Nina Holm Vohnsen

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.

The chapter returns to the questions raised in the beginning of the book: how might we understand the self-generative character of bureaucracy? And what might we learn about how implementation works in general based on a discussion of this specific ethnographic study? Building on the insights developed in the previous four chapters it sets out to chart the systematic ways in which policy implementation fails. The chapter presents seven theses on how implementation works which it suggests can be observed in most if not all cases of policy implementation – be that national policy or international development policy.

In this chapter the reader is introduced to the municipal and ministerial reality respectively. While introducing some of the central people in the book the chapter focuses in the genesis of Active – Back Sooner. ‘Where does a policy come from?’ is the central question addressed in the chapter. That ‘it’ comes from no one place, that ‘it’ has from the onset no unity but rather is a container of discreet agendas held momentarily together by means of the unlike materials of statistics and hopes is the conclusion the chapter reaches.

Chapter 2 portrays Active – Back Sooner as ‘it’ starts to disintegrate. It shows how upon arrival in one of the municipal units charged with the implementation of the trial, the original project design is undermined and recreated by the multiple local concerns to which it must adapt or defer. Developing the analytical metaphor ‘vector of concern’ the chapter documents how contradictory decisions were being made from minute to minute, all generated by attempts to make the interventions sensible and purposeful. The chapter concludes that when implementation fails it does so because implementation is in fact a second planning phase characterised by a high degree of instability.

The introduction lays out the book’s empirical interest (the repercussions of policy), the analytical focus (decision-making) and its theoretical aim (to theorize the non-linear aspect of implementation by addressing it through the lens of the absurd). This introduction firmly places the book in the fields of implementation and development studies, but does so by introducing a focus on all that is rejected, ignored and excluded from planning and bureaucratic decision-making. The introduction also provides a reflection on how best to write complexity and incoherency, and it develops the book’s primary analytical writing style inspired by photojournalism, more specifically environmental portraiture (Kobré 2008).

This chapter is an interactive novel where the reader is invited to step into the role of caseworker and implementer of policy. The form is in itself an analytical point: any decision the reader makes might later trap him or her or have unintended consequences. By taking one decision rather than another, the reader is cut off from knowing what other decisions might have led to. The epilogue thus paraphrases the central Kierkegaardian dilemma that will return to haunt policy implementation: what you will regret is not the thing you do but all the thing you by implication did not do. The method used is the style of writing sometimes referred to as a branching-plot novel or gamebook. The idea is that the reader participates in the narration of the story by taking decisions in key moments. The aim of this is to engage the reader and make them ‘complicit’ in the casework rather than analytically distanced. The validity rests on a close commitment to the empirical data. Each situation des...

Chapter 2 portrays Active – Back Sooner as ‘it’ starts to disintegrate. It shows how upon arrival in one of the municipal units charged with the implementation of the trial, the original project design is undermined and recreated by the multiple local concerns to which it must adapt or defer. Developing the analytical metaphor ‘vector of concern’ the chapter documents how contradictory decisions were being made from minute to minute, all generated by attempts to make the interventions sensible and purposeful. The chapter concludes that when implementation fails it does so because implementation is in fact a second planning phase characterised by a high degree of instability.

Chapter 4 follows Active – Back Sooner to one of the private employment agencies, ENGA, where the core delivery of the local version of the trial, the ‘activities’ and the ‘close follow-up’, were meant to take place. This chapter follows the privately employed social workers as they do their utmost to make something sensible take place as they are faced by what they find to be utterly pointless referrals from the municipal caseworkers. The chapter shows what happens when the caseworkers and employees are pushed to the limits of their personal capacities to make sense of what is going on and ultimately stop trying. The chapter concludes that the fundamental urge to make sensible decisions drives the employees to rebel against local directive and agreements. It is the very thing that creates the grounds for institutional absurdity while being in itself the only stable source of meaning.

In this chapter the reader is introduced to the municipal and ministerial reality respectively. While introducing some of the central people in the book the chapter focuses in the genesis of Active – Back Sooner. ‘Where does a policy come from?’ is the central question addressed in the chapter. That ‘it’ comes from no one place, that ‘it’ has from the onset no unity but rather is a container of discreet agendas held momentarily together by means of the unlike materials of statistics and hopes is the conclusion the chapter reaches.

<p>The book opens with a montage of 'ethnographic snapshots' which in very different ways exemplifies central aspects of development and planning. Each snapshot is 10-15 lines long and might be a conversation, a dilemma, a scene from a bureaucratic setting, a decision taken or a situation confronted. The prologue will in this manner introduce the reader to the book´s main analytical pair: the numerous attempts to make sensible decisions and the resulting experience of absurdity when confronted with the sum of them. The montage makes use of two writing techniques: American novelist Kurt Vonnegut's dispensation with 'beginning, middle and end' in narratives, and Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein's 'intellectual' montage – here adapted with American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce as a principle for destabilizing conclusion.</p>

Chapter 3 explores how the temporarily united interests and viewpoints that had found a common ground in the proposal for the trial continued to live on and produce new versions of Active – Back Sooner. It portrays Active – Back Sooner as its methodological requirements puts it on collision course with national employment policy, legal principles, and local organisational attempts to ensure the quality of the general casework. Through attempts to rectify counterproductive or inexpedient practice the trial’s purpose begin to multiply. The chapter shows that the continuous planning Active – Back Sooner was subjected to was not restricted to the municipal Jobcenter, but rather that the trial continued to be designed and planned centrally in the Ministry too. The chapter documents that all these diversions from the initial plans were generated by highly sensible decisions and attempts to make the interventions meaningful, and further, that these attempts were what in turn tore Active – ...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore and problematizes one of the oft-cited reasons why the implementation of public policy and other development initiatives goes wrong – namely that there is a mismatch or antagonistic relationship between street-level worker’s decisions and priorities on the one hand and on the other hand the policy-makers’ or administrators’ directives and priorities. Design/methodology/approach – The paper builds on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork set in a Danish municipal unit which administered the sickness benefit legislation. Findings – Through the reading of an ethnographic example of implementation of labour market policy this paper suggests that when policy invariably is distorted at the administrative level it is not necessarily due to lack of will among street-level workers to comply with legislation or centrally devised directives but rather because: in practice, planning and implementation are concurrent processes that continuously ...

Page 1. Absurdity and the Sensible Decision implementation of Danish labour market policy Nina Holm Vohnsen PhD thesis Aarhus University 2011 Section for Anthropology and Ethnography Submitted to the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, August 1 st 2011. ...

Brudflader mellem forskning og bureaukrati Det har i en årrække været en ambition i det danske embedsværk at kunne baserestadig flere indsatser på evidens. Hvor den evidensbaserede tilgang tidligereprimært var at finde på de sundhedsfaglige indsatsområder, har tilgangen nuogså vundet frem på det sociale område og i beskæftigelsesindsatsen. Dermedskriver Danmark sig ind i en bredere tendens, som også omfatter det amerikanskeog det britiske embedsværk. Bestræbelserne på at frembringe evidensbaseretpolicy er imidlertid blevet problematiseret både fra forskningsmiljøerne oginternt i statsadministrationerne. I disse analyser konkluderes det, at evidenskun sjældent, hvis nogensinde, bruges direkte i politikudviklingen, men oftere erenten håndplukket til lejligheden eller indgår som et blandt flere input. I denneartikel vil jeg på baggrund af feltarbejde i det danske embedsværk diskutere,præcis hvori udfordringerne ved at arbejde evidensbaseret består. Hvordan gårdet altså til, at evidens ...

A current ambition in welfare states as diverse as Denmark, the UK, and the USA, is to base political decision-making on rigorous research. Sound as this might seem the ambition has nevertheless been problematized by both policy-makers and the research community. This article intends to draw out some general pitfalls in the curious meeting of science and politics by focusing on one particular attempt to make evidence-based legislation in. These insights will be relevant for anthropological researchers of legislative processes who wish to move beyond a merely discursive approach to the study of policy and politics.

The absurdity of bureaucracy offers an ethnographic portrayal of an attempt to make and implement evidence-based policy set in the Danish labour market system in 2009. It departs from the author’s puzzlement that the civil servants she met during her research would maintain a double stance towards their work; they were convinced they were in the process of constantly improving the welfare system while at the same time they found the outcome of their decisions and the system they constructed in the process deeply absurd. The main protagonist of the book is the randomized controlled trial Active – Back Sooner which was a central component of the Danish Government’s Action Plan on Sickness Benefit meant to reduce to the cost of sickness benefit and to secure the ‘active labour force’. It is the continuous planning and disintegration of this effort and the myriad of decisions made in relation to it that is the primary object of empirical portraiture and theoretical discussion. Based on 12 months of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing in the Danish Ministry of Employment and one of the implementing municipalities the book documents how rejected reasons and alleyways of action return to haunt the decision-makers (be they caseworkers, the government administration, or politicians) creating an absurd world of contradictions and dilemmas. The book documents how ‘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.