There is large room for research on SLBT despite the major advances since 1980 reported above. So far, there are only a few quantitative studies of street-level discretion (e.g., May and Winter 2009; Nielsen 2015; Riccucci et al. 2004). Most policy implementation studies are qualitative in nature (Hupe 2014, 170; Meier et al. 2004, 31; Tummers et al. 2012, 718; Tummers et al. 2015, 1107). In addition, much focus of research on SLBT has been on the significance of individual interests and policy preferences but not on attributes and abilities (Nielsen 2015, 1,024). Unsurprisingly, many important questions about street-level discretion have remained unanswered. I select five issues for discussion below.
Michael Lipsky Street Level Bureaucracy Pdf Download
Empirical studies have so far examined how the exercise of discretion is related to the signals by political superiors (Keiser and Soss 1998), administrative emphasis of policy objectives (Ewalt and Jennings 2004; Riccucci et al. 2004), and managerial supervision (Brehm and Gates 1997; Riccucci 2005b). These studies have produced mixed results. Some scholars have shown the influence of managers on street-level discretion in the West (Henderson and Pandey 2013, 16; May and Winter 2009, 467; also Riccucci 2005b). However, others have shown different findings on management influence on the exercise of discretion by frontline workers (Brehm and Gates 1997, 128; Evans 2013, 739; Keiser 2010, 253; Oberfield 2010, 739; Riccucci 2005b, 115; Riccucci et al. 2004, 439).
Specifically, some scholars have claimed that age is related to the exercise of discretion (Nielsen 2015, 1019; Stensöta 2012, 563; Tummers et al. 2012, 725). However, Oberfield (2010, 740) does not think that age would affect how frontline workers make discretionary judgements. There are no good accounts about why age matters or does not matter with regard to street-level discretion. It is possible that young people are less likely to be managers or supervisors and tend to be less experienced in policy implementation. As a result, they are less likely than others to make discretional judgements. But it is also possible that they are more likely to exercise discretion because they are less familiar with regulations and procedures or because they are young and less mature. Either way, age is a potential predictor of street-level discretion and should be controlled in data analysis.
Third, does education matter with regard to street-level discretion? Some scholars think so (Hupe and Buffat 2014, 552; Riccucci 2005a, 101; Stensöta 2012, 563). Better educated workers are less likely to be rigid rule followers since they are more likely to think independently and be analytic and critical than poorly educated workers. However, Oberfield (2010, 740; also Riccucci et al. 2004, 444) does not think that education affects how frontline workers make discretionary judgements. Either way, it is a potential predictor of street-level discretion and should be controlled in data analysis.
Oberfield addresses this question differently. He shows (2010, 739) that most street-level bureaucrats in the US began their careers aspiring to be objective rule followers. After 2 years, about 40 % of the police officers saw themselves as discretion users, about 20 % saw themselves as neutral, and only 40 % saw themselves as rule followers. Similarly, after 2 years, about one-third of the social workers saw themselves as discretion users, one-third saw themselves as neutral, and almost 40 % saw themselves as rule followers.
This chapter aims to initiate a structured conversation between political theory and the literature on street-level bureaucracy. It presents four questions that empirical findings on street-level bureaucracy raise for democratic theory, sketches preliminary answers to them and charts promising lines for future inquiry. The questions examined are: the justification of street-level discretion, the values that should guide its use, the challenge of retaining a balanced moral disposition in the thick of everyday work and the problem of securing street-level accountability.
Creditor-debtor relationships are understood as either universal moral relationship (Graeber, 2011), or as particular and contextually embedded in specific legal environments and practices (Riles, 2011; Gregory, 2012). We look at the organisational and institutional context of debt by applying the street-level bureaucracy framework to the legal-financial field (Ortiz, 2021), and specifically examining the practices and their contestations of contracted-out bailiffs as part of the state bureaucracy in Hungary. Bailiffs are are semi-autonomous state-appointed legal professionals acting as street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), and actually administer and enforce debt payments through coercive deduction from debtors' savings account, wage garnishments and/or the auctioning of movables or immovables. The formal operation of bailiffs is organised and prescribed by the procedural 1994 Laws of Debt Enforcement, yet their actual operations are based on informal practices and their own morals and logic common to the interpretive agency of SLBs (Bierschenk and Sardan, 2019). The tension between the formal and the informal has resulted in nationwide scandals and an unequal but contested relationship with debtors. Our research focuses on micro-contestations of poor household debtors in rural Northern Hungary by analysing official documents, interviewing debtors and bailiffs, and accompanying debtors to bailiffs' customer service bureaus, which are the primary sites for such contestations. Debtors encounter bailiffs - or rather their assistants - to contest their debts and such encounters can be treated as "meetings" (Brown et al, 2017), which allow debtors to negotiate and question the debts, the amounts, and the legality and fairness of debt enforcement.
The workings of street-level bureaucracies have typically been studied empirically from an insider perspective, i.e. through the subjectivities of bureaucrats, with an emphasis on constrained agency, e.g. discretion. An ethnographic approach that incorporates the experiences and narratives of both claiming citizens and bureaucrats around streamlined claims-making encounters is rare. This paper hones in on claimant-bureaucrat encounters in two urban contexts in Romania concerning family entitlements and old-age pension in order to explore how claimants and bureaucrats accomplish their respective goals: the application for an entitlement akin to legitimately earned property in the case of claimants and the verification and collection of application files in the case of street-level bureaucrats. The paper shows that instead of being routine, habitual(ised) interactions akin to those one experiences daily in the public domain, claimant-bureaucrat encounters often unfold as "cultural disjunctures", requiring the 'deployment' of various tools to ensure the successfully finalisation of the encounter. On both sides of the "window", claimants and bureaucrats manage their demeanour, negotiate knowledge and ignorance of the rules and bureaucratic procedures to arrive at a satisfactory outcome, albeit each one in different ways and to a different extent. The intensity of what can be demanding (emotional) labour for both parties is often criticised by both citizens and civil servants as unpalatable manifestations of "our" state, "our" society, "our" public bodies, revealing that claimant-bureaucrat encounters are and permit a study of the welfare state and (colliding) social worlds in contemporary society.
The paper looks at the work of social workers in the Center for social work in a Serbian town. An anthropological approach to political changes and state politics requires researching the mutually constituting relationship between social policy and its somewhat self-generating practices. Anthropologically focusing on both practices and representations of the state ensures understanding of the mechanisms enabling legitimization of the "state idea" (Abrams 1988) and helping the reproduction of current (or emerging) power relations. This should not mean a simple acceptance of the idea that the state is an abstraction with its concrete manifestations. Rather, it implies an attempt to create an analytical model that can articulate the concrete and abstract character of the state. The aim is to understand the effects of this construction and the ways in which state emerges as a specific institutional form. Twofold embeddedness -- in both state administration and local community -- characterizes social workers. This creates a paradox of street level administration that may be resolved only if social workers have room for manoeuvring, which, peculiarly, also requires abiding by the rules. Recent changes in the structure and regulations of welfare provisions in Serbia, coupled with the privatization of the public sector, created certain ambiguity that caused social workers' navigating the muddy waters of public administration that perpetuates their living in the constant paradox of street level bureaucracy that seems impossible to resolve.
It shows however that mistrust is not necessarily conceived as a socially disruptive feature but is understood by street level bureaucrats as a basic prerequisite for survival in the Argentinian society. Still the legal counselors propose to rely on formal contracts and to put trust in the Argentinian legal system. This suggestion seems paradoxical since the rule of law is particularly fragile in these informal settlements and the justice system does not provide adequate solutions for problems of legal plurality.
Analyzing the different dimensions of trust and mistrust in such counseling situations this paper discusses the affective and emotional relations of street-level bureaucrats with their clientele and the challenges they face when navigating between informal and formal principles and often contradictory cultures and requirements of (mis)trust that relate to the personal encounter, the local community, and the state. 2ff7e9595c
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