Journal Article

Making the eyes of the state: algorithmic alienation and mundane creativity in Peruvian street-level bureaucrats

García, Luis, Cerna-Aragon, Diego

2025

Overview

The production of state legibility has been a prolific subject of study. However, most works have not paid much attention to the quotidian labor of the street-level bureaucrats that implement legibility projects at a local level. The aim of this article is to explore the implementation of a social registry system at a local level to understand how frontline workers make the population legible. Instead of taking legibility as an object of evaluation or critique, we pay close attention to the inner workings of bureaucracies at the instances in which the sociomaterial conditions of the population are translated into data. Drawing from qualitative research in Peruvian municipalities, we describe the operations of an algorithmic system that classifies the population for the distribution of welfare. We observed how under-resourced bureaucrats were constrained by regulations and technologies of the system. Paradoxically, to make the system work for their local realities, the bureaucrats had to bend the rules and find workarounds. From this perspective, the making of legibility looks less like a top-down exercise of bureaucratic compliance or a story of domination over the population. Instead, we find actors attempting to maintain a delicate balance between inadequate legal rules, scarce resources, and sociopolitical demands.

• Publisher: Springer US,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Algorithms / Alienation / Attention / Bureaucracy / Bureaucrats / Dominance / Economic Policy / Legibility / Political Science / Political Science and International Relations / Political Science and International Studies / Population / Population distribution / Public Administration / Qualitative research / Regulation / Research Article / Welfare