Abstract
Early reactions to the publication of Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, which have persisted over the passing decades, was that ethnomethodology could not address what sociology deemed to be socially significant matters such as ‘power’ and ‘the state’. This, however, is not the case. How such matters enter into the practical everyday affairs of members is of equal interest to ethnomethodology when compared to how any matter enters into members’ everyday life, and how they display that. It just does not have more importance. Egon Bittner spelt this out with regard to Weber’s interest in bureaucracy when he reminds sociology that when Weber talked about efficiency he was not referring to an objective standard but as something that is attuned to practical interests as they emerge in the context of everyday life. This paper examines some of the actions and interactions that were encountered in a Governmental Department in one of the European countries. It makes visible how characterisations of bureaucracy such as ‘rational’, and ‘efficient’ are achieved in the actions and interactions of Department employees, and some of the practices involved in that achievement. Garfinkel, and ethnomethodology in general, are not, in principle, to be found wanting where matters of overarching, primordial interest to sociology are concerned.
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Notes
See Sharrock and Button (2010) for an extended examination of the ‘structure/agency debate’ and the criticisms levelled against Garfinkel and ethnomethodology in general, and the mis-interpretations they involve.
A governmental department in a European country—referred to as The Department—concerned with the administration of welfare payments to the unemployed. At the time this study was undertaken The Department had a “customer policy” that treated people who were claiming or making claim applications as its customers and employees of the Department referred to them as their “customers”. Accordingly we have adopted that convention. All the names of people, and systems have been changed to preserve anonymity. We would like to acknowledge the help and co-operation of The Department and the support and generosity of the people we worked with.
The Department’s concern to protect the privacy of customers prevented us from recording customers’ sides of conversations on the telephone with The Department’s agents. Consequently the utterances made by the customer—C—are field note renditions of what they actually said. Speaker ‘A’ is the agent answering the call, ‘D’ is the agent’s supervisor, and ‘J’ is the fieldworker.
A Z60 form is issued by employers and records the income received, and the national insurance contributions made by an employee during a period of employment within a tax year. It is an important document that is used by the Revenue Authority (the country’s tax collecting authority) to calculate the taxes owed by an employee.
Due to the economic crisis facing the country in question with respect to the world economic conditions pertaining at the time, the fieldwork coincided with a time of extreme pressure on the Department. Since unemployment was rising rapidly, this led to a backlog of filing and this ‘black hole’ of unorganised files. In normal circumstances the filing is regularly completed in a timely manner.
The Employment Centre is the local office where a customer will first make an application for support, and the Employment Seekers Allowance is the actual monetary support they receive. The application involves making a contract in which an applicant commits to look for work while receiving the allowance.
Indeed it is a marked phenomenon that awareness of customers calling several times in quick succession tends to be transmitted through the verbal communication of telephony agents on the floor rather than through case documents.
Of course it is explicit in the looking for work contract that customers must be actively pursuing work to be eligible for benefit and customers are made aware of this, rather it is the subtleties of how this is demonstrated that The Departments employees cannot make available directly to the customer, rather it is up to the customer to infer it.
Interestingly, one way in which potential fraud is ‘investigated’ is to get customers to fill out supplementary forms on the suspicious area of their claim, e.g., in relation to their small business, their finances or living arrangements. More questioning or greater scrutiny can either throw inconsistencies into sharper relief or the request itself can get some customers to withdraw claims.
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Button, G., Martin, D., O’Neill, J. et al. Lifting the Mantle of Protection from Weber’s Presuppositions in His Theory of Bureaucracy. Hum Stud 35, 235–262 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9229-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9229-x