摘要：French bureaucracy is legendary. L’administration serves often as a stereotypical exemplum of impersonal, anti-human machinery reproducing needless documentation, rules, impeding the life of citizens and consequently finding new ways to justify its existence and omnipotence. The relation between needy people and welfare system, which main role is to tell apart deserving poor from the undeserving ones, is complicated with plenty of possible interpretations, as well as ideological tensions. Vincent Dubois in his impressive study challenges both these phenomena. Without attempting to make any large scale generalizations of extrapolate its findings onto the whole welfare system, applying ethnographic approach to fieldwork, he analyzes everyday interactions in the welfare offices between family benefits applicants and front-line welfare providers, presenting readers with fascinating picture of complicated and manifold social interrelations. Sociology of poverty, sociology of institutions, micro-sociological study of everyday interactions, poverty research, public administration research, ethnographic approach to fieldwork, the work of French scholar fits each of these descriptions. In this case traditional borders between sociological sub-disciplines and research approaches seem to be invalid. Yet, this eclecticism, bridging research approaches and combining theoretical and methodological references leaves no impression of chaos, as the selection of various instruments from sociological repertoire is purposeful and precisely adapted to the nature of studied phenomena.
