This neglect seems particularly strange as the study of organizations in the 1920s was actually initiated by anthropologists – who quickly discovered that there is ALWAYS a gap between bureaucratic ideals and practices. So such a finding should not be listed under the heading of new discoveries, nor should that be done with a research result that large-scale organizations are heterogeneous phenomena. Sociological institutionalism (Meyer and Rowan 1991) has demonstrated that quite a while ago and theorized it with the concept of ‘loose coupling’ (Weick 1976), while policy studies since the 1980s have shown that implementation ALWAYS goes into unplanned directions, and “How great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oakland; Or why it is amazing that (any policy) works at all” (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973). And there are sociologists who have produced interesting work on the ethics of bureaucracy and the bureaucrat, starting with Max Weber and including for example Hilbert (1987) and Osborne (1994); I do agree that this is an interesting field and more could be done here. But some interdisciplinary looking right and left, including to the history of bureaucracy, would certainly do no harm – even if we have to acknowledge that altogether, our sister discipline of sociology has been surprisingly passive in the field. Where interactionist sociology has been active, way ahead of anthropology, was in the ethnographic study of (semi-)professionals, like policemen (Bittner 1967), or medical personnel (Becker et al. 1961; Freidson 1970) – a field which produced some very important French-language contributions (e.g. Monjardet 1994, 1996; see also Crozier 1963).

Maybe this aversion of anthropologists to epistemologically siding with the bureaucrat, e.g. taking him/her as the native, might be an effect of the genetic imprint on the discipline which up to the present day is fascinated by the margins, the peripheral and the exotic. Just look at the recent enthusiasm of many anthropologists for the topical writings of Graeber which contain little ethnographic evidence, but rather a set of opinion pieces espousing anarchist convictions which might be considered a typical first world luxury. Certainly by my African colleagues. For it could very well be argued that the (global) South needs more, and not less bureaucracy, provided it is well functioning (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C30bJBcM_0c#action=share; written version in German: written German version: https://perspective-daily.de/article/363/probiere).
The neglect of bureaucracy and bureaucrats might also be the effect of anthropologists going, somewhat unreflectively, native – hasn’t anthropology been described by cynical observers as the study of anybody who is darker and poorer than you are, and do such people not often find it difficult to handle bureaucracy and bureaucrats? Or is it, as Chihab El Khachab suspects, because of the revulsion of anthropologists at “the ways in which university bureaucracies impact scholarly work and constrain knowledge production”?
I propose that in addition, there is an additional, subcutaneous reason for this aversion: bureaucrats are the unrecognized, ‘evil’ twins of anthropologists. After all, as writers, do we not essentially do the same type of work: enquire, summarize, translate, categorize, draft? Do we not, as writers, obey to very similar aesthetic rules as those which Mirco Göpfert (2013) has beautifully described for the case of African policemen? Do we not also try to formulate authoritative statements on the world and attempt to impose them on others? This aversion to the ones who are most similar to us would not surprise a psychologist, and do we, as fieldworkers, not also find those people most despicable who are the closest to us, e.g. tourists?

What indeed seems to be new in the study of bureaucracy, and a perspective which has been mainly developed in anthropology, is the interest in the materiality of bureaucracy, e.g. the paperwork, from Cabot (2012) to Hull (2012), to name only a few authors. This newly emerging focus is, in fact, the result of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, in this case with science and technology studies. In addition, I would pick up on an idea first sketched by Marcus and Holmes (2006) but, as far as I can see, not much taken up empirically (but see Islam 2015), and argue for another perspective for further ethnographic enquiries, under development with my colleague Jan Beek at Frankfurt: Increasingly, bureaucrats become para-ethnographers. In fact, they even might have been trained as anthropologists, as many people active in the management of migration nowadays are. But in any case, as scientist-practitioners they have to professionally deal with cultural diversity and do their own theorizing, e.g. produce cultural analysis of what they see and experience, much of it in written form, and some of it directly influenced by academic anthropology. In this perspective, the anthropology of bureaucracy has the potential to become a type of increasingly necessary second-degree observation, an ethnography of ethnographers, and contribute to the self-reflection of the discipline in this 21st century (Bierschenk, Krings and Lentz 2013).

References
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