BUREAUCRATS AND RULERS: A look into the world of informal practices
Korac, Srdjan. 2023. Bureaucrats and rulers: a look into the world of informal practices.
Belgrade: Institute for Political Studies. ISBN 978-86-7419-385-3
The author identifies and analyzes the time-constant and civilization-universal presence of “hubs” in which elastic informal practices are “imprinted” into the formal “shell” of bureaucratic organization. In this endeavor, Dr. Korac uses the theoretical and analytical tools of political anthropology and political science to shed light on the factors and processes that influenced the formation of the structural features of bureaucracy as a political institution and social group. Unlike the otherwise rare studies on bureaucracy in our country, the author views the role of the bureaucrat in the political order, as a kind of intermediary between the decisions of the top political authorities and the final outcomes of official (state) policy, in the totality of what is normed and what is real.
The author seeks to achieve three research goals:
• to shed light on the universal nature of informal patterns of behavior of officials in the performance of entrusted state duties;
• to point out the normative and institutional solutions that rulers devised and implemented for the purpose of effective control over the state apparatus and the bureaucracy as a guild;
• to shed light on the mutual intertwining of informal bureaucratic practices with the broader social and cultural context.
Korac advocates the thesis that the numerous differences in the political and value-based constitution of administrative apparatuses from individual civilizations, i.e. states, and historical periods can be abstracted, and that, in accordance with the model of dyadic exchange, the focus of analysis can be shifted from the state as a sociopolitical and institutional macro-plane of analysis to the micro-plane of everyday practices of civil service, more precisely to the field of interaction with the top of the government, managers, colleagues and other members of the political community (i.e. with those who are governed). The author believes that from the empirical abundance of these individual cognitive "micro-planes" it is possible to rise to the level of continuity and universality of the challenges, problems and moral dilemmas that today's public servants face in their work. These are the problems that every official faces immersed in a complex network of hierarchical social interactions through which the process of redistribution of social power takes place by implementing the decisions of the supreme political authority.
Insight into the unchanging properties of bureaucracy can provide clues regarding the future of its social role in the political life of the 21st century, in which deviations from the democratic ideal are discernible with potential long-term consequences in the form of the revival of certain informal practices from earlier historical periods.
