Embedded Ethics and Street-level Justice: Labor Inspectors? Experiences in Buenos Aires.

PERELMITER, LUISINA

Austin

Workshop; Workshop UT-Austin-UNSAM: La Argentina en Perspectiva Sociológica; 2017

UT-Austin e IDAES-UNSAM

State and public policies are usually observed from a top-down perspective. Yet, a growing and productive literature focuses on state agents? practices and daily bureaucratic encounters to reconstruct on-the-ground how policies are enacted and the state is experienced by different social groups. Drawing on six months ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2015 in Buenos Aires with labor inspectors, I engage this literature in order to analyze the principles of justice that organize their practices. Like any "street level bureaucrat", as in the classic Lipsky?s definition, labor inspectors in Buenos Aires play an important role in the way state power is daily experienced by a variety of employers. Likewise, in bureaucratic encounters inspectors exercise wide discretion in the way and extend they enforce the labor law. However, I argue, this discretion is not random or always self-interested. I show how it is collectively organized by tacit conventions and knowledge that serve ?justice ideals? that sometimes go beyond the legal order, often in the face of situations perceived as ethically dilemmatic.