LEY Y JUSTICIA EN LA TRINCHERA ESTATAL

EXPERIENCIAS DE INSPECTORES LABORALES EN BUENOS AIRES

Abstract

The State, bureaucracies and public policies have usually been analyzed from the top down, from the top down. There is, however, a promising research agenda that addresses the practices of state agents and their interactions with citizens in order to reconstruct, "from below", the way in which public policies are acted upon and experienced by different social groups. . From the ethnographic fieldwork carried out with labor inspectors for 6 months in the City of Buenos Aires, this article uses this literature to reconstruct the devices, practices and reasoning inscribed in various inspection situations. In particular, we analyze the relationships between experience of “enforcing the law” and that of “doing justice” in said situations. It is argued that this relationship takes the form of a worldly tension in the institutional life of this street bureaucracy; dilemmas that do not cause any rupture of the system itself, but that give content to what we call the experiential dimension of citizenship. Thus, the article crosses two relevant issues for a sociology of the State sensitive to the challenges of contemporary society. On the one hand, the question of how the State deals daily with the difficulties in making universal principles of justice effective. On the other hand, the question of how much these difficulties contribute to blurring the boundaries between the legal and the illegal in the institutional life of that State.