Objectivity as a Bureaucratic Virtue: The Lived Experience of Objectivity in an Israeli Medical Bureaucracy

In my Ph.D. research, I studied how an ethical ideal of “objectivity” shapes work procedures at the Israeli Public Committee for the Enhancement of the Medical Services Basket (known in Israel as Va’adat Sal Hatrufot), which determines government subsidies for medical treatments.

With the generous support of several grants and awards, I conducted 16 months of ethnographic research with the committee’s bureaucratic staff members. This all-women team prepares the data upon which the committee makes its decisions. For these women, working “objectively” constitutes what I call a “bureaucratic virtue,” an ethically desired quality of conduct. I discerned four practical meanings staff members give to working objectively: (1) providing truthful data; (2) following strict timetables; (3) providing a non-positional overview; (4) taking a non-emotional stance. Each chapter considers one of these meanings and examines how it oriented staffers’ everyday work practices and the implications of these practices on committee decisions and Israeli society more broadly.

Findings and insights from this study have been published in leading journals in anthropology and beyond, including American Ethnologist, Bioethics, BMC Health Services Research, and Social Analysis. This research was supported by generous grants from the and the RLF/SPA Pre-Dissertation Fellowship and the Yunes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, UCLA.