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The Bureaucrat and the Poor: Encounters in French Welfare Offices, by Vincent Dubois. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 206pp. $99.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781409402893.
The Bureaucrat and the Poor is an Englishlanguage translation of Vincent Dubois' La vie au guichet: Relation administrative et traitmente de la misere, published in France in 1999. In it, Dubois examines the relationship between ''street-level bureaucrats'' (Lipsky 1980) and welfare recipients. The book is based on six months of observations and interviews in two French welfare offices, and Dubois' primary focus is on interactions between welfare agents and welfare clients at the reception desk. He argues that the reception desk is symbolic of the divide between the state and the people. At these desks, reception agents represent a boundary or mediator between these two entities. However, Dubois seeks to dispel what he sees as the false, oppositional dichotomy that often characterizes understandings of bureaucratic interactions: that of the impersonal bureaucratic agent versus the standard welfare client. In doing so, he succeeds at illustrating the complex ways public policy operates at the ground level. This work is particularly useful in comparison to similar studies of neoliberal welfare policy in the United States.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I, ''The Social Conditions of the Administrative Relationship,'' focuses on the relationship between welfare clients' public and private lives as mediated by bureaucratic identification. Dubois focuses on how clients internalize bureaucratic identifications assigned to them by welfare agents. He illustrates that, rather than react emotionally, welfare agents generally receive the...