Confiança, desconfiança, quebra de confiança: uma abordagem etnográfica da improbidade na administração pública.

This article proposes an ethnographic approach to “administrative improbity” in the Brazilian public service. Based on the analysis of disciplinary procedures originated by an anonymous denunciation which led to the dismissal of an employee of the Ministry of Finance, I argue that the determination of administrative improbity depends on pragmatic conjugations between legal principles and actions of public agents, whose qualities are defined simultaneously and reciprocally in the descriptions that articulate them. This makes it possible to consider the principles of public administration as empirical phenomena of the same order as the actions that they supposedly guide or punish. Mistrust emerges as an implicit principle of public administration, supporting institutional forms and operating as a vector of the tensions and passages between what is described as trust and breach of trust in disciplinary processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]