Beyond administrative burden: Activation and administrative harm

Within recent public policy and administration scholarship, there has been a growing focus on the concept of “administrative burden” to describe the learning, compliance and psychological costs incurred by citizens when trying to access services and exercise social and political rights. Specifically, in the context of activation and welfare-to-work programmes, scholars have highlighted the effects of administrative burdens on claimants' autonomy, dignity and well-being. We bring critical social policy scholarship on administrative harm into conversation with Adam and Balfour's concept of “administrative evil” to highlight the underlying dynamics of masking, moral inversion and dehumanisation that facilitate street-level workers to adopt dispositions of enforcement of administrative burdens. To illustrate the applicability of Adam and Balfour's work to understanding how experiences of administrative burden can be intensified by the practices and dispositions of street-level workers, we draw on examples of from an ethnographic study of the delivery of welfare-to-work in Australia.