Anti-bureaucratic nostalgia produces its own rigid, unquestioned goals

Evidence

Like most Americans, volunteers and social service providers assumed that the opposite of cold, bureaucratic control was warm, family-like care: a village. Americans often accuse bureaucracies of instrumentally enlisting workers busily to carry out orders without questioning the goals. The irony in Amargo was that social service workers’ anti-bureaucratic nostalgia resulted in a flurry of activity toward an unquestioned, pre-set, given goal. I add here a third element that is neither cold bureaucracy nor warm, cloistered family: free, open-ended conversation, playful curiosity about the fresh, wide, open world. That was what was missing in Amargo. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 462

Categorization

• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 462