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Policymakers in the defense community should approach bureaucracy as a sixth domain of warfare because, in doing so, they can successfully handle its processes and procedures. Part one of this two-part article discusses the first three (of 10) fundamentals these professionals must develop to navigate the bureaucratic domain and address and balance the complexities of the policy-making process for the overall benefit of US national security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social housing in Australia is an extremely scarce resource in high demand. This scarcity makes how applicants are prioritised for this resource a crucially important process with significant consequences. We examine the assessment process in three Australian states, New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania. In all three, the processes in place are premised on the assumption that they allow for the fair assessment and allocation of social housing to those most in need. Drawing on interviews with 40 informants with expert knowledge of the application process, we examine the three different approaches. We use Weber's concept of ideal type bureaucracy to assist and frame the analysis. A central premise of Weber's analysis is that to avoid corruption, discretion in the making of decisions should not be a feature of a bureaucracy. We conclude that although the assessment processes in place are rule-bound, in many instances discretion is essential and beneficial for the applicant. Further, we demonstrate (in line with Weber's analysis), that the expertise of assessment workers is key. However, there is limited transparency and appealing a decision is possible but can be a challenging task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public Administration's attempts to understand race and racism insufficiently engage with the historical processes and legacies of White Supremacy. This paper problematizes whiteness and proposes an approach to expand social equity and deepen the field's racial analysis. Drawing on institutional logics perspective, we identify and describe logics of whiteness, an analytic approach that reveals whiteness through the logics of racial capitalism and whiteness as property and provides entry for historical, systems-connected, multi-level analyses of race, racism, racial categorization, and racialized power. We locate whiteness in the institution of citizenship to engage these logics and interrogate how citizens and citizenship are defined by and served in the bureaucracy. Neoliberalism has allowed the administrative state to assign differential citizenship identities across groups according to the logics of whiteness, with both symbolic and material implications for individual lives and for Public Administration theory and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of representative bureaucracy has provided an important yet limited framework for understanding exclusion in the public sector. This theoretical paper engages with critical approaches to argue for an expanded theory that centers social equity. Close attention to the relationship between the public and nonprofit sectors illuminates how public institutions protect and reproduce White, masculine space by shifting the burden of representation onto racially minoritized public administrators and community-based nonprofit organizations led by and for people of color. An expanded theory will (1) advance an understanding of both sectors as institutional spaces that protect Whiteness and impede full representation and (2) recognize the importance of the labor required to counter inequities and actively represent minoritized constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the bureaucratic and legal processes that culminated in the creation of the modern national security classification system in Executive Order No. 10,290, issued by Harry Truman in 1951. It argues that classification was shaped by processes of improvisation endogenous to the federal bureaucracy, which produced the problems of overclassification, definitional vagueness, and ambiguous constitutional status that have haunted the secrecy regime until the present. In so doing, it provides new insight into the development of the modern presidency, the national security state, and American democracy, and suggests possible paths to reform the contemporary pathologies of the classification system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of Tocqueville's best-known empirical claims in Democracy in America is that there is no national-level public administration in the United States. He asserts definitively and repeatedly that "administrative centralization does not exist" there. However, in scattered passages throughout the text, Tocqueville points to multiple federal agencies that contemporary historians and APD scholars characterize as instances of a growing national administrative system, such as the Post Office Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I reevaluate Tocqueville's treatment of bureaucracy in America in light of this evidence. I contend that Tocqueville, perhaps in spite of himself, reveals even the most paradigmatic examples of active, democratic self-government in Democracy in America —townships and other voluntary associations—to be embedded in and causally supported by a network of interrelated, centralized public administrative institutions. Crucially, Tocqueville never resolves the tension between his acknowledgment of the causal power of these institutions and his claims that they do not exist. This new picture of the empirical and normative complexity of Tocqueville's treatment of bureaucratic institutions offers a rich set of conceptual resources for contesting, among other claims, the political construction of nostalgia for a lost age of do-it-yourself White settler democracy in a time before bureaucracy in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bureaucracy and audit are an increasingly pervasive fact of scientific and academic life. In this article, I examine this bureaucracy through the perspectives of non‐faculty staff at a Chinese research institute: the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF). I build upon the lament of a staff member called Tao that inflexible bureaucracy is the consequence of civil servants' determination to evade vulnerability. Bringing Tao and her colleagues' analyses into conversation with the anthropology of gift exchange, I show how a literature that has long informed anthropological analyses of informal bureaucratic back doors provides an equally rich set of resources for understanding bureaucracy's formal, document‐mediated front door. Most especially, I draw upon the anthropology of gifts to illuminate the anxieties and vulnerabilities that shape and are shaped by bureaucratic practice. This approach can help us to understand Chinese bureaucracy in an era of increasing wariness towards informal social connections (guanxi). It can also help us to explore what might be at stake for the non‐faculty colleagues who – despite their indispensable roles – we seldom consider in conversations about academic audit cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nordic welfare states are imagined as generous and universal due to their residence- and needs-based welfare rights. We analyse how welfare state borders are implemented in practice through what we term bureaucratic bordering and how this bordering creates complex precarity for temporary migrants stemming from multiple sources. Drawing on qualitative research with asylum seekers and non-European Union/European Economic Area (non-EU/EEA) student-workers, we argue that migrants with temporary residence permits encounter an opaque system characterised by bureaucratic borders. These borders produce precarity in relation to the right to reside, work and access welfare services. We find that in the case of asylum seekers who find work and seek to legalise their residence through work, precarity is produced through limiting access to labour-based permits, while for student-migrants, precarity is produced through the indirect imposition of precarious part-time work alongside studies. In both cases, complex bordering practices emerge as the migrants attempt to navigate both the residence and the welfare system in the interstices of institutions, street-level bureaucrats and personal connections. We contend that the bordering practices necessarily also contribute to reshaping the welfare state itself by eroding residence-based access to rights, marginalising residents and creating new hierarchies based on temporary residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced welfare states are under pressure to customize services, promptly enough to prevent a cascade of harms. With these goals, the Netherlands in 2015 decentralized social care services to municipalities, and within municipalities to neighborhood teams in continuing contact with clients. The overall results have been disappointing. But the experience of Utrecht, the Netherlands' fourth-largest city, has been strikingly different. By using hard-to-resolve cases to signal conflicts in rules, obstructive jurisdictional boundaries, and the shortcomings of private service providers, Utrecht is learning to customize and speed delivery of social care through incremental steps. This article explains how Utrecht's success addresses apparently intractable limits to the adaptability of the rule-bound welfare state, such as the problem of low-level discretion or street-level bureaucracy and the division of services into silos, in the process bridging, and perhaps effacing, the gap between the Habermasian life world and the system world of formal rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the rapid progress in developing generalist AI systems and the potential risks associated with their autonomy. Topics include the race among companies to create AI systems that surpass human abilities; the increasing investment in AI capabilities and efficiency; and the potential for AI to amplify social harms and pose control challenges.

The paper investigates the determinants of corruption in Russia based on an original survey of 1,376 businesspeople in 39 regions. Regression analysis reveals economically and statistically significant correlations between bribes, development, and state intervention in the economy. Using the instrumental variable of geographical location, this paper provides supportive evidence for a causal (negative) relationship between prosperity and bribes. It finds a positive correlation between regional corruption and state ownership and a negative one between corruption and the size of the bureaucracy. These results hold for both perceived and experiential corruption. This paper contributes to the investigation of corruption in Russia and post-communist countries. It illustrates the importance of economic development, effective bureaucracy, and the reduction of state property for mitigating corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops 'street-level bureaucracy' theory to conceptualise how policy implementation within urban design governance is shared among actors whose role transcends sectoral responsibilities and motivations. It presents case study research with a Scottish local authority which has made a strategic investment in a placemaking policy agenda, including the creation of an influential design review panel of volunteer experts which exemplifies the wider embrace of private capacity within public governance. The paper identifies the distinctive role of design review panel members in street-level implementation, and shows how their discretion is shaped simultaneously by public and private interests. It concludes that understanding and utilising these micro-level processes provides opportunities for conceptualising policy implementation within a neoliberalising urban governance context, and for addressing the implementation gap between the aims of public urban design policy and the realities of delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When agencies make statements about the law, people listen. This insight yields a fundamental tension. According to one set of views, such agency statements, and their ability to influence public behavior, are critical not only for a well-functioning bureaucracy but also for our entire system of government. According to another set of views, this agency power, if left unchecked, could border on tyranny. Administrative law responds to this tension through an extensive, purportedly comprehensive, framework that attempts to police agency statements. The framework places different types of agency statements into different legal categories. On the one hand, legislative rules make new binding law. On the other hand, less formal guidance (including interpretive rules and policy statements) offers an agency's interpretive or policy positions about the law. Scholars and courts have long debated the categorization effort as well as what legal consequences flow from it. This Article identifies a striking gap in this categorization framework. As a critical part of their service to the general public, agencies often simply explain the law. Although such explanations are central to agency interactions with the public, the intricate administrative law framework that applies to agency statements fails to capture such explanations. Agency explanations of the law could be seen as a subset of existing categories of agency statements (such as "legislative rules," "interpretive rules," or "policy statements"), but agency explanations do not fit comfortably into any of these categories. All of these regimes assume that agencies are communicating what the law is or what agencies believe it to be. But when agencies provide such explanations to the public, they often present the law as simpler than it is or what agencies believe it to be. We argue that administrative law's failure to address communications between agencies and the general public reflects a broader "democracy deficit. " Administrative law fails to ensure that agency communications with the general public occur in ways that are consistent with essential features of democratic governance, such as transparency, public scrutiny, and debate. In contrast, when sophisticated parties and industry insiders engage with agencies regarding formal guidance, there are ample protections to engender agency transparency and provide affected parties with opportunities to contribute to the guidance. After identifying the democracy deficit in administrative law, we propose a framework for infusing agency communications with the general public with the same administrative law and democratic values as those that apply in interactions between agencies and sophisticated parties. These reforms would encourage public participation in drafting and issuing agency explanations of the law, provide opportunities to challenge published agency explanations, and allow members of the public to rely on certain agency explanations and to bind the agencies to follow these statements in enforcing the law. We also identify the types of agency communications with the public that most urgently need reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their 'cases'. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants' bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that 'enacts' the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the 'capacity to act' within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one's life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under multiple public administration reforms since the 1980s, public bureaucracies' activities range from connecting with markets to inviting the participation of service users, citizens, and networks of organizations in policy development, decision-making, and implementation. Despite this broadening of stakeholder participation, certain organizations are at risk of being overlooked, despite their direct involvement in efforts to engage communities and address persistent social problems. We contend that one reason for this exclusion is that these organizations are not recognized as their own organizational type. This paper identifies Relational, Emergent, Transformative, and Change-Oriented Organizations (RETCOs) as a discrete organizational type, and argues that they should be represented in the model cases that are used to educate public administrators, recognized as worthy of public funding and support, and included in public administration research. Recognizing RETCOs as legitimate stakeholders can correct some of the ethical problems of under-representation of important voices and perspectives in government-citizen interfaces. RETCOs are most appropriately studied through qualitative research methods that are sensitive to what make RETCOs a uniquely responsive organizational type, including their prioritizing of relationships within organizations, emergent rather than fixed organizational forms, goals of transformation, and commitments to liberatory social and economic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distrust in the civil service is not unique to any country but felt across much of the globe amid ascendant populist movements. A significant correlate of distrust in the civil service is the perception of corruption among bureaucrats. Our research addresses two main questions. First, in OECD countries, to what extent does the public view bureaucrats as corrupt? Second, what factors explain these perceptions? Data from 23 countries in the International Social Survey Programme's 2016 Role of Government survey are analyzed using multilevel logistic regression models. Among the explanatory variables included in this multilevel analysis are respondents' exposure to bribery, political party support, and political efficacy. Country-level correlates drawn from the 2016 Worldwide Governance Indicators are analyzed to explore the impact of governance quality on corruption perceptions. Results indicate that better quality of government is associated with lower perceptions of bureaucratic corruption. Likewise, notable individual-level findings suggest political efficacy and exposure to corruption are significantly associated with corruption perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of literature on equality bodies and bureaucratic expansion, we examine the current crisis of confidence in Romania's anti-discrimination agency, the National Council for Combating Discrimination (NCCD), a quasi-court. We argue that, through a process of conceptual creep, discrimination has been defined so generously that increasingly trivial acts are now sanctioned. This has generated increased strategic and opportunistic petitioning, with two consequences: raising the stakes of political control over the agency; and the agency's increasingly difficult conceptual management of discrimination. We document 'discrimination creep' by analysing the Council's case law on 'discriminatory speech', though our focus stays on the interaction of bureaucracy, expertise and activism which has enabled creep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policing has long been implicated in state projects that construct race and racial inequality, yet many officers maintain that their work is colorblind. Burgeoning theories of racialized organizations offer a means of analyzing the processes that mediate such relationships between state racial projects and the ideologies of individuals. I suggest an extension of the racialized organizations framework that specifically considers the functions and forms of bureaucracies. Using a case study of policing in a segregated city, I describe a phenomenon of bureaucratic dissociation: bureaucratic arrangements facilitate racial governance, on the one hand, while obscuring the racial logics and consequences of daily work from officers, on the other. After detailing the incorporation of racial state interests into the police bureaucracy, I draw on over 500 hours of ethnographic observations of police work to explore the connections between bureaucratic structures and the racial ideologies of the police. I find widespread denial of racism in officers' accounts of phenomena ranging from segregation to police shootings. Officers instead offer colorblind interpretations of social problems and narrate their work in relation to geographic and functional subdivisions, policies, and laws. These organizational accounts operate to legitimize police work in the face of its ongoing racial projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As typical of many developing contexts, Kenyans know how most civil servants make an honest living out of public monies – in other words, there is generally nothing wrong with making a living, legal or otherwise, from where one works. But this situation can be more complex than that. Bureaucratic corruption is more about bureaucratic structure and culture (how things are done here), as well as the bureaucracy's sociopolitical environments. Most importantly, variables relating to bureaucracy's political outliers show that bureaucratic corruption can also be a tool of regime consolidation, a space of elite struggle for rewards and control. The result is that, a mafia-like white-collar corruption syndicate (cartels) and isolated corrupt practices emerge at all levels and sectors to enforce corruption and swindle citizens through unscrupulous bureaucratic processes. These cartels employ an assortment of enforcement tools to achieve their goals, from exercising official investigations to bribery, kickbacks, threats and murder. Using a multi-dimensional administrative rituals approach, this paper is a modest attempt to understand how these factors produce bureaucratic gray areas that rationalize and institutionalizes corruption and cartel activities. While the solution primarily lies with the political leadership, this cannot happen unless a civil society, instead of the opposition parties-led citizen movement, is reinvigorated in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee‐migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state‐subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation are underrecognized. Immigration officers' strategies of mediation, such as intermittently acknowledging typists, implicate brokerage as both part of and distinct from the everyday bureaucratic workings of the state. I argue that through their acts of mediation, brokers are essential to bureaucratic work and have come to embody the fuzziness surrounding where the state begins and ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides and empirically tests an analytical model that considers the relationship between the discretionary power of street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) and the institutional and organisational structures at meso and macro levels. The proposal maintains a bottom‐up perspective in the analysis of discretionary practices; at the same time, it highlights the relevance of multilevel governance systems as institutional spaces in opening and constraining the room for manoeuvre of SLBs. The analytical model is tested to comparatively analyse the implementation of the Italian guaranteed minimum income (Reddito di Cittadinanza) in two different regional welfare systems. The analysis focused on the practices and perceptions of the "navigators", a new professional group introduced to implement the same policy. The fieldwork pointed out different spaces for and forms of discretion, highlighting that different institutional arrangements affect discretion and the variability of practices; however individual and professional group factors coupled with similar external constraints nuanced this variability with the emergence of common ones. In this article, the analytical model allowed to consider in a comparative perspective how institutional factors, besides individual and professional ones, influence discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the work of the Public Space Authority (AEP) in Mexico City to explore the politics of site selection in public space infrastructure investment. By focusing on a pocket parks program as a case study, we explore how governments and agencies make efforts to configure their distributional criteria for urban public goods. We develop an explanatory framework around showcase politics, where agencies favor high-profile locations to create rapid demonstrations of their programs and their effectiveness for an audience of governmental and social actors. Through showcase politics, agencies deploy their limited resources for maximum exhibitionary effects with the aim of justifying the existence of the agency and its programs as a legitimate solution to urban problems, and to support the overall political agenda of the party in power. While this decisional logic makes sense for the maintenance of a newly created agency within a bureaucracy, it contradicted the agency's own stated policy goals to distribute public space amenities broadly throughout the Mexican capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For forced migrants who lack unqualified state protection, citizenship acquisition serves as the only secure way to graduate from legally precarious conditions. However, despite the seemingly obvious upside, the decision to naturalise is not necessarily automatic and for those who do choose to move forward, the process is rarely straightforward. Based on 30 interviews with Syrian forced migrants in Berlin, we address why some applicants who are eligible to naturalise choose not to apply and why eligibility 'on paper' does not necessarily translate to ability to naturalise 'in practice'. By combining literature on migrants' experiences with street-level bureaucracy and individual-level determinants of naturalisation, the primary objective of this article is to advance our understanding of how citizenship and non-citizenship decisions are made. In order to do so, we build upon the two-step intention-ability framework and in particular introduce 'bureaucratic trajectory' as a significant determinant of one's intention to apply and practical ability to acquire citizenship beyond eligibility. We demonstrate how perceived discretionary implementation and red tape not only constrain but also entice migrants to develop strategies to 'enable' access to citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early support for expert policy making through administrative agencies was rooted in concerns over political power. In a context of formal universal male suffrage, late nineteenth-century liberals (typically well-educated, urban professionals) opposed policies to regulate business out of fear of working-class radicalism. Yet by the 1910s, liberals supported economic regulation—through administrative agencies. We use a formal model to show how potential policy feedback effects made an antibusiness coalition between liberals and populists unachievable and how, by diminishing feedback effects, agencies facilitated a successful coalition to regulate business. Because administrative agencies guaranteed a central policy-making role for credentialed urban professionals, liberals could support farmers and industrial workers against big business while no longer fearing the rising power of their coalition partners. In this way, the strategic dilemma created by a changing distribution of power among social groups explains the development of broad political support for bureaucratic agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, leaders in a number of nations have undermined their public sector's capacity to deliver on its core goals. To understand this interference, it is necessary to examine the formal and informal organizational dynamics at play within bureaucracies. Considering a widely applicable generalized organization, a formal model outlines how a leader may augment the career incentives of supervisors and lower-level workers, which shifts the alignment of policy with an organization's central mission. While hierarchy may amplify disruption, organizational culture can coalesce as a norm facilitating resistance to extreme shifts, thereby stabilizing long-term mission compliance. Yet, should disruption lead to an exodus of mission-driven employees, durable reversals of an organization's capacity to fulfill its aims may ensue. The model highlights three trajectories disrupted organizations follow: temporary reversal, erosion, and resistance. Implications are considered for public sector institutions and international organizations as well as for the study of bureaucratic and state capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russian imperial officials hoped to transform the Kazakh Steppe from a zone of pastoral nomadism into a zone of sedentary grain farms. They planned to accomplish this transformation by importing peasants from European Russia and settling them in the steppe along with advanced scientific agricultural practices, equipment, and infrastructure. It was a project that linked steppe settlement and the Russian Empire to a global story of settler colonialism, science, and technology in the first decades of the twentieth century. An examination of this project through the lens of the expansion of grain farming reveals that the changes it wrought were not solely due to European science and technology but were contingent, dependent on local knowledge, the vagaries of climate, and adaptation to the realities of the steppe environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions in each context in the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don't. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political appointment of bureaucrats is typically seen as jeopardizing development by selecting worse types into the bureaucracy or by depressing bureaucratic effort. I argue that political appointments also affect outcomes through a third, less studied channel, namely, by changing how bureaucrats work. Patronage provides connections between bureaucrats and politicians, and thereby grants access to material and nonmaterial resources, enhances monitoring, facilitates the application of sanctions and rewards, aligns priorities and incentives, and increases mutual trust. Political appointments can thus enhance bureaucrats' accountability and effectiveness, not just for rent‐seeking purposes but also, in certain conditions, for public service delivery. I test this theory using data on Brazilian municipal governments, leveraging two quasi‐experiments, two original surveys of bureaucrats and politicians, and in‐depth interviews. The findings highlight the countervailing effects of connections on bureaucratic governance in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advocates for a deeper engagement with the organizational structures that shape the governance of research ethics in anthropology. The authors argue that anthropological critiques of bureaucracy often sidestep the kinds of knowledge needed to pursue meaningful institutional change. They show how different regulatory dynamics and organizational arrangements across jurisdictions produce more or less responsive bureaucracies, comparing Institutional Review Boards in the United States with a case study of a European university's Ethics Review Committee. The authors suggest that such organizational understandings of bureaucratic processes can more meaningfully inform their redesign and contribute to developing more appropriately scaled ethics governance. In so doing, ethics review promises greater responsiveness to the particular demands of ethnographic research while remaining legible to regulatory stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a conversation with political scientist William Howell about his podcast, Not Another Politics Podcast, and his research on the presidency and American politics. The podcast aims to discuss research on politics rather than provide commentary on current events. Howell and his co-hosts bring their different backgrounds and expertise to the conversations, and they select papers to discuss based on their importance and relevance to politics. Howell also discusses his recent book, which argues that populism thrives amidst government failure and suggests reforms to the presidency and Congress to address this. He also discusses the challenges and importance of presidential power and the role of academic research in improving government. Howell is currently working on a book about the rise of the strongman presidency. [Extracted from the article]

Whilst NHS Health Service management is usually characterized by hierarchized bureaucracy and profit-driven competitiveness, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted these ways of working and allowed London-based non-clinical management to experience their roles otherwise. This paper is based on 35 interviews with senior non-clinical management at a London-based NHS Trust during 'Alpha phase' of Britain's pandemic response (May-August 2020), an oft-overlooked group in the literature. I will draw upon Graeber's theory of "total bureaucratization" to argue that though the increasing neo-liberalization of the health-services has hitherto contributed toward a corporate mentality, the pandemic gave managers a chance to experience more collaboration and freedom than usual, which ultimately led to more effective realization of decision-making and change. The pandemic has shown NHS managers that there are alternatives to neoliberal logics of competition and hierarchy, and that those alternatives actually result in happier and effectively, more capable staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Housing in the Margins: Negotiating Urban Formalities in Berlin's Allotment Gardens" by Hanna Hilbrandt challenges traditional understandings of informality in urban studies. The book argues that informality should not be seen as a deficiency, but rather as a strategy employed by various actors to manage urban problems within the boundaries of formal laws and institutions. Hilbrandt focuses on allotment gardens in Berlin as a non-conflictual example of informality, shedding light on the complexities of informal urbanism and the negotiations between the state and practitioners. The text emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of informality and its impact on urban spaces. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on critiquing Ryan Murphy's stance on the developmental state in Singapore, emphasizing the importance of understanding the concept of developmental state capitalism and its broader implications in academic literature and policy practice. It argues that Murphy's response overlooks the essence of the earlier argument and demonstrates a lack of comprehension regarding the nature of developmental state capitalism.

Countries are facing the deterioration of democratic institutions under a process named democratic backsliding. In this context, political attacks on public organizations become more frequent and intense. While previous studies have examined how civil servants counteract and resist political attacks, their ultimate impact on civil servants' well‐being remains underexplored. To shed light on this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design with civil servants from Brazil. The first phase of the study is qualitative and exploratory. The second is quantitative and we tested if perceived political attacks was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, would lead to a greater incidence of physical health symptoms. Both studies provide compelling evidence of the negative impact of political attacks on civil servants' emotional and physical health, which may have significant consequences for the performance of public organizations and the effective functioning of the democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines bureaucrats facing administrative architectures that are multiple, overlapping, ambiguous and sometimes incompatible. It makes two main contributions. Firstly, by an organizational approach it derives fine‐grained predictions on how bureaucrats maneuver when taking part in integrated multilevel administrative orders. Secondly, benefitting from a large‐N data‐set (N = 4285) from 16 ministries and 47 government agencies in Norway, the study demonstrates how organizational factors systematically 'moderate' and bias behavioral perceptions among government officials. Moreover, to probe the robustness of explanatory models, the study specifies patterns of moderation by outlining multiple interaction models as well as illustrating how interaction effects unfold. The study finds that few moderators make dramatic effects by profoundly weakening relationships. Moderating variables either strengthen or attenuate already apparent effects, thus probing the empirical robustness of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since it establishes differentiated socio-legal eligibility categories among different migrant groups, family reunification constitutes a prime example of the internal border. In my article, I investigate how the border is produced and negotiated in the context of family reunification of refugee children and parents by focusing on discretionary practices of German immigration bureaucracy through the lens of counselling actors in the city. Taking the city of Frankfurt am Main as my research site, I identify ignorance, verification, and temporalization as three administrative control mechanisms over descent-based refugee families. I argue that family reunification constitutes a highly selective and culturalized field of border control, in which refugee families are filtered according to their conformity to a certain family norm and European bureaucratic standards. By examining how counselling actors understand administrative practice, I also discuss how they respond to it, including their own participation in de- and (re-)bordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large discrepancies in asylum recognition rates across individual judges and asylum agencies constitute a cause for concern. To better understand the asylum determination process, existing research has addressed various aspects, including the identities of asylum judges and their role as street-level bureaucrats who make discretionary decisions. Building on these streams of literature, this study examines how asylum judges in Germany and Greece make decisions under conditions of high uncertainty. Drawing on original interview data with lay and administrative judges from the respective capitals, this study focuses on 'grey area' asylum cases and sheds light on the decision-making mechanisms used by judges. This research finds that, in the face of moral dilemmas, judges experience a conflict between their role and person identities. Depending on which identity they prioritise, their decisions may be more 'evidence'-based or more preference-based. This article highlights the importance of the identities of asylum judges, not only as bureaucrats but also as people with a unique set of beliefs, norms and values. In doing so, it contributes to the debate on asylum determination and the field of street-level bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates bureaucrats to integrate refugees into welfare services even when they do not have any legal obligation to do so? How do they decide which services to include refugees and which not? Based on 61 semi-structured interviews with local municipal bureaucrats in Istanbul, and representatives of humanitarian agencies that collaborate with local municipalities I find that bureaucrats choose to cater different types of services to refugees depending on their motivation for extending services. Most municipal bureaucrats initiate cash, food, and in-kind goods transfers to refugees with extrinsic motivations – with the aspiration of appeasing the voters in their locality and protecting the mayor from a possible electoral backlash. Contrastingly, bureaucrats with professional motivations conduct needs assessments and initiate service and program development efforts in response to the specific needs of refugees in their municipalities. These findings are significant as they illustrate that local bureaucrats' motivations for service extension play a great role in explaining the variation in types of services that refugees can access and terms and conditions of access. They also demonstrate that inclusive distributive behavior toward refugees does not always emanate from bureaucrats' motivations of helping and benefiting refugee populations but can be instigated by extrinsic motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts Turkey's current state crisis into a historical perspective. During the transition to neo-liberalism after the hegemony crisis of the late 1970s, a critical objective for those in the high echelons of bureaucracy and ruling politicians was to ensure the security of state apparatuses. However, the policies implemented to achieve this led to fragmentation in both the state and the political spheres. Thus, during the second half of the 1990s and during the 2000s, the state became a field for open warfare between power networks that had established direct links between state apparatuses, political society, and civil society. These fragmentations – that is the parcellation of state apparatuses – triggered an intra-state crisis. Regarding the formation of the state and the political spheres in the neo-liberal era, this article shows that Turkey is a unique case in the debate on variegated forms of authoritarian statism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contributions of Surgeon M. Rehman, a prominent cardiac surgeon in Pakistan, to the development of cardiac surgery in the country. Surgeon Rehman played a key role in establishing cardiac surgery programs at various institutions, including the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) in Karachi and the Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC) in Lahore. He also initiated the construction of the Rehman Medical Institute (RMI) in Peshawar, which has become a leading healthcare facility. The article highlights the challenges faced by RMI in obtaining a university charter and emphasizes the need for private medical universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). It also discusses the importance of making decisions in the healthcare sector that benefit the medical profession and the people of the province. [Extracted from the article]

When COVID-19 struck India in March 2020 the central government announced a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. In Delhi, the suspension of normal economic and social life precipitated a crisis of hunger for the thousands who depend on daily wage labour to feed their families. Many of these workers were unable to access the city's Public Distribution System for subsidised food supplies because they lacked the correct paperwork. In response, the Delhi government implemented an online system, known as E-Coupons, through which those affected could apply for emergency rations. However, this digital system proved complicated to navigate for the marginalised people that it was aimed at. In the east Delhi neighbourhood in which this research took place brokers offering digital connections and online form-filling services proliferated in the crisis, but often provided unreliable or incomplete support to those in need. Recognising the need for digital mediation and support for the marginalised we argue that networks of reliable community advocates are required if welfare bureaucracies are to be digitised through mobile governance projects such as E-Coupons. The human mediation and advocacy, which underpins these schemes should be acknowledged and included in system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Egyptian migrant mothers living in Paris often advice one another that they ‘just have to wait’ and practice ‘patience’ as they navigate French migration and welfare bureaucracies. These exhortations bring into view agentive modes of inhabiting bureaucratic waiting. This paper examines the ways in which Egyptian-background working-class mothers in Paris shape their position as ‘patients of the state’. Based on informally shared understandings of waited time as the central currency to French bureaucracy’s hidden logic, these mothers engage with their time-spent-in-waiting as something that can be offered to the bureaucratic system in exchange for a possible resolution. They also draw on religious repertoires of patience and acceptance as gendered Islamic virtues, endowing bureaucratic challenges and enforced waiting with divine significance. Migration bureaucracy thus is converted into a domain of spiritual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contributions of Surgeon M. Rehman, a prominent cardiac surgeon in Pakistan, to the field of cardiac surgery. Surgeon Rehman played a key role in establishing cardiac surgery programs at various institutions, including the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) in Karachi and the Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC) in Lahore. He also initiated the construction of the Rehman Medical Institute (RMI) in Peshawar, which has become a leading healthcare facility. The article highlights the challenges faced by RMI in obtaining a university charter and emphasizes the need for private medical universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). It also discusses the importance of making decisions in the healthcare sector that benefit the medical profession and the people of the province. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines whether a degree of autocracy and high quality of bureaucracy—two mechanisms often discussed in the context of Covid-19 responses—provide a meaningful explanation for East Asia's relative success compared to the rest of the world at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Our multiple regression analysis for 111 countries supports our expectation, as East Asia as a region is significantly and negatively associated with confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths compared to the rest of the world, and its interaction with the quality of bureaucracy further contributes to the negative association. In sum, this research highlights the important role of East Asia's regional characteristics in pandemic responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context and background: Community participation in master planning and implementation processes in sub-Saharan Africa has been given little attention despite the fact that it increases a sense of ownership and the chances of plans implementation. Methodology: This study firstly, examines community participation practices in master planning and implementation processes in four shifted capital cities of Abuja, Dodoma, Gaborone and Lilongwe and secondly, recommends for policy changes. This study gathered information through literature review whereby a total of one hundred and two (n=102) documents were reviewed. data was analysed using content analysis by identifying the common themes from empirical and theoretical literatures then comparing and synthesising them based on convergence discourses. Results: The results show that bureaucrats' pay less attention to integration of local knowledge coupled with overlooking the socio-economic and cultural aspects of communities in master planning and implementation processes. bureaucrats are reported to embrace western planning concepts and practices paired with ineffective communication, lack of transparency, awareness, an inclusive ideas generation, top-down decision making and power imbalance. the sidelining attitude of community needs and preferences has resulted into polarization of cities into haves and have-nots. This study recommends active engagement of civil societies organizations (CSOS) in planning and implementation processes to act as watchdogs of planning systems. this study further stresses on conducting routine capacity building to bureaucrats to improve community engagement and constant revisit of available legal tools, monitoring and evaluation frameworks to effect community engagement in planning and implementation stages. these findings are worthwhile to policymakers, urban planners and the private sector to prepare plans which are community centered and enhance inclusive and sustainable development in SSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the 'Crisis' of the 1970s" by Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson explores the concept of popular individualism in post-war Britain. The authors argue that the 1970s witnessed a growing demand for personal autonomy and self-determination, which was not solely a result of Thatcherism but also a cause of it. They highlight various progressive responses to this individualism, such as the Women's Liberation Movement and the Institute for Workers Control. The article also discusses the impact of popular individualism on the Labour left, particularly in relation to campaigns for constitutional reform and mandatory reselection of MPs. Overall, the article challenges the dominant narrative of Thatcherism and emphasizes the existence of multiple political possibilities in post-war Britain. [Extracted from the article]

In China's one-party bureaucracy, central directives issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council are the most important instrument of formal policy communication, yet their language has rarely been studied. This study highlights three politically salient varieties of directives: grey (ambiguous about what can or cannot be done), black (clearly states what can be done) and red (clearly states what cannot be done). Grey directives encourage flexible policy implementation and experimentation, black ones strongly endorse and thereby scale up selected initiatives, while red ones forbid certain actions. Together, this mixture of ambiguous and clear directives forms a system of adaptive policy communication. Using automated text analysis, I classify nearly 5,000 central directives issued from 1978 through 2017 into the categories of grey, black and red. This first-of-its-kind measurement effort yields new insights into the patterns and evolution of central commands from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]