Street Level Workers As Institutional Entrepreneurs

Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization – whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers’ institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds. The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective.

This volume offers empirically based insights and findings on the question of how human service organizations are reacting to the increasing need for greater impact, effectiveness, and performance. As demand for increased impact outstrips our knowledge of how best to achieve these goals, the book’s contributors discuss the innovative strategies being used to ensure that multiplex goals are being met and the degree to which client and staff concerns are being sacrificed for the organizational bottom line. Taken together, these discussions demonstrate that specific management strategies and collaboration based on trust and consideration of mission may help improve the quality of some services; however, many of the pressures which organizations and managers experience are resulting in lower staff morale, compromised missions, and inefficiencies. This book will be of interest to those researching human service agencies, as well as those with a broader concern for how organizations react to doing more with less. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Human Service Organizations journal.

When the objectives of public policy programmes have been formulated and decided upon, implementation seems just a matter of following instructions. However, it is underway to the realization of those objectives that public policies get their final substance and form. Crucial is what happens in and around the encounter between public officials and individual citizens at the street level of government bureaucracy. This Research Handbook addresses the state of the art while providing a systematic exploration of the theoretical and methodological issues apparent in the study of street-level bureaucracy and how to deal with them.

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

In this book, street-level bureaucracy scholars from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America analyse the conditions that shape frontline work and citizens ́ everyday experience of the state. Institutional factors such as political clientelism, resource scarcity, social inequality, job insecurity, and systemic corruption affect the way street-level bureaucrats enforce rules and implement policies. Inadvertently, they end up implementing inequities in citizens’ access to rights and services — despite efforts to repair organisational deficiencies and broker relations between vulnerable citizens and a distant state. This book illuminates these realities and challenges and provides unique insights into critical themes such as resource scarcities, bureaucratic corruption, control practices, and the complexities of dealing with vulnerable population groups.

This book draws together internationally acclaimed scholars from across the world to address the roles of public officials whose jobs involve dealing directly with the public. Covering a broad range of jobs, including the delivery of benefits and services, the regulation of social and economic behavior, and the expression and maintenance of public values, the book presents in-depth discussions of different approaches, the possibilities for discretionary autonomy, and directions for further research in the field.

Street level discretion -- Three pathologies: the indifferent, the enforcer, and the caregiver -- A gymnastics of the self: coping with the everyday pressures of street-level work -- When the rules run out: informal taxonomies and peer-level accountability -- Impossible situations: on the breakdown of moral integrity at the frontlines of public service

This book contains a series of essays and empirical case studies exploring the nature of institutional work.