Fragments and rumors of legality: an ethnographic essay on the experience of law in civil service
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5380/cra.v23i1.83159Keywords:
bureaucracy, Civil Service, laws and regulations, rumors.Abstract
Bureaucracy scholarship often emphasizes the distinction between formal and informal rules, official guidelines and everyday practices. Based on an administrative process concerning the irregular exclusion of consignments on the payroll of a federal agency in Brazil, this article discusses forms of presence of laws and regulations in public administration that challenge these oppositions. In the course of the proceedings, civil servants’ accounts on rules to be observed when fulfilling their responsibilities present a repertoire of fragments and rumors of what is legal, transmitted, sedimented and transformed in relations among colleagues and in the performance of daily assignments. Considering that this kind of experience of law surpasses the agency in which the case occurred, it is argued that the continuous recombination of rumors and fragments constitutes a widespread and persistent pattern not only of the existence of legal rules in public administration but of the formation and transformation of its institutions.
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