Moral Logics of Bureaucratic Indifference

This article reviews scholarship concerned with the ways in which moralityshapes organizational practice on the frontlines of the state: how bureau-crats,who draw on,contest,and apply moral schemas while delegating rights,resources, and punishments on behalf of the state to discrete subjects, man-age the reality of being on the frontlines. A central focus of this scholarship ison situations characterized by tensions between agency-codified regulationsand moral values; in such situations, moral categorizations once relegatedto the background of consciousness become visible and subject to debateand, in turn, shed important light on how morality informs organizationalpractice. Current theorizing on the interrelations between morality and or-ganizational practice in client-serving bureaucracies could nonetheless beimproved by greater scholarly attention to bureaucrats' perceptions of moralincongruence, and to the micro-dynamic processes through which they seekto actualize their aspirations for moral resolution.