stick to their bureaucratic role ; most of them alternate between involvement and detachment, assistance and domination. Welfare offices have become a place for ‘resocialisation’, where people can talk about their personal problems and ask for advice. On the other hand, bureaucratic encounters are increasingly violent, symbolically if not physically. More than ever, they are now a means of regulating the poor.

This first-rate ethnography provides a unique vista point from which to understand how public policy translates into mundane dealings with marginal populations. By mating the theories of Bourdieu, Goffman and Lipsky, The Bureaucrat and the Poor delivers the best analysis yet of the specificity of bureaucratic domination and makes a signal contribution to the comparative sociology of welfare reform in the neoliberal era.
Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley, USA

A lucid, well-written and well-organised account of everyday bureaucracy at the welfare agency’s window : first-class empirical sociology, savvy, streetwise, and with a wicked sense of clients’ covert tactics. French bureaucrats and their clients are clearly not unique : as Dubois portrays them they look uncannily familiar.
Abram de Swaan, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Vincent Dubois’ newly translated The Bureaucrat and the Poor : Encounters in French Welfare Offices provides an ethnographic ‘insider’s’ look at the double role enacted by welfare workers as they encounter their clients. In his ethnographer’s role, Dubois follows these street-level bureaucrats up close and personal, and explores the workers’ ‘double bodied-ness’ as they juggle at one and the same time their administrative roles and responsibilities with their human compassion for the misery of the poor with whom they interact and whose lives they are called upon to regulate. The book is an astute study of the interrelationships between social conditions and administrative practices, analysing the impact of welfare policies and practices on the well-being of their implementors, as well as their clients. In addition, it provides a superb illustration of the advantages of an interpretive analytic approach to the analysis of public policies, one that rests on ethnographic methods that are focused on questions of meaning for all concerned in a complex policy and organisational situation.
Dvora Yanow, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

By emphasising the encounters of the least powerful state actors and our least powerful citizens, Dubois presents a different, at once more troubling and hopeful view of the administrative state. Throughout The Bureaucrat and the Poor the emphasis remains on the fragility of social roles : nothing is so fixed as to prove immutable ; all is contested and in play. For students and scholars of administration and policy, these are essential insights and well worth the read to appreciate in full.
Steven Maynard-Moody, The University of Kansas, USA

Le guichet d’une administration concentre et symbolise tous les traits négatifs que l’on a coutume de prêter à la bureaucratie (attente, routine, impersonnalité, froideur, formalisme, etc.). À l’inverse, les discours de la " modernisation du service public" prétendent "personnaliser" l’accueil et transformer l’ "usager" en "client". En révélant la teneur des interactions au guichet et en les replaçant dans les structures sociales qui les fondent, l’analyse proposée ici écorne tant le mythe de l’abstraction bureaucratique que celui qui assimile la relation administrative à un échange "commercial". À partir du cas des caisses d’allocations familiales, ce livre rend compte des conséquences de la dégradation des conditions sociales et économiques sur le rapport à l’administration et, dans le même temps, montre le rôle des relations administratives dans le traitement de la misère et la gestion des rapports sociaux. A priori routinières et formelles, les relations administratives se révèlent alors délicates et chargées d’enjeux. A priori standardisés et impersonnels, les rôles bureaucratiques se révèlent fortement perméables aux dispositions de ceux qui les jouent. Cette 3e édition, revue et corrigée, est complétée par une préface de Jacques Lagroye, un avant-propos inédit de l’auteur et un index thématique.

Le contrôle est devenu un instrument des politiques sociales, au sens où les procédures qui le constituent sont en elles-mêmes investies d’une fonction dans la réalisation des objectifs qui leur sont assignés. En revenant sur l’une de ces procédures (les enquêtes au domicile des bénéficiaires de minima sociaux), cet article analyse une forme particulière d’interrogation bureaucratique, dont le dévoilement des caractéristiques, des modalités et des usages, contribue à éclairer les modalités contemporaines du traitement institutionnel des assistés sociaux. La force contraignante de l’institution et de ses règles s’y combine à l’incertitude des situations des contrôlés, des modalités de leur contrôle et des règles mobilisées à cette occasion. Le paradoxe d’un contrôle conduit au nom de la rigueur juridique mais où domine l’incertitude et le pouvoir discrétionnaire des agents de base révèle ainsi plus largement le fonctionnement d’un gouvernement des pauvres qui procède de la combinaison d’une multitude de relations individualisées, plus ou moins coordonnées mais néanmoins inscrites dans une logique structurelle, associant l’impératif économique de remise au travail à une entreprise morale de redressement des habitus non conformes aux exigences du marché de l’emploi et-ou à celles de l’institution d’assistance.

Gli approcci in termini di policy ethnography sono utili per la raccolta di materiale qualitativo che offre una visione sfumata e realistica di politiche spesso analizzate dall’alto e in modo astratto. Tuttavia, la loro ambizione non deve limitarsi a procurare informazioni più dettagliate. A partire da un’inchiesta sul controllo degli assistiti sociali in Francia, vedremo come il lavoro etnografico sul campo, e in particolare l’osservazione diretta, possano rivelarsi in grado di svelare alcune caratteristiche strutturali dell’intervento pubblico. Nella fattispecie, la de-oggettivazione delle categorie collettive costruite per lo sviluppo dello stato sociale, conduce in particolare a controlli sempre più stretti sugli assistiti. Tali controlli si fondano su criteri vaghi definiti in pratica e in situazione. È dunque un’evoluzione d’insieme a rendere importante lo studio di queste pratiche e situazioni per mezzo dell’inchiesta etnografica, la quale a sua volta permette di farne un esame critico. Le nostre indagini sulle trasformazioni nel trattamento degli assistiti sociali illustrano così quella che vorremmo chiamare una etnografia critica delle politiche (critical policy ethnography).

Policy ethnography approaches provide useful qualitative data that offer a nuanced and realistic ground-level view of policies, too often analyzed abstractly from the top. However, the ambition of these approaches must not be limited to producing more precise information. Fieldwork on the control of welfare recipients in France shows that ethnography, and more specifically direct observation, is particularly suited to uncovering the structural features of the new wave of public policies sweeping through advanced societies in the wake of demise of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. Indeed, among other consequences, the “de-objectivation” of the collective categories built during the process of welfare state development leads to more astringent and intense controls of recipients. These controls are based on loose criteria defined in situated practices and interactions. The ethnographic capture and analysis of the concrete practices of the agents of welfare bureaucracies enable us to track and critique the more abstract transformations of the social state in the age of “workfare.” Such fieldwork provides an illustration of the empirical and theoretical potentials of critical policy ethnography.