Handing Off
Frontline Redistribution of Work
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21289136 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elizabeth Chiarello (0000-0002-2131-2527, Washington University in St. Louis, corresponding author), K Fong (0000-0001-9662-6347, University of California, Irvine), Josh Seim (0000-0002-4503-1228, Boston College) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 91 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 651-673 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00031224261454367 |
| OpenAlex | W7166662358 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 43 |
In the governance of poverty and marginality, a complex array of frontline workers manages social suffering. Enabled and constrained by vertical and horizontal relations of production, these workers frequently redistribute work across organizational boundaries. Recent scholarship often reduces such redistribution to a single dynamic: “burden shuffling.” This study extends and complicates that framework. Drawing on three case studies—ambulance crews, mandated reporters of child maltreatment, and physicians treating chronic pain—we theorize how frontline workers’ practical and moral judgments structure the form and justification of redistribution. Variation in the extent to which workers feel equipped and see tasks as worthwhile produces three distinct tactics: burden shuffling (when ill-equipped workers offload tasks they do not consider worthwhile), aspirational referrals (when ill-equipped workers seek better-equipped actors for tasks they view as worthwhile), and abandonment (when well-equipped workers disengage from tasks they deem unworthy and leave them to others). By disaggregating redistribution and tracing its relational conditions, this article shows how governance is enacted—and deferred—on the frontlines, and we offer a framework for understanding how workers navigate fragmentation and uneven responsibility in contemporary labor
Abandonment (legal) · Corporate governance · Fragmentation (computing) · Poverty · Redistribution (election) · Redistribution of income and wealth · Scholarship · Work (physics) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Emotional Labor in Professions · Employment and Welfare Studies
Bandage, Sort, and Hustle
Stacked Decks
Down, Out, and Under Arrest
The System of Professions
Dignity at Work
Street‐Level Bureaucracy Theory
A Public Service Gap
When the State Meets the Street
The New Welfare Bureaucrats
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Frontline Professionals in the Wake of Social Media Scrutiny
Jailcare
Predict and Surveil
Can't Catch a Break
The Fissured Workplace
Cops, Teachers, Counselors
How Institutions Deprive
The War on Drugs Comes to the Pharmacy Counter
Interorganizational Utility of Welfare Stigma in the Criminal Justice System
Adjudication Under Cover
The ascension of Kafkaesque bureaucracy in private sector organizations
The New Governance
Shuffling Within the System
Street-Level Bureaucracy and Public Accountability
Trojan Horse Technologies
Contested by the State
Privatizing the Welfare State
Motherhood, pregnancy, and the negotiation of identity
Producing paramedicine
Even my sister says I'm acting like a crazy to get a check
Complaint-Oriented Policing
To Punish, Parent, or Palliate
Talk Is Cheap
Organizations and the Governance of Urban Poverty
Bureaucrats with Badges
Governing Marginality
Technologies of Crime Prediction
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |