Book Review: People of the ”System”. Unwritten Rules, Compromises and Survival in Public Administration, by Dragoș-Valentin Dincă

Abstract

People of the “System”. Unwritten Rules, Compromises and Survival in Public Administration, by Dragoș-Valentin Dincă, offers an unconventional journey into the inner workings of Romanian public administration, drawing on professional experience, institutional observation, memory and a kind of humour that makes even its dysfunctions easier to endure. This review deliberately adopts a personal perspective, also because the author and the reviewer belong to the same generation of public administration graduates and were classmates at SNSPA. Beyond its memoir-like dimension, the book opens a highly relevant discussion about the relationship between formal legal rules and informal practices, between merit and acceptability, between reform and institutional self-preservation, as well as about the individual’s ability to pass through institutions without becoming captive to their mechanisms. The book’s principal merit lies in its refusal to treat the “system” as an abstract entity and in its decision to return people to the centre of the administrative explanation. In this sense, Dragoș Dincă’s volume is not merely a book about public administration, but also one about character, adaptation, institutional memory and the limits of compromise.