This book offers an ethnography of African state bureaucracies and how they operate in practice. The volume begins with two broadly theoretical and comparative chapters by the editors, and then contains two subsequent sections entitled ‘Bureaucrats at Work’ and ‘Bureaucracies at Work’. Each section includes six chapter-length case studies plus a theoretical synthesis chapter by one of the editors. As a whole, the book offers a comparative perspective on African states, rooted deeply in case-specific empirical detail.
The key lessons of States at Work are best captured in the book's own rich and illustrative phrasing. This begins at the title, which has two meanings. First, the state itself is ‘at work’ in that it is a sort of ‘building site’, a work-in-progress constantly under construction and subjected to revision, a locus of shifting and contested patterns of behavior and practice. And second, the public service takes real actions on the ground and this state-in-action must be understood through the ways it is ‘at work’. This necessitates looking deeply inside the quotidian state. A lesser book might suffer from a back cover that leads by claiming it explores ‘mundane practices’ of state-making, but these ‘mundane practices’ are indeed what this book illuminates, and brilliantly; it favors an empirical examination of the complexities of actual practice over yet another assessment of African states against ideal types.
To draw from several chapters, the authors note that African public services, in all their complexity, are built over time through processes of ‘sedimentation’; they are internally heterogeneous, crisscrossed with different commitments, comprised simultaneously of formal and informal elements, characterized both by adherence to formal rules and adaptive bricolage, and by both meritocracy and patronage. Bureaucracies often are fragmented, even factionalized. Some are best understood as ‘archipelagoes’, with ‘islands of efficiency’ existing alongside and overlapping with units whose failings have previously been explained (even overdetermined) by prior scholarship on the African state.
Importantly, the book shows that the long-standing neopatrimonial model provides too reductive an understanding of the African state. The image preferred here is one of hybrid and complex states, in which neopatrimonialism can coexist with bureaucracies that have genuine public service vocations. The scholars in the book (like the subjects of their studies) are often concerned with demarcating the ‘moral boundaries’ and ‘practical norms’ that guide action by state bureaucrats. This entails examining how state bureaucrats interact and negotiate their behaviors vis-à-vis other government personnel and those on the other side of the (very blurry) line that separates the state from social actors. The authors show that the African bureaucrat is not captured through the caricature of rent-seeking alone; in aggregate and often individually, bureaucrats combine self-interest with principled commitments, a sense of moral obligation to the state, and an esprit de corps with fellow officials.
Beyond theoretical and empirical achievements, States at Work has a noteworthy structural accomplishment. For an edited volume, the disparate case studies – each deeply grounded in particular subjects and context – are integrated into an impressive whole. The book coheres without observable constraints on individual analyses by offering useful conceptual frames and theoretical common ground, and then allowing individual cases to speak to overarching themes. Crucially, the volume's coherence amid empirical diversity is not only a testament to editorial organization: it also constitutes valuable evidence that the understandings and approaches of these authors resonate across locales. This should encourage Africanists in building a grounded theory of the contemporary state bureaucracy, even as the authors would insist on caution about ‘generalizability’.
Any concerns about the book pale in comparison to the contributions. One might quibble that the book's final section (‘Bureaucracies at Work’) could benefit from more thorough framing around the concept of reform and its limitations, since these issues are prevalent in the section. Similarly, a masterful synthesis chapter by Bierschenk is situated at the end of one section when its breadth really spans the book, much like Olivier de Sardan's powerhouse concluding chapter. But such questions are mere trivialities and do not detract from the strength of individual or collective contributions.
This book will remind many readers of the pleasures of being an Africanist. The authors are anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and scholars of public administration, public policy, and development studies. And the result is a volume of significance across all of these disciplinary boundaries and equally so to political scientists, economists, and others. As our understanding of African states evolves away from its monolithic neopatrimonialism, we will do well to interrogate the balance between theoretical commonalities and specificities of local context. In that vein, these editors and authors have illuminated where we are and where we may be going.
