Granting “human dignity”. How emotions and professional ethos make public services

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare bureaucracies, this article explores the place of emotions in the administrative treatment of cases – particularly those involving migrants, whose welfare rights are increasingly limited. Welfare offices are responsible for granting social assistance – either in the form of medical treatment, material help, or financial benefits – in order to guarantee that those residing in Belgium live in dignified conditions. This paper delves into both civil servants’ emotional engagement, discourses, and relationship to “the state”; and into the way they decide on specific cases based on feelings, administrative guidelines, and instructions from above. It challenges the assumption that street-level bureaucrats’ discretion and daily practices often effectively restrict citizens’ access to public services, and shows instead how emotions, professional ethics and values contribute to assessing deservingness, and to the way civil servants “do the state” on a daily basis.