States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies

States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants. Adopting mainly an ethnographic approach as a basis for theorizing, the authors deal with topics including: bureaucratic cultures and practical norms, operational routines in offices, career patterns and modes of appointment; how bureaucrats themselves perceive and deliver goods and services and interact with service users; the accumulation of public administration reforms and how the different bureaucratic corps react to the 'good governance' discourse and new public management policies; the consequences of these reforms for the daily working of state bureaucracies and for the civil servants' identities and modes of accountability; and the space that exists for bottom-up micro-reforms that build on local innovations or informal arrangements.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9004264787
• ISBN13: 9789004264786
• Release Date: January 2014
• Publisher: Brill
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"