The Absurdity of Bureaucracy : How Implementation Works

In The absurdity of bureaucracy, Nina Holm Vohnsen offers an ethnographic portrayal of the Danish labor market system. The point of departure is her puzzlement that the civil servants she met during her research would maintain a double stance towards their work: on one hand they were convinced they were in the process of constantly improving the welfare system, on the other they routinely found the outcomes of their decisions deeply absurd.

Focusing on the randomized controlled trial Active—Back Sooner, a central component of the Danish government’s Action Plan on Sickness Benefit, Vohnsen tracks the continuous planning and disintegration of this scheme and the myriad decisions made in relation to it, providing both empirical portraiture and theoretical discussion. She draws on twelve months of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing at the Danish Ministry of Employment and one of the implementing municipalities to document how rejected ideas and paths of action return to haunt the decision-makers—be they caseworkers, the government administration or politicians—creating an absurd world of contradictions and dilemmas. Ultimately, Vohnsen demonstrates that ‘going wrong’ is built into the very nature of decision-making and suggests that the analysis of absurdity is central to any understanding of how policy develops and how implementation works.