Intermediaries as infrastructure
Interrogating the phatic labor of state-building
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2399796 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ranjit Singh (0000-0001-6453-8676, Data & Society Research Institute, New York, NY, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 577-598 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1440-7833 • E-ISSN: 1741-2978 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14407833241234675 |
| OpenAlex | W4392470021 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 40 |
Investments in the digital welfare state are often driven by the promise of removing intermediaries between the state and citizens, yet they continue to play a key role in the last mile delivery of state services. By intermediaries, I mean people who interface between bureaucrats and citizens. Their work, often as proxies for citizens, is not only to simplify bureaucratic procedures for them, but also help insulate them from bureaucratic apathy. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe the work of intermediaries around government offices, who (in)visibly support citizens in navigating the bureaucratic procedures of enrolling into Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identity number. Building on Julia Elyachar's conception of 'phatic labor,' I position such intermediaries themselves as infrastructure and illustrate how their affective networks can be leveraged to orchestrate a form of distributive justice to ensure that being marginal does not preclude a citizen's access to welfare services
Economics · Intermediary · Sociology · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Finance · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Analyzing due process in the workplace
Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure
Anti-Politics Machine
Ethnography in/of the World System
Exploring the Interpersonal Transaction of the Brazilian Jeitinho in Bureaucratic Contexts
Avenues of Participation
Democracy's Infrastructure
Biometric State
Reassembling the Social
Legal identity in the sustainable development agenda
Bureaucracy intermediaries, corruption and red tape
Technologies of Disintermediation in a Mediated State
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The role of intermediaries in corruption
Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)
Seeing the State
Middlemen in Third-World Corruption
Between surveillance and recognition
From Russia with Blat
Maddening States
Government of Paper
I Is; Therefore I Am
Producing Guanxi
Blurred Boundaries
People as Infrastructure
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo
| Citations per year | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |