Street-level Discretion Research Articles

Asylum Adjudication and Street-Level Discretion: Negotiating Practice Rules

Studying asylum adjudication in Switzerland, this article investigates how front-line practitioners in street-level organizations (SLOs) effectively exercise collective rulemaking power when they engage in construction of procedural rules, known as “asylum practice” rules. Asylum practice rules aim at standardizing decision-making by defining which profiles can be protected or not, according to each country of origin. These rules potentially influence individual discretion and refugee status determination by shaping which decisions street-level adjudicators perceive as possible according to asylum seekers’ motives, situation and country of origin. The article argues that, in the context of a judicialized asylum policy, the development of asylum practice rules is part of a strategic and adversarial game with the legal defense of refugees and the court reviewing asylum appeals to interpret asylum law and determine its specific applications.

Street level bureaucrats, policy entrepreneurship, and discretion in enforcing bans on motorcycle taxis in Lagos, Nigeria

AbstractRecently, the authorities in Lagos have implemented policies progressively restricting the operation of okadas (motorcycle taxis). We analyze the enforcement of these measures through the lens of street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) and street‐level policy entrepreneurs (SLPEs). Doing so, we introduce two novel features into the literature. First, the extant literature focuses primarily on policies that deliver public services, whereas policies can also control proscribed behavior. We refer to these as service delivery and regulation, respectively. Second, the exercise of discretion by SLBs and SLPEs can result in both “underenforcement” and “overenforcement” of regulatory policies, the latter potentially involving breaking the law. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Lagos between 2021 and 2023, we find strong evidence of both underenforcement and overenforcement of okada bans over time, but with more overenforcement. This offers important insights conceptually for the SLPE literature and empirically to the challenges of policing urban Lagos.

Discretionary Responses in Frontline Encounters: Balancing Standardization with the Ethics of Office

AbstractPolicy reforms of public service encounters often seek to control, delegate, or eliminate discretion at the frontline. In this article, we show that rather than eclipsing discretion, the technologies meant to standardize and optimize decision making in public service delivery introduce rough categorizations and scripts for action that make new types of discretionary responses and workarounds necessary. Here, accounts of street-level discretion as grounded in self-serving coping strategies are inadequate to capture discretion-as-used in the frontline encounter. The article proposes a Weberian ethics of office approach to frontline discretion that contributes to current more appreciative perspectives on street-level discretion. Through a comparative ethnography of first encounters in three Danish public service bureaucracies, we develop a typology of office-based discretionary responses to standardization. We label the three types as adaptive handling, attentive compensation, and affective encouragement. Our study of doctors, midwives, and citizen-service bureaucrats suggests that discretionary possibilities differ in relation to organizational context and level of professional training. However, across cases the discretionary responses are indicative of the frontline practitioners’ casuistic practices of balancing professional virtues, client-orientation, and managerial demands in the quest to deliver fair and responsive services. Accordingly, securing the conditions for the exercise of discretion in frontline encounters is essential to the responsible provision of public services.

The complexities of digitization and street-level discretion: a socio-materiality perspective

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the debate on eGovernment and street-level discretion by using a qualitative case study of digitization at a street-level bureaucracy. This study advances this debate in three ways. First, we argue that the impact of digitization on street-level discretion can be best understood by examining the affordances and constraints that emerge relationally through the interactions between users (social) and technology (material). Second, subordinate-supervisor relations shape how street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion, and the introduction of technology reconfigures these relations. Third, system-level and street-level discretion shape rather than displace each other through a dialectic relationship.

Kafka’s Bureaucracy: Immigration Administrative Burdens in the Trump Era

Abstract What does a government do when it decides to make a public service as burdensome as possible? We consider this question in the context of immigration policy during the Trump administration. The case demonstrates the deliberate and governmentwide use of administrative burdens to make legal processes of immigration confusing, demanding, and stressful. Many of these changes occurred via what we characterize as formal administrative directives, a level of policy implementation that falls between high-level formal executive legal powers, such as executive orders or rules, and street-level discretion, pointing to the importance of processes such as memos and training as an understudied space of using burdens to make policy. The case challenges the standard portrayal of the principal–agent dilemma, given that the political principals engaged in a disruption of public services akin to sabotage, while the bureaucratic agents remained largely quiescent. The outcome was a system of racialized burdens, where changes were targeted at racially marginalized immigrants. The case also highlights the use of fear as a particular type of psychological cost.

Improving public housing policies that target low-income households: The value of adding proximity to discretion

Research on street-level bureaucrats has examined the various ways in which these professionals have implemented public policies in areas such as healthcare, education, and security, often emphasizing the role played by discretion in the implementation process. Despite its importance, the concept of street-level bureaucracy has scarcely been approached by housing studies. This study focuses on the role of street-level workers in the delivery of public housing to the lower-income population. We affirm the value of complementing street-level discretion with the concept of proximity, a premise borrowed from the microfinance literature, to increase the understanding of the interactions and relationships established between street-level workers and policy recipients during the implementation process. Such complementarity may contribute to a more accurate understanding of the housing policy implementation dynamics on the street-level and the possible adjustments to meet local needs. To explore this issue, we used a theoretical lens inspired by Goffman’s frame analysis that points to the importance of relational mechanisms that characterize the interactions between street-level workers and beneficiaries. These lenses were applied to a collective case study of Minha Casa Minha Vida-Entidades, a Brazilian subprogram in which street-level workers linked to social housing movements assume a leading role in the planning and execution of interventions. The results indicate that the combination of proximity and discretion has a positive influence on the implementation of housing policies. Our analysis shows the existence of nonprofit-oriented arrangements that may present different features and nuances at the implementation (micro) level and contribute to the (macro) debate on housing policies.

Coping with Denialism: How Street-Level Bureaucrats Adapted and Responded to COVID-19 in Tanzania.

This article aims to highlight challenges and adaptations made by local health officials in Tanzania in working to contain and manage COVID-19. The study takes an inductive approach, drawing on the reported experiences of 40 officials at different levels of government across four purposefully selected regions in July 2020. Interviewees were asked about the guidance they received to contain COVID-19, the source of that guidance, their challenges and successes in implementing the guidance, and if and how they adapted the guidance to their particular setting. The interviews depict considerable challenges, including a lack of supplies and resources for implementing infection control, surveillance, and mitigation practices and dealing with fear and stigma. At the same time, they also provide evidence of innovation and adaptation among street-level bureaucrats. Respondents overwhelmingly praised the president, whose limited national response is seen as helpful for reducing fear and stigma. Other scholars have highlighted the potential dangers of street-level discretion if local officials "make policy" in ways that contradict their agencies' stated goals. In contrast, our study suggests benefits of autonomy at the street level-particularly in contexts where the central state was relatively weak and/or acting against the public interest.

Supervisory Leadership at the Frontlines: Street-Level Discretion, Supervisor Influence, and Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Attitude Towards Clients

Abstract Steering street-level bureaucrats is utterly complex due to their discretion and professional status which grant them relative autonomy from supervisory directives. Drawing from transformational leadership theory, this article explores the opportunities these work conditions provide for supervisory leadership at the frontlines. Looking at street-level bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients, we analyze how the frontline supervisor affects this core perception that protrudes the human judgments street-level bureaucrats are required to pass in their use of their discretion. Using a survey dataset of 971 street-level bureaucrats and their 203 frontline supervisors, this study shows that frontline supervisors function as an attitudinal role model to street-level bureaucrats. Moreover, their supportive leadership behaviors are crucial to them upholding a positive attitude towards clients. Supportive leadership does not unequivocally strengthen the supervisor’s position as an attitudinal referent, though. These findings challenge pessimistic assessments of the potential for supervisory leadership at the frontlines. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Australian welfare workers and street-level discretion when working with clients from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds

This article explores street-level discretion of Australian welfare workers when working with clients from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. The research is situated within the context of New Public Management (NPM) and neoliberalism in the welfare sector. Findings suggest that workers’ discretion oscillates between extra support for clients, or further scrutiny and sanction. Such contradictory patterns of discretion highlight workers’ capacity to resist neoliberalism while concurrently upholding it. The article argues that cultural understanding, recognition of the limitations in welfare-to-work policies and neoliberalism, and how those factors, together with ethnicity, may influence street-level discretion are necessary for welfare workers to support CALD clients effectively.

An approach to the development of comparative cross-national studies of street-level bureaucracy

AbstractPropositions about street-level bureaucracy run the risk of violating the scientific precept that a theoretical generalisation should be tested by replication in a variety of contexts. Many examples can be found of writings that simply indicate that street-level discretion is pervasive. This prompts the questions, ‘but how’, and under what conditions ‘may’ that happen? Comparison is needed to answer these questions, particularly cross-national ones. It will be argued that good cross-national comparative work must rest upon precise specification of the contexts to be compared and avoiding comparing tasks that seem similar, but in fact serve different functions in different contexts. To explore this one particular task – pre-school child care – is selected. The discussion of this specific example is examined as a model for similar comparative work.

PRAKTIK DISKRESI DALAM IMPLEMENTASI KEBIJAKAN REHABILITASI HUTAN DI KESATUAN PENGELOLAAN HUTAN LINDUNG RINJANI BARAT

This study analyzed the implementation of discretion in forest and land rehabilitation policy (RHL) on street-level bureaucracy (SLB). The study conducted at Forest Management Unit (KPHL) Rinjani Barat, used Michael Lipsky's conception about street-level bureaucracy and discretion in the forest management. The result shows the history and forest tenure problem become a forest management framework for SLB. Because of that, forest management from top down system has changed to participatory between SLB and communities. The result of RHL policy is sucess story, good forest management and community welfare.

Discretion and the values of fractal man. An anthropologist’s perspective on ‘Street-level bureaucracy’

ABSTRACT Michael Lipsky’s seminal book entitled ‘Street-level Bureaucracy’ has long been a core citation for a social work scholarship concerned with practice. This article takes issue with a key notion in Lipsky’s book, that of ‘discretion’. It argues that Lipsky’s notion of discretion relies on assumptions often associated with the trope of ‘Economic Man’, and that the notion of discretion remains inadequately theorised in the scholarship that routinely cites the book. To re-orient inquiry about street-level discretion, the article proposes that social work scholarship can usefully look to anthropological discussions of complexities pertaining to the notion of ‘value’.

Street‐level discretion, emotional labour and welfare frontline staff at the Australian employment service providers

AbstractDespite the current controversial debates about discretion in public bureaucracies in general, and in welfare agencies in particular, the current literature on street‐level bureaucracy mainly assumes that discretion is a distinctive feature of the daily work of public servants. Nonetheless, a pertinent question has not specifically been asked in this literature, that is, given the context of privatisation and increased welfare conditionality in the welfare sector that are seriously challenging welfare frontline staff's commitment to social justice and human rights‐based practices, what are forms of street‐level discretion likely to contribute to improving the quality of welfare services? In this study, we attempt to address this question by exploring discretion displayed by welfare frontline staff in four Australian employment service providers. We argue that emotional labour, especially when being informed by critical empathy, is an important and effective form of street‐level discretion that welfare frontline workers can perform to better support welfare recipients and minimise the punitive aspects of welfare policy.

Digital discretion: A systematic literature review of ICT and street-level discretion

Digital discretion: A systematic literature review of ICT and street-level discretion

Increasing parental participation at school level: a ‘citizen to serve’ or a ‘customer to steer’?

ABSTRACTCollaboration between schools and parents has become increasingly prominent on the political agenda in Norway. Schools are obliged to promote parent–school cooperation in accordance with parents’ rights as stakeholders in education. This article explores the governing strategies of seven primary or lower-secondary schools that have taken initiatives to improve parent–school collaboration. The main intention is to explore how New Public Management (NPM) measures (such as market values, decentralization, competition, and output control) and New Public Service (NPS) tools (including coalition building and citizens’ involvement) are reproduced at the local level when parent–school collaboration is put on the agenda. The analysis shows that street-level discretion at school level implies considerable uncertainty around the achievement of policy objectives. Different opinions on parents as a target group seem prominent in explaining how frontline workers act and strategize. Two distinct collaboration strategies are identified: serving and steering. The serving strategy is based on a linear partnership by making use of local knowledge in order to reach parents and enable their participation. The steering strategy is characterized by non-linear relationships with parents and certain steering mechanisms by routinizing collaboration activities, modifying goals for parent–school collaboration and rationing school services to parents.

Research on Street-Level Discretion in the West: Past, Present, and the Future

Lipsky’s Street‐Level Bureaucracy (1980) led to a major paradigm shift in the study of public administration and bureaucracy. It identified discretion by frontline workers as a critical issue in the study of street-level bureaucracy. Chinese scholars have since 2000 joined research on street-level bureaucracy. Some reviews of the English literature on street-level bureaucracy have been published in China. This paper discusses some major issues in research on street-level discretion in the West, drawing on Hupe and Buffat (Public Manag Rev 16(4):548–569, 2014); Maynard‐Moody and Portillo (The Oxford handbook of American bureaucracy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 255–277, 2010); Portillo and Rudes (Annu Rev Law Soc Sci 10:321–334, 2014). Compared with the Chinese reviews noted above, this paper is a more substantial and updated summary and assessment of the literature on street-level discretion. It also raises some issues for future research on frontline discretion in China.

Prolegomena to a caring bureaucracy

Bureaucracy has had few admirers, as a quick perusal of 20th-century political and social theory readily indicates. In recent years, several feminist theorists have also joined this vociferous anti-bureaucracy chorus, denouncing bureaucracy’s excessively hierarchical, impersonal, cold and controlling nature. The goal of this article is to review these charges and to show why the term ‘caring bureaucracy’ is not an oxymoron. In the first two sections, the author considers the various reasons why bureaucratic structures are said to be bad both for the people who work in them (especially women) and for those who deal with them. The author proposes to discuss these charges in light of some research on feminist organizations and street-level bureaucracy (Ashcraft, Due Billing, Dubois). The intention is not to offer a paean to street-level discretion or to the claims of ‘the heart’ in public service; it is, rather, to underscore at once the beauty and the danger of discretion. It is also noted that feminist the...

The Space before Action: The Role of Peer Discussion Groups in Frontline Service Provision

Studies of street-level discretion tend to focus on what influences workers’ behaviors and the consequences of their choices for advancing or compromising policy goals, but studies rarely focus on the space before action, that is, the processes through which workers make decisions and, in particular, how they deliberate with one another about practice problems within groups dedicated to improving social service delivery. Drawing from two qualitative studies of peer discussion groups, a study of teams of child welfare workers and a study of interorganizational groups composed of employment service workers, we find that workers in each setting grappled with similar types of problems but differed in their focus on specific clients or routine tasks, how they sought to legitimate their responses, and the extent to which their proposed solutions modified established approaches to practice. Our analysis suggests that features of the accountability contexts associated with the two policy fields help explain observed differences.

Complexities of discretion in social services in the third sector

Policy analysts have devoted considerable time to examining the problem of the policy implementation gap, with one important strand in the literature following Michael Lipsky's work on street-level bureaucracy and discretion. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature concerning shifts in government/third sector organisation contractual arrangements and whether they constitute a significant (post-neoliberal) development in policy implementation. Using a case study of contracted government services in Australia, we revisit the conception of discretion to reflect on the impact of these changes and document their implications for the use of discretion in management and front-line worker practices.

Discretionary Decision-Making in a Changing Context of Activation Policies and Welfare Reforms

AbstractStreet-level bureaucrats are considered to be subject to bureaucratic managerial regimes and threatened by stronger regulation and a reduction in their ability to exercise control over their work. Contrary to the managerial approach, predicting curtailment of professional autonomy, theorists foretell the continuing importance of discretion in the translation of social objectives into actual service delivery. Given such opposite predictions, what is the perceived direction of change and scope for independent decision-making for front-line workers? This paper empirically investigates the contradictory hypotheses predicting continuing or declining opportunities for street-level discretion in a context of activation policies and welfare reforms. The data come from two surveys conducted among practitioners and local managers in the Norwegian employment and welfare services in 2004 and 2011. Despite managerial control and bureaucratic procedures that regulate many decisions, discretion still remains a characteristic of front-line work. Continued discretion is closely related to the implementation of activation goals and the merging of tasks and integrated services following the whole-of-government reform. The findings confirm the role of managers as key players in implementing policies at the local level. Concurrently, the discretionary power of trained social workers is decreasing and challenged by the push for uniform practices and a managerially regulated role.