Caring for the Bureaucracy

This chapter considers how the notion of care makes specific scholarly accounts of bureaucracy possible. Knowledges and worlds produced within bureaucratic settings has often played the role of a ‘hegemonic’ backdrop against which alternative knowledges, attachments, politics have been put to the fore. Recounting an ethnographic engagement with a strategic urban planning office in Copenhagen, I highlight how the initial framing of the research collaboration, which entailed researching and developing liveability assessment tools in the municipality, gave cause for several instances of me being troubled by the expected outcome of my research. A careful engagement with these troubles both gives pause in ways that are worth considering and carries a potential to transform the situation from where the researcher intervenes. Being troubled both by the likely political consequences of building tools for liveability governance, and the immediately apparent possible ways of relating as researcher to this unease, I suggest that rethinking the notion of the useful idiot, and acting as one, became a viable response to these troubles. Furthermore, I suggest that the notion of care may be useful not only in terms of engaging with (hegemonic) power, but also as a means to reveal how exercised power itself may be vulnerable and undervalued as a caring practice.