Reluctant Bureaucracy: Accounts, Narrative, and Negotiation in Serbian High School Classrooms

Despite anthropologists’ increased interest in bureaucracies, the pervasive role of talk for resolving policy–practice gaps and structuring citizen–bureaucrat encounters has been underanalyzed in the literature on the everyday practices of the state. This article examines classrooms in Belgrade, Serbia, as examples of sites in which some locally recognized features of bureaucratic interactions can be enacted and reproduced. I argue that frequent student‐teacher negotiations over grades, attendance, and behavior render the classroom a space for reluctant bureaucracy. Teachers, even those who criticize the bureaucratic rules that govern education, spend much of their time enforcing and interpreting an oft‐confusing set of state‐mandated school policies, while students use excuses, justifications, and narratives to negotiate outcomes. This situation parallels many Serbs’ experiences in government offices, where they believe the law is rarely applied fairly and success depends on making a persuasive case. Although student–teacher negotiations may reproduce some common features of bureaucratic interactions, teachers also demonstrate ambivalence toward the practice of negotiation—and its political implications—through an alternation of what I call the institutional voice and the intimate voice. Through this alternation, teachers critique the system that they simultaneously perpetuate and train students to manage.