Absurdity of Bureaucracy - How Implementation Works

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.

List of contents

Series editor's preface
Acknowledgements
Reading guide
Central people, documents, and organizations
Prologue: Labor days
Introduction: the absurdity of bureaucracy
1 Anticipations
Portrait 1: "making a difference"
Portrait 2: the perfect plan
Analysis: a container of discrete agendas
2 Mutations
Portrait 3: the trial mutates
Portrait 4: satisfying needs
Analysis: vectors of concern
3 Multiplications
Portrait 5: the purpose multiplies
Portrait 6: the productivity of controversy
Analysis: absurdity is a perspective that appreciates the sum-total
4 The quest for meaning
Portrait 7: "bending" the rules and agreements
Portrait 8: the end of meaning
Analysis: they rebel, they do not resist
5 How implementation works
Epilogue: bureaucracy-choose your own adventure
Appendix: data, position, method

About the author

Nina Holm Vohnsen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University

Product details

• Authors: Nina Holm Vohnsen, Vohnsen Nina Holm
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.11.2020
• EAN: 9781526150066
• ISBN: 978-1-5261-5006-6
• No. of pages: 208
• Series: Political Ethnography
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Social & cultural anthropology, Social welfare & social services, Social welfare and social services, Social and cultural anthropology, Civil service and public sector, Civil Service & Public Sector, Welfare & benefit systems