Discretionary Responses in Frontline Encounters
Balancing Standardization with the Ethics of Office
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7322607 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirstine Zinck Pedersen (0000-0002-7058-131X, Copenhagen Business School, corresponding author), Anja Svejgaard Pors (0000-0003-1616-9372, University College Copenhagen) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 80-93 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1053-1858 • E-ISSN: 1477-9803 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jopart/muac012 |
| OpenAlex | W4214911822 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 55 |
Policy 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
Business · Political science · Public relations · Standardization · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Public Policy and Administration Research · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Law
Coping with Tensions That Arise from Professional Collaboration Among Street-Level Bureaucrats in the Context of Public Sector Reform
Doing Ethics Work in Digitalised Welfare
Learning from Crisis
Assuring Social Distancing Through Regulatory Intermediaries
Organizing Digitalization in Schools
Revisiting coping mechanisms on the street-level
Making administrative work matter in public service delivery
Limiting bureaucratic discretion? Analyzing the design and exercise of administrative judicial review in the welfare sector
Technology 3.0
Flying under the radar
Emerging modes of digitalisation in the delivery of welfare‐to‐work
From Discretion to Calculation
Automatically Prepared? How Frontline Workers Cope in the Face of Automation
Discretion and Street-Level Practice
Conceptualizing Discretion
Making Social Science Matter
Abductive Analysis
Becoming Bureaucrats
Abuse of Casuistry
A Public Service Gap
Professionals, discretion and public sector reform in the UK
Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government
A literature review of the anchoring effect
Automated Discretion
When the State Meets the Street
Agents of the Welfare State
Professional Discretion and Accountability in the Welfare State
Discretion and Bureaucracy
Cops, Teachers, Counselors
Weber
The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies
More E-Government, Less Street-Level Bureaucracy? On Legitimacy and the Human Side of Public Administration
Digital discretion
The ethics of practical reasoning—exploring the terrain
Street-level morality at the digital frontlines
Coping During Public Service Delivery
Accountable and Countable
Professionals, Managers and Discretion
From Street‐Level to System‐Level Bureaucracies
Are Street‐level Bureaucrats Compelled or Enticed to Cope
The ‘Iron Cage’ Strengthened? Discretion and Digital Discipline
The Bureaucratic Ethos in Street-Level Work
In Praise of Bureaucracy
Max Weber
Social Equities and Inequities in Practice
Mind the Gap
Moving Beyond Discretion and Outcomes
Public Administration Needs More Ethnography
Deliberation and Deliberative Organizational Routines in Frontline Decision-Making
Bureaucracy Redux
Putting Street-Level Organizations First
State Agent or Citizen Agent
Policy Work
Serving many masters
The Case for Comparative Ethnography
"Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation
What is Wrong with Social Theory
It's all about time
Becoming digital - passages to service in the digitized bureaucracy
Danish Exceptionalism
| Citations per year | 4.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |