Dealing with disgust: Street-level bureaucrats as agents of Kafkaesque bureaucracy

Abstract

Bureaucracy is deeply implicated in the biopolitical regimes that create and render invisible social waste—individuals classified as abnormal, deviant, or useless—in contemporary societies. According to previous theorists, bureaucracy is able to carry out this critical task through moral distance and reliance on technical efficiency. By specifically focusing on street-level bureaucrats, a unique tier of bureaucracy which is often afforded neither moral distance nor clear directions, this article explains the microprocesses of classification, managing and recycling through which social waste management is carried out in contemporary society. In doing so, this article highlights that in addition to official policies, informal factors like social, organizational, and group norms are critical determinants of bureaucratic behavior in front-line organizations and problematize some of the key assumptions of Weberian bureaucracy. Unlike functional interpretations, we argue that, in some instances, the informal factors influencing street-level bureaucrats are more regressive than official public policies and help explain some of the dystopian features of contemporary bureaucracy and its impact on social inequity.

Keywords

Kafkaesque bureaucracy marginalization social waste street-level bureaucracy wasted lives

When it comes to encounters with disgust, suffering, and other negative emotions, we pay and oblige administrators to ‘take care of it’. In some instances, we ask them to avert their eyes, and in others, to palliate, confront, or invent particular types of disgust. We want them to grapple with and regulate a plethora of disgusting people, acts, and situations, and to do so in particular ways. (Patterson, 2001: 206)

Given the increasing empirical research suggesting an uneasy relationship between bureaucracy¹ and marginalized social groups (Epp et al., 2014; Nisar, 2018a; Schram et al., 2009), there has been a growing dissatisfaction with existing theories of bureaucracy. There is an increasing consensus in the academic community that the traditional interpretation of bureaucracy as a rational ideal-type may be of little use in understanding the social equity footprint of real bureaucracies that are the cornerstone of contemporary state apparatus (Clegg et al., 2016; Hodson et al., 2013a). That is why, there have been multiple calls for a fundamental shift in the normative focus of research on bureaucracy and a deeper theoretical engagement with the idea of social marginalization and the relation of bureaucratic practice to it. For example, Catlaw (2007) has argued for bureaucratic research to focus on social margins by analyzing ‘the generative, situational process of subject constitution and the conduct of conduct’ by bureaucracy to make sure that ‘[g]overning must be good for those who have been reduced to nothing and . . . stripped of all symbolic belonging’ (p. 194) in contemporary societies. Similarly, Hodson et al. (2013a) argue that Weberian theory of bureaucracy has run its course and ‘the social sciences need a fundamentally revised theory of bureaucracy capable of understanding bureaucracy’s power laden and often dystrophic features’ (p. 256). In a similar vein, Das and Poole (2004) argue that it is important to understand and analyze how bureaucratic ‘practices run through everyday life on the margins’ since the ‘forms of illegibility, partial belonging and disorder that seem to inhabit the margins of the state constitute its necessary condition’ (p. 6).

Responding to these calls and adding to the emerging alternative theorization of bureaucracy based on the works of Kafka and Bauman, this article presents a critical account of the role street-level bureaucracy plays in the lives of marginalized publics using the metaphor of waste² management. In doing so, it adds to Bauman’s (1989) discussion of bureaucratic rationality as the enabler of moral distance for state and dominant groups in the society. While Bauman critiques the role of bureaucracy in creating and maintaining the socially constructed fantasy of a sanitized social order, this analysis remains incomplete as it treats the entire bureaucratic institution as a homogeneous entity. Our analysis explicates this process of moral distancing within the modern bureaucratic structures by highlighting the critical role of street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980)—tier of front-line workers directly dealing with the public—who serve as the boundary between the sanitized social order and marginalized social groups. Unlike rest of the bureaucratic apparatus that is afforded moral distance from its actions, street-level bureaucrats are at the center of the critical task of classifying, categorizing, and disposing of social waste. We argue that due to their unique boundary position, the street-level bureaucrats must confront suffering at a personal level and resolve categorization dilemmas not addressed by written public policies. In doing so, traditional determinants of bureaucratic rationality in Bauman’s critique—moral distance, reliance on technical efficiency, and displacement of responsibility—break down. Front-line bureaucrats, therefore, must rely on informal social norms, individual preferences, and affect of citizen–state interactions in their decision making. Because of these factors, street-level bureaucrats often end up reinforcing the social inequities experienced by marginalized groups. Understanding and theorizing the distinct nature of street-level work, therefore, is an important task for the developing alternative theorization of bureaucracy as it can potentially lead to a messy and complex understanding of bureaucratic work, instead of treating it as a homogenized automaton of rationality. Moreover, in contrast to more functional interpretations, we argue that in some instances, the informal factors influencing street-level bureaucrats are more regressive than official public policies and help explain some of the dystopian features of contemporary bureaucracy and its impact on social inequity. This article, therefore, argues for a critical engagement with street-level bureaucracy to examine not only their role in creating and sustaining social order but also the underlying rationales of their work.

To this end, the rest of this article is organized as follows: First, we briefly review the recent literature on the intersections of bureaucracy and social equity highlighting the key arguments put forth in the critique and defense of bureaucracy. Second, we explain the metaphor of waste and waste management and discuss why these metaphors are appropriate for developing a deeper understanding of the role of street-level bureaucracy in managing the proverbial margins of the state. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the different key aspects of street-level bureaucratic waste management in contemporary societies. Finally, we discuss the key implications of our analysis for theorization of contemporary bureaucracy.

Creating the fantasy of order through bureaucracy

Bureaucracy and its relation to ideals like accountability, social equity, and moral duty has received a lot of academic and public attention in recent years. The academic research on this account can be divided into two broad lines of inquiry. First, public management research, where public organizations are the primary object of study, an emerging line of inquiry on the intersection between administrative praxis and social equity, has shown that bureaucracy is intimately involved in discipling the amoral, the deviant, and the abnormal through selective policy implementation, increased administrative burden (Moynihan et al., 2014; Nisar, 2018a), administrative exclusion (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010), and selective policing (Goel et al., 2016; Epp et al., 2014). Implicit in this literature is the largely instrumental critique of the role bureaucracy plays in creating social inequity and sustaining marginalization of certain groups. This line of research also highlights the centrality of street-level bureaucrats particularly front-line workers like police, judges, doctors, nurses, teachers, and social workers in determining the social equity footprint of public policy in general and bureaucracy in particular. While employees at other levels of bureaucracy often do not interact with the public directly and are afforded moral distance from their clients, ‘front-line workers do not think abstractly about the deserving poor: they deal with the blind woman who qualifies for assistance but has a personality disorder that will forever limit her ability to function in society’ (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003: 23). The role of street-level bureaucracy is thus to manage the bodies and matter that remain out of place in the modern sanitized social order by first classifying them as abnormal, deviant, sick, or dirty and then dispose them off in different disciplinary institutions. By doing this dirty work (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999), street-level bureaucrats not only allow the state and dominant social groups to maintain the fantasy of a clean, tidy, and sanitized public order but also allow bureaucracy to maintain the image of a rational tool of modernity.

The violence and messiness inherent in this classification project and the resultant inequities particularly for marginalized social groups have been noted by multiple researchers (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010; Epp et al., 2014; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003; Nisar, 2018a; 2018b; 2018c). This is because of the unique nature of street-level work (Lipsky, 1980): interpretation of often contradictory and voluminous administrative rules and the nature of classificatory project itself which relies on the subjective judgment of the front-line worker (p. 13). Hence, street-level bureaucrats not only act as gatekeepers to services of the state but also have considerable discretion in their job. Consequently, even in the presence of seemingly neutral laws and public policy, they can disproportionately disempower specific social groups through informal practices and selective implementation (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010). However, despite the useful insights it has provided, this line of inquiry has been limited to what Farmer (2003) calls the transparent layer of analysis: instrumental considerations of what ought to be done about equity-related issues; and the symbolic framing of street-level bureaucracy as an instrument of sanitization remains largely unchallenged. Consequently, the pathologies of bureaucracy are almost always ascribed either to limitations in policy design or to a few deviant bureaucrats. Hence, no meaningful normative critique of contemporary bureaucracy and the role of front-line bureaucracy in creating systemic inequities has been developed within the mainstream public management research. That is why, some scholars argue that even when the evidence points otherwise, researchers on public bureaucracies have been guilty of selective blindness in downplaying the negative aspects of the administrator–citizen relationship (e.g. Catlaw, 2006; Fox, 2003; Nisar, 2018c; 2019).

Second, a more normative critique of bureaucracy has developed largely in the management and organizational studies (MOS) literature and has primarily been concerned with understanding the pathologies of contemporary bureaucracy. This line of inquiry, which extends some of the earlier philosophical critiques of bureaucracy by Bauman (1989), Kafka (1925), and Arendt (1973), has a more theoretical focus compared to the instrumental critiques in public management research. Different arguments and observations in this research stream are gradually coming together around the concept of Kafkaesque bureaucracy—a theorization of bureaucracy as ‘enigmatic, contradictory, and dystrophic’ (Hodson et al., 2013b: 1252) based on works of Franz Kafka. A consistent finding by scholars in this line of inquiry has been that ‘chaos, divergent goals, patrimonialism, and unwritten rules’ (Hodson et al., 2013a: 272) are a necessary feature of contemporary organizations. Consequently, instead of experiencing a rational, neutral, and efficient organization, citizens interacting with contemporary bureaucracy experience ‘socially constructed meaninglessness, managed inaction and taught helplessness’ (Clegg et al., 2016: 169). Some scholars within this stream—primarily based on Kafka and Bauman’s work—further argue that the primary reason for the pathologies of bureaucracy is the moral distance this form of organizing allows its members from their clients (Huber and Munro, 2014; McCabe, 2015). The ‘moral distance’ argument is premised on the idea that ‘meticulous division of labour’ and ‘substitution of technical for a moral responsibility’ (Bauman, 1989: 100) allows the bureaucrats to carry out tasks that would otherwise seem impossible from basic ethical and humanitarian standards. It is because of this moral distance that bureaucracy is the ideal instrument for the modern state to create a sanitized social order based on the ideologies of dominant social groups.

While this line of theorization is pertinent to our argument, especially in contesting the sanitized nature of mainstream bureaucratic research, we believe that the process of moral distancing while creating and maintaining a certain social order is not as straightforward. Particularly important in this regard is the role of street-level bureaucracy, which is distinctive in two significant aspects. First, while they are intimately involved in the process of ordering, front-line workers lack the moral distance afforded to rest bureaucracy. Unlike policy makers who rarely come face-to-face with the public at the receiving end of their policies, front-line bureaucrats have to routinely pass judgment on their clients and live with its moral, emotional, and psychological cost. Second, research on street-level bureaucracy indicates that many seemingly enigmatic and contradictory features of contemporary bureaucracy are due to unpredictable job situation, high workload, limited distance from clients, and considerable discretion (Lipsky, 1980). Instead of substituting technical for a moral rationality (as pointed out by Bauman), street-level bureaucrats do the dirty work of creating a social order and recalibrate their ideological focus to cope with the demands of their job (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999). However, even though many of the theoretical arguments developed under the label of Kafkaesque bureaucracy focus on administrator-citizen interactions, this critique has mostly not engaged with the unique significance of street-level bureaucracy. An insightful recent study based on Kafkaesque citizen–state interactions in front-line public organizations, for example, Clegg et al. (2016), does not engage with any research on street-level bureaucracy despite similar theoretical focus. We argue that it is an important limitation as a greater theoretical and empirical engagement with research on street-level bureaucracy can clarify and extend the emerging alternative theorization of bureaucracy. To this end, in the next section, we describe how the metaphor of waste management can help explain the deeply biopolitical nature of the job of contemporary bureaucracy in general and street-level bureaucrats in particular. This metaphor is also helpful in elucidating some of the ideas that have recently been put forth under the large umbrella of Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

The metaphor of waste and waste managers

Shit is ‘good to think with’ because of the ways in which it can unsettle the boundaries between the body and its others, public and private, truth and concealment, state and environment, and, of course, pure and impure. (Hawkins, 2003: 42)

Metaphor-based research and theory has helped provide valuable insights in multiple areas of MOS-like organizational behavior (El and Sawad, 2005; Greenberg, 1995), identity (Cornelissen, 2002, 2006; Gioia et al., 2002), communication (Putnam and Boys, 2006; Putnam et al., 1996), and development (Jacobs and Heracleous, 2006; Tell, 2000). As metaphors ‘allow us to understand an abstract and/or unknown concept in terms of another that is concrete and/or familiar’ (Richard, 2014: 18–9), they facilitate creation of new ways of understanding and thinking about complex phenomena. In the discussion that follows, we use the metaphor of waste and waste management as an organizing idea to discuss the multiple intersections of public bureaucracies and the lives of marginalized individuals. More specifically, we argue that the social role of street-level bureaucracy can best be described as a waste management system. This waste management system identifies and disposes off human waste to make sure the social order retains its apparent purity, order, and unity. We use the word ‘waste’ to describe ‘the walking dead of modernity—those designated out of order building, the superfluous ones of little or spent utility to progress, those consigned by globalization to their separate dumping sites’ (Elliot, 2013: 209). With the rise of globalization and neo-liberalism, the generation of this human waste continues to increase exponentially posing ever-increasing problems to the existing socio-economic order. ‘Refugees, the displaced, asylum seekers, migrants, the sans papiers’ are the familiar examples of this waste (Bauman, 2004: 58–9).

To further clarify the metaphor of waste, Douglas’ (1966) watershed work is insightful. While many researchers have noted the problems associated with categorization schemas of society, it was Douglas who most clearly articulated that things—‘matter out of place’—that cannot be categorized easily given the social norms and categorization schemas are often deemed disgusting, impure, and hence, classified as waste. Other bodies and/or identities that are condemned to live unlivable lives (Butler, 2004) at the proverbial margins of the society because of limitations of the representative social order (Catlaw, 2007), problems of legal categorization (Yanow, 2003), and the entrenched power relations in society (Dahl and Soss, 2014) are also included in this definition of waste. In other words, the idea of wasted human fundamentally ‘stems from a social bifurcation between integrated and repressed individuals’ (Jacobsen and Poder, 2008: 51).

There are multiple reasons for choosing this metaphor. Multiple sister concepts like the homo sacer (Agamben, 1998; Catlaw, 2007), abject citizenship (Kristeva, 1982; Sharkey and Shields, 2008), and the inexistent (Badiou, 2009; Prozorov, 2014a, 2014b) speak to some aspects of subject matter discussed in this article. However, we prefer the metaphor of waste and waste management for multiple reasons. First, waste is a broader concept that incorporates all these sister concepts within it (see, for example, Moore, 2012) and allows for a comprehensive analysis of the intersection of all these categories of ‘otherness’ with the civilizing bureaucracy. For example, the metaphor of homo sacer primarily focuses on people outsider the purview of law, while the metaphor of inexistent concerns the people not visible within the categorizing schemas of the state. The metaphor of abjection in its focus on the exclusion of the ‘improper, the unclean, and the disorderly elements of its corporeal existence that must be separate from its “clean and proper” self’ (Gross, 1990: 86) comes closes to the sense in which we use the metaphor of waste. However, abjection is primarily used in the context of individual subjectivity, and its psychoanalytic interpretation makes it a complex multidimensional construct. The metaphor of waste is comparatively simpler and intuitive, especially when engaging with the idea of its governance at the population level through a waste management system which is the primary objective of this article.

Second, in addition to the metaphorical significance of waste management, it is also a useful ‘conceptual tool of thinking sociologically with negations’ (Jacobsen and Poder, 2008: 51). Hence, the metaphor of street-level bureaucracy as a waste management system allows us to see ‘the rotted reverse’ (Laporte, 2000) of bureaucracy as an order building enterprise. By understanding what is classified as waste and how it is disposed of, we can understand better the work required to achieve the apparently pure, sanitized nature of the social order.

Third, the metaphor of waste best captures the social situation of individuals at sociopolitical margins by combining the idea of being discarded with the emotion of disgust. Hence, waste captures not only the effect but also the affect of how waste is perceived and managed. This aspect of waste also helps illustrate why most of those who are involved in the dirty work (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999) must reframe and recalibrate the nature of their work. Instead of seeing it as what it really is (removing, discarding, and hiding those that threaten the normality of the social order), they must emphasize its ‘good side’: clean, safe, and crime-free public spaces.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the metaphors of waste and waste management are inextricably tied to the socio-spatial configuration of modernity because the ‘processes of expelling wasted objects, places, and people are essential to the production of modern spaces and citizens’ (Moore, 2012: 13). Many scholars have noted how sanitization and imposition of a social order are critical features of the civilizing process of modernity that has served as the governing ideal of the state at least since the 19th century (Elias, 1978; Foucault, 2000a, 2000b, Hinchy, 2014; Laporte, 2000). Catalyzed by the ‘politico-sanitary’ panics of the urban bourgeoise (Curtis, 2002; Foucault, 2000b), cleansing the public sphere from waste of every kind, be it physical or moral, became one of the central concerns of the state apparatus. This led to the emergence of new techniques of governmentality that—while based on older practices like quarantine and exclusion—had the health and purity of the entire social order as their objective (Curtis, 2002; Foucault, 2000b). The different ‘sanitation projects and concepts of hygiene; anxieties over unproductive labour, discourses of criminality; and concerns with the uncontrolled movement of populations across political borders’ (Hinchy, 2014: 27) should be viewed as different facets of this larger project. This increasing obsession with cleanliness, purity, and order, therefore, led to ‘the emergence of certain power/knowledges that . . . discipline[d] modern subjects and produce modern spaces’ (Moore, 2012: 12).

Therefore, it should be no surprise that bureaucracy became entrenched as an organizational system with the advent of the modern state. As its ambitions and outreach increased, the state needed a system that dutifully managed the abject, the poor, and the abnormal being created and relegated to margins by the forces of modernity. Having the ability to draw ‘boundaries—between citizens and others (strangers, aliens, barbarians); between public and private spaces; between categories of virtue and categories of deviance; and between ‘majorities and minorities’’ (Corrêa et al., 2008: 157), bureaucracy was the perfect solution to this ever-increasing problem. The primacy of instrumental rationality and diffusion of responsibility further made bureaucracy the ideal organizational form to carry out the task of waste disposal. Neither the state nor the public wanted to see the disgusting, out-of-place illegal immigrants, transgenders, homeless, and other such groups who were wasted by-products of the civilizing process of modernity. Hence, by hiding this waste from the public, the bureaucracy allowed the public to blissfully benefit from the ‘gifts’ of modernity. This explains why bureaucratic performance has gradually became synonymous with government performance and any failure of the bureaucratic apparatus ‘doesn’t just call the self into question, but technologies of governance, faith in infrastructure’ (Hawkins, 2003: 40). Understanding the foundations of bureaucratic management of social waste can, therefore, provide important insights about its characteristic modus operandi, rationality, and social equity footprint.

Street-level bureaucrats as waste managers

While the entire bureaucratic apparatus is entrusted with waste management and the senior bureaucrats are afforded the luxury of moral distance (Bauman, 1989), ultimately it is the street-level bureaucrats who must identify and dispose of the social waste. Therefore, it is important to understand how street-level bureaucrats of different departments—the police officers, the social welfare workers, the medical professionals and the teachers—perform this critical task of sustaining modernity.

In this regard, the works of Bauman (2004), Douglas (1966), and Foucault (2000b) help identify key aspects of the social waste management system. Per these scholars, the modern social waste management system has two inter-related but distinct aspects; the classification order which labels and marks the wasted bodies through multiple categorizing practices and the action order that makes sure the individuals labeled as wasted bodies continue to live their unlivable lives hidden away from the ‘normal’ society so that the façade of its normality can be maintained (Jacobsen and Poder, 2008). As gatekeepers to the public sphere and government services, the street-level bureaucrats play a critical role in managing both these aspects of the social waste management system. In the discussion that follows, we elaborate on this distinct role of street-level bureaucracy in the social waste management system and discuss the implications of these findings for a conceptualization of the social position of bureaucracy.

Street-level bureaucracy and the classification order

As learning proceeds objects are named. Their names then affect the way they are perceived next time: once labelled they are more speedily slotted into the pigeon-holes in future. (Douglas, 1966: 37)

When in the early days of 1933 the first civil servant wrote the first definition of ‘non-Aryan’ into a civil service ordinance, the fate of European Jewry was sealed. (Hilberg, 1967: 699)

Perhaps no image captures the nature of modern state better than a citizen holding her breath in front of a street-level bureaucrat waiting to hear about her ‘official’ identity. Whether it is an asylum seeker waiting for a verdict on his immigration status, a welfare applicant waiting to know whether she deserves unemployment benefits, or an African American stopped by police waiting to hear whether he was over speeding or simply ‘driving while black’ (Harris, 1996, 1999); it is the street-level bureaucrats who classify all of us along the normal/deviant and useful/waste axes. This careful codification of bodies and/or identities is the first critical step in managing social waste because ‘before spaces, people and identities can be accepted as objects for restructuring they must be symbolically coded (e.g. lionized or stigmatized) through the use of common understandings, which demarcate them as villains, victims, salvationists, and ominous forces’ (Sternberg, 2013: 188). Street-level bureaucrats—as the custodian of official ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1980)— are the central disciplinary apparatus of the state in-charge of this critical biopolitical technology of governance, and decide what is deemed normal in society and what must be discarded as waste (Catlaw, 2007; Dean, 2010; Townley, 1993).

Even though categorization of individuals along useful-wasted axis also takes place within informal institutions (like family), street-level bureaucrats’ categorization is qualitatively different from any social categorization. As the street-level bureaucrats rely on the state’s ability to categorize individuals and to put valuation to those categories (Bourdieu, 1989, 1994), their categorization becomes the state-sanctioned ‘truth’ about its bearer (Salamon, 2010). If you are classified as undeserving for unemployment benefits by the front-line workers of the social welfare departments, whether or not your significant others deem you deserving has no bearing on your official state as undeserving (Soss et al., 2011). Similarly, the coding of refugees and asylum seekers, along the deserving/underserving axis by the bureaucracy, is the most critical factor in determining whether they become insiders or remain ‘out-of-place’ unwanted aliens. Yet, another example is of gender non-conforming individuals for whom the gender on their legal ID—often adjudicated by a street-level bureaucrat—becomes their official identity even when it has little relevance to their self-identity (Nisar, 2018a).

Even though the street-level bureaucrats rely on law and public policy to classify the public along useful/waste axes, written public policy is only one aspect of the bureaucratic order that generates the social waste. Since categorization of individuals does not take into account the inherent ontological multiplicity in nature (Catlaw, 2007), there are always people who cannot be put into clear brackets according to the official categorization schemas. These ambiguous and/or anomalous identities (Douglas, 1966)—monsters as Foucault (1997) famously called them—are threatening for the social order as they expose the underlying arbitrariness in laws based on rigid categories. That is where the street-level bureaucrats come to our rescue by either hiding these ‘out of place’ bodies from the public sphere where their presence threatens the fabricated purity of the social order (as discussed in the next section) or by putting them arbitrarily into identity boxes they deem fit. That is one of the reasons why street-level bureaucrats have considerable discretion in their classificatory role (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). Thus, it is often a street-level bureaucrat who decides whether a driver looks suspicious enough to warrant a stop; or a passer-by looks like an illegal immigrant and requires a spot check of identity; or a traveler looks like a potential terrorist and requires a pat down: all decisions about such indeterminacies are taken by street-level bureaucrats.

While resolving these codification dilemmas, street-level bureaucrats are neither afforded the moral distance nor the luxury of displacing their responsibility to someone else. Similarly, they cannot hide behind arguments like technical efficiency or rationality as no clear policy guidelines exist in such cases. Instead, the street-level bureaucrats—either individually or as a group—must come up with definitions of their own about who should be classified as social waste. Research indicates that street-level bureaucrats generally rely on ‘non-rational’ factors like dominant societal discourses (Nisar, 2018a), group norms, and organizational cultures that are often discriminatory toward minority groups (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003; Oberfield, 2014) to resolve such dilemmas. Hence, while a white driver is given a verbal warning, an African American may be given the full financial penalty under the given law for committing the same transgression (Epp et al., 2014). Similarly, two individuals applying for social welfare might be classified on the deserving/undeserving axis by front-line workers based on their race or ethnicity in line with their dominant social constructions (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003; Soss et al., 2011). As multiple researchers (Epp et al., 2014, 2017; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2012; Nisar, 2018b; 2018c) have noted, during these labeling encounters, front-line workers can also de-subjectify and de-humanize the marginalized social groups to re-assert their status as waste helping ‘separate ourselves from that which we consider filthy in order to reassure ourselves that we are not that filth’ (Morrison, 2015: 31). Repeated over time, these acts of labeling individuals marginalized along the intersection of class, race, gender, sexual preference, and religion as deviants or pollutants reinforces their classification as wasted bodies. Hence, through the multiple administrator–citizen interactions, the street-level bureaucrats continuously (re)create individual, group, and institutional boundaries often defined through social and cultural norms and their individual biases.

It is pertinent to note here that with the rise of the surveillance state, this sifting of publics is increasingly being automated as the street-level bureaucrats become screen-level and then system-level bureaucrats (Bovens and Zouridis, 2002). As the ‘surveillance system obtains personal and group data in order to classify people and populations . . . to determine who should be targeted for special treatment, suspicion, eligibility, inclusion, access, and so on’ (Lyon, 2005: 19), the bureaucracy now increasingly relies on computer codes (that it designs) to analyze these data to categorize individuals. Whether it is decisions about asylums seekers, welfare services, or policing, automated coding is increasingly becoming the norm in separating the normal from the deviant, the useful from the waste, and the insider from outsider. While the apparent objectivity of the computer codes might be appealing, it is critical to remember that these codes are no less socially constructed than the bureaucracy and no less imperfect than previous categorization schemas (Garcia, 2016; Kirkpatrick, 2016; Noble, 2018). That is why, it is critical to remember that surveillance and digital governance does not limit the classifying power of bureaucracy. Instead, it not only allows the bureaucracy to hide behind a façade of objectivity—the waste is only what the computer codes as such—but also allows them further ‘“distancing” from the unsightly or morally repelling outcomes of [their] action[s]’ (Bauman, 1989: 23).

Street-level bureaucracy and the action order

The standard notion of the way fantasy works within ideology is that of a fantasy-scenario which obfuscates the true horror of a situation: instead of a full rendering of the antagonisms which traverse our society, we indulge in a notion of society as an organic Whole, kept together by forces of solidarity and cooperation. (Žižek, 1998: 190)

If categorization of waste is the first step in managing the social waste, ‘sealing it off’ (Bauman, 1989) from the existence of the sanitized public order is the other. As Bauman notes, sealing off means that wasted individuals are ‘either removed physically from the context of the daily life and concerns of other groups, or separated psychologically by overtly or unambiguously discriminating definitions and the emphasis on the targeted category’s uniqueness’ (Bauman, 1989: 122–3). Hayden makes the same point by noting that those classified as the social waste are ‘stripped of dignity, driven to the farthest margins of society and eradicated from public spaces while hidden in plain sight’ (Hayden, 2009: 43).

This second aspect in management of wasted humans is critical because as soon as something gets classified as waste, its proximity becomes threatening for the social order that is based on its apparent objectivity, purity, and inevitability. As Patterson (2001) notes, ‘it is not simply encounter with the anomalous that disgust us. Things out of place are bothersome . . . but it is their fit at the bottom of a conceptual grid that matters . . . They are disgusting if they are unwilling to stay there’ (p. 220). This is especially pertinent for the social waste because even though most of us know generation of such waste is the inevitable price of the artificial purity of our social order, we do not want to see or think about it (Rosiers, 2003). As Dean (1999) argues,

at its simplest the dilemma any of us face when confronted by a beggar [or any other wasted life] is whether to give money or not, yet beneath this dilemma lies the necessity for the kind of classificatory judgments that had supposedly been colonized by social administrators: is the supplicant deserving or undeserving, genuine or fraudulent? (pp. 3–4)

Most of us do not want to confront such questions that requires us to think about the broader questions related to the intersection of work, income, capital, and deservingness. This is where the street-level bureaucracy comes to our rescue yet again.

Formal law and public policy are again one of the primary instruments that provide the street-level bureaucrats with the legitimacy required to carry out this dirty work of disposing off the social waste. Anti-vagrancy, anti-solicitation, and anti-immigrant laws are examples of legal instruments that not only classify the passive poor, the sex workers, and the illegal immigrants as the social waste but also play a central role in sealing off these groups from the public sphere. Such laws—meant to keep the ‘too disturbing’ others (Rosiers, 2003: xiv) hidden from the public sphere—are integral for keeping the contemporary social order working for the normal population. As implementers of such laws, street-level bureaucrats pick up the social waste and deposit it in its appropriate disposal place (like the drug rehabilitation center, prison, youth hall, mental health facility, immigrant detention center). The street-level bureaucrats thus keep the city clean and serene for the rest of us. They save us the agony, moral discomfort, and unease of encountering the social waste that reminds us about the ugly underbelly of the contemporary social order.

It is important to note that the action order of waste management is not limited to simply hindering the presence of wasted humans in the public sphere but also ‘making invisible the very humanity’ (Bauman, 1989: 26) of such individuals. This critical procedure allows the state and society the moral distance it needs to look the other way when confronted by the occasional events when such individuals contest their marginalization and demand a renegotiation of the social order that has relegated them to the status of waste. This is done by another critical task of bureaucracy in which they present and reframe (Heidelberg, 2017) the ‘problem’ of marginalized groups’ presence as an issue of sanitization—instead of social equity—by designating ‘onto groups who can serve as, so to speak, the surrogate dirt of a community, enabling the dominant group to feel clean and heavenly’ ’(Nussbaum, 2010: 7). These reframing and refocusing strategies (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999) are important in two ways: First, by reframing the marginalized groups as a problem of sanitation and hygiene, street-level bureaucracy normalizes the removal/disposal of such groups from public spaces as inevitable and obvious. Second, they are also able to minimize the moral and social taint of their dirty work by characterizing it as doing the public service or following orders, rather than mistreating racial, ethnic, and gender minorities. In this regard, the response of the bureaucracy to the Occupy movements is insightful. Catlaw and Eagan (2016) note that the sit-ins by the Occupy protesters were mostly ‘framed as problems of public safety, sanitation, and waste removal’. Such a framing reduced the occupiers trying to re-assert their rights in the public places ‘to giant leaps of waste by police and city officials’ and reinforced the fabrication of bureaucrats as agents of ‘cleaning and civilizing urban space’ (Catlaw and Eagan, 2016). Similarly, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) archetypes—like ‘gleeful gay killers’, ‘lethal lesbians’, ‘disease spreaders’, ‘deceptive gender benders’, ‘hyper sexual moral pollutants’ (Mogul et al., 2011; Nisar, 2018c)—developed by law enforcement officials make it easier for them to sanitize their discriminatory actions against the LGBT minority groups. Yet, another example is the title of ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ given to a police mission in England in 1993 that was launched ‘in a bid to “clear” the city streets of beggars’ who were ‘described by the politicians and the media as “dirty,” “offensive,” and “eyesores”’ (Wardhaugh, 1996: 709). Street-level bureaucrats thus ensure that bodies that contest or problematize the definitions of normality are denied visibility, mobility, and access to the public spaces of society. Researchers in many contexts have shown how bodies and identities considered deviant along the axes such as gender (Daum, 2015), sexuality (Dwyer, 2010; Wolff and Cokely, 2007), race (Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel, 2014), and class (Wardhaugh, 1996) experience public spaces as threatening and hostile limiting their presence and visibility in society. This selective and mediated visibility ensures that the ‘true horror of the situation’ (Žižek, 1998) as it relates to social inequity and societal waste remains hidden from the ‘normal’ public and myth of a sanitized public sphere can be perpetuated.

Importantly, as noted above, street-level bureaucrats must also rely on their own assessment of the marginalized groups during the implementation of such policies (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010; Nisar, 2018a; 2018c; Oberfield, 2014). Consequently, groups classified as social waste by the dominant societal norms can be hidden from the public eye even when there are no legal prohibitions to this effect. For example, even though traffic rules are ostensibly ‘identity neutral, racial and ethnic minorities still experience discriminatory and frequent traffic stops by frontline workers of police’ (Epp et al., 2014). Similarly, as Daum (2015) and Buist and Lenning (2015) note, terms like ‘driving while black’ and ‘walking while trans’ (Edelman, 2014) capture the informal surveillance marginalized groups must experience in urban public spaces by front-line workers of the government. Street-level workers using the power and discretion at their disposal can also enforce these social norms through violence, corruption, extortion, and arbitrary arrests as well (Biradavolu et al., 2009; Nisar, 2018c; Verma, 1999). Overall, such dis-empowering experiences act as signals to those classified as the social waste that their presence in the sanitized public sphere is never unconditional and can be rescinded at any time without warning. Finally, it is important to note the limits of this metaphor. Humans are not like objects or things that can be picked up and cleanly tucked out of sight (and out of mind). While formal institutions like bureaucracy have an important role in managing societal waste, waste management is a complex system in which multiple institutions play a significant intersecting role. For example, as Hall (1996) argues, it is ‘not enough for the law to summon, discipline, produce and regulate, but there must also be the corresponding production of a response from the side of the subject’ (p. 12). Hence, no management of social waste is perfect if there continues to be reluctance or resistance by those relegated to the social margins. This is where disciplinary subject formation in various informal social institutions plays a critical role in social waste management. While bureaucracy combines the juridical, disciplinary, and pastoral powers of the state to classify and manage the societal waste, informal social institutions (like the family) act as disciplinary apparatuses that try to make sure that such individuals conform to the dominant norms of society (Foucault, 1980). It is often subject formation within informal institutions which by limiting the hopes and aspirations of marginalized individuals keeps them from revolting against the system that reduces them to an unlivable life. Street-level bureaucrats within ideological state apparatuses (Althusser, 2006 [1970]) like schools, hospitals, and rehabilitation centers also play an important role in this process of subject formation (Foucault, 1982) through which the subjects are ‘encouraged’ to pigeonhole themselves into certain legitimate, regulated identities.

It is important to note here that the purpose of our discussion here is to highlight the dystopian features of modern bureaucracies and their role in creating and reinforcing the marginalization in modern society. However, it is equally important to note that even though classified as ‘waste’, people can still develop subject positions that withstand and resist this classification. Various strategies of resistance—both collective and individual—are employed by marginalized groups to not only contest their social classification but also to renegotiate and resist their containment within the boundaries of social order. Indeed, research in multiple contexts has highlighted that marginalized communities resist and subvert their state-mandated legal classifications through micro-acts of resistance (Butz, 2002; Frederick, 2017; Scott, 2008). Occasionally, these strategies allow marginalized groups to renegotiate the label of waste imposed on them by street-level bureaucrats and/or public policy instruments. Changing social construction of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) community due to advocacy efforts of multiple organizations and wide-spread critique of policing in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States are just of some of the examples where such strategies have been successful in bringing these categorization issues in public consciousness. Perhaps the most appropriate example for the present analysis comes from Nisar (2018b) who describes how marginalized genderqueer individuals in Pakistan use undressing in public (or a threat to do so) as a successful resistance strategy against the street-level bureaucrats. By threatening to expose what was supposed to be hidden, they not only thwart harassment and ridicule by front-line workers but in doing so also highlight how the sanitizing order of society is threatened by the social waste oozing into public space. In the context of citizen–state interactions, small individual acts of contestation are, therefore, often a useful arsenal for the relatively powerless groups in society particularly when open subordination is not possible.

Discussion

In this article, we have argued that as one of the central disciplinary apparatuses of the state, street-level bureaucracy plays an important role in the maintenance of social waste. In the interactions between street-level bureaucrats and the marginalized publics, those classified as waste are marked by their identities permanently and relegated to invisibility in the public sphere. In performing this task, the street-level bureaucrats must rely on cultural and group norms in addition to the prevailing laws in society, highlighting the complex nature of this task. Understanding the biopolitical nature of these tasks is critical for a comprehensive understanding of the social role of bureaucracy in the contemporary states.

Before discussing the implications of our analysis for bureaucratic theory, it is important to address a potential critiques of our analytic approach. It can be argued that our analysis is primarily focused on the social margins and has limited relevance to the role of bureaucracy at the proverbial ‘center’. However, it is important to remember that it is often at the margins that the dynamics taken for granted at the center are laid bare (Das and Poole, 2004). While our discussion has focused on the citizen–state intersections at the margins, many underlying dynamics, especially the role of street-level bureaucracy as a categorizing and disciplinary apparatus, are likely to be the same at the so-called center of the state and society. In the neo-liberal social order, all of us are being classified—or encouraged to self-classify ourselves—along multiple identity dimensions by the bureaucratic apparatus. These classifications are critical determinants of access (or denial) to key social, political, and economic opportunities. The bureaucratic order thus ensures that all of us—even those at the proverbial center of the society—spend our lives striving to reach or stay at the normal-useful end of the social identity spectrum.

It is also important to acknowledge important limitations of our analytic approach. First, while the discussion of classifying and action order of bureaucratic waste management in this article was done primarily in terms of binaries of normality/abnormality or useful/waste, these orders should best be conceptualized as a spectrum with normal-useful identities at one end and abnormal-waste ones at the other. For example, in some instances, individuals (or social groups) considered superfluous by the local social order have to be formally invested with recognition and legal rights. This can be due to multiple reasons ranging from global human rights discourses (Žižek, 2005) to local policy windows (Kingdon, 2003) emerging from some triggering events. For such individuals, Sharkey and Shiled’s (2008: 239) term abject citizenship perhaps best captures the essence of their paradoxical relationship with street-level bureaucracy: the need to resolve the fact that ‘someone can be thrown away, considered worthless, yet still be formally vested with privileges and identity’. Relatedly, while some bureaucratic categorizations—like those based on ethnicity, gender, and race—are permanent, others are not; some groups can be recycled back as sanitized insiders (Bauman, 2004).

Street-level bureaucrats are, again, critical actors in this process as they not only dispose off the social waste but also decide which waste can be recycled (or rehabilitated) through the disciplinary institutions of society: schools, prisons, drug rehabilitation programs, and so on. Such individuals and/or groups are often accorded a liminal status by the street-level bureaucrats. These liminal groups—like the temporarily unemployed, aspiring immigrants, or one-time offenders—are provisionally shifted to the category of waste yet can be rehabilitated later. Again, it is the street-level bureaucrats who decide whether an individual is rehabilitated or clean enough to be welcome as an insider again. Hence, the relationship of bureaucracy and individuals at social margins is much more complex than the simply useful/waste binary. However, the fundamental dynamic of this relationship remains the same; street-level bureaucrats categorize and allocate opportunities to different social groups based on dominant social, legal, and group norms about utility, purity, and normality.

Second, it is important to note that while we have discussed street-level bureaucrats primarily as instruments of dominant interests in state and society, it is critical to note that in their unique liminal role, front-line workers also occasionally go out of their way to help those who would otherwise be classified as social waste. Hence, a client applying for social welfare, who otherwise does not qualify for public support, may be labeled as eligible by a front-line worker who can relate to her circumstances at an individual level (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). Similarly, a police officer may let someone who was caught doing a minor felony escape based on their internal calculus of cost and benefits of such an arrest. However, these exceptional cases generally operate at the individual level and do not change the larger social and organizational categorizations of social waste. Moreover, these exceptions further reinforce the argument that bureaucracy at the frontlines is very different from the simple picture of moral distance and technical efficiency painted by earlier scholars like Bauman.

Notwithstanding these limitations, this analysis makes the following contributions to bureaucratic theory. First, this article contributes to the emerging literature on Kafkaesque bureaucracy by explaining the process by which street-level bureaucracy is able to create and sustain the fantasy of a sanitized social order. As this article illustrates, modern states require creation of endless quantities of social waste in the ruthless civilizing process. The identification and disposal of this waste is critical for maintaining the fabricated purity of the contemporary social order. However, carrying this task requires confronting foundational paradoxes of the civilizing process of modernity. Bureaucracy in general, and street-level bureaucrats in particular, takes up the dirty work of managing this societal waste: They classify people as abnormal, deviant, sick, or dirty by drawing on law and dominant social, group, and organizational norms and then hide it or dispose it off in the disciplinary institutions created by the state and the society. By getting their hands dirty, street-level bureaucrats allow the state and dominant social groups to maintain their moral distance and live in the fantasy of shining, thriving, modern cities.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, this article adds to Bauman’s critique of bureaucracy as the instrument par excellence for carrying out the dirty business of the modern state. We argue that in addition to the factors identified by Bauman as critical determinants of bureaucratic action, other factors like social, organizational, and group norms also influence decision making at the frontlines of public organizations. Our discussion further shows that in many cases these additional influences may end up reinforcing the differences and inequities prevalent in the society. For example, when some groups, previously categorized as waste, are afforded legal rights and are recognized as ‘normal’, they may still be discriminated against by street-level bureaucrats who continue to rely on social and group norms of categorizing such groups. It is critical, therefore, to account for these ‘non-rational’ influences on bureaucratic behavior for any alternative theorization of contemporary bureaucracy.

Finally, this article helps integrate some key insights from public management research and MOS, two primary lines of inquiry about bureaucracy that have remained largely independent. While the public management literature has noted the centrality of street-level bureaucrats in determining the social equity footprint of bureaucracies, apart from a few exceptions, the MOS literature has largely neglected this theme from their critique of bureaucracy. Conversely, while the MOS literature has engaged with systematic normative and symbolic critique of bureaucracy, mainstream public management research has primarily had a functional impulse and has resisted contesting the sanitized image of bureaucracy. This article incorporates ideas from both these research streams to develop a normative critique of street-level bureaucracy that can help inform future research and analytics of contemporary bureaucracy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Thomas Catlaw, Mary Feeney, Spiro Maroulis, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Muhammad Azfar Nisar

Notes

Author biographies

Muhammad Azfar Nisar is an assistant professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is interested in bureaucratic theory, social equity and street-level bureaucracy.

Ayesha Masood is an assistant professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences. Her research interests include anthropology of work, bureaucracy, and gender identity.

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