The absurdity of bureaucracy

How implementation works

Nina Holm Vohnsen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526101365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1

Anticipations

The first two portraits will introduce the reader to the municipal and ministerial reality respectively. While introducing some of the central people in the book they will tell some stories of the genesis of Active—Back Sooner. Their central question is “Where does a policy come from?” The conclusion they will reach is that “it” comes from no one place, that “it” has from the outset no unity but rather is a container of discrete agendas, held momentarily together by means of the dissimilar materials of statistics and hopes. It is the hopes and statistics, then, which these portraits will explore while we follow the stitching together of the Action Plan on Sickness Benefit by the civil servants in the Ministry of Employment.

Portrait 1: “making a difference”

I begin my account a couple of minutes before 9:30am, the last Friday before Christmas in 2008, as I run through the drizzle down a street in Denmark towards the town’s job center. I was late. It was still dark and I sweated in my winter clothes as I passed the graffiti-adorned apartment houses in the street for the first time. The job center was situated in an old hospital building in a shabby part of the town. While the sliding glass doors leading into the reception were new, the tiny wooden elevator creaked and bounced on its way up to the fourth floor where I had a meeting with the manager of the section, Ulla, and the team leader, Peter, who was in charge of the team that would be responsible for implementing the controlled trial Active—Back Sooner. When I reached the fourth floor I easily found Ulla’s office. Her door was wide open but I knocked as I entered. Ulla looked up from her computer screen and launched straight into a complaint about her inbox:

Ulla: Phew! Work just keeps pouring in today. Everything needs to be dealt with before the holidays start. I received an email last night at 8pm in which I am asked to respond and have some papers ready within two hours. The Central Administration seem to assume that I work 24 hours a day. You will have to excuse me briefly. I just need to make a phone call.

The Municipality was of a considerable size and the employment area was divided into several sections that each answered to the Central Administration placed in the heart of the town some distance away from the job center. I had been introduced to some of the people from the Central Administration at a conference we had all attended a few days earlier but as yet I had no impression of the relationship between the administrative levels. However, I remembered that Ulla had remarked laconically during the lunch we had shared, that “being a manager primarily consists in passing numbers upwards,” a remark I was yet to understand the full implication of.

I was still sweating after the running, and so while Ulla was on the phone, I went looking for the toilet to get a sip of water and wash my hands. While there was no water in the warm tap, there were both water and what looked like small stones in the cold. The contrast between the Capital’s ministerial buildings where I had so far spent my time and the town’s municipal buildings was tangible. Confident I would be offered coffee at the meeting (no Danish meeting is complete without it) I decided against the water and left the toilet. In the corridor leading past Ulla’s office, Peter had appeared, leaning against the wall. Ulla was still on the phone so I asked Peter about his role in the project. He told me that for the past year he had been managing the team of caseworkers who worked with recipients of sickness benefit until their 26th week of sickness absence. After the 26th week, the cases would be transferred to another team. The 26-week limit had been recommended, he added, by a consultancy company that had analysed their case flow but he no longer remembered the reason why they had arrived at this particular limit.

I asked Peter why the job center had decided to join the project. While I had negotiated my access to the job center I had repeatedly been told that they were extremely busy in Peter’s team and yet they had taken on this time-consuming task. Peter explained they anticipated the elements in the project would become obligatory by law sometime during the summer of 2009 and being a municipality of considerable size they needed to be conversant with the development. At the same time, the elements in the project answered some of the wishes that the caseworkers had been voicing—the possibility of referring people to psychologists or physiotherapy. He explained that they had already done a lot to create such offers oriented towards treatment rather than returning to the labor market since the recipients of sickness benefit were generally very happy with such offers and found that they benefitted from them. “I think that ought to count,” Peter said as Ulla called for us to enter her office.

While Ulla passed around cups of coffee I explained to her and Peter that I was interested in the implementation of Active—Back Sooner and the context it would be implemented in. I explained to them that the caseworkers—or street-level workers as they were sometimes referred to in the social sciences—were generally singled out in the literature on implementation as the ones who did, in the long run, decide whether or not a certain policy would be followed. Furthermore, as Ulla and Peter were well aware, the caseworkers in the municipal job centers were often blamed, both in the Danish press and by the Minister of Employment, for being conservative or unwilling to follow new national policy, for professional reasons or for reasons of ideology. What I would like to do, I said, was to undertake an empirical study that looked into these caseworkers’ everyday work life and the conditions under which central policy was translated into practice. My dream scenario, I pressed on, would be to simply “hang out” in the job center for an uncertain period of time and follow the caseworkers in whatever they did, especially those affiliated with Active—Back Sooner.

After the meeting I was very excited. Ulla had promised to get back to me before the New Year and I had the feeling that my wish would be granted. It felt like something of an accomplishment. It had not been easy to get this far. Ulla was a busy woman and the person from the Central Administration who had promised to forward my request to her some weeks earlier had cautioned me: “Do not expect anything. The caseworkers are extremely busy and our first priority is to make sure they do not feel we impose all sorts of things on them,” a remark several of the caseworkers would later laugh at, reluctant to believe that any such considerations were ever taken. Before the meeting, Ulla too had told me not to expect anything, again with reference to the workload in the section. However, from the moment the decision arrived a week or so later to let me do my research in the section they welcomed me with open arms.

In order to provide a background for understanding the subsequent analysis of the implementation of the controlled trial and the planned revision of the sickness benefit legislation, I will ask the reader to follow me through a series of “introductory conversations,” which were not part of the controlled trial. The casework described in the following sections was therefore regulated by the legislation which the proposed legislative revision projected in the Action Plan on Sickness Benefit would substitute. This was—in other words— the “normal intervention” which the trial’s control group would receive.

The “normal intervention”

There were three successive “intake” hours on Monday mornings in early January: 32 citizens¹ per hour had received letters telling them to present themselves at 9am, 10am or 11am respectively for an “introductory conversation.” The meetings were called thus because it was the first time during their sickness absence that they had any interaction with their municipality in this regard. The recipients of sickness benefit were obliged by law to attend this municipal “follow-up” of their cases in order to maintain their right to the public benefit. On this specific Monday morning only 19 of the 32 citizens had shown up for the 9am intake. The remaining 13 would later receive a letter enquiring into the reasons for their absence. This collection of personal statements was part of a procedure that took place before the municipality could either shut their cases or set a new date for a meeting. It was not unusual, I was told, that only half of those summoned showed up.

Entering through the sliding doors to the job center one walked directly up to the reception desk where the recipients of sickness benefit were supposed make their arrival known. After the receptionist had located the yellow-brown cardboard file with their name on, and moved it from the pile of folders belonging to those who were supposed to show up to the pile of those who actually showed up, they were asked to take a seat in the waiting area surrounding the reception on three sides. On this morning nine people were sitting by nine small coffee tables in one section of the waiting area while the rest had scattered along the walls. At 9am the caseworkers began to arrive from the hallway running perpendicular to the reception desk. Their offices were either distributed along a corridor running at an angle to the main hallway or on different levels of a tower rising above the point where the corridor met the hallway. The caseworkers lined up behind a tall coffee table inside the reception and turned towards the waiting area every few seconds to call out the name of one or other of the waiting people.

At 9:10am those whose name did not get called in the first round began to move about. There was a shelf by one of the walls on which a few brochures were placed. A few people walked up and fidgeted with them for a few seconds then walked away. There was a rack supposed to contain magazines on the wall but it was empty. Instead, people passed the time by staring into space. It was very quiet and bits and pieces of the conversations between the receptionists were audible: “he just has to show up or we will shut down his money.” They lowered their voices. One of them giggled. At 9:30am a young woman got up to ask whether she had been registered. “It said in my letter that the appointment was for 9am?” She was told not to worry and just await her turn. A man stood up, walked to the shelf and looked at the brochures, then returned to his seat and continued to stare into the distance. Every now and again a caseworker returned and called somebody’s name. At 9:40am a man walked through the door and started an argument with the receptionist. He wanted a meeting immediately. He was loud and insistent but the receptionist kept repeating that she could do nothing to help him besides noting in his file that it was urgent. At 9:45am the young woman went up to the reception again and asked them to check if they were sure she had been registered. She had seen four caseworkers walk up to the coffee table and leave again without calling anyone’s name. I left the waiting room to join one of the caseworkers, Ian.

“Pulling a case”

At 10am, Ian and I left his office and walked out into the corridor towards the waiting room. A few doors down he stopped by Ida’s open door and tapped her door post gently. “At it again Ida,” he said cheerfully. A few meters further down the corridor we turned right and continued down the hallway leading from the office area to the reception area. To our left we passed the waiting room, now again full of people. Ian headed towards the coffee table where a new stack of cardboard case-files had been placed. With his back towards the waiting area, Ian took the top folder and scanned the flap for a name. He then found the corresponding name, Maria Hansen, on a sheet of A4 paper placed next to the cardboard folders, ticked the box by her name to indicate she had shown up and then signed his name on the line next to her name. With this gesture he had become and would continue to be Maria’s caseworker either until her case was shut or until it reached 26 weeks of administrative age, when it would be referred to another unit in the Municipality.

The folder contained an information chart (oplysningsskema) which Maria had filled in and returned to a separate part of the Municipality called Benefit Service (ydelsesservice). They handled the actual payment of benefits. Because Maria’s contract with her employer entitled her to be paid a full salary during periods of sickness absence her employer could, after the first three weeks of sickness absence, get a sum equivalent to the sickness benefit rate reimbursed by the Municipality (Retsinformation 2008).² Had she not been entitled to a full salary or had she been self-employed the sickness benefit would have gone directly to her. When her employer filed for reimbursement, Benefit Service sent the information chart to Maria Hansen and the payout then depended on her submission of the chart. If filled in correctly the chart ought to contain information about the cause for the sickness absence and ongoing treatment, details about her current employment situation and the date of expected return to work. Apart from the information chart, the folder contained a copy of the notice letter (indkaldelsesbrev) Maria had received. This letter informed her that she had to present herself at the job center today at this hour. Still with his back to the waiting area Ian quickly read on Maria’s information chart that she suffered from “pain in the arms and inflammation in the shoulders.” Apart from this Ian knew nothing about the woman whose name he was about to call: “Maria Hansen?”

An “introductory conversation”

Maria got up and after some introductions she followed Ian and me through the hallway and down the corridor towards his office. Ian’s office lay in a corridor with five bright offices of around 8 square meters on either side. The doors had large windows in them but were relatively soundproof. Most offices had a tall narrow wardrobe on the right side of the door where the caseworkers kept their coats, bags, and often bicycle helmets, since most lived in the town and cycled to work. A spacious desk with a computer and writing materials occupied the left wall, while bookshelves stood along the right wall. The walls at the far end of the offices were all dominated by one large window looking out into green yards. Before them one or two chairs were placed. This was where Ian asked Maria to take a seat. I had placed a chair just left of the door with the result that Maria could see me while Ian had his back turned towards me to indicate that I was not part of the conversation, a routine I had soon slipped into with all the caseworkers. As with all the caseworkers I had followed, Ian had a particular order in which he liked to do things. He began the meeting by telling Maria why she had been summoned to the meeting and what they were going to talk about:

Ian: First we will talk about the background for your sickness absence and what will happen from here on. Then I will tell you some things about the law that you need to know as a recipient of sickness benefit. Finally, I would like you to fill out a declaration of informed consent so I can get access to your medical papers and other information I might need to work on your case. You do not have to sign this declaration but if you do not, I might not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Reading guide
• Central people, documents, and organizations
• Prologue: Labor days
• Introduction: the absurdity of bureaucracy
• 1 Anticipations
• 2 Mutations
• 3 Multiplications
• 4 The quest for meaning
• 5 How implementation works
• Epilogue: bureaucracy—choose your own adventure
• Appendix: data, position, method
• Bibliography
• Index