“Fairness” in an unequal society: Welfare workers, labor inspectors and the embedded moralities of street‐level bureaucracy in Argentina

This article advances a new argument on street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) moral dilemmas in developing countries. Developing countries feature deeper and more pervasive social economic inequalities than their developed counterparts. They also what I call fragmented stateness: states whose legal bureaucratic reach is functional territorially unequal that have an ambiguous relationship with own legality. macro-level force shapes daily encounters SLBs’ practices ways the literature has not fully grasped. found awareness of this stateness implies kind structural experience arbitrariness makes exercise fair judgments implementation policies elusive. ground my ethnographic account different arenas Argentinean protection system: welfare provision labor inspection. By reconstructing connections between state workers’ dilemmas, presents novel empirically grounded theoretical often-overlooked dimension collective regulation conflicts at frontlines.