This is about the power that can be imposed, and the misery that is caused, especially for the poor, by the simple act of waiting. Although set in Buenos Aires, Auyero describes a variety of different situations, including waiting for national identity cards, for welfare agencies, and the endless waiting for relocation from the slums. This study of power by bureaucrats and the state is applicable to many countries and places.

Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital’s outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing. Scrutinizing the mundane interactions between the poor and the state, as well as underprivileged people’s confusion and uncertainty about the administrative processes that affect them, Javier Auyero argues that while waiting, the poor learn the opposite of citizenship. They learn to be patients of the state. They absorb the message that they should be patient and keep waiting, because there is nothing else that they can do. Drawing attention to a significant everyday dynamic that has received little scholarly attention until now, Auyero considers not only how the poor experience these lengthy waits but also how making poor people wait works as a strategy of state control.

"Patients of the State shines in providing empiricalevidence in support of the importance of waiting for understanding the ways in which power and domination are played out in practice in the relations between the urban poor and the front-line bureaucrats of the state.... [It] shines in providing empirical in support of the importance of waiting for understanding the ways in which power and domination are played out in practice in the relations between the urban poor and the front-line bureaucrats of the state."  - Journal of Latin American Studies