Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2018: Bernardo Zacka, for When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency

Winner: Bernardo Zacka (MIT), for When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency (Harvard University Press)

To merit this award, the committee strongly felt that a book must strike the right balance between theoretical innovation and a rigorous contribution to interpretive research methodologies. When the State Meets the Street is well written and provides a rich, detailed and nuanced ethnography of the state by focusing on street-level bureaucracy at the frontlines of public service. The book builds from findings and an ethnographic sensibility to inform political theorizing about bureaucratic polities. It focuses on state pathologies including: the indifferent, the enforcer and the caregiver. The work is imaginative and documents ideas about disposition and implementation through administrative practices of government bureaucracy. From an interpretive lens, When State Meets the Street contributes to democratic theory through rooting in everyday experiences and practices of administrative power.

Selection Committee:

Sarah Marie Wiebe, chair (University of Hawai’i, Mānoa)

Nick Cheesman (Australia National University)

Kristen Monroe (University of California, Irvine)