705874

2017
ASRXXX10.1177/0003122417705874American Sociological ReviewMcDonnell

American Sociological Review

Patchwork Leviathan: How 2017, Vol. 82(3) 476­–510

© American Sociological
Association 2017
Pockets of Bureaucratic DOI: 10.1177/0003122417705874
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417705874
journals.sagepub.com/home/asr

Governance Flourish within

Institutionally Diverse
Developing States

Erin Metz McDonnella

Abstract
Within seemingly weak states, exceptionally effective subunits lie hidden. These high-
performing niches exhibit organizational characteristics distinct from poor-performing peer
organizations, but also distinct from high-functioning organizations in Western countries. This
article develops the concept of interstitial bureaucracy to explain how and why unusually
high-performing state organizations in developing countries invert canonical features of
Weberian bureaucracy. Interstices are distinct-yet-embedded subsystems characterized by
practices inconsistent with those of the dominant institution. This interstitial position poses
particular challenges and requires unique solutions. Interstices cluster together scarce proto-
bureaucratic resources to cultivate durable distinction from the status quo, while managing
disruptions arising from interdependencies with the wider neopatrimonial field. I propose a
framework for how bureaucratic interstices respond to those challenges, generalizing from
organizational comparisons within the Ghanaian state and abbreviated historical comparison
cases from the nineteenth-century United States, early-twentieth-century China, mid-
twentieth-century Kenya, and early-twenty-first-century Nigeria.

Keywords
development, bureaucracy, political sociology (states), Africa, public administration

Current scholarship on states and develop- decades of wisdom—grounded in what works

ment agrees broadly on two things. First, state
organizational capacity in low-income coun-
tries is essential to the success of many other
developmental efforts (Acemoglu, Johnson,
and Robinson 2005; World Bank 2002, 2003;
cf. Zhou, Ai, and Lian 2012). Second, we
have little idea how to engender state organi-
zational capacity. Efforts to build states’ orga-
nizational capacity are notoriously prone to
failure (Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock
2013; World Bank 2015). Global experts rec-
ommend organizational reforms based on
within wealthy, industrialized, Western coun-
tries. Reform efforts sometimes change the
letter of the law—a thin external veneer—but
fail to change the animating spirit of daily
a
University of Notre Dame
Corresponding Author:
Erin McDonnell, Department of Sociology,
University of Notre Dame, 810 Flanner Hall,
Notre Dame, IN 46556
E-mail: erin.mcdonnell@nd.edu
McDonnell 477
practice (Henisz, Zelner, and Guillén 2005;
Weber, Davis, and Lounsbury 2009). Yet even
where organizations earnestly adopt new best
practices, they do not gain the expected ben-
efits (Bruhn and Zia 2013; Giné and Mansuri
2014; Karlan and Valdivia 2011).
Scholarship increasingly agrees that fail-
ures arise from mismatches between advocated
organizational practices and local institutional
environments (World Bank 2015). DiMaggio
and Powell (1983:147) famously declared
that “the bureaucratization of the corporation
and the state have been achieved.” Largely
true in the West, this neglects what citizens in
developing countries know from experience:
all contemporary states have formal organiza-
tions performing administration, but not all
state organizations embody the ethos and
practices of Weberian-style bureaucracy.1
Instead, many polities—like Ghana—would
be better characterized as institutional brico-
lage, where proto-bureaucratic elements con-
front and contest predominant neopatrimonial
practices.2 Paradoxically, I find that highly
effective Ghanaian state organizations eschew
the letter of legitimated global organizational
practices, and by doing so, they cultivate the
underlying bureaucratic spirit that so often
eludes reform efforts. This article develops
the concept of interstitial bureaucracy to
explain how and why, within such neopatri-
monial environments, these unexpected and
unconventional organizational practices
enhance effectiveness.3
Conventional practices advocated in reform
efforts are ill-equipped to engender high per-
formance, because they do not address vulner-
abilities organizations face in a local institutional
environment lacking a widespread bureau-
cratic ethos. Utilizing a comparison of cases
within the Ghanaian state, I argue that this is
why organizational practices of high-perform-
ing cases differ from ineffectual peer agen-
cies, but also from Western bureaucracies
upon which so much organizational theory is
based. These cases are not idiosyncratic suc-
cesses, nor are they dependent solely on
inspired leadership: high-performing niches
utilize similar organizational practices despite
being located in substantively different minis-
terial portfolios, suggesting this is a system-
atic organizational response to their common
position.
Public sector agencies in contemporary
developing countries are typically character-
ized by low morale, poor productivity, and
corruption. Civil servants work in decrepit
conditions, overcrowded into small offices
amid towering, unorganized paperwork. Offi-
cials are often absent, neglecting government
work to attend to informal jobs augmenting
meager salaries. Others leverage public office
for private gain—through bribery, patronage,
or budgetary theft—at the expense of organi-
zational goals and the public interest.
This image of dysfunctional public service,
although frequently accurate, tells only part of
the story. Monolithically dysfunctional admin-
istrations are the exception, not the rule—
albeit the exception that has long captured
popular and academic attention (Evans 1989;
Helman and Ratner 1992). Instead, many
states regarded as uniformly ineffectual have
great internal variation, with agencies span-
ning a continuum from ineffectual quagmires
to competently achieving organizational man-
dates in the public interest. These state “levia-
thans” are patch-worked: they are cobbled
together from scarce available resources, with
organizational diversity sewn loosely together
into the semblance of unity. In such states,
adapted Weberian-style bureaucracy exists in
interstices—niches within predominantly
neopatrimonial administrations.
The consequences of variation within state
administrative structures are typically over-
looked, because a particularly influential
body of development work is enmeshed in the
convenient shorthand fiction that “the state”
is a single, homogenous entity—an assump-
tion woven into cross-national work due to
methodologically nationalist limitations of all
prominent measures of governance (Kauf-
mann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2010; Transpar-
ency International 2010). Work extolling the
developmental virtues of Weberian bureau-
cracy similarly analyzes the quality and extent
of bureaucracy as a uniform feature of the
478 American Sociological Review 82(3)
state (Evans and Rauch 1999). This notion
that the state has a monolithic character is
misleading. Scholars’ focus on inequalities of
bureaucratic administration between states
overlooks tremendous variation within states.
The difference in corruption scores between
Ghana’s best- and worst-rated state agencies
approximates the difference between Bel-
gium (WGI = 1.50) and Mozambique (WGI =
–.396), spanning the chasm of so-called
developed and developing worlds.
This spectrum of intra-state administrative
variation goes beyond the poor performance of
corrupt, inept agencies that have captured atten-
tion: it also includes agencies performing com-
petently in the public interest despite substantial
obstacles. Existing theories are ill-equipped to
explain the practices of Weberian-style bureau-
cracy in the context of great administrative
variation, because these theories originate from
the study of organizational fields where bureau-
cracy is hegemonic. Scholars know volumes
about bureaucracy as the Goliath of modern
statecraft, but what about bureaucracy as David,
the underdog and interloper?
The challenges of being embedded in
adverse environments give rise to what I call
interstitial bureaucracy. Building on Mann’s
(1986) work, interstices are social niches
within a larger institutional field, distinct-
yet-embedded subsystems characterized by
practices inconsistent with—although not
necessarily subversive to—those of the domi-
nant institution. The characteristics of inter-
stitial bureaucracy differ from the hegemonic
bureaucracy upon which most theory is based,
because the bureaucratic practice and ethos,
when locally non-dominant, must confront
extant institutions and beneficiaries of the
status quo, which shapes its character. The
dual cultural competence associated with
fruitful innovation (Uzzi and Spiro 2005;
Vedres and Stark 2010) is embodied in the
interstitial structural position of “withinness,”
which affords institutional betweenness, ena-
bling creative hybridization. Canonical fea-
tures of hegemonic bureaucracy include
hierarchical coordination, discrete jurisdic-
tions, stable promotion from within, and an
association with repetitive drudgery. In social
contexts where the institutional building
blocks of bureaucracy are comparatively rare,
I find bureaucratic interstices twist canonical
features of bureaucracy to mitigate their envi-
ronmental vulnerabilities and cultivate the
bureaucratic ethos: impersonal administration
for the routine, effective, and timely satisfac-
tion of organizational duties. Often taken for
granted, routine satisfaction of organizational
duties is an impressive accomplishment of
socialization, disciplining state agents to miti-
gate personal interest and coordinate to
achieve collective goals.
Development, States, and
Organizations
Failures of Conventional
Organizational Reforms
In the past ten years, the World Bank (2016)
spent more than $16 billion trying to reform
state organizational capacity, mostly in low-
income countries, where outside experts typi-
cally recommend changes based on what
works in wealthy, industrialized, Western
countries—with little success. There are myr-
iad normative critiques of development practi-
tioners’ unreflexive export of Western ideals
and models as the means and ends of develop-
ment, including neoliberalism. Newer critiques
are further grounded in practical concerns:
such institutional exports rarely work in the
ways they were intended. Even development
practitioners now recognize “building capa-
bilities of human systems—including that
human system called ‘the state’—has proven
much more difficult [than building infrastruc-
ture]” (Andrews et al. 2013:234).
External and top-down reforms encounter
limitations, even without translating institu-
tions across borders. External actors may suc-
cessfully impose easily observable and
enforceable de jure changes, but struggle to
create bona fide reform that changes de facto
practices (Bromley and Powell 2012; Hallett
and Ventresca 2006; Henisz et al. 2005;
Weber et al. 2009). This results in a façade
McDonnell 479
familiar in many developing states, layering a
veneer of administrative functionality over
inner chaos that haunts reform efforts. Ana-
lyzing the problematic emergence of modern,
rationalizing states, Scott (1998:309) docu-
ments “the natural and social failures of thin,
formulaic simplifications imposed through
the agency of state power.” Top-down reforms
replicate abstracted best practices models that
are intelligible to external actors but fail to
address local challenges. Reformers impose
their familiar Western bureaucratic models—
which depend on tacit knowledge unfamiliar
to recipients—while overlooking the unknown
unknowns of local conditions that recipients
confront daily.
Organizational reforms predicated on what
works elsewhere may fail even when local
actors enthusiastically adopt new practices.
Some surprising failures of organizational
reforms are clearest in private enterprises,
where the outcome of profit provides a crisp
evaluation metric. Even well-funded business
training efforts typically fail at the primary
aims of increasing profitability or scale (Blatt-
man and Ralston 2015; McKenzie and Wood-
ruff 2013). Crucially, this is not because local
entrepreneurs fail to adopt the organizational
best practices trumpeted in training, such as
inventory management. Even where trainees
adopt canonical Western business practices, the
practices do not improve profitability (Bruhn
and Zia 2013; Giné and Mansuri 2014; Karlan
and Valdivia 2011). Randomized controlled tri-
als highlight the importance of localized knowl-
edge, which differs substantially from the
organizational content typically covered in
training (Brooks, Donovan, and Johnson 2015).
This suggests there may be a fundamental mis-
fit between organizational practices conveyed
in training and the local environment within
which these organizations operate. One of the
foremost unappreciated challenges facing
actors building effective organizations is that
they must cope with disruptions from the sur-
rounding high-variation, incompletely bureauc-
ratized organizational field.
State organizational capacity is intricately
interrelated with—and often seen as a founda-
tion of—a number of more abstract concepts,
including state strength, state capacity, and
governance quality. Much cross-national work
analyzing bureaucratic diffusion, state strength,
capacity, and governance quality reifies the
state as a singular, homogenous organizational
entity, within which the administrative charac-
teristic of interest is treated as uniformly dis-
tributed (Knack and Keefer 1995; La Porta et
al. 1999; Meyer et al. 1997). In this work, all
prominent cross-national indicators of govern-
ance capacity are measured at the national
level (e.g., Kaufmann et al. 2010; Transpar-
ency International 2010). In fairness, data limi-
tations constrain cross-national statistical
inquiries to a methodologically nationalist
frame. Yet eliding methodological limitation
with empirical reality has consequences: schol-
ars and practitioners have not been sufficiently
concerned with how variation in foundational
organizational differences conditions the effec-
tiveness—or even appropriateness—of con-
ventional Western organizational practices.
Organizational practices embodied in reforms
are tacitly predicated on a thoroughly bureauc-
ratized institutional field, which is often lack-
ing in low-income states, precisely the states
targeted by reform efforts. Thus, an influential
body of development scholarship and practice
has failed to appreciate how variation in organ-
izational capacity in the local environment
may profoundly shape the kinds of organiza-
tional practices that are locally effective.
Uncovering Variation within States
Political sociologists have long critiqued
some analyses for “exaggerating the unity of
the state and the degree to which state offi-
cials are aware of and serve ‘its’ interests”
(Hooks 1990:363; see also Quadagno 1987).
Such reification overlooks complexity in the
functioning of states: “viewing the state as a
single actor risks subsuming sprawling, com-
plex concatenations of governing institutions
under one presumptively unified bureaucratic
apparatus” (Morgan and Orloff 2016:15).
Newer historical, case-based, and qualitative
political sociology acknowledges the state is
not organizationally homogenous (Adams,
Clemens, and Orloff 2005). The powerful
480 American Sociological Review 82(3)
image of a coherent state entity is a social
construction accomplished despite “the actual
practices of its multiple parts” (Migdal
2001:16). Even scholars canonically associ-
ated with state-centered approaches argue that
“there may be insulation or contradictions
among different kinds of state capacities”
such that “possibilities for state interventions
of given types cannot be derived from some
overall level of generalized capacity or ‘state
strength’” (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and
Skocpol 1985:352–53). Advancing under-
standing of institutional change therefore
requires disaggregating the state into com-
plex, interrelated systems of agents and agen-
cies (Steinmetz 1999). This scholarship draws
attention to variation within states, but it stops
short of considering how within-state varia-
tion is consequential for practices that can
influence the effectiveness of organizations—
that is, for precisely the content organiza-
tional reform efforts so frequently target.
Some political sociology examines variation
in organizational capacity, but this work pri-
marily views variation as tied to different geo-
graphic locations and scales within national
boundaries, attending to how levels of govern-
ment—federal, state, or municipal—have vary-
ing preferences and capacities (Dobbin 1994),
including subnational variation (e.g., Singh
2015). Similarly, scholars of non-Western state-
craft use “brown areas” (O’Donnell 2004) and
“urban bias” (Bates 1981) to highlight variation
in the state’s ability to enact and penetrate, but
they see that variation as fundamentally struc-
tured by geographic and social distances—for
example, rural peripheries or urban slums are
more difficult to govern.
Less work focuses on differences among
agencies and ministries comprising the cen-
tral state apparatus. Some prominent histori-
cal work on early-modern state-building
tacitly acknowledges the heterogeneity of
state agencies when emphasizing fiscal
organizational capacity as the first-mover and
harbinger of broader state capacities (Levi
1988; Tilly 1990). However, the emphasis on
tax authorities leaves unclear how strong
organizational capacity emerges within tax or
other government portfolios, except for the
presumed mechanism of buying disciplined
expertise with higher revenues. Gorski’s
(2003) work on the importance of a “discipli-
nary revolution” in society prefiguring state
capacity calls into question the ability to will
into being disciplined and effective bureau-
cratic agents with only finances.
Alternatively, institutionalist scholars are
increasingly analyzing variation among state
agencies and within organizations, focusing
on how different institutional logics conflict
within organizational environments (Clemens
and Cook 1999). Contestation arises when
different agencies—even subunits within
organizations (Binder 2007; Tilcsik 2010)—
have divergent interests due to different pro-
fessional identities (Fligstein 1987; Heimer
1999), organizational goals, and clienteles
(Chibber 2002; Gilbert and Howe 1991).
Conflicting intra-organizational institutional
logics may arise from cohorts with different
professional training. For example, in post-
Communist agencies, a newer cohort of
reformists trained in data measurement and
cost-benefit analysis conflicted with the
communist-minded old guard over subsidiz-
ing unprofitable organizations (Tilcsik 2010).
In Binder’s (2007:568) analysis of conflicting
institutional logics in public service provi-
sion, the counseling department was more
exposed to clients and therefore motivated by
“protecting the children,” whereas accounting
was exposed to government auditors and
therefore focused on “keeping the money
stream flowing.” Baumgartner and Jones’s
(1993:31) foundational work on venue shop-
ping4 in Western polities argues that policy
success depends on how symbolic framing
interacts with a venue’s organizational goals:
pesticides are viewed differently by an agri-
cultural committee, which cares about
“increasing farmers’ profits,” than by an envi-
ronmental group, which focuses on “the nega-
tive health effects.” Chibber (2002:957)
similarly sees the functional division of min-
isterial portfolios driving variations in goals,
observing that inter-agency conflicts arise
even when agencies act in the public interest,
because “the state is a complex amalgamation
of agencies, charged with distinct functions.”
McDonnell 481
Such state scholarship primarily views log-
ics as derived from shared professional identity
or organizational goals—counseling depart-
ments protect children, agricultural ministries
promote farmer productivity. Conflicts arise
from variation in interests, derived from agen-
cies’ or units’ official mission. This reflects a
presumption, built into much of Western
organizational theory, that individuals will
identify with and align their efforts to their
office: if hired as a counselor, they will try to
protect children. This presumes a widespread
bureaucratic ethos as a routine part of social
habitus. Jepperson and Meyer (1991:208) note
that “myths of the universal collective good”
are essential to generating rationalized organi-
zational structure. Such myths of rationality
and collective good are presumed to be “built
into modern societies and personalities as very
general values” such that “the building blocks
for organizations come to be littered around
the societal landscape; it takes only a little
entrepreneurial energy to assemble them into a
structure” (Meyer and Rowan 1977:345).
However, those building blocks are not
widely available in many non-Western states,
like Ghana. Particularly scarce in these social
landscapes is what Weber called the bureau-
cratic ethos: characteristic tendencies to per-
ceive the world, think, decide, act, and appear in
particular ways driven by an orientation to the
organization’s goals. The bureaucratic ethos
embodies the striking transformation of social
attachments that is the backbone of modernity:
an affiliation to organization and mission that
transcends primordial ties. Following Weber,
the “bureau comprises the social and cultural
conditions of a distinctive and independent
comportment of the person, one that is basically
non-sectarian in character . . . the office consti-
tutes a ‘vocation’ (Beruf )—a focus of ethical
commitment and duty, autonomous of and supe-
rior to the holder’s extra-official ties to kith, kin,
class, or conscience” (du Gay 2005:51).
Bureaucracy’s Renaissance
Sociology of non-Western states and organi-
zations has considered the consequences of
cross-national variation in state organiza-
tional capacity for a host of outcomes, from
conflict to economic growth (Centeno 1997;
Evans and Rauch 1999; Evrensel 2010; Huber
and McCarty 2004). Yet this parallel interest
in technical organizational effects has not
enjoyed the same attention to internal varia-
tion. Scholarship on “developmental states”
reignited the sociology of bureaucracy, high-
lighting the critical role of bureaucratic
administration in marshaling unprecedented
economic and social development in previ-
ously poor countries, like South Korea (Evans
1995; Kohli 2004; Woo-Cumings 1999;
World Bank 1997). Economic development
depends on organizational features of the
state administrative apparatus, particularly
whether it possesses characteristics of Webe-
rian bureaucracy, including civil service
entrance exams, competitive financial com-
pensation, and long, stable careers within
civil service (Evans and Rauch 1999).5
These important contributions to develop-
ment sociology advanced understanding of the
relationship between development and states
as organizational entities. That scholarship
was primarily built on cases like the “Asian
tigers,” where states used already-effective
bureaucratic administrations to coordinate
rapid industrialization. A competent and disci-
plined bureaucratic administration was a pref-
ace to their analytic focus on state-society
coordination, a necessary condition that either
went largely unexplained or seemed to depend
on the conflux of unique historical conditions.
Comparisons examined catastrophic failures,
like the predatory state of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (Evans 1989). Attention to
extremes left unresolved how bureaucratic
practices function in cases, like Ghana, that
are neither extensively bureaucratized nor
completely failing, which empirically repre-
sent the majority of states globally.
The dominant cross-national paradigm of
corruption research engages the organiza-
tional capacity of states, but again reifies the
state as a unitary entity, using single measures
for central state corruption (Evrensel 2010;
Mauro 1995). Case-based corruption research
482 American Sociological Review 82(3)
acknowledges intra-state variation in organi-
zational capacity, but it tacitly normalizes
bureaucratic administration, presuming cor-
rupt units are aberrations requiring explana-
tion. Corruption research thus overlooks
cases with high administrative quality, and it
generates theoretical mechanisms that cannot
explain positive deviation within high-variation
environments. Explanations for corruption
center on how certain administrative tasks—
especially taxation or customs—allow offi-
cials lightly monitored access to revenue and
monopoly control over needed resources,
which enhances opportunities for corrupt
practices like bribery (Ferreira, Engelschalk,
and Mayville 2007; Flatters and Macleod
1995). The near-universal presence of tax and
customs authorities at the bottom of any list
of trusted public organizations across nations
(World Bank 1999–2007) supports the claim
that certain administrative tasks structurally
enable corruption in a variety of cultural and
institutional contexts.
Critically, the converse is not true: the
most effective and trusted ministries vary
widely cross-nationally (Barma, Huybens,
and Viñuela 2014; Transparency International
2010; World Bank 1999–2007). This suggests
organizational function is not a sufficient
explanation for exceptional performance in
environments where many others fail. Some
scholars might expect state administrative
functions more connected to the global econ-
omy—such as central banks and finance
ministries—to be the most high functioning
(Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002;
Guthrie 2001). However, empirical patterns
do not support this intuition: finance minis-
tries are regarded as among the most corrupt
state agencies in Benin, Ecuador, Madagas-
car, and Zambia, although their central banks
are well-regarded. The opposite is true in
Burundi, Guinea, Indonesia, and Slovakia,
where central banks are among the worst-
reputed public agencies; in Thailand, both
organizations are poorly regarded (World
Bank 1999–2007). Exposure to global capi-
talism may be one pathway to greater organi-
zational effectiveness, however, empirical
patterns suggest it is neither necessary nor
sufficient: some state functions with high-
level exposure fail to become highly effec-
tive, whereas others with low-level exposure
demonstrate uncommonly strong capacities.
The group affiliations approach suggests
an alternative explanation, arguing that state
agencies’ capacity and autonomy depend on
whether officials remain strongly identified
with social groups of origin (Carruthers 1994;
Migdal 2001). States operate in an arena of
competing domestic power sources, like fam-
ilies, tribes, and political parties, “in which
multiple sets of rules struggle for predomi-
nance” (Migdal 2001:57). Research on Afri-
can states has long been concerned with how
states are affected by the extent to which
officials remain beholden to ethnic groups
(Bates 1974; Bratton and Kimenyi 2008). A
concentration of officials from a particular
identity group—if they are strongly identified
with that group—may undermine organiza-
tional capacity by encouraging patronage and
subverting the organizational mission to serve
group goals (Carruthers 1994). This may
explain why some organizations with demo-
graphic concentrations fall prey to patronage,
but not why others succeed. Moreover, there
is no clear evidence of a pattern differentiat-
ing staff demographics within high-performing
Ghanaian niches from control cases, nor from
college graduates generally. Finally, the influ-
ence of group affiliations depends critically
on the absence of significant esprit de corps,
whereby organizational socialization reori-
ents officials’ identities (Carruthers 1994).
Significant esprit de corps is itself an accom-
plishment of organizational cultural work and
therefore endogenous to niche organizational
capacity, as I will discuss later.
Researchers need a new framework for
understanding administrative successes. A
growing group of scholars are analyzing
“pockets of effectiveness”—well-performing
organizations in adverse environments
(Barma et al. 2014; Grosh 1991; Leonard
2010; Roll 2014; Tendler 1997). They docu-
ment high-performing government organiza-
tions across functions, time periods, and
McDonnell 483
nations, all in environments where most
organizations are ineffectual (Grindle 1997).
These scholars broadly agree that existing
theories, focused on explaining public service
failures, are inadequate to explain why some
public agencies succeed against impressive
odds. Grindle’s (1997) comparison study
found that neither enhanced compensation
nor organizational function explained differ-
ences between high- and low-performing
state agencies. Instead, she found that “man-
agement style” and an “organizational mys-
tique” differentiated the strong and weak
performers, but she concluded it remained
unclear how performance orientation was
embedded in organizations. This study, there-
fore, is a critical extension examining the
small-group sociological processes and
organizational features foundational to such
pockets of productivity.
This article builds on sociological approaches
addressing variation within state administra-
tive structures by examining organizational
subunits within the Ghanaian central state.
Because explanations based on negative varia-
tion do not explain high-end positive devia-
tions, I examine the range of variation typically
overlooked: highly competent groups with
strong, positive reputations for effective
administration in the public interest, embedded
in a larger state administrative milieu not con-
ducive to their functioning. Understanding
how trusted and high-functioning groups thrive
in unsupportive contexts advances scholarship
beyond the presumption that bureaucracy is an
abstract system amenable to superficial diffu-
sion, instead bringing to light the considerable
social, cultural, and organizational work that
goes into cultivating and sustaining the bureau-
cratic ethos when it is non-dominant.
Methods
To disentangle the processes whereby bureau-
cracy confronts and contests other institu-
tions—core to understanding institutional
change—sociology needs greater examination
of states, like Ghana, that are neither bureau-
cratic successes nor over-determined failures.
As one of the best-governed states in Africa,
Ghana is just the sort of mid-range case that
has been neglected in conventional research.
Ghana possesses a range of state agencies,
some working effectively in the public’s inter-
est, and others approximating the stereotypi-
cal image of “third world” civil service
mentioned earlier. The coexistence of bureau-
cratic and non-bureaucratic administrative
practices offers insight into the structures and
practices of interstitial bureaucracy. Identify-
ing the characteristics of Weberian-style
bureaucratic practices within Ghana thereby
yields insight into the cultivation of adminis-
trative rationality and the nature of state effec-
tiveness in low-income states more generally.
To select cases of central state organizations
with reputations for effective administration in
the public interest, I interviewed expert observ-
ers of the Ghanaian state from 21 organiza-
tions, including research institutes, universities,
international nongovernmental organizations,
industry groups, and donor organizations.
Other selection interviewees included key
actors inside the Ghanaian state: personnel
from the Office of the Head of Civil Service,
the Public Services Commission, the Ministry
of Human Resources, and the Management
Services Division, and other high-ranking gov-
ernment officials. Selection interviews contin-
ued until saturation, when no interviewees
suggested expert observers or key stakeholder
organizations who had not already been con-
tacted. By cross-referencing public lists of
organizations consistently invited to stake-
holders’ meetings by the government, I am
confident case-selection interviewees repre-
sent the near-universe of significant observers
of the Ghanaian government. I interviewed
expert observers about which organizations
were most effective at accomplishing their
mandate and about elements of Weberian
bureaucracy (e.g., meritocratic hiring) least
affected by inimical folk understandings asso-
ciating bureaucracy with sloth.
Based on results from diverse expert
observers, I selected four public sector organ-
izations with the strongest and most consist-
ent reputations for organizational capacity.
484 American Sociological Review 82(3)
Some experts nominated large organizations,
others specified particular subunits. Within
nominated large organizations, I refined case
selection to core organizational functions and
selected subunits to study based on agreement
between high-ranking internal members and
external observers who mentioned particular
subunits as noteworthy.
Selected subunits include (1) the Monetary
Policy Analysis & Financial Stability Depart-
ment, for short called the Monetary Policy
Research Department (MPRD), a Bank of
Ghana department that prepared research for
the Monetary Policy Committee, (2) the Pol-
icy Analysis and Research Division (PARD), a
group within the Ministry of Finance and
Economic Planning responsible for generating
and researching fiscal policy initiatives, (3)
the Ghana Commercial Courts (GCC), part of
the High Courts—only the Appeals and
Supreme Courts rank higher—dealing exclu-
sively with commercial cases, and (4) Fre-
quency and Spectrum Management (FSM),
the field testing and monitoring units of the
National Communications Authority (NCA),
which is responsible for licensing, regulation,
and monitoring of communications. Individ-
ual interviews covered 60 to 95 percent of
staff in the focal units and lasted at least one
hour; a number were over an hour and a half.
With the respondent’s permission, most inter-
views were audio-recorded and transcribed. If
respondents declined recording, I took written
notes. Quotation marks indicate recorded ver-
batim transcriptions; material enclosed in
apostrophes is from notes taken at the time
(Lofland and Lofland 1995). Participants in
both selected and control cases roughly
approximate college graduates in Ghana gen-
erally: most have at least one parent with sec-
ondary school or better education, and they
are from a variety of regions and ethnic groups
(with some under-representation of northern
groups). All participants have at least one col-
lege degree, except support staff personnel in
the courts (e.g., transcriptionists) and at NCA
headquarters. Law, engineering, and econom-
ics degrees predominate in the courts, NCA,
and MOFEP/BOG, respectively.
I also conducted limited fieldwork with
comparison subunits within each larger
organization to better understand the context
and operations of the focal cases (see Table
1). These were not pure negative cases—that
is, they were not intentionally selected for
absence of the outcome—but rather were
selected as minimal controls broadly repre-
sentative of the organizations’ operations and
administrative culture. Practical constraints
necessitated more limited fieldwork within
controls: I interviewed five or fewer officials
per case, and when possible I included obser-
vations. To limit extraneous diversity, I
selected functionally analogous control cases
when possible.
Following the logic of comparative analy-
sis, I focus on characteristics shared across
diverse primary cases but that are generally
absent in secondary control cases (for an
overview, see Table 2). Given space limita-
tions, I focus on the case of PARD to illustrate
the main findings and integrate other cases
throughout to demonstrate similarities and
articulate variations. This presentation bal-
ances the interests of providing readers
breadth across cases and depth within a case,
while also showcasing the inner workings of
the fiscal policy generating unit, a unit of
particular substantive interest to political and
developmental sociologists.
Interstitial
Bureaucracy In Ghana
“When the [bureaucratic] office is fully
developed, official activity demands the full
working capacity of the official. . . . For-
merly the normal state of affairs was the
reverse: Official business was discharged as
a secondary activity.” (Weber 1978:958)
Observing the ministry area of Accra, Ghana,
documents a predictable flow of people. Civil
servants trickle into offices between 9 and 11
a.m. Around noon, most exit the ministry
buildings for lunch at “chop bars,” eating
steaming bowls of stews with their hands.

Table 1. Overview of Selected and Control Subunits, by Organization

Organization: Ministry of Finance and Econ. High Courts National Communications Bank of Ghana (BOG)
Planning (MOFEP) of Justice Authority (NCA)

Primary Ministry of Finance, responsible
function: for fiscal policy, allocation and
management of government resources.
Third-ranking Superior
Courts in the British-
derived Ghanaian
justice system, behind
only the Supreme Court
and Court of Appeals.
Licenses audible, visual, and
data telecommunication
systems; allocates, monitors,
and regulates use of
frequencies; monitors quality
of services.
Central bank of Ghana.
Generates monetary policy,
issues and regulates currency,
licenses and regulates banking
and nonbanking financial
institutions.

Selected Policy Analysis and Research Division
case: (PARD)
Primary Research and report on economic
function: impact of fiscal policies proposed
by Minister of Finance. Some policy
generation around fiscal policy issues,
for example, expediting processing of
government contract work or budgetary
request approvals. Reports to Minister
of Finance.
Commercial Courts (GCC) Frequency & Spectrum
Management (FSM)
High court specializing in Monitor and evaluate audible
commercial law cases. spectrum usage around
the country, including
field testing with roving
technical units, reporting on
distribution of bandwidth
and service quality.
Monetary Policy Research Dept.
(MPRD)
Research and report on
economic impact of monetary
policies proposed by the
Monetary Policy Committee
of the Bank of Ghana. Reports
to the Monetary Policy
Committee, composed of the
Governor of Bank and other
high-ranking govt. officials.

Control Budget Division Regular High Court Admin. Headquarters Banking Supervision Dept.
case:
Primary Budgetary dispersals to ministries for High court hearing all Paperwork administration for Supervision and examination of
function: operational and other expenses, civil and criminal cases licenses and regulations over banking institutions.
including compensation of referred to the high telecommunications, human
government contractors. court, including but not resources management.
limited to commercial
law cases.

485
486
Table 2. Overview of Organizational Characteristics by Ghanaian Cases

Adaptive Missing Managing

Organization Selected and Control Units Autonomy Redundancy Pride Middle Embeddedness
Ministry of Finance and Policy Analysis Research Yes (Achieved) Yes (Ind.) High High Yes
Economic Planning Division
  Budget Division No No Low Low No

High Courts of Justice Commercial Courts Yes (Sponsored) Yes (Unit) High High Yes
  Conventional High Court No No Moderate, Frustrated Low No
Courtroom

National Communications Broadband Monitoring Units Yes (Achieved) Yes (Unit) High Moderate Yes
Authority  Administrative Headquarters No No Low Low No

Bank of Ghana Monetary Policy Research Yes (Formal) Yes (Ind.) High Moderate Yes
Unit
  Banking Supervision Yes (Formal) Yes (Unit) Moderate to High Moderate Yes
Department (BSD)a
a
The Bank of Ghana was the only organization in which internal and external observers nominated the organization in its entirety, as opposed to specific units
within the organization. That is, the Bank of Ghana seems to be a highly effective niche that exists at the scale of the formal organization. As such, the BSD
should not be read as a negative case. Instead, the findings suggest that, as another well-regarded and effective unit, it is noteworthy the extent to which the
BSD has similar characteristics to all the other units, including interstices outside the bank.
McDonnell 487
Some sleep at desks through the heat of early
afternoon, overshadowed by piles of disor-
ganized paperwork. Before formal closing
time, officials begin heading home, or to a
second job supplementing their income. This
is the rhythm of the typical day in the build-
ings housing the core functions of the Ghana-
ian state.
At 10 p.m., most office lights have been off
for hours. However, the lights are still ablaze
in the Policy Analysis and Research Division
(PARD) of the Ministry of Finance and Eco-
nomic Planning (MOFEP). Since before 6
a.m., PARD has been a whirl of action amid
the otherwise-quiet morning. National budget
deadlines are approaching, so PARD staff are
putting in 14-hour days to ensure the work is
completed. The division head joins me on the
balcony around the building’s central court-
yard. From our vantage point on one of the
highest floors, nearly every office is visible. A
few lights still burn bright, illuminating a
handful of other officials still at desks, typing
away at this late hour.
‘Still a few lights on,’ I observe. He points
to each illuminated room, naming the inhabit-
ants and their department. One is a member of
the Budget Division who used to work for
PARD. In another, the Multi-Donor Budget
Support team clusters around a desk deep in
conversation despite the late hour. There is a
pregnant pause, then, still gazing at the few
lighted offices, he remarks, ‘As for those peo-
ple, they are like us. They come early, they
stay late until the work is done.’
This simple proclamation spoke volumes
about the ethos and challenges of interstitial
bureaucracy. In Ghana, staying late is a radical
badge of the corporatist ethos, only possible
when individuals are sufficiently invested in
something beyond the self, particularly when
lesser levels of devotion are expected. Mem-
bership in this radical subculture was not
flaunted. Rather, the camaraderie of difference
was expressed quietly and inadvertently—the
lights were on only as a necessary conse-
quence of working late. Existing scholarship
on African states does not account for such
unusual levels of devotion, nor explain how a
few clusters functioning outside the norms of
the larger administrative culture manage to
cultivate and sustain these deviant practices.
How did being embedded within a larger
administrative field affect the characteristics
of bureaucracy within these subunits?
Although MOFEP’s reputation varied among
expert observers, PARD was considered, by
both insiders and outside experts, to be a niche
of administrative excellence. My research
suggests PARD, like the other bureaucratic
niches—but in contrast to the control cases—
flourished by adapting conventional social
technologies of Weberian bureaucracy to
local environmental constraints, enabling
routine satisfaction of its organizational man-
date. These adaptations of bureaucratic char-
acteristics enabled the niche to carve out a
social space of difference, attract and moti-
vate qualified individuals despite low pay,
and make its work more predictable by
defending against disruptions from entangle-
ment with the larger environment. This data
section highlights five ways interstitial
bureaucracy inverts classic features of hegem-
onic bureaucracy.
Carving Space for Distinctiveness:
Autonomy Instead of Hierarchy
Hierarchy is a canonical characteristic of
hegemonic bureaucracy; autonomy in part of
an organization is considered a source of inef-
ficiency that reduces coordinated effective-
ness and efficiency (Chibber 2002; Weber
1978). But when the state-at-large lacks
effectiveness and efficiency, autonomy
enables the possibility of distinctiveness
where more bureaucratic practices may
emerge. This section focuses on control over
personnel, although as the next section elabo-
rates, autonomy may entail various degrees of
control over important aspects of organiza-
tional life, including recruitment, resources,
and goals. The Bank of Ghana had formal
legal autonomy, but the other cases have
fewer formal opportunities for personnel con-
trol: NCA is supervised by the Ministry of
Communication, GCC falls within the
488 American Sociological Review 82(3)
judicial staffing system, and PARD is subject
to centralized civil service hiring through the
Office of the Head of Civil Service (OHCS).
Because formal autonomy is rare, this sec-
tion analyzes how niches engage cultural and
organizational work to accomplish greater
autonomy over personnel despite low formal
autonomy. Absent formal autonomy, some
control can be obtained if a “big man” with
status and capital in the larger organizational
milieu takes interest in a niche. For example,
the chief justice viewed GCC as a pet project
and used his influence to protect hiring
appointments, because he viewed the success
of the GCC as a reflection of his own legacy.
In contrast, PARD achieves quasi-auton-
omy over personnel through a combination of
strategic choices and leveraging political cap-
ital. PARD leaders used tactics of refusal,
poaching, and reassignment to informally
achieve personnel autonomy. When the list of
recruits from OHCS circulated, other direc-
tors eagerly sought more subordinates, which
could increase status in the organization (Par-
kinson 1955). However, PARD preferred to
take no one if recruits did not meet PARD
standards. PARD would occasionally poach
officers from elsewhere within MOFEP.
Recruiting within the ministry provided an
informal probationary period. Adjoa, a recent
university graduate hired elsewhere in
MOFEP, said, “But when I got there, it was
like there was nothing there. . . . I come to
work, I don’t do anything. So, it’s like I keep
moving on, like going to people asking about
what’s good in other divisions.” She eventu-
ally met a senior officer who suggested she
was a good fit for PARD. Careful to be politi-
cally tactful, people worked behind the scenes
to gain the chief director’s permission to reas-
sign her to PARD. Still others are recruited
after doing national service, affording a year
to acculturate and be evaluated before being
officially hired as civil servants.
Sanctioning through reassignment also
afforded personnel control. Legal provisions
and cultural norms make it exceedingly diffi-
cult to terminate a civil servant. Reassign-
ment within civil service does not violate the
extensive labor protections, but it is remark-
ably rare and violates hegemonic administra-
tive norms. However, PARD’s director
reassigned someone to a post outside the divi-
sion for failing to meet the niche’s standards
for timeliness, productivity, and work quality.
This may seem incidental to people with pri-
vate sector experience in the West, where job
insecurity is typical, but interviewees under-
scored the rarity of transferring a civil servant
for poor performance. Interstitial insiders ani-
matedly recalled this transfer as an ‘event,’ a
cautionary tale in the collective imagination,
particularly for new members. Interviewees’
retelling of the event underscored it as a
marker that the department was distinctive
and “serious.” GCC support staffers were
similarly impressed by their own cautionary
tale about a problematic staffer being trans-
ferred for failure to conform to expectations
for punctuality and performance.
Recruitment and Nonfinancial
Motivations: The Mystery of Missing
Middle Managers
Middle management is the mascot of hege-
monic bureaucracy, born of “office holding as
a vocation” (Weber 1978:958), entailing a
secure and predictable “career” with “a sys-
tem of ‘promotion’ according to seniority or to
achievement or both” (p. 220). Yet such iconic
middle managers are largely absent in Gha-
na’s interstices. Middle management’s stable
bureaucratic career is possible only insomuch
as that career provides reasonable financial
security. The harsh fiscal reality for many
low-income countries is that official salaries
cannot compete with business and INGOs
(Rauch and Evans 1997). Therefore, to attract
scarce, high-skilled human resources, niches
must offer enticements beyond salary.
Nearly all interstitial insiders reported
working there despite the salary. The niches
attracted demographically bifurcated clusters:
(1) youth drawn to experience and exposure,
who could tolerate low pay because of famil-
ial support and intended to leverage experi-
ence into a more financially secure position in
McDonnell 489
the future; and (2) older, established profes-
sionals from private practice or abroad with
sufficient financial security, who were drawn
to the prestige of working at the pinnacle of
their profession, exercising significant influ-
ence, or making a patriotic gift of their ser-
vice to the state. By contrast, few mid-life
Ghanaians can afford to make the same trade-
offs, because they are expected to provide for
dependents, including extended kin, which
creates considerable social pressure to avoid
low-paying government work.
The modal older member entered public
service later, at higher levels of authority, and
aspired to advance within the system to its
highest levels. For example, one GCC justice
noted, “[Where will I be in] five years?
Whew. I’m already a high court judge for four
years now, so probably five years, nine years,
I’ll be at the court of appeal.” Because older
members were already near the professional
pinnacle, they saw upper-echelon promotion
within public service as offering more of what
drew them to service in the first place—a
means to achieve even more professional dis-
tinction and influence—and they foresaw no
difficulty accomplishing the goal.
Attracting the brightest young graduates
presents a distinct challenge in a resource-
scarce environment. Yet, relative to the rest of
the public service, these niches manage to
attract high-quality university graduates. Kofi
joined PARD fresh from university, emblem-
atic of the youth perspective:
“When I joined the civil service . . . someone
told me, you know how much you’ll be
paid? Can you live on 1 million cedis at the
end of every month? So, I think about it and
I was like, oh, 1 million is no money. [pause]
But I also wanted to develop my career. . . .
I wanted that experience exactly about what
I had studied in school. So, I said, well, I
don’t mind. I’m not thinking about money
now. Let’s just get the experience.”
Younger members were explicitly aware
of the finance-experience tradeoff. Kobena
noted, “Well, the ministry is not all about the
money but the exposure is huge. And people
that we see right now in very top positions
around Ghana . . . most have started from
ministries or Ministry of Finance. So, it’s like
a tradeoff now. I’m giving up something,
money, a lot of money, to get exposure.” The
director consciously cultivates beneficial
exposure, creating great affection and loyalty
among younger staff. Kobena continued:
“And every meeting that goes on in the
country that has Ministry of Finance
involved, whether a minister’s there or not, my
colleagues and I can enter the meeting. . . .
We go to every place, and that is the expo-
sure we have. That is the privilege we have.
And the good thing is our boss not only
wants to have the knowledge, but he diffuses
it. . . . He pushes, ‘hey, my people, call peo-
ple at PARD, tell them to come.’”
Young members willingly forgo higher
short-term salaries, seeing the interstice as a
long-term investment in experience and expo-
sure, opening up more lucrative careers beyond
civil service. When I asked PARD’s youngest
members where they saw themselves in five
years, only one considered remaining in civil
service. Most anticipated leveraging their
high-profile experience into graduate educa-
tion, INGOs, or private sector positions.
Older and younger members shared a
belief that the work itself is valuable—to
someone beyond themselves—and personally
or professionally interesting. Implemented
policy ideas originating from PARD staff
were a source of pride and conversation,
including the cell phone tax and a new track-
ing system for paying government contrac-
tors, which insiders interpreted as valuable
and tangible contributions to the nation.
Whether a communications engineer at the
NCA, a GCC justice, or a newly hired junior
economics officer at PARD, respondents
described their work as something that gives
them an opportunity to practice their profes-
sion and education at the highest levels. Eze-
kiel enjoyed the job because of “the quality of
the work you get.” Daniel echoed that the
490 American Sociological Review 82(3)
primary benefits are “the ability to personally
influence important decisions. And the nature
of the work itself.”
Cultivation and Identification: Pride
Instead of Cogs in a Machine
All four cases displayed continual boundary
work demarcating the interstitial subculture,
within which different practices and logics
dominate. Talk of pride in comparison rein-
forced distinctiveness and encouraged posi-
tive identification with the niche. Bureaucracy
is long-associated with drudgery, alienation,
and diminution of ingenuity. Even Weber
([1909] 1956:127), speaking of bureaucratic
administrators, opined, “it is still more horri-
ble to think that the world could one day be
filled with nothing but those little cogs, little
men clinging to little jobs and striving towards
bigger ones.”
But where the bureaucratic ethos is rare, it
can be a source of fierce pride. Interstitial
niches expressed pride in their unit, the work
they did, and how they did it. Rather than
viewing themselves dispiritedly as “cogs,”
members described PARD as “the engine of
the ministry,” “the heart tremor,” or “the
backbone of the ministry.” Such expressions
frame their work as a dynamic force and an
essential aspect of the work performed in the
ministry, as expressed by Patience:
“For us, I think, more often, they say this
ministry, the best place to be is PARD.
Because PARD is the heart tremor. . . .
PARD is involved in just about everything
that goes on in the ministry. So for us, people
get to go, we always get to go to meetings,
we are always involved in a lot of things. We
always get to do a lot of training. Ok, we’re
involved in just about everything.”
Participants in all four cases spontane-
ously mentioned explicit pride in their work.
One GCC justice recalled that since she was a
little girl, she dreamed of serving her country
as a judge. Several GCC support staff like-
wise said they felt honored to be selected for
the new commercial courts rather than regular
courts. Communication engineers at NCA
saw themselves as integral to the nation’s
communication system, bridging policy and
practice, and keeping watch for abuses. By
contrast, workers in comparison groups rarely
mentioned pride in their work, instead citing
the stability of government employment as
the primary attraction.
Internal Coping Practices: Adaptive
Redundancy Instead of Discrete
Jurisdictions
Based on established bureaucracy, scholars
have long asserted that specialization and
discrete jurisdictions in the division of labor
promote orderly and efficient conduct. In this
conventional view, each official covers only
his own jurisdiction. Workers are not substi-
tutable. Yet intentional redundancy was pres-
ent in all four cases of interstitial bureaucracy,
and generally absent in the control groups.
Redundancy here means work was actively
managed so each individual or subunit paired
with another who was nearly identical in
skills and project knowledge, and thereby
able to substitute immediately in case of an
absence.6 An external observer might view
this overlap as fundamentally unbureaucratic.
It defies the taken-for-granted wisdom of
organizations; no organizational textbook or
management consultant would recommend
such a strategy (Sorensen 2015). But this is
bureaucracy at its finest: a strategic, routin-
ized response to context, oriented to that core,
defining feature of bureaucracy—the routine
satisfaction of organizational goals. Paradoxi-
cally, redundancy is how “methodical provi-
sion is made for the regular and continuous
fulfillment of these duties” (Weber 1978:956)
within interstices in the predominant neopat-
rimonial power structure.
Intentional redundancy is an adaptive
social technology enabling productivity and
predictability in the context of uncertain-
ties—such as disruption of personnel availa-
bility without warning—that come from
being embedded in larger administrative,
McDonnell 491
social, and epidemiological systems. The
Ghanaian epidemiological system is charac-
terized by a variety of tropical illnesses that
can strike suddenly, causing prolonged sick
leave and threatening workers’ health and
productivity. A flare up of malaria can cause
an official to unexpectedly take a month off.
The larger sociocultural system within which
interstitial niches operate likewise presents
locally distinctive threats to personnel relia-
bility. Foremost among these are the elabo-
rate, time-consuming Ghanaian funeral customs.
For the death of a kinsman, a civil servant
may be called away on little notice for up to
several weeks to celebrate funerary rites.
Funeral events are held in the family’s village
of origin, potentially requiring a bus ride up
to 24 hours away from the capital. One FSM
worker noted, “I have been out of the office
for about a month. I lost my mom so I was
out. I just came this week.”
Another frequent form of personnel disrup-
tion observed during fieldwork came from
embeddedness within the larger administrative
culture. In the Ghanaian state, “secondment” is
a form of requisitioning staff, temporarily
transferring a staff member to another unit
either within or outside the ministry. Second-
ment is a threat arising due to niches’ intersti-
tial positions. Interstices were targets for
secondment from outsiders who needed to
borrow their capabilities, because interstices
enjoyed quiet reputations for efficiency and
competence—characteristics that were plenti-
ful within the niche but rare elsewhere.
Interstices responded to these conditions of
personnel insecurity by cultivating intensive
jurisdictional redundancy: workers partnered
with others who replicated their skill sets and
the up-to-date project knowledge required to
complete the work. They had regular meetings
to keep informed on all aspects of their part-
ner’s work to stay abreast of project knowl-
edge. In MPRD, this redundancy was a
taken-for-granted aspect of the daily work
routine. Patrick’s response was typical:
“The way things are organized here in this
unit, I can do about two different guys’
duties. So, they, it’s been structured in such
a way that if I’m not there, someone can
easily just jump in my shoes. And if he is
not there, I can easily just jump . . . so I
could just go in there and work on proce-
dure as normally as possible.”
PARD utilizes a strikingly similar redundancy
system. Patience described what would happen if
he were unable to report for work at PARD:
Patience: “I have other colleagues, so if I’m not
there, they just have to fill in for me, so
they’ll do extra work.”
Author: So there are others who know how to
do every element of your job somehow?
Patience: “Just about, yeah. If, maybe there’s
about 10. Maybe about—actively involved
about six [people]. Then there’s another
person who’s also actively involved in all
the six [areas] I do as well.”
By contrast, control cases lacked redundancy.
The MOFEP Budget Division, for example,
was organized according to classical division
of jurisdictions, with each desk responsible
for a non-overlapping portfolio of ministerial
budgets. Although this seems more classi-
cally Weberian, it was a poor fit for local
conditions. When a worker was absent from
his budget desk, work went undone or col-
leagues attempted to fill in haphazardly with-
out knowing the status of the pending work,
leading to confusion and delay.
Disciplining Outsiders: Managing
Problematic Embeddedness Instead
of Hierarchical Order
Conventional bureaucracy attends to inter-
office relations primarily as hierarchical sub-
ordination. However, interstitial bureaucratic
niches are part of the vast state administrative
apparatus; their organizational duties often
demand contact with outsiders operating
under different workplace norms and prac-
tices. Therefore, interstitial niches altered
their conduct when dealing with outsiders, or
engaged in longer-term projects disciplining
outsiders who could impinge on the routine
satisfaction of duties.7 Discipline means not
492 American Sociological Review 82(3)
merely negatively sanctioning, but training
others into practices beneficial for the suc-
cessful functioning of the interstitial niche.
Such alteration or disciplining when engaging
outsiders were efforts to make their environ-
ments more predictable—a hallmark of
bureaucratic administration.
Interstitial insiders are cognizant of the
cultural work they do to protect their vulnera-
ble position of being embedded in a larger
administrative culture that often undermines
interstitial practices. Niches are particularly
vulnerable to upstream outsider interactions
when the niche’s work depends on inputs from
outsiders. Patience gave a common example:
“There’s a problem when you are going for
data. . . . Maybe they don’t recognize the
agency involved and they just go about it
anyhow, they go like, ‘come back later for
it.’ And go back and they still don’t have it.
. . . Because when you have a deadline, I
have to present something, I need that data
to work with.”
The problem is so common that PARD mem-
bers have a term for it: “chasing.” Another
PARD member described a similar problem
with a different data provider:
Kojo: I wanted data from GETFund. I was
sending them a fax; I was chasing on it, so I
could do some end-of-year poverty expen-
diture calculations. I was chasing them on it.
Author: So how were you chasing it?
Kojo: I called them yesterday. Like the person
is not in. . . . I should call around this time,
called again [pause] and then they were like
I should call later maybe.”
I probed how often routine data required for
assigned official duties is acquired easily ver-
sus chased. Kojo replied, “90 percent I’m
chasing.”
PARD’s core mandate is analysis, which is
critically dependent on externally produced
data. Patience tacitly distinguished between
interstitial insiders and outsiders, even seem-
ing affronted that the outsider did not recog-
nize PARD worked differently and therefore
handled the request with typical sluggish
apathy, “they just go about it anyhow.”
Patience repeatedly attempted to acquire data
he was officially entitled to, and he was exas-
perated the dilatory outsider would slow the
timely completion of PARD’s duties.
Internal coping mechanisms can mitigate
vulnerability from inter-organizational depend-
encies. Interstitial insiders adjust gathering
techniques, shifting from interstitial ideal prac-
tices to externally valued practices, such as
appealing to social connections. Junior officers
reported relying on elite educational networks
from university. Beyond that, they appealed to
“big man” social capital that was respected in
the larger administrative environment: they
either asked the subunit’s director to intervene
or emphasized to delaying outsiders that work
was required by important figures, like
MOFEP’s minister. This demonstrates how
fluidly insiders engage with the larger admin-
istrative culture through “code switching” ver-
naculars, cultural capital, and interaction
strategies (Anderson 2000). Some respondents
dropped from the highly erudite English typi-
cally used in the office into thickly accented
“pidgin” English to replay these exchanges,
verbally marking the transition from one ethos
into another.8
Interstitial insiders occupying positions
accorded power in the larger system—GCC
justices’ legal authority or FSM officers’ reg-
ulatory authority—have less oblique means
of disciplining the environment. Both organi-
zations enjoy official sanctioning power, and
they are relatively advantaged by how their
workflow intersects with interstitial outsiders.
NCA and GCC primarily interact with down-
stream outsiders who consume the niche’s
work outputs. For example, NCA controls
licensing and regulation of audible spectrum
use rights, necessary for radio and cellular
companies. FSM utilizes mobile technical
equipment to collect its own data, limiting
upstream dependencies. If FSM monitoring
detects violations, they can issue warnings,
impose fines, and, for severe repeated trans-
gressions, threaten licenses.
Similarly, upon founding, the GCC jus-
tices began a long-term coordinated effort to
McDonnell 493
remake their social environment. The justices
adopted a system of mandatory Alternative
Dispute Resolution (ADR), where two parties
meet for mediation before courtroom hear-
ings. The justices saw this as a core tool for
carrying out their organizational mandate—
expediently resolving a larger number of
cases. Statistics from Judicial Service news-
letters document the success of ADR and
other GCC organizational innovations: even
in their first year, GCC handled a larger case-
load with shorter time to resolution than com-
parable high courts. Justices report that
lawyers and clients initially resisted ADR
because it was unfamiliar and felt less ‘offi-
cial.’ As GCC quickly earned a reputation for
expedient, professional trials and expertise in
commercial law, justices leveraged this ben-
eficial reputation to impose ADR over client
objections. Justices report that most users
came to favor ADR after experiencing it.
GCC also disciplined daily practices affect-
ing its goals. I observed judges embarrass
lawyers who arrived late with incomplete or
incorrect paperwork, or who were not properly
attired in black robes and white curled wigs per
courtroom protocol. One justice emphasized
gravely, ‘It won’t happen again, yes?’ If infor-
mal verbal discipline proved insufficient, jus-
tices could formally sanction lawyers. By
contrast, in the comparison regular high court,
lawyers arrived late, unprepared, or dressed
inappropriately, without sanction.
Another long-term tactic for managing
inter-organizational dependencies hints at one
possible mechanism for diffusing the practices
of interstitial bureaucracy outside of originat-
ing niches. Selznick’s (1949:13) classic study
describes organizational cooption as “the pro-
cess of absorbing new elements into the lead-
ership or policy determining structure of an
organization as a means of averting threats to
its stability or existence.” That is, organiza-
tions respond to threats by incorporating out-
siders into their own leadership structure. By
contrast, interstices may use “reverse coop-
tion,” sending insiders out into positions of
leadership in outside units that are otherwise
positioned to disrupt the interstice.
Temporary reverse cooption occurred
through secondment or unofficial voluntary
assistance on outside work to ensure it was
done promptly and well. Yao recounted seek-
ing data PARD needed and helping an outside
unit manage their data, although this was not
part of PARD’s duties: “They conducted a
survey on, it was on health workers, ok? And
I helped them with some of the compilation
of some of the data. And I had to print some-
thing out to help them and pull up some data
at the census’s secretariat.”
Reverse cooption can be more significant
and durable. PARD routinely depends on data
from MOFEP’s Budget Division. Therefore,
lack of expediency or quality in the Budget
Division threatens PARD’s productivity.
Eventually, MOFEP’s leadership partitioned
the Budget Division. Zakaria, considered
PARD’s ‘second-in-command,’ was trans-
ferred to head one of the budget units, along
with several junior PARD members. Although
the content of budget work was different, the
work style in the budget unit staffed with for-
mer PARD members more closely resembled
PARD than that of the other budget unit. Fur-
thermore, PARD and the reverse-coopted
budget unit remained connected through
long-standing interpersonal relationships.
The PARD director described how Zakaria
remained connected to PARD:
“In fact [he] had been in the policy analysis
division all this time until about, about three
or four months ago. We still consider him as
a member of PARD in the diaspora [chuck-
les] because umm, he even seems to be
reporting to me still because I had to con-
vince him to leave policy analysis and go
because we thought that will help us because
he understands the issues. It will help us to
coordinate better with the Budget Division.”
This example of reverse cooption suggests
bureaucratic interstices potentially serve as
sites within which individuals gain lived
exposure to the benefits of Weberian-style
bureaucracy, thereby augmenting the corps of
bureaucratically experienced and oriented
494 American Sociological Review 82(3)
individuals, that scarcest of all bureaucratic
resources.
Understanding
Interstitial
Bureaucracy
The organizational practices typifying these
effective niches are the obverse of classic
Western Weberian-style bureaucratic charac-
teristics, because the observed practices are
systematic organizational responses to similar
interstitial structural positions. An interstice
is a distinct niche within a larger field, char-
acterized by practices inconsistent with—
although not necessarily subversive to—the
predominant institutional practices and rules
of the game (Mann 1986). Mann’s (1986)
approach emphasizes structural withinness as
enabling institutional hybridity: social change
arises from interactions between old and new.
The interstitial lens examines how preexist-
ing, competing practices structuring power
and behavior affect the formation of intersti-
tial institutions. Bureaucratic interstices fos-
ter socially innovative or deviant values,
practices, and cultural tools by clustering a
critical mass of proto-bureaucratic human,
cognitive, and material resources. Bureau-
cratic interstices are, effectively, a bureau-
cratic subculture—a loosely bounded
numerical minority within a dominant major-
ity, characterized by “a set of modal beliefs,
values, norms, and customs associated with a
relatively distinct social subsystem (a set of
interpersonal networks and institutions) exist-
ing within a larger social system and culture”
(Fischer 1975:1323). Even where the sur-
rounding institutional milieu is not actively
hostile—for example, imposing patronage
hires on a niche—distinctiveness vis-à-vis the
environment means the environment provides
few helpful resources. Contrary to neoinstitu-
tionalists’ claim, the sociocognitive “building
blocks” of bureaucratic organization are not
“littered around the societal landscape”
(Meyer and Rowan 1977:345). Operating as a
bureaucratic interstice is like trying to play
chess when everyone else is playing a differ-
ent game, you have to whittle the pieces your-
self, precious few potential players have ever
seen the game before, and the playing area is
prone to disruptive bursts of wind.
Evans (1995:58) argues that in less-devel-
oped countries “scarcity, not surfeit, of
bureaucracy underlies ineffectiveness.” Inter-
stitial bureaucracy extends Evans’s observa-
tion: it is not merely that the human, cognitive,
and material resources of bureaucracy are
rare. Where they are rare, it matters critically
how they are distributed. Clustering a critical
mass of proto-bureaucratic resources enables
camaraderie born of similarity and synergies
of concentration that are impossible when
such scarce resources are spread thinly
throughout the state. Such clustering also
produces distinctiveness vis-à-vis the larger
environment. These twin needs—clustering
rare proto-bureaucratic resources and manag-
ing precarious distinctiveness—make intersti-
tial bureaucracy organizationally distinct
from both bureaucratic organizations in the
West and poor-performing peer organizations
in similar environments. The combination of
within-group similarity and without-group
distinctiveness enhances insider identification
with and commitment to the working group.
This foundation emphasizes organization and
mission over primordial commitments, such
that work becomes “a focus of ethical com-
mitment and duty” (du Gay 2005:51).
But Is It Bureaucracy? From
Characteristics to Ethos
Students of classical theory will recall
Weber’s (1978:1393) formulation of bureau-
cracy as “characterized by formal employ-
ment, salary, pension, promotion, specialized
training and functional division of labor,
well-defined areas of jurisdiction, documen-
tary procedures, hierarchical sub- and super-
ordination.” Interstices subvert these conventional
characteristics, but I argue these niches are
fundamentally bureaucratic because they are
imbued with the bureaucratic ethos: charac-
teristic tendencies to perceive the world,
McDonnell 495
think, decide, act, and appear in particular
ways driven by an orientation to the organiza-
tion’s goals. Niche members strongly identify
with and feel an ethical commitment to the
office that transcends everyday commitments
to friends and family. They have distinctive
ways of doing and being in the office—from
adaptive redundancy to chasing and staying
late—that are oriented toward achieving
rational, predictable, effective, and deperson-
alized administration. Deep reading of
Weber’s work highlights the centrality of
ethos as the core animating force of bureau-
cracy. The bureaucratic ethos embodies the
distinctively modern transformation of social
attachments, whereby one’s job becomes an
affectively-laden identity category, unreflex-
ively commanding commitment. At the heart
of bureaucrats’ “distinctive and independent
comportment” is an orientation to the office
as “a focus of ethical commitment and duty,
autonomous of and superior to the holder’s
extra-official ties to kith, kin, class, or con-
science” (du Gay 2005:51).
Orientation to organizational goals is revo-
lutionary, compared to prior organizational
forms, because it radically depersonalizes
administration. Instead of personal economic
interest or network ties motivating work in
prebendalism or patrimonialism, bureaucratic
officials are oriented to achieving goals on
behalf of abstract collectives—the organiza-
tion, state, or citizens. From paperwork to
rules and meritocracy, those characteristics
are means for cultivating the bureaucratic
ethos and reorienting individual action to col-
lective goals.
The oft-cited ideal-typical bureaucratic
features were social technologies that—under
the conditions Weber observed—cultivated
that transformational bureaucratic ethos, facil-
itating impersonal administration in the rou-
tine satisfaction of the organizational mandate.
Ultimately, bureaucracy inures not in the char-
acteristic existence of “paperwork,” but in
what paperwork can accomplish: separation of
personal and professional spheres, increased
monitoring, and more effective goal achieve-
ment based on analysis of documented pat-
terns. Extensive formal rules are not as
important as whether those rules depersonal-
ize administration, lead to more predictable
outcomes, and encourage decisions based on
organizational interest rather than personal
aggrandizement. Without the bureaucratic
ethos, characteristic bureaucratic features
often fail to achieve the ends of rational, pre-
dictable, effective administration. Conversely,
my data show that in high-variation environ-
ments, characteristics that appear non-
bureaucratic actually support the bureaucratic
ethos and ultimately achieve rational, pre-
dictable, effective, and depersonalized
administration.
Generalizability
In contrast to theory derived from hegemoni-
cally bureaucratized environments, analyzing
the bureaucratic ethos as interstitial better cap-
tures the nature of statecraft where (1) patron-
age is the predominant means of organizing
political power, engendering widespread
assumptions that official positions will be used
to enrich oneself and one’s networks, (2) the
bureaucratic ethos, including other forms of
social discipline upon which it may be built, is
not a routinely available social habitus, (3) but
within which exists proto-bureaucratic human,
cognitive, and material resources that are inter-
mediate in their intensity, organization, and
distribution. Such contexts of incomplete insti-
tutional dominance, where proto-bureaucratic
elements are neither too high (hegemonic
bureaucracy) nor too low (hegemonic neopat-
rimonialism) are conducive to the emergence
of bureaucratic interstices.
The mid-range of incomplete institutional
dominance characterizes many formerly colo-
nized, low-income states, which underwent
decades of external coercion that incom-
pletely transferred Western institutions,
thereby weakening traditional institutions
without fully supplanting them. For example,
as in Ghana, state administrations in formerly
colonized Bolivia, Malawi, and Indonesia are
also characterized by a few distinctively
excellent agencies amid many other ineffec-
tual or corrupt ones (World Bank 1999–2007).
Historically, many now-strong states were
496 American Sociological Review 82(3)

Table 3. National Contexts to Which Interstitial Bureaucracy May Generalize

Hegemonic Mid-Range Institutional Hegemonic

Neopatrimonialism Bricolage Bureaucracy
Angola Argentina Canada
Burundi Brazil Germany
DR Congo Chile Japan
Haiti China (Historical) Singapore
Sierra Leone Dominican Republic South Korea
Ghana Sweden
Indonesia Switzerland
Kenya Taiwan
Malaysia United Kingdom
Nigeria
Rwanda
Senegal
Thailand
Vietnam
Philippines
Uganda
USA (Historical)
Uruguay

Table 4. Overview of Abbreviated Comparison Cases

Time Period Country Agency Abbreviation Key Directora

Mid-nineteenth USA Coast Survey Department CSD Alexander Dallas
century Bache
Early-twentieth China Sino-Foreign Salt Salt Inspectorate Sir Richard Dane
century Inspectorate
Mid-twentieth Kenya Kenyan Tea Development KTDA Charles Karanja
century Agency
Early-twenty-first Nigeria National Agency for Food NAFDAC Doris Akunyili
century and Drug Administration
and Control
a
Refers to the director at the time when scholars indicate that the agency emerged as distinctively
effective; in all cases, the specific organization—or an organization that performed the same state
function—existed prior to becoming highly effective.

once characterized by a critical mass of proto-
bureaucratic elements in the context of gen-
eral prevalence of patronage, including
Republican-era China and the Jacksonian-era
United States. Table 3 gives a non-exhaustive
list of country-cases meeting boundary condi-
tions for interstitial bureaucracy, based on
secondary literature and discussion with
scholars with lived expertise in-country.
Within these mid-range contexts, as with
Ghana, a few state agencies or departments
are distinctively high-functioning, known for
competent, impersonal administration in the
public interest despite operating in adverse
environments in which neopatrimonialism,
patronage, and poor administration predomi-
nate (see Table 4). In the United States, during
the Jacksonian-era synonymous with patron-
age, the Coast Survey Department (CSD)
became “a world-renown scientific agency,
doubtless producing the best known of all the
scientific work sustained by the government”
(White 1954:490). In Republican-era China,
the Salt Inspectorate inherited an ad hoc sys-
tem prone to local capture and “tax leakage,”
and yet increased net revenues by 747 percent
McDonnell 497
Figure 1. Visual Overview of the Mechanics of Interstitial Bureaucracy
in its first 10 years, although it “operated in an
extremely turbulent, often hostile, environ-
ment,” as much of post-dynastic China
descended into “warlordism” (Strauss 1998:
59). In post-independence Kenya, amid infa-
mous ethnicized neopatrimonialism, the
Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA)
increased the quantity of production 50-fold
and improved quality to command above
world-market prices, achieving high rates of
return on investments (Grosh 1991; Leonard
1991). In contemporary Nigeria, amid turbu-
lent politics rife with corruption—and while
facing targeted vandalism, arson, and kidnap-
ping attacks—the National Agency for Food
and Drug Administration and Control (NAF-
DAC) halved the rate of counterfeit drugs in
circulation, emerging as the agency with by
far the strongest public reputation for effec-
tiveness (Pogoson and Roll 2014).
The remainder of this section will argue
that across considerable variation in time
period, geography, and state function, these
unexpectedly effective organizations possess
similar interstitial mechanics (see Figure 1):
sufficient operational autonomy to control
personnel and rewards, enabling clustering of
otherwise rare proto-bureaucratic resources to
produce a subculture of bureaucracy that is
distinctive from the surrounding institutional
milieu. That distinctiveness simultaneously
promotes within-group identification and
necessitates organizational responses to miti-
gate environmental vulnerabilities.
Autonomy
The clustering and contradistinction from the
larger neopatrimonial institutional field that
characterize interstitial bureaucracy are pos-
sible only with sufficient operational inde-
pendence—especially over personnel, tasks,
and rewards (including status rewards). Con-
trary to the erroneous presumption that orga-
nizations everywhere are already thoroughly
bureaucratized, in many non-Western con-
texts the bureaucratic ethos is the deviant
institution, requiring autonomy to insulate it
from the contrary practices of a patronage-
based administrative milieu.
Unusually high operational autonomy was
present in every observed case of interstitial
bureaucracy, from PARD’s informally
achieved autonomy to formal autonomy in
Ghana’s BOG, China’s Salt Inspectorate, and
Nigeria’s NAFDAC.9 Both formal and infor-
mal autonomy depend on elite support or inat-
tention, either of which can protect from the
more sundry effects of political elite interfer-
ence—like patronage staffing. Neopatrimonial
political elites need patronage dumps—organi-
zational dumping grounds saturated with
patronage employment—to maintain power
(Swidler 2016). Large ministries with plentiful
job opportunities—for example, education or
public works—afford more patronage opportu-
nities than do smaller, technical units (Schrank
2016), like Ghana’s FSM. Opportunities for
non-legal income, like in customs or traffic
498 American Sociological Review 82(3)
police, can make patronage posts even more
attractive. Elites may ignore smaller or techni-
cal pockets of central state administration,
which are structurally undesirable for patron-
age and corruption, thereby affording greater
autonomy. Alternatively, political elites may
actively support agencies when elites’ interest
in organizational accomplishments trumps
competing political or patronage goals, as was
the case in KTDA (Leonard 1991). Elites may
voluntarily foster organizational achievement
if cognitive and cultural understandings frame
particular state functions as essential to elites’
symbolically laden nationalist or modernizing
projects (Barma et al. 2014). International
creditors may also coerce elite interest in
agency success—for example, credit crises
facilitated elite support for tax collection by
the Salt Inspectorate (Strauss 1998). However,
international pressure alone is often unsuccess-
ful (Johnson 2015). Political elites’ (in)atten-
tion is inflected through prevailing local
interpretations and interests, further explain-
ing the lack of clear cross-national patterns in
effectiveness by state function.
Elites may tolerate greater organizational
discretion when they have interpersonal ties
with organizational leaders. Interpersonal ties
are substitute disciplinary mechanisms where
the bureaucratic ethos of discipline on behalf
of an office or abstracted collective good is not
a widespread part of the social habitus (Adams
2005). Therefore, even when elites seek tech-
nically competent candidates, prudence sug-
gests presuming recruits hold external loyalties
in competition with the organization’s best
interests. Thus, significant discretion is only
tolerated where loyalty is assured.
Simultaneously, relatively rare technocratic
experience or credentials help orient opera-
tional discretion toward organizational achieve-
ment. Technocrats possess authority derived
not only from elite connections. Threat of
dismissal by neopatrimonial elites means less,
thanks to technocrats’ relatively plentiful
alternative job opportunities. Ideas about what
constitutes good work are not wholly derived
from patron-client relationships. Whether
grounded in domestic professionalized
training, experience in a sufficiently
bureaucratized domestic private sector, or
working or training abroad, lived experience
formulates within such technocrats a largely
unconscious schema. This schema, or network
of neural associations, influences how people
perceive and evaluate a situation, making
some practices and actions more readily think-
able while discouraging others (Lizardo 2017;
Vaisey 2009). Directors with both techno-
cratic merit and elite connections possess
enough trust to gain discretion, enough famili-
arity with alternative cognitive schema to pur-
sue organization achievement over patronage,
and enough leverage vis-à-vis elites to push
unconventional organizational practices. For
example, Alexander Bache—head of CSD—
was one of the foremost scientific minds of his
era, but also from a politically influential fam-
ily that included Benjamin Franklin (White
1954). Charles Karanja, KTDA director, was a
credentialed engineer when university gradu-
ates were sparse (Kenya 1960), but also a
personal associate of President Kenyatta.
Thus, the patrimonial milieu encompassing
interstices may alter even meritocracy—a
keystone bureaucratic characteristic—toward
mixed meritocracy, whereby leaders have
both personal connections to political elites
and a sufficiently rare claim to expertise.
Clustering
Even autonomous state agencies cannot con-
trol the skills and tacit socio-organizational
schema of the labor pool (see Figure 2).
Potential recruits variously possess both
subject-relevant technical skills—explicit
knowledges like econometrics or Excel—and
often-tacit cognitive schema—socio-organiza-
tional orientations, experiences, motivations,
judgments, or practices—with elective affini-
ties for the bureaucratic ethos. Within a hege-
monic bureaucratic milieu, these building
blocks of organization are (as neoinstitutional-
ists presume) helpfully strewn throughout
society; bringing them together takes little
entrepreneurial effort. Conversely, the few
such individuals who enter civil service within
hegemonically neopatrimonial environments
exhaust themselves standing alone against the
McDonnell 499

Figure 2. Proto-Bureaucratic Concentration in Labor Pool and Clustering within State

Administration

strong current of neopatrimonialism. Within and further organizing of the bureaucratic

societies in the institutionally bricolaged mid-
range, a modest number of potential recruits
possess technical skills and proto-bureaucratic
cognitive elements. But if thinly dispersed,
these recruits face the same overwhelming
challenges that frustrate individual effort.
Clustering a critical mass of these scarce
resources enables new organizational possi-
bilities, fostering in-group identification, dedi-
cation, and enhanced effort, culminating in a
cognitive subculture of the bureaucratic ethos.
Clustering is the process of (1) recruitment
and pruning, the ongoing selection about
which persons are in (or out) of the group,
and (2) cultivation, the enriching, thickening,
schema embodied within existing members
through lived experience (see Figure 1).
Niche practices explicitly orient toward
achieving organizational goals, in contrast to
neopatrimonial practices prevalent in the sur-
rounding milieu. At each stage, these distinc-
tive practices simultaneously have direct
technical benefits advancing the organiza-
tion’s goals and no-less-important indirect
effects of reaffirming social boundaries
between niche and milieu. These symbolic
boundaries unsettle within the group the
otherwise-settled cognitive schema of neopat-
rimonialism that are so prevalent and practi-
cal outside the group (see Swidler 1986).
500 American Sociological Review 82(3)
Recruitment and pruning. Niches seek
both job-relevant substantive skills (traditional
meritocracy) and difficult-to-discern proto-
bureaucratic socio-organizational orientations.
Unfortunately, these characteristics—like
being “incorruptible” or “hard-working”—are
rare and difficult to evaluate except by per-
sonal knowledge or observation, creating high
search costs. This may explain why prior
knowledge of candidates is a comparatively
common feature of recruitment within bureau-
cratic interstices. PARD poached observable
hard-workers from within the ministry or
hired national service interns after a year’s
observation. GCC justices were hand-picked
by the chief justice for excellence in legal
practice, but also for a reputation for a strong
work ethic and what one interviewee called
‘incorruptible character.’ FSM and MPRD
recruitment relied heavily on recommenda-
tions from professors at elite training pro-
grams. At NAFDAC, Akunyili’s hand-picked
management team balanced technical merit
and “proven integrity and commitment to the
NAFDAC mission” (Pogoson and Roll
2014:103). Recruitment into KTDA balanced
“an element of personal loyalty mixed in with
a preponderance of objective merit” (Leonard
1991:134). Ironically, the seemingly non-
bureaucratic practice of recruiting among
known associates may be an essential aspect
of interstitial bureaucracy, because direct
observation or interpersonal knowledge may
be the only effective way to manage search
costs and discern rare and difficult-to-measure
characteristics.
Nonpecuniary motivations. Where
rationalizing myths are not part of the wide-
spread social habitus, state-builders instead
appropriate other forms of social disciplining
that habituate individuals to working toward
collective goals (Adams 2005; Gorski
2003)—in contemporary poor states, the fore-
most example is sufficiently professionalized
occupations (Abbott 1988; Leonard 1991).
Professionalization accustoms members to
identifying with and orienting toward advanc-
ing the status of an abstract collective that
transcends face-to-face contacts. Profession-
alization also promotes seeking nonfinancial,
professional status rewards. Individuals
thereby acquire “orientations which transcend
individual rational-instrumental behavior,” a
necessary foundation for institution-building
(Rueschemeyer 1986:59), by participating in
a sufficiently professionalized occupation.
Economics, engineering, and law are all con-
sidered highly professionalized fields within
Ghana, endowing the Ghanaian niches with
an advantageous baseline pool.10 However,
the extent of professionalization varies cross-
nationally and by occupational field, further
explaining why there is not more cross-
national consistency in the location of inter-
stitial bureaucracy by state function.
Niches offer personally costly, high-time,
high-effort work, such as travel to undesira-
ble, remote locations: for example, FSM
field-monitoring of audible spectrum usage,
inspectorate officials collecting salt tax from
rural regions, or NAFDAC inspectors field-
testing for counterfeit drugs. Those costs are
balanced principally by benefits that do not
attract all applicants equally: engaging in
high-impact work and (typically nonpecuni-
ary) status rewards. Consider PARD’s recent
graduates seeking exposure to high-profile
professional work or GCC justices drawn to
practicing at the pinnacle of their profession.
The cumulative structure of costs and benefits
tends to disproportionately attract profession-
oriented candidates and selects out applicants
merely seeking stable government jobs,
which can be less effortfully had elsewhere.
Structural challenges from the larger institu-
tional milieu may shape the pool of applicants
for whom the professional enticements exceed
the time and financial opportunity costs—for
example, kinship obligations placing a finan-
cial burden that overwhelms even profession-
oriented midlife Ghanaians.
The concentration of rare proto-bureau-
cratic socio-organizational orientations was
further defended by pruning niche insiders
who failed to conform to the distinctive com-
portment of the niche. Pruning improved pro-
ductivity by directly eliminating unproductive
McDonnell 501
insiders, but—as in PARD and GCC—also
further distinguished niches from business-
as-usual in the surrounding milieu, where
punishment for poor productivity was
unthinkable. Dismissals for underperformance
or corruption were similarly noteworthy
within NAFDAC—where Akunyili cleaned
house after her appointment—and KTDA,
where dismissal explicitly flaunted ethni-
cized patronage politics as Karanja “applied
the principle as rigorously to his relatives
and the politically connected” (Leonard
1991:133).
Cultivation. Lived experience within the
niche amplifies proto-bureaucratic common-
alities, aggregating into increasingly ordered
schema as group participation routinely reaf-
firms a proscriptive and prescriptive bureau-
cratic logic—oriented toward achieving the
organizational mandate—in contrast to
neopatrimonial logics. Newcomers to PARD
recalled with fascination witnessing the direc-
tor deftly sidestep neopatrimonial influence
while avoiding confrontation, and they
marked the encounter as a template for their
own future action.
Each historical case of distinctively high-
functioning niches involves particular innova-
tive technologies, to which scholars attribute
the distinctive success of the agency. GCC
innovated Alternative Dispute Resolution to
streamline time to adjudication. The Salt
Inspectorate innovated new salt evaporation
techniques to improve quality. The CSD inno-
vated mathematical techniques for adjusting
triangulation networks in surveying. KTDA
innovated farm-to-processing techniques for
tea cultivation. The particular content of tech-
nical solutions varied, but what transcends
cases is that procedures were selected on the
basis of organizational goal-oriented logics,
and were thereby notably distinct from pre-
vailing logics of personal enrichment, political
preference for particular groups, or nurturing
clientelist relationships. Beyond direct techni-
cal benefits, utilizing distinctive goal-oriented
technologies affirmed the boundary between
the interstice and the environment.
Insiders experience their niche as distinc-
tive vis-à-vis the larger environment—in par-
ticular, the niche offers a positive source of
identity that sharply contrasts the spoiled
identity of public servants broadly—which
cultivates insider loyalty and shores up organi-
zational boundaries against neopatrimonial
logics. Individuals discover shared common-
alities through interaction and strengthen
those perceived commonalities within groups
(Wohl 2015). Through ongoing interaction,
including social disciplining (especially of
new members), perceived commonalities
reach a relatively stable equilibrium. Group
judgment, taste, style, and appropriate or val-
ued practices are reinforced in regular interac-
tion within a bounded social space, comprising
a group style, or “recurrent patterns of interac-
tion that arise from a group’s shared assump-
tions about what constitutes good or adequate
participation in the group setting” (Eliasoph
and Lichterman 2003:737). Lived experience
within a niche comes to comprise a largely
unconscious schema keyed to the office, a
network of neural associations influencing
perception, evaluation, and action (Lizardo
2017; Lizardo and Strand 2010; Vaisey 2009).
That which interstitial insiders have in com-
mon, and which makes them maximally dis-
tinct from outsiders,11 is the style of
comportment oriented toward accomplishing
the organization’s goals while eschewing pat-
rimonial influences. Thus, the distinctive
comportment that comes to characterize the
interstice is the bureaucratic ethos: character-
istic tendencies to perceive the world, think,
decide, act, and appear in ways driven by an
orientation to the organization’s goals.
Paradoxically, this work suggests the
administration of the office may be carried
out according to “general rules, which are
more or less stable, more or less exhaustive,
and which can be learned” (Weber 1978:958),
but the bureaucratic ethos upon which that
administration depends cannot. Just as every
contingency of a business relationship cannot
be enumerated in a written contract, such that
contracts depend on unspoken, non-contractual
elements (Macaulay 1963), bureaucracy
502 American Sociological Review 82(3)
includes rules and features of administration,
but also myriad practices that together com-
prise the bureaucratic ethos. One reason top-
down reforms fail is that the bureaucratic
ethos cannot be effectively and exhaustively
enumerated such that it can be transmitted by
mandate. Rather, it must be lived to be learned.
Managing Embedded Distinctiveness
Clustered distinctiveness fosters insider iden-
tification and dedication, but it also poses
unique challenges. Ensuring routine comple-
tion of organizational duties in an environ-
ment that ranges from not conducive (e.g.,
lack of time-disciplining habitus means
PARD has to chase data) to actively disrup-
tive (e.g., personnel secondment or funerary
travel demands) means niches spend greater
organizational effort mitigating basic vulner-
abilities, compared to Western organizations
or poor-performing local peers. Bureaucratic
interstices within neopatrimonial state admin-
istrations are embedded in a preexisting sys-
tem that is largely beyond their control. State
interstices are tied to the state administrative
apparatus: state organization precludes free-
market competition, so interstices cannot
select alternatives when partners are under-
performing. In Ghana—as in Nigeria, Repub-
lican China, or Jacksonian America—in the
surrounding administrative milieu, sloth,
ineptitude, and patronage are the expected
rules of the game that structure initial interac-
tions between state functionaries and outsid-
ers. Interstices must cope with interruptions
arising from how those expectations structure
how outsiders approach the niche.
Niches deal with environmental challenges
by modifying internal practices and engaging
in long-term projects to remake their physical
and social surroundings. Whether and to what
extent interstices mitigate vulnerabilities
through internal coping mechanisms or
engage in external disciplining projects
depends on structural organizational vulnera-
bilities (e.g., upstream versus downstream),
as well as the nature, magnitude, and dispersal
of the challenge. For example, epidemiological
challenges to personnel availability—like
malaria—are perceived to be too big, dis-
persed, and technically beyond the capabili-
ties of PARD to change, and therefore the
niche modifies its internal working processes
to mitigate the risk, adopting adaptive redun-
dancy. Conversely, particular problematic
behavioral patterns among down-stream
recipients of a niche’s work products—like
punctuality among lawyers at GCC—are
more likely targets of external disciplining
projects that remake the social practices of
outsiders interacting with the niche.
Internal organizational responses.
The specific content of internal organiza-
tional responses is perhaps as varied as the
diverse local challenges interstices confront,
yet they all share the core characteristic of
targeting particular local conditions and chal-
lenges with solutions that were relatively
uncommon in the local environment (further
underscoring distinctiveness), in contrast to
one-size-fits-all global best practices. When
most government officials enjoyed lucrative
patron-client relationships with local elites,
the Salt Inspectorate instead frequently
rotated official postings “to forestall incipient
tendencies toward ‘capture’ by local elites”
(Strauss 1998:72). The KTDA utilized prac-
tices that seem the opposite on paper, but
which were similar in responsiveness to their
particular set of local environmental chal-
lenges. Within the intense racially and ethni-
cally charged context of post-Independence
Kenya, when Kikuyu favoritism was expected
but resented, KTDA engaged a variety of
managers to work coethnically with tea farm-
ers of the same ethnicity. This engendered
trust and made visible the demographically
proportional hiring of management.
External projects of reshaping. Inter-
stices may also engage in long-term projects
to reshape their environment. Such external
reshaping to serve organizational goals could
include infrastructural projects. For example,
the Salt Inspectorate remade the relevant
physical environment to mitigate external
McDonnell 503
threats to their ability to achieve their organi-
zational mandate: they constructed salt depots
to frustrate smugglers, and they improved
road access to facilitate compliance. But most
common among all cases are projects of dis-
ciplining routinely encountered outsiders into
new ways of interacting with the niche. GCC
justices disciplined lawyers. KTDA disci-
plined tea farmers. The CSD disciplined
coastal tide observers.
A niche’s interstitial structural position
makes challenging long-term projects to
reshape the environment plausible. Signals of
distinctiveness demarcating a cluster—both
behavioral and physical, like GCC’s distinc-
tive building—cue outsiders when alternative
schema apply. Clustered distinctiveness
affords economies of concentration that pro-
vide incentives for learning new practices:
whereas lawyers may forgo the effort of
learning new practices to satisfy one judge, a
commercial lawyer cannot readily ignore
concerted signals from all commercial law
specialty courtrooms, which he will revisit
regularly in the future. Moreover, niche insid-
ers share the burden of disciplining outsiders
and support each other through the sometimes
exhausting work of doing so. The frustration
and futility of lone effort is illustrated by the
justice in the control courtroom. He espoused
identical desires for judicial practice, yet he
was routinely frustrated in his efforts. It is not
merely that the sea of environmental threats
overwhelms, for interstitial niches face the
same waves. A clustered, critical mass of dis-
tinctive members with strong internal identi-
fication can engage processes of external
change that would otherwise overwhelm indi-
vidual efforts.
Conclusions
Patchwork Leviathan advances a research
tradition of state-building largely based on
premodern European states (Adams 2005;
Ertman 1997; Tilly 1990), calling theoretical
and empirical attention to within-state varia-
tion in capacity. Within-state variation is a
significant empirical reality conditioning the
organizational sociology of political bodies,
particularly in many developing countries.
Broadly, it suggests scholars should recon-
ceptualize states as patch-worked composites
of fractious subunits that may differ vastly in
foundational organizational capacities and the
institutional rules of the game guiding their
actions.
Interstitial bureaucracy unpacks the micro-
foundations of a canonical institution—
bureaucracy—calling attention to the
cognitive and cultural elements of institutions
that are embodied in what Weber called the
bureaucratic ethos. It thus follows in the foot-
steps of scholars like Evans (1995), who
points to esprit de corps, and Rueschemeyer
(1986, 2005) who calls attention to the non-
bureaucratic elements of bureaucracy. It
draws on advances in cognitive and cultural
sociologies—strangely absent in most macro-
political sociology—to identify cognitively
plausible foundations for how understandings
and practices emerge, are shared, and stabi-
lize within groups. This is consonant with
institutional and organizational research seek-
ing to “inhabit” institutions (Hallett and Ven-
tresca 2006), situating institutions within
human actors engaged in specific contexts.
Institutions like bureaucracy are not merely
material manifestations, such as written rules
and regulations, but also a set of orientations,
practices, and inclinations grounded in the
lived experience of people. Some scholarship
has examined the global diffusion of the out-
ward material manifestations of bureaucracy,
but I join others who argue we have been
overconfident in the ability of these materials
to cultivate the animating bureaucratic ethos.
This distinction matters because without
the bureaucratic ethos, classic bureaucratic
features often fail to achieve the ends of
rational, effective administration—an under-
appreciated reason why organizational reform
efforts fail. Conversely, in environments
where the building blocks of rational organi-
zation are not widespread within social habi-
tus, characteristics that appear to defy Western
organizational wisdom—like redundancy—
may actually support the bureaucratic ethos
504 American Sociological Review 82(3)
and ultimately achieve rational, predictable,
effective, and depersonalized administration.
Adopting unconventional organizational
practices is paradoxical from the perspective
of existing scholarship, which expects organi-
zations to adopt globally legitimated models,
but also anticipates decoupling and thus an
eventual failure to reproduce the underlying
spirit of reforms. By contrast, bureaucratic
interstices adopt practices that do not con-
form to global organizational wisdom, but in
so doing, they cultivate the underlying spirit
that often eludes reform efforts.
This article explains both how interstitial
bureaucracy differs from hegemonic bureau-
cracy and why. Hegemonic bureaucracy may
be characterized by the hierarchical coordina-
tion of discrete jurisdictions, staffed by offi-
cials motivated by stable and financially
secure employment throughout a lifelong
career steeped in drudgery. By contrast, the
Ghanaian interstices were defined by high
operational autonomy, organized by adaptive
redundancy, spent inordinate organizational
effort managing external environmental dis-
ruptions, and staffed by officials with nonpe-
cuniary motivations who did not anticipate or
even desire stable lifelong employment, but
were bursting with pride. Interstitial bureau-
cratic organizational characteristics differ
from canonical Weberian bureaucracy, because
the adapted characteristics are systematic
responses to the interstitial position. This
position demands novel organizational prac-
tices to cluster and cultivate resources that are
not widely available, and to manage disrup-
tions arising from interdependencies with the
adverse surrounding milieu.
Sufficient operational autonomy matters
because it conveys control over personnel and
rewards, affording deviation from the status
quo in the surrounding neopatrimonial envi-
ronment. Autonomy enables clustering of
otherwise rare proto-bureaucratic resources,
through intentionally recruiting for proto-
bureaucratic orientations and recruit-side
selection effects. Clustering is further culti-
vated as niche insiders come to identify and
conform with the standards that typify their
distinctive work group—particularly along
vectors that maximize out-group distinctions.
Over time, this culminates in a subculture of
bureaucracy that is distinctive from the sur-
rounding neopatrimonial environment. That
distinctiveness simultaneously promotes
within-group identification and calls for
active efforts to mitigate environmental vul-
nerabilities. These conditions are both struc-
tural and interactional. Recruitment through
networks is interpersonal, but it is also
affected by structural factors shaping the
availability and distribution of proto-bureau-
cratic tendencies within the population. A
seemingly structural condition, like a position
of autonomy or distinction, is ultimately the
culmination of concatenations of interper-
sonal interactions unfolding over time, even-
tually resulting in a set of stabilized practices
in which those inside and outside the niche
feel and act as though the niche is autono-
mous and distinctive.
Interstitial bureaucracy raises compelling
new research directions, especially for schol-
ars concerned with development, states,
bureaucracy, and organizations. Investigating
an uncommon phenomena like bureaucratic
interstices faces methodological challenges,12
so theory-generating research is an important
first step to guide future research. Why does
interstitial bureaucracy develop in some parts
of the state but not others? Under what condi-
tions do these niches endure or become over-
whelmed by the larger environment? What
might enable their distinctive ethos and prac-
tices to spread within the state? Under what
conditions does interstitial bureaucracy
emerge as organization-wide (e.g., NAF-
DAC) or as a subunit (e.g., PARD), and how
does the scale affect particular dynamics?
Niches of corruption may also be based on
autonomy enabling selection and cultivation
that yields a concentration of distinctive per-
sons, typified by strong insider identification
(although based perhaps on shared risk) and
the careful management of external vulnera-
bilities. How might the interstitial process
vary when explaining pockets of normatively
“negative” deviations—like a particularly
McDonnell 505
corrupt police department—embedded within
largely bureaucratic environments? There is
some evidence that clustering distinctive per-
sons may be correlated with particularly
effective niches in early-modern European
states (Aylmer 1961), but how does the world-
historical context—lacking globally prevalent
bureaucracy—affect the process?
This article explains how bureaucratic
niches work, by extension suggesting that the
locations where bureaucratic interstices will
exist are those where the conditions are met.13
It is a fascinating question, although beyond
the present scope, to explain how some of
those conditions themselves came into being.
However, several hypotheses emerge for
scholars interested in identifying patterns in
precipitating conditions. Given the impor-
tance of clustering a critical mass of numeri-
cally rare distinctive people, hypothetically,
interstitial niches should be more likely in
smaller units. Furthermore, given the institution-
building benefits of recruiting people who
already have proto-bureaucratic orientations,
niches may be more likely to exist in sectors
corresponding to particularly sought-after or
effective university programs, or sectors
where people have significant foreign educa-
tion or work experience. Country-specific
patterns in university or international educa-
tion may therefore be correlated with the
location of bureaucratic niches.
This analysis also raises hypotheses about
conditions under which interstitial bureau-
cracy may spread, be overwhelmed, or—often
overlooked—reach a durable equilibrium as
an interstice. We might hypothesize that the
greater the dependency on inputs from exter-
nal sources (especially vast or varied sources),
the more likely fledgling niches are to be
overwhelmed, resulting in demise. Con-
versely, self-contained functions—like the
FSM, which collect all their own data—may
be less likely to be overwhelmed. Self-con-
tainment may also constrain diffusion, result-
ing in durable interstitiality. Beyond upstream
dependencies, niches that directly serve the
public may leverage public reputations for
excellence into a support coalition, which can
protect them from political predation (Car-
penter 2001), helping them endure.
Conditional on niche survival, diffusion of
the distinctive ethos of interstitial bureau-
cracy may be most likely to occur through
inter-agency transfer of experienced intersti-
tial insiders, because the bureaucratic ethos is
grounded in lived experience. This suggests
diffusion may be more likely to other units
whose qualification requirements are similar
enough to enable personnel transfer. How-
ever, transferring a sufficient concentration of
experienced interstitial insiders to inculcate a
new interstice may depend on active coopera-
tion from political elites. Where niches sur-
vive on benign neglect from political elites,
they may arrive at durable interstitiality.
Niches that are too identified with particular
political patrons may become the sacrificial
lamb of the next administration, leading to
their demise. If niches manage to skirt parti-
sanship and be valued by (but not beholden
to) successive political appointees, political
elites atop the organization may facilitate the
strategic diffusion of personnel, as in the
example of PARD employees moving over to
the Budget Division. Yet the very conditions
that enable interstitial bureaucracy may also
limit the ability to scale up. Interstitial bureau-
cracies feed off the mediocrity of others to
fuel their own hyper-performance and
enhance in-group solidarity through a sense
of relative superiority and pride. This ques-
tions the idea that bureaucratic interstices will
be the spark that spreads bureaucracy like
wildfire throughout the state.
For organizational sociologists, this article
updates canonical bureaucratic theory, high-
lighting structural vulnerabilities and organi-
zational responses of interstitial bureaucracy
not present in bureaucracy’s hegemonic form.
It advances understanding of large formal
organizations as simultaneously unitary and
composed of many more-or-less autonomous
parts, which are still part of the whole. This
inherent tension in many large formal organi-
zations is important and under-theorized in
organizational research, where dominant the-
ories treat organizations as either coherent
506 American Sociological Review 82(3)
actors (e.g., principal-agent theory) or loose
networks (e.g., Davis 2009). This work sug-
gests that most organizations, including
nation-states, have properties of both, a dual-
ity that affects organizational practice. U.S.
corporations likewise contain subunits that
distinctively outperform the rest of the corpo-
ration (Sutton and Rao 2014). Ethnography
shows high-performing corporate subunits
are similarly semi-autonomous and character-
ized by a distinctive ethos and strong insider
pride (Kunda 2009). This suggests dynamics
of interstitiality may generalize to high-
performing niches beyond interstitial bureau-
cracy in neopatrimonial settings.
Interstitial bureaucracy raises policy impli-
cations for the billion-dollar development
industry. By highlighting how much the par-
ticular form an adaptation takes depends on
local context, it questions the efficacy of one-
size-fits-all global best practices. Capacity-
building reforms should instead demonstrate
greater humility about the limitations of West-
ern organizational wisdom. Reformers should
eagerly support and learn from local actors in
identified bureaucratic interstices, whose dual
cultural competency in the local environment
and functional bureaucracy has enabled the
cultivation of practices with already-proven
efficacy in that context. Donors might also
rethink having foreign consultants fly on-site
for short training workshops intended to
enhance organizational capacity, which con-
serves costs but yields fleeting or no improve-
ments. Given the importance of lived experience
for fostering the cognitive foundations of doing
bureaucracy, donors might instead fund
medium-term international training experi-
ences for a critical mass of public servants from
the same department. This deep experience for
a clustered critical mass is more likely to yield
durable change. Apart from capacity-building
aid, interstitial bureaucracy might occasion a
rethinking of how public-facing development
projects are distributed. Donors might system-
atically target programmatic development aid
to sectors related to existing niches of excel-
lence within recipient states. For example, a
state with a highly effective health ministry
might have a disproportionate amount of aid
directed to health, increasing the effectiveness
of each dollar spent thanks to the enhanced
competence of the local development partner.
Bureaucracy is taken-for-granted—even
scorned as red tape—in the West. Advanced
industrialized nations are so accustomed to
Weberian bureaucracy that it appears to func-
tion like clockwork without a keeper. Intersti-
tial bureaucracy highlights that in some
contexts, the bureaucratic ethos is a fragile and
deviant active project entangled with dominant
local conditions. It thereby counters the logic
of inevitability that sometimes pervades
accounts of institutional change. Too often, we
assume rationality and modernity are natural,
overlooking the effort and commitment it took
to foster them. Unlike a sweeping disciplinary
revolution, interstitial bureaucracy is a thou-
sand small revolutions quietly blooming in
rugged and unruly meadows.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Art Stinchcombe, who taught me to love
sociological approaches to organizations and thoughtfully
commented on the earliest versions of this project. Thanks
to Jim Mahoney, whose insight shaped the project from the
beginning. I am deeply grateful to the ASR Deputy Editor
who handled my submission, my anonymous reviewers,
and the Editors. They engaged the paper deeply, showcas-
ing the best of what a developmental review can be; this
paper has improved considerably due to the exchange with
these anonymous but intellectually generous scholars.
Thanks to other scholars who thoughtfully gave feedback
on this project and article, including Charles Camic, Bruce
Carruthers, Nitsan Chorev, Jessica Collett, Michaela
DeSoucey, Barry Eidlin, Wendy Griswold, Geoff Hark-
ness, Carol Heimer, Jennifer Jones, Abigail Jorgensen,
Amy Langenkamp, John Levi Martin, Damon Mayrl,
Elizabeth McClintock, Terence McDonnell, Matthew
McEwen, Daniel Morrison, Abi Ocobock, Paul Ocobock,
Erin Rehel, Andrew Schrank, Jesper Sorensen, and Ann
Swidler. At early stages the project benefitted from feed-
back from the Northwestern University Comparative His-
torical Social Science workshop and the UW Madison
Sociology of Economic Change and Development
Research Seminar; the paper also benefitted from presen-
tations at the Watson Institute at Brown University, the
Sociology Colloquium at Duke University, the University
of Chicago Social Theory and Evidence Workshop, the
Stanford Graduate School of Business Organizational
Behavior Seminar, and the University of Notre Dame
Culture Workshop and Africa Working Group.
McDonnell 507
Funding
The fieldwork for this project would not have been pos-
sible without generous funding from the National Sci-
ence Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement
Grant #0728059), as well as research fellowships from
Northwestern University’s Department of Sociology and
Program of African Studies. This project has also benefit-
ted from a Weinberg Dissertation Writing Fellowship
from Northwestern University.
Editors’ Note
To avoid any possible conflict of interest, the entire
review process for this article was handled by an ASR
Deputy Editor with no Notre Dame affiliation.
Notes
  1. Some scholars use “bureaucracy” to mean “govern-
ment administrative structure” (e.g., “representative
bureaucracy”). Because I argue that not all states
are bureaucratic in the Weberian sense, hereafter
“bureaucracy” refers to Weberian-style bureau-
cratic ethos, and “administration” denotes a formal
organizational system in general.
  2. Neopatrimonialism is a system in which elites use
state resources to enrich themselves and cultivate
loyal supporters through money, in-kind benefits,
or patronage employment. It is a particularized
network-based site and logic governing important
decisions decoupled from office or generalized col-
lective good (Cammack 2007).
  3. By effective, I refer to organizations, relative to oth-
ers in their environment, with a widely shared repu-
tation for accomplishing organizational goals and
doing so in a largely impartial manner serving the
public interest. This article does not engage debates
about effectiveness versus efficiency. Similarly,
predatory, clientelist, or corrupt states may also
operate well-managed projects that are not public-
oriented, but that is not the focus of this article.
  4. Venue shopping is the process of policy supporters
seeking a more receptive location or legislative com-
mittee in which to push proposed policy changes.
 5. Generally, high bureaucratic effectiveness or effi-
ciency serves as a foundation to enable high state
capacity. However, some scholars argue that the Chi-
nese state demonstrates high state capacity absent
high bureaucratic efficiency (Zhou et al. 2012).
  6. This might also be considered a specialized division
of labor.
  7. This relates to managing boundary-spanning inter-
dependencies and environmental uncertainty from
classic organizational theory (see Thompson 1967).
  8. Ghanaian Pidgin is simplified English coupled with
local expressive conventions. For example, Ghanaian
pidgin when departing is “Eee Chale, I da go come.”
Chale is an expressive convention similar to “chap.”
“I da go come” is the literal translation of the Twi “Me
kō na ba” (I go and come), used when departing.
  9. Grindle (1997) likewise identifies personnel auton-
omy as a key characteristic distinguishing relatively
high-performing agencies from lackluster ones.
10. This should not be read as nothing-but-profession-
alization. Economists, lawyers, and engineers—
professional identities affiliated with the four
niches—exist throughout public service and are not
everywhere as successful where the rest of the inter-
stitial mechanics are not present.
11. See the social psychology on optimal distinctive-
ness (Brewer 1991).
12. Methodological limitations include, for example,
that contemporaneously observing interstitial
bureaucratic “birth” would require observing myr-
iad government agencies hoping one becomes a rare
bureaucratic interstice during fieldwork—a costly
and potentially fruitless endeavor.
13. Interest in where within the state niches are located
may be grounded in an intuition that government
function must matter (see the earlier discussion on
function-based explanations). Systematically iden-
tifying niche-location patterns is hampered by the
lack of cross-national comparative data on within-
state measures of organizational capacity.
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Limited.
Erin Metz McDonnell is a Kellogg Assistant Professor
of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Her
research cuts across organizational, political, cultural,
and economic sociology, focusing on how social organi-
zation affects economic outcomes. Her work on Webe-
rian budgetary units, published in the American Journal
of Sociology, won the 2015 Theory Award. Her current
work intersects Weberian bureaucracy and interstitial
organizational theory to understand sub-state variation in
administrative capacity in the global South.