This research explores public procurement as a form of infrastructure through which the Romanian post-socialist state organises relationships between public institutions, private enterprises, and citizens. While procurement systems are typically portrayed as neutral, rule-based mechanisms designed to ensure transparency and efficiency, ethnographic observation reveals them as dynamic, interpretive, and emotionally charged domains of everyday state practice. The study proposes that procurement operates as a social infrastructure, a communicative, moral, and procedural system that both enables and constrains participation, and that continually produces asymmetries between actors. Drawing on the anthropology of infrastructure, pragmatics, and moral experience, the project investigates how procurement officials and supplier representatives interpret each other’s utterances, documents, and silences, and how these interpretive asymmetries generate forms of social difference and inequality. Public procurement thus becomes a site where the moral dimensions of bureaucratic action are made visible, particularly through hesitation, discretion, and silence. These micro-practices reveal broader patterns of legitimacy, fairness, and exclusion within post-socialist institutions. The fieldwork will combine ethnography, participant observation, and naturalistic experiments, integrating methods from linguistic and cognitive anthropology. The researcher will be professionally embedded within both contracting authorities and supplier organisations, alternating observation between buyer and supplier sides to trace how decisions, clarifications, or omissions acquire institutional meaning. Additional data will include interviews, procurement documents, and archival material from socialist, transition, and EU-regulated periods (1989present). Linguistic-pragmatic analysis, grounded in Relevance Theory, will be applied to examine how meaning, authority, and legitimacy are negotiated through speech, text, and silence. Romania provides an analytically rich case for this inquiry. Post-socialist institutions combine formal EU regulatory frameworks with enduring informal practices, moral ambivalence, and discretionary authority. By examining how actors navigate uncertainty within this environment, the research will contribute to the anthropology of infrastructure, morality, and bureaucracy, offering new insights into how procedural systems shape human relations and institutional trust. Methodologically, the project bridges micro-level analysis of communicative acts with macro-level institutional and moral structures. The expected outcome is a multi-layered ethnography that situates procurement as both an administrative mechanism and a lived moral field. The study ultimately seeks to illuminate how infrastructures of governance through documents, technologies, and silences produce the subtle social hierarchies and affective experiences that define public life in post-socialist Romania.
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