In no man’s land:
self-employed public officials, precariousness and diffuse hierarchies in a chilean state programme
Keywords:
Public officials, state programme, precarity, multiple-parties organisation, flexible contracts, ChileAbstract
This article addresses how precarity, made effective by the neoliberalisation of Chile’s labour regime and the implementation of employment casualisation and flexibility reforms within the public sector’s operational level, both explains and troubles the everyday practices of public officials at the bottom rung of the state’s organisational hierarchy. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork accompanying state employees charged with the implementation of a state-sponsored development programme in Chiloé, southern Chile, the article describes the labour conditions, institutional entanglements and organisational intricacies that allow for this programme to operate. It also explores its goals, methodologies, and the conditions that provide possibilities for action for those actors involved in the project’s implementation. In particular, the article reflects on how the position of these officials in the organisational structure – both as those who dwell at the bottom of the hierarchy or as those in between two institutions – produces an ambiguous environment in which the officials themselves have to navigate uncertainties, accept their reduced capacity to negotiate, find their space within this intricate arrangement and make the effort to produce and sustain an institutional belonging.
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