Street Level Bureaucrats

Street-level bureaucrats implementing public policies have a certain degree of autonomy – or discretion – in their work. Following Lipsky, discretion has received wide attention in the policy implementation literature. However, scholars have not developed theoretical frameworks regarding the effects of discretion, which were then tested these using large samples. This study therefore develops a theoretical framework regarding two main effects of discretion: client meaningfulness and willingness to implement. The relationships are tested using a survey among 1,300 healthcare professionals implementing a new policy. The results underscore the importance of discretion. Implications of the findings and a future research agenda is shown.

Avec un nombre de salariés équivalent aux effectifs de la fonction publique territoriale, de nombreux volontaires et stagiaires en quête d’expériences significatives pour leurs curriculum vitae, et une armée de bénévoles, compétents, expérimentés et dont la croissance déjà remarquable sera renforcée par les prochains départs en retraite, le monde associatif est devenu un véritable marché du travail. Pourtant, dans les représentations collectives, ce monde demeure consacré comme celui du bénévolat, du don de soi et de l’engagement citoyen. Loin d’être un monde "hors du monde", il cristallise les "grandes transformations" qui caractérisent la société salariale : d’une part, il est le lieu de luttes de classement dans la définition des frontières entre secteurs marchand et non-marchand. De l’autre, il mêle des pratiques que la société reconnaît comme relevant de la sphère productive, puisqu’elles sont intégrées au salariat, à des prestations réalisées dans le cadre du bénévolat et du volontariat. En ce sens, il interroge les catégories traditionnelles du « travail ».

Cet ouvrage démontre ainsi que la catégorie des "travailleurs associatifs" constitue désormais une fraction du salariat que l’on ne peut plus ignorer. Parce qu’il incarne une forme particulière de service de l’intérêt général, l’emploi associatif représente une alternative de plus en plus sérieuse à la raréfaction des postes de titulaires dans la fonction publique. Ceci vaut en particulier pour les jeunes sortants de formation initiale qui, en d’autres temps, n’auraient éprouvé aucune difficulté pour devenir fonctionnaire. L’explosion du travail associatif ne peut donc être comprise qu’à la condition d’être replacée dans le cadre des recompositions du service public et, plus généralement, de l’ordre économique

Across the globe, states have long aimed to control the movement of people, identify their citizens, and restrict noncitizens' rights through official identification documents. Although states are now less likely to grant permanent legal status, they are increasingly issuing new temporary and provisional legal statuses to migrants. Meanwhile, the need for migrants to apply for frequent renewals subjects them to more intensive state surveillance. The contributors to Paper Trails examine how these new developments change migrants' relationship to state, local, and foreign bureaucracies. The contributors analyze, among other toics, immigration policies in the United Kingdom, the issuing of driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and community know-your-rights campaigns. By demonstrating how migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems through the issuance of identification documents, the contributors open up new ways to understand how states exert their power and how migrants must navigate new systems of governance.

Contributors. Bridget Anderson, Deborah A. Boehm, Susan Bibler Coutin, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Sarah B. Horton, Josiah Heyman, Cecilia Menjívar, Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Doris Marie Provine, Nandita Sharma, Monica Varsanyi

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  The anthropology of bureaucracy should address the role of organized power in organizing complex and unequal societies.  This article reviews the development of bureaucracy studies, focusing on the thinking done by bureaucrats in their efforts to control the actions of others.  Then the central concept of thought-work is placed within a series of queries about levels and relationships of power, with particular attention to the encompassing classifications and assumptions embodied in organizational worldviews.  The worldview of officers of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, examined as a case study, are found to give cohesion to a contradictory policy that balances publicly visible arrests and invisible but effective perpetuation of undocumented labor migration.  Human rights abuses and avoidance of abuses are both explainable as outcomes of these thought-work routines.  A stronger theoretical approach to organized power enhances applied anthropology's ability to address the behavior of state and private bureaucracies with respect to the rights and interests of nonbureaucrats.

States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants. Adopting mainly an ethnographic approach as a basis for theorizing, the authors deal with topics including: bureaucratic cultures and practical norms, operational routines in offices, career patterns and modes of appointment; how bureaucrats themselves perceive and deliver goods and services and interact with service users; the accumulation of public administration reforms and how the different bureaucratic corps react to the ‘good governance’ discourse and new public management policies; the consequences of these reforms for the daily working of state bureaucracies and for the civil servants’ identities and modes of accountability; and the space that exists for bottom-up micro-reforms that build on local innovations or informal arrangements.

This paper examines the ways in which the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) type evaluation measures impact upon the administrative culture of street-level bureaucrats and professionals working within Irish social policy. Those working at the frontline or street-level of the public policy process are of vital interest to research because the decisions these actors make have significant bearing upon citizens' daily lives and hence they can be regarded as the gatekeepers of democracy.
Administrative culture can be simply described as 'the way things get done around here' (Deal and Kennedy, 1982). Culture is dynamic and can be altered or influenced by new ideas or forces.  NPM ideas advocate altering the culture of public sector organisations to a more business-like one in order to encourage increased efficiency, effectiveness and economy.
The literature indicates that an increased emphasis on performance measurement and evaluation systems has been an integral part of NPM (Alcock, 2003; Taylor and Kelly, 2006), whether this is at organisation, programme or individual level. Goals are defined, targets are set and outputs are measured and quantified. Evaluation of this sort may not always be meaningful in relation to social policy areas as goals are often ambiguous, targets can be difficult to set and results are not always clear. NPM type evaluation mechanisms have been introduced in order to reduce red tape and make bureaucrats and professionals more accountable. Evaluation measures are a clearly identifiable visible manifestation of administrative culture.
The Competing Values Framework (CVF) was first developed by Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983). The CVF acknowledges that administrative cultures may co-exist and or compete with each other within an organisation. It is a useful model for assessing administrative culture as is has been 'applied and validated in both public and private organisations and in cross-cultural studies involving multiple countries (Kaarst-Brown et al, 2004: 41). This paper is based on the analysis of data obtained from eighty-three semi-structured interviews with street-level bureaucrats and professionals employed in the education, health, housing, personal social services and social welfare sectors in Ireland. These interviews were conducted between May to October 2011 as part of a wider PhD project. Research on street-level bureaucrats which combines the literature on NPM and administrative culture is noticeably absent in the Irish context, therefore, this study fills a void in the existing literature. 
Despite the diverse contexts of all five policy areas under investigation, a considerable number of participants underline how cumbersome processes and procedures have become and the extent to which levels of control have tightened within their respective sectors. This research reveals first hand an increasingly bureaucratised administrative culture within Irish social policy, obsessed with rules and procedures and fuelled by a fear of litigation. Accountability has not been enhanced by NPM, nor does there appear to be any alignment between evaluation systems, if in place, and individual performance. The analysis demonstrates that despite participants expressing a preference for market culture evaluation and accountability mechanisms, they are largely absent in Irish social policy.

(ITA) Questo lavoro è il risultato del mio studio per il master professionale di II livello in Management e Politiche delle Pubbliche Amministrazioni presso la LUISS Guido Carli di Roma (2021). Il lavoro mira a comprendere quale sia il ruolo della discrezionalità burocratica nella fase attuativa di una politica pubblica. Il lavoro è strutturato in tre capitoli. Nel primo viene analizzato il concetto di "politica pubblica", concentrandosi sulle diverse fasi del ciclo politico. Il secondo capitolo riguarda la burocrazia. Attraverso lo studio dei principali studiosi e teorici, viene analizzato cos'è la burocrazia e il suo ruolo in fase di attuazione. L'ultimo capitolo si concentra sul nucleo del lavoro: vengono analizzati i diversi elementi delle discrezionalità burocratiche e in che modo influenzano l'attuazione.
Questo lavoro è diventata una pubblicazione indipendente acquistabile su Amazon al link https://www.amazon.it/regno-della-burocrazia-discrezionalit%C3%A0-nellimplementazione/dp/B0974FM7BJ.
(ENG) This work is the result of my study for my II level professional master in Management e Politiche delle Pubbliche Amministrazioni at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome (2021). The work aims to understand which is the role of bureaucratic discretion during the implementation stage of a public policy. The work is structured in three chapters. The first will be analyzed the concept of "public policy", focusing on the different stage of the policy cycle. The second chapter is about bureaucracy. Through the study of main scholars, we'll analyze what the bureaucracy is and it's role during the implementation stage. The last chapter focus on the core of the work: the different elements of bureaucratic discretions will be analyzed and in which way they influence the implementation.

Political theory is rediscovering the colossus of public administration—the vast public service and regulatory bureaucracies and their countless employees and extensions that conduct the daily business of government. This review explains how something so visible could ever have fallen from view, and surveys four burgeoning areas of research. These pertain to the legitimacy of public administration, to the articulation of standards of good government distinct from good public policy, to the analysis of how the moral agency of bureaucrats is implicated and undermined by the everyday operation of bureaucratic agencies, and to how we should conceptualize the state when we apprehend it through the seemingly banal routines of administration. What emerges from this body of work is a picture of the executive bureaucracy as an object of normative, critical, and conceptual inquiry on a par with the other two branches of government, the legislature and the judiciary.

This paper examines the local construction of law on the street regarding immigrants. Local agencies play a key role in immigration enforcement and in providing services to immigrants. As such, they are increasingly the ‘face of the state’ to immigrants, a face which varies across localities and regions and ranges from friendly to hostile. Some agencies have a full array of policies and procedures for providing services to immigrants, including policies requiring equal service without regard to immigration status, informational materials in foreign languages and training in providing neutral professional service, while others have few or none of these things.
Much of the research has focused on law enforcement actions towards immigrants, but many other public agencies frequently interact with these groups and shape official policies and immigrant perceptions of the state. This paper focuses on public libraries a service organization that receives scant public or academic attention. The purpose of this paper is two-fold; first, it develops a framework for measuring the degree of ‘welcomeness’ of public agencies. Second, it examines how widely local agencies are welcoming (or unwelcoming) to immigrants and what are the conditions that shape the degree of welcomeness. To address these questions, this paper uses results from nationwide surveys of local public library systems in counties with a minimum population of 30,000 and a foreign-born population of least 5%. The research is framed by three competing theoretical approaches: minority group threat, neo-institutionalism and economic regimes. Libraries face conflicting political pressures that are often hostile to immigrants and professional norms favoring equal service to all in the community. The degree of welcomeness depends on the balance between these opposing forces. This study improves understanding of how administrative policies and practices evolve in the context of political and institutional pressures. Preliminary results find a remarkable degree of deliberate welcomeness toward immigrants even in some politically conservative states.

What explains changes in public policies outcomes? This issue is the core business of the comparative politics and has been given several answers. Obviously, numerous theories have proposed to explain the very shape of policies’ results stressing institutions or actors, convergence process or differentiation. Notwithstanding the variety of paradigms and theoretical prisms, it appears that the classical public policies’ theory shadows a very central process in its analyse. The implementation is indeed rarely questioned as a major concern. However, this phase of the policy-making has a huge impact onto political decisions’ concrete results. And was forgotten in political process academic approach. It was without counting on Michael Lipsky’s lighting on these dimensions of the state intervention on citizens’ lives. This theory, namely the Street-Level Bureaucracy theory, requires focus on the implementing process, i.e. state representatives’ activities at a policies’ users level. And, as a consequence, it sets aside centralized state policy-making to really draw attention at the Street-Level Bureaucrats’ practices considered as a major phase in the shaping of public policies. It implies additionally a removal from a long theoretical tradition of thinking the state’s action which is really significant of the classical academic analysis. This long tradition draws its sources from both Hegelian definition of the modern state and Weberian conceptualization of bureaucratic ethics. It thus consists in a real reversal from classical way to see the state and its action, which cannot anymore  be seen as this abstract and blind intervenor it used to be seen, argued Lipsky and his fellows. Public policies toward citizen are not only rules and operations thought in democratic fora and applied formally and indiscriminately, but also face-to-face unformal services performed by human beings – and not by this ‘absolutely rational’ hypothetical body which is the Hegelian state. This Lipskyan statement forms a sociologization of the state intervention which has been salutary for the very understanding of the policy-making.

This article reimagines poverty governance as a labor process. Extending theories of bureaucratic fields and street-level bureaucracies, the proposed model suggests that the state manages the poor through fragmented activities embedded in horizontal and vertical relations of production. I use an ethnography of 911 ambulance operations in a single California county to advance this perspective. From plugging gunshot wounds to moving sidewalk slumberers, ambulance crews interact with a mostly impoverished clientele base by transforming spaces in bodies and bodies in spaces. This two-sided governance puts the ambulance in recurrent contact with the hospital emergency department and the police squad car. Across these institutions, ambulance crews struggle with their nurse and police counterparts over the horizontal shuffling of burdensome work, shaping the life chances of their subjects in the process. At the same time, bureaucratic and capitalistic forces from above activate a lean ambulance fleet that is minimally wasteful and highly flexible. This verticality structures clientele processing through the ambulance and fuels tensions across the frontlines of governance. In an effort to advance theory and fill an empirical gap, this article proposes a new model for understanding the management of marginality and highlights an overlooked case of poverty regulation.

The absurdity of bureaucracy is a contemporary implementation study that unveil how organisational complexity and inefficacy is fed and sustained by employees well-meant attempts and almost primal instinct to compensate for malfunctioning bureaucratic systems by repairing them, short-cutting them, or surpassing them.

Although judges were included in the street-level-bureaucracy (SLB) group by Lipsky (1980), socio-legal scholars have barely used this theoretical framework to study them. This article aims to specify their position with respect to SLB, in order to bridge the gap between public administration and socio-legal research. Specifically, using a cross-national ethnography of judicial institutions, it compares family trial judges’ practice on the ground in France and Canada. General conditions separate them from the core SLB group: encounters with clients are less direct; discretion is more legitimate. However, French judges are far closer to the SLB group than their Canadian counterparts regarding public encounters and case processing. As such, the accuracy of the SLB framework depends on professional and cultural patterns that combine differently in these two national contexts.

In this article, we draw on Michael Lipsky's work on streetlevel bureaucrats and discretion to analyse a real case setting comprising an interview study of 30 Swedish doctors regarding their experiences of changes in clinical work following patients being given access to medical records information online. We introduce the notion of invisibility work to capture how doctors exercise discretion to preserve the invisibility of their work, in contrast to the well-established notion of invisible work, which denotes work made invisible by parties other than those performing it. We discuss three main forms of invisibility work in relation to records: omitting information, cryptic writing and parallel note writing. We argue that invisibility work is a way for doctors to resolve professional tensions arising from the political decision to provide patients with online access to record information. Although invisibility work is understood by doctors as a solution to governmentinitiated visibility, we highlight how it can create difficulties for doctors concerning accountability towards patients, peers and authorities.

The effects of performance management—on organizational outcomes and, to a lesser extent, organizational behavior—have been widely studied. However, we know little about how organizations dominated by street-level bureaucrats respond to performance management reform. Focusing on one large urban school district that adopted performance management reforms in 2007, this article analyzes qualitative and quantitative data to understand how organizational climate shapes street-level bureaucrats' performance management values and performance management behavior. Using a validated scale of organizational climate, it finds that a human relations climate is positively associated with the espousal performance management values and performance management behaviors. Individual dimensions of human relations climate, moreover, exhibit different effects. A climate that prioritizes employee welfare is positively associated with performance management reform, while one that facilitates employee involvement and dissent is negatively associated with performance management reform. Moreover, certain elements of climate , such as trust among colleagues and supervisory support, affect certain performance behaviors more than others.

Le sfide poste dalle recenti trasformazioni sociali, economiche, culturali e politiche ai sistemi di welfare europei sono profonde e significative. Gli ultimi decenni, ma anche gli anni a venire, vedono una stagione di riforme, ripensamenti e innovazioni che stimolano importanti riflessioni a livello politico, culturale e operativo del welfare. Il volume si concentra sugli effetti di questi cambiamenti sulla fase di implementazione delle politiche, in particolare sul punto d’incontro tra il sistema di welfare e i cittadini. Attori cruciali di questo processo sono gli assistenti sociali e gli altri operatori che lavorano alle “frontiere”  dei servizi, il cosiddetto street-level. Attraverso una comparazione tra due casi studio svolti nei servizi sociali di Bologna e Copenaghen, si evidenzia come il ruolo di queste figure stia cambiando per effetto dei mutamenti in atto e come esse prendano parte e contribuiscano alla riproduzione e al riadattamento del welfare.

This chapter sheds light on the contemporary regime of bureaucracies through a study of unemployment policies in France. I wonder how management accountants rationalize and frame counsellors’ work to solve the so-called effectiveness problem of the state in reducing mass unemployment.
This inquiry derives from ethnographic field works addressing the contemporary transformations of the state. According to such a literature, New Public Management actualizes the long-lasting dynamics of rationalization in public bureaucracies – revealed by M. Weber. Public organizations embraced an evidence-based steering and an objective measurement of their performances. The idea that New Public Management consists in a top-down imposition of new managerial tools downplays the political underpinning of management: when you optimize a ratio, you first have to state what you consider as a benefit or as a cost. Therefore, management tools are social procedures conveying political outlooks. This chapter will contribute to contemporary studies upon rationalisation in welfare state organizations by examining the relations between three groups of employees in the French Jobcentres: job counsellors, managers and management accountants. I will first analyse how management accountants need qualitative information to do their official task: an objective analysis of figures and curves. I’ll then point out to what extent management accounting can be seen as a political practice. I’ll finally expose how job counsellors react to this frame in order to shield their work from a complete external framing.
This chapter will assert that each occupational group uses figures in its own way to boost its legitimacy – i.e. its ability to coin administrative problems. Measurement of work performance in an administration therefore opens a controversy where what is at stake is what work is worth.

ABSTRACT: Do place and race matter in mortgage loan applications? This article presents evidence from mortgage markets in the Dutch cities of Arnhem, The Hague, and Rotterdam, suggesting that place, and to a lesser extent also race, do matter. In general, race and place are not factors of direct exclusion, but (1) zip codes are included in credit scoring systems, and (2) both place and race are significant factors in the assessments by loan officers because applicants who do not meet all formal criteria are more often accepted (“overrides”) for indigenous Dutch and low-risk neighborhoods than for ethnic minorities and high-risk neighborhoods. In addition, a “national mortgage guarantee” is compulsory for loan applications in high-risk neighborhoods and thereby used as a substitute for redlining, comparable to the compulsoriness of private mortgage insurance in the United States. Some lenders also engage in direct redlining by rejecting low-risk “national mortgage guarantee” loans in high-risk neighborhoods, a practice potentially explained by transaction cost economizing. Since the high-risk neighborhoods in all three cities accommodate relatively large shares of ethnic minority groups, they are hit twice: through place-based and through race-based exclusion. In other words, place-based disparate treatment results in race-based disparate impact. The neighborhood does matter; place-based exclusion in the mortgage market has a neighborhood effect.

* This research was selected for the special issue of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Working Group 8.6 2007 annual conference (see the entry for this conference). This publication is part of the special issue.

Given the importance of contextual influences on the diffusion of innovations, the theories and methodologies that take context into account are increasingly relevant to research and practice. One such approach, the systems of innovation approach, considers context to be a cascading set of effects arising from various participants and innovations surrounding the production and diffusion of a focal innovation. Based on this approach, we focus on a public program involved in the diffusion of e-business systems to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). E-business systems are complex innovations, and the contextual influences are particularly important here, because SMEs often lack the knowledge and resources to strategically adopt, modify, and use these innovations. Using the systems of innovation approach, we examined the contexts around public program interventions with an SME in order to explain their form and influence on e-business adoption processes. The empirical findings suggest that many public programs fail to effectively deliver interventions because program contexts restrict program personnel's ability to completely assess and respond to the range of adopter needs. While some aspects of the program contexts can be altered by the program directors, others are further removed and are currently beyond our collective control at this point-in-time. The implications for diffusion research and practice are discussed.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of the conflicts and tensions in the role of NHS complaints managers. The thesis sets out to explore the contradictions inherent in the role of complaints managers and the ways complaints managers deal with these contradictions. The interdisciplinary theoretical underpinning of the research is informed by conceptualizations of the complaints manager in the specific socio-legal sense of 'complaints handler'/third-party dispute handler;' a broader public administration framework, of 'administrator'/bureaucrat, and finally a wide-ranging sociological/social psychological framework, as 'social actor'.

This qualitative study examines the role of clients in petty corruption by analyzing actual corrupt exchanges between ordinary citizens and low level public and private employees in post-communist Hungary. Using a grounded theory approach, interviews reveal how clients from different social strata deal with low-level agents in corrupt situations. Findings suggest two contrasting forms of low-level corruption: transactions where the client and the agent do not have a prior relationship and where external factors dominate the relationship; and cases with stronger social ties between the actors, where the client has more freedom to structure the transaction. However, a client's social background frequently determines the form of corrupt transaction and the form of resources illegally exchanged in the deal.

Description
‘Why do pubic sector professionals resist change? Tummers offers a compelling account of the alienation of professionals following new public management reforms. This timely and methodologically innovative book shows public managers how to implement organisational change, and provides scholars with a set of new measurement scales. Policy Alienation and the Power of Professionals is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how professional organisations operate, and why professionals resist some changes, while embracing others.’
– Steven Van de Walle, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Contents
Contents: Preface 1. Introduction to Policy Alienation and the Power of Professionals 2. Historical Background of Alienation 3. Public Policies and Alienation 4. Measurement Instrument of Policy Alienation 5. Antecedents of Policy Alienation 6. Policy Alienation and Resistance to Change 7. Policy Alienation, Organizational Context, Personality and Resistance to Change 8. Discussion and Conclusions References Index

Further information
‘Tummers’ book resurfaces alienation as an established and useful concept, but also as a forgotten and ignored reality. Shifts in policies affect the meaning of these policies, and reforms affect power balances. The analyses in this book are crucial to help understand why policies fail and why there is resistance to change. Tummers coins “policy alienation” as an increasingly indispensable concept. Reforms would have been different if Tummers’ analysis on powerlessness and meaninglessness was more taken into account.’
– Geert Bouckaert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and former President of the European Group for Public Administration

‘Lars Tummers has written a must-read book! While systemic changes ushered in by market-oriented reforms have received attention, little is known about the plight of the individual in modern bureaucracies. Tummers presents a masterful and authoritative account of policy alienation that public service professionals experience. The breadth and depth of Tummers’s scholarship is impressive! This book has something of value for everyone from the casual reader to public management scholar.’
– Sanjay K. Pandey, The State University of New Jersey, US

‘Why do pubic sector professionals resist change? Tummers offers a compelling account of the alienation of professionals following new public management reforms. This timely and methodologically innovative book shows public managers how to implement organisational change, and provides scholars with a set of new measurement scales. Policy Alienation and the Power of Professionals is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how professional organisations operate, and why professionals resist some changes, while embracing others.’
– Steven Van de Walle, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Professionals often have problems with governmental policies they have to implement. This ranges from Israeli teachers striking against school reforms, via British civil servants quitting their jobs as they have problems with New Public Management reforms focused on cost cutting, to US healthcare professionals feeling overwhelmed by a constant flow of policy changes, resulting in tensions, conflicts, and burn-outs.

This eloquent book by Lars Tummers develops a framework to understand these important issues with policy implementation, using the innovative concept of ‘policy alienation’. Policies in healthcare, social security, and education are analyzed. The conclusions challenge the common assertions regarding the reasons why professionals resist policies. For instance, the impact of professional influence, often viewed as an end in itself, is nuanced. Lars Tummers reveals that it is far more important for professionals that a policy is meaningful for society and for their clients, than they have an influence in its shaping.

Policy Alienation and the Power of Professionals is essential for public administration scholars, policymakers, change managers and professionals. To improve its academic and practical significance, a ‘policy alienation’ questionnaire is developed to measure the degree of policy alienation felt by implementers. This instrument can be used to first understand and then improve policy performance in various settings.

Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegibility in the public's encounter with the state. Much of this work has taken the perspective of the public, however, and less has been said about how functionaries of the state perceive their interactions with the public. This perspectival bias needs to be overcome through ethnographies of the state and of state bureaucracies in everyday practice. This article examines the Immigration Services Branch of the South African Department of Home Affairs, a state bureaucracy widely deemed “illegible” by South Africans and non-South Africans alike. It documents some of the factors that inform the actions of street-level bureaucrats, illustrating how bureaucrats develop systems of meaning to help them mitigate the challenges posed by an unpredictable populace and management hierarchy. These systems serve to stabilize these two unstable entities, but they also enable officials to act in ways that might run counter to official discourse while simultaneously upholding its legitimacy. Their stabilization efforts therefore incite a destabilization of the state, leading it to appear as “magical” or “illegible” to the public.

Ethnographic research on the clinical encounter has focused almost exclusively on what happens in exam roomsdparticularly patient-provider interactionsdleaving much to be understood about other actors within the clinic. As part of a larger ethnographic study examining the impact of colonialism, trans-national migration, discrimination, and gender relations on Chuukese migrant women's reproductive and sexual health outcomes in Guam, I conducted eight months of participant observation in three publicly funded health clinics, 24 interviews with health care workers, and 15 life-history interviews with Chuukese women between September 2012 and February 2014. Findings demonstrated differential treatment of Chuukese patients by front-line workers (FLWs), who engaged in " boundary work " with these patients. Further, care varied by clinic space and the actors in that space. This differential treatment and variation in care impacted Chuukese women's access to and experiences with health care in Guam. Utilizing the concept of " deservingness, " this analysis unpacks how FLWs, like Lipsky's " street-level bureaucrats, " are influenced by bureaucratic, biomedical, and community hierarchies, all contributing to differential patient treatment. This study concludes by calling for more integrated analyses of clinical environments which utilize Lipsky's concept to include community narratives of " deservingness " and incorporate the influence of clinic and community stratification.

This Chapter demonstrates how front-line workers balance between competing norms as they make complex discretionary decisions about access to social assistance benefits. Drawing on qualitative socio-legal research into the Ontario Works program, it shows that, at the "street level," caseworkers accommodate seemingly incompatible notions of justice. This finding offers new insights into how the administrative justice models first proposed by Jerry Mashaw interrelate. Rather than one justice model necessarily dominating over others, I argue that administrative justice models are accommodated between when we examine the practices of front-line workers.

Este artigo trata dos desafios para se promover uma saúde emancipatória em um Centro de Atenção Psicossocial (CAPS) do Distrito Federal, situado numa região de periferia. Foram feitas cinco entrevistas semiestruturadas com profissionais de um CAPS de uma unidade do DF e uma entrevista com uma gestora pública e ativista dos direitos humanos do DF. Os resultados sugerem, a partir da percepção dos entrevistados, que o CAPS em questão luta para aplicar os princípios da reforma psiquiátrica em seu cotidiano, sofre com problemas financeiros e dificuldade na coordenação interburocrática e se vale muito do ativismo político de seus/suas profissionais, usuárias/os e entidades da sociedade civil.

Zimbabwean displacement has significant implications for the evolution of state forms in Southern Africa. In South Africa, Zimbabwean migrants' claims to residence confront exclusionary immigration laws. The South African government officials who are responsible for enforcing these laws have helped migrants to circumvent protocols and procedures while simultaneously overstepping the bounds of their authority to prevent migrants from entering the nation's borders and residing within. Drawing upon a range of ethnographic and survey data, this study explores these two tendencies in government efforts to tackle smuggling across the Zimbabwean border, limit access to immigration permits and police undocumented residence in the city of Johannesburg. The article suggests that these seemingly contradictory developments – corrupt circumvention and overzealous enforcement – are both products of a single dynamic: the state's monopolisation of legitimate movement. The ‘state’ is not being captured but is helping to generate parallel and informal orders alongside conventional immigration law.

This special issue examines welfare programs as sites where Europe’s increasingly diverse societies are being shaped and negotiated. It zooms in on parenting as a central governmental domain where concerns about, and hopes for, the future of society intersect with notions of citizenship, family care, welfare, and deservingness of public resources. In this introduction to the special issue, we draw out three paradoxical orders that shape the encounters between migrant parents and welfare actors we have studied. One is concerned with the tension between the universal and difference, the other with the re-articulation of the public and the private, and a third with irreconcilable social and institutional demands. This helps us understand how Europe’s diverse societies are being shaped on the ground, beyond the often strongly racialized, nationalist rhetoric that has come to dominate public debates.

This paper deals with the transformation of “institutional culture” in bureaucratic agencies. This is explored in the context of post-Apartheid South African public sector reform, and more particularly that of migration management within the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The paper assesses the effects on staff’s perceptions and practices of a politically driven attempt at inculcating a new sense of “service delivery”. Structural factors are not found to have been prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in implementing the reform. It is rather the failure of the political leadership to address the lack of a shared sense of mission and the range of unintended, counter-productive effects, elicited by the reform itself which explain the overall incapacity to amend perceptions and behaviours among civil servants.

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the role of relational asymmetries in influencing the coping strategies adopted by frontline workers to deal with the policy–client role conflict.Design/methodology/approachA comparative analysis of three different services highlights the role of the service relationships characteristics in explaining similarities and differences in the strategies adopted by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). The research is based on the secondary analysis of three case studies conducted in Italy: the reception system for homeless people, the job brokerage service in the public employment service and the dispute settlement procedure in the labour inspectorate.FindingsThe results underline the interaction between the characteristics of the service relationship and the different coping strategies adopted to deal with the policy–client conflict.Originality/valueThe contribution of this study is threefold. Firstly, the authors focus on the influence of the characteris...

Zimbabwean displacement has significant implications for the evolution of state forms in Southern Africa. In South Africa, Zimbabwean migrants' claims to residence confront exclusionary immigration laws. The South African government officials who are responsible for enforcing these laws have helped migrants to circumvent protocols and procedures while simultaneously overstepping the bounds of their authority to prevent migrants from entering the nation's borders and residing within. Drawing upon a range of ethnographic and ...

Although often neglected, the availability of employment opportunities is central to the effectiveness of active labour market policies. Employers play a crucial role in this policy field as they are both clients and co-producers of public employment services (PES). This study focuses on that relationship and reports qualitative research conducted in Tuscany (central Italy) from a street-level perspective. The findings show how public job-brokers manage this asymmetrical relationship and develop specific strategies to obtain employers’ cooperation and accomplish the PES mandate. The strategies identified here involve language adaptation, curricula “creaming”, and control of the bureaucratic procedure. These are shaped through a variable mix of four components that will be defined as relational, perceptive, technical, and tactical. This study contributes to the debate on activation policies, analysing in detail how PES frontline workers interact with employers, dealing with market logic in the public encounter.

This paper aims to bring together discussions about policy implementation and reproduction of social inequalities. Our main goal is to identify and take inventory of the different mechanisms through which the day-to-day operations of government and the encounters between service workers and users may engender risks of inequality reproduction. Implementation processes take place in the hidden recesses of routine or in the obscure actions and inactions of public agents. Beyond contributing to the execution of the desired effects of social policies, we argue that policy implementation processes also produce other non-intended effects on service users and targeted populations. These effects may contribute to the persistence of social inequalities by producing the accumulation of material and symbolic disadvantages on social groups who traditionally experience forms of vulnerability. The empirical analysis draws from the systematic comparison of 23 concrete cases of social policy implementation in Brazil and Mexico. By looking across the cases, we identified an array of mechanisms linking implementation dynamics to the material and symbolic effects reinforcing already existing inequalities. Recognizing these mechanisms is an important step towards making social policies and services more effective in the pursuit of sustainable development goals.