ABSTRACT. A main reason for implementing automated decision-making (ADM) within human service organizations, is to make decision-making more time efficient, and consequently relocate resources from administration to ‘real’ social work, such as meeting with clients. Being street-level bureaucrats, social workers perform the goal of time efficiency in automation policy according to the potentially conflicting goals and needs of the organization, the client and themselves. However, making social work more time efficient through ADM implies redefining social workers’ discretion. Little attention has been given to how ADM policy is legitimized and performed through particular goals, such as time efficiency, shedding light on ADM’s relation to central public values and on its contested relationship to discretion. The paper aims to understand how ADM policy is legitimized and performed through time efficiency, by a comparison of ADM policy in two Swedish municipalities’ social assistance agencies. It draws on 17 interviews with managers and professionals in two Swedish municipalities’ social assistance units. Findings show how ADM is legitimized through arguments of activation and relations, and used to handle more applications or increase customer time. Overall, time efficiency is not perceived to increase the quality of social assistance services, but rather the volume of cases and client meetings. This highlights the significance of organizational goals for how street-level bureaucrats perform their tasks within their discretionary powers.

ABSTRACT. The concept of digital discretion has emerged and been defined as information and communication technology (ICT) influencing or replacing the professional judgment of civil servants (cf., Busch & Henriksen, 2018). An important focus is on the positive and not so positive effects of ICT on discretion (de Boer & Raaphorst, 2021; Petersen 2021); the latter kind is often denominated as the curtailment thesis. In these studies, various degrees of consideration about the details of the studied context, humans and digital technologies appear. An important aspect is the ´digital infrastructure´ that is made up of case management systems, e-applications and devices by which clients can interact with local government as well as increasingly also decision support in form of Robotic Process Automation. This kind of infrastructure enabling ´digital discretion´ will of course affect the role of street-level bureaucrats, as social caseworkers and the work practices they perform as well as data that is generated.

The focus of this paper is on digital discretion, digital infrastructure, the consequential generated data and its impact on social caseworkers working with social assistance in Sweden. The aim is to enhance the understanding of how they affect social caseworkers working with social assistance in their roles, working process and professional judgments. The paper will answer the following two research questions: 1) how can the implications of digitalization be described? 2) how can these changes affect the outcome of the social caseworkers professionalism (values) and discretion today as well as from a more general policy perspective?

The paper is based on empirical data collected during 2019-2022 in five Swedish municipalities. Semi-structured interviews with key informants such as social caseworkers, team leaders and politicians have been made.

ABSTRACT. The introduction of digital input masks for placing complaints to local government, (with an emphasis on complaints concerning local infrastructure like garbage/waste collection, defect traffic lights and other technical problems) seems to influence the spectrum of citizen complaints that reach officers in local complaints management via the structure set by input/entry masks. Modern technical interfaces promise a quick, easy and transparent handling of citizen complaints, as they often offer a possibility of uploading pictures and also show the processing state of the complaint to at least the complainant, often every citizen visiting the complaints page of a local administration. Drawing from qualitative interview data from my ongoing PhD project analyzing complaints management in local government in Germany and the UK, I argue that from the perspective of the street-level bureaucrats dealing with citizen complaints, digitalization in the form of input masks on local governments’ websites can make their work easier, faster and more transparent. However, it also limits what can be expressed via standardized input masks and sometimes makes understanding a customer’s core issue more difficult. This in part also applies to more established digital communication tools like email. The interactive character so central to street-level bureaucrat’s working worlds is thus impacted. Coping strategies consist of, among others, “bringing interaction back in” by picking up the phone or seeking other, more interactive formats for finding out “what’s really going on.” The two countries were chosen to possibly provide examples of different approaches and consequences, with the UK traditionally taking a leading role in public service reform.

ABSTRACT. The revived European discussion on social rights calls into question the current delivery of social policy at the street-level, as the ambitious plan aims to establish a right to minimum income benefits and social services. The current normative countermovement gives ample of thought on how to how the state and its frontline workers should interact with citizens. Over the last decade, numerous authors developed different ideas on what aspects to regard. In respect to the citizenship perspective, Betzelt and Bothfeld (2011) tied social rights to the maintenance and development of individual autonomy in the area of individual identity and affiliation, interrelatedness and reflexivity as well as commitment and participation. Likewise Walker and Chase (2012) and Walker et al. (2013) take the individual perspective, but emphasize the psycho-social realm and stress the negative effects of stigma and shame. Ahmed (2014) and Gubrium and Leirvik (2021) add to this a recognition of the changing nature of the social context and contacts, including changing welfare institutions and movement through these when analysing individual perspectives. The discretionary autonomy of street-level workers is accompanied by the psycho-social realm as well. Zacka (2017) emphasises the psychological aspect as frontline workers struggle to align capabilities and demands in their everyday work. Here the caseworker’s moral framework of caseworker may not align with normative demands of administrative work grounded on accessibility to social rights. The proposed paper aims to analyse current research on social rights in relation to citizens and frontline workers, as to unravel the discontent on individual autonomy and psycho-social development for both groups. In a next step, we develop a normative framework, which outlines values and steps that assist to attain social rights attuning citizens’ and caseworkers’ autonomy and psychological wellbeing.

ABSTRACT. In Scandinavian countries, social workers with a professional education and identity have been a dominant occupation in social services to clients that now are encompassed by activation policies. This raises the question of how the social work profession responds when activation policies lay open a potential new jurisdictional domain involving “their” client group.

Our case is social work in the context of a politically initiated, major organizational reform of Norwegian labour and welfare service, with the aim to increase labour market participation and reduce benefit recipience. The reform, as proposed by the ministry and accepted by the parliament, was compatible with a social work professionalism and laid open a potential new jurisdictional domain of employment assistance to groups marginalised in the labour market. This was a domain not yet colonized, and social workers were the only occupation in the new frontline organization with character and identity of a profession.

Given this position of the social workers, from the theory of professions one would expect such a reform to prompt an expansion of the professional project of the social work profession. However, the profession did not grasp the opportunity to expand its jurisdictional domain. Instead, scepticism, critique and passivity characterised the responses to the reform by key agents of the profession.

Drawing on secondary sources of scientific literature on social work profession in the context of this major organizational reform, we investigate the following question: What could explain that the profession did not grasp the new jurisdictional domain? We discuss whether this could be explained by a) the character of the organizational context, b) a social work scepticism to the activation policy that frontline workers were to implement, c) an inherent conservatism of professions, and d) specific features of the social work professionalism.

ABSTRACT. To improve front line service provision to reduce child maltreatment, Child Welfare Services (CWS) need new, innovative, and evidence-based interventions, that are adaptive to local contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate how researchers, NGOs and front-line practitioners in CWS can work together to develop an intervention that are both research-informed, grounded in practitioners’ knowledge needs, adapted to the local organization, and possible to evaluate using a randomised controlled trial. We used the model for Mutual Innovation and Learning Platforms (Andersen et al., 2017; Caswell & Dall, 2019) in developing the intervention. We draw on theoretical and methodological approaches for creating and researching public innovation, using perspectives offered by Cooperative Knowledge Production (Hüttemann & Sommerfeld, 2008) and Collaborative Innovation (Sørensen & Torfing, 2011, 2017), stressing the collaborative and relational element in organizational innovation in the public sector. Through the learning platforms we identified organizational challenges in the CWS, and developed an intervention supported by existing knowledge about effective elements in preventive measures. The collaboration resulted in an intervention handbook, which is being implemented in three local child welfare services, and will be evaluated for potential upscaling and a possible randomised controlled trial.

ABSTRACT. Literature has often focused on national welfare regimes and state-wide differences; less is known about the impact of local/regional conditions on social policy. This is an important topic, given the trend that many Western countries have decentralised social policies from national to local authorities. The aim of this study is to explore whether and how the attitudes of street-level professionals towards decentralised social policies are shaped by local/regional organisational conditions. Local governments increasingly work together with other public, private and not-for-profit organizations to create joint policies or services. Street-level professionals are expected to seek closer collaboration with clients to produce more effective solutions. This paper builds on a literature review of public management models and changed expectations of public professionals. Empirically, the paper analyses national policy changes in the Netherlands, in particular the Participation Act (2015), as a basis for a comparative study of street-level professionals at three local/regional sites where local governments collaborate with partner organisations. Data include (focus group) interviews with 31 professionals and supervisors. The findings show both similarities and differences in the attitudes of street-level professionals at the three locations. Street-level workers equally experience tensions between national regulations and citizens’ needs that challenge collaborative efforts. But the three sites also show different emphases in their organizational response to the national social policy, creating important differences in the local/regional conditions for street-level work. Hence, inside the national welfare regime, local professionals and their organizations respond in both parallel and diverse ways. Similar responses of street-level workers in the three locations are mainly explained by the national policy context and the motivations of the professionals towards clients (macro and micro level). Differences in the attitudes of professionals at street level can be better understood by local/regional conditions, such as the history, structure and culture of collaboration (meso level).

ABSTRACT. The paper analyses how employees in NAV experience their space for discretion related to these benefits: financial assistance, the work assessment allowance, and the qualification program. Organizational factors beyond these programs are also addressed. The findings show that experienced space for discretion varies with type of benefit. The work assessment allowance holds more rigid rules, sanctions, and control routines than the qualification program and social assistance. The leadership style at the local NAV office impacts the experience of discretion – it matters whether the leader is delegation oriented or not. Also, the street level bureaucrat’s affiliation with formal and informal groups at the office where the benefits are topics also has an impact, but in diverse ways. Sometimes discussions in such groups broaden discretion, sometimes restricts it, and sometimes leave discretion unchanged. The County Governor`s practice regarding counselling related to financial assistance seems to broaden the space for discretion, whilst NAVs organizational unit at county level “Arbeid & Ytelser” which handles applications for the work assessment allowance is seen as circumscribing local discretion by turning down applications. Theoretically, the paper combines Dworkins regulatory perspective on discretion with institutional ones, by looking at variety of organizational layers (as mentioned above). A main point is that the conditions for discretion at each layer is dynamic and may change in time and place. Also, the conditions for discretion might appear in combinations between layers, and thus impact the total span of discretion in any direction (broadening – circumscribing). The paper will point at possible future research to develop the model. 10 qualitative interviews with employees in five local NAV-offices, in 2020, underpin the paper.

ABSTRACT. Discretion is one of the constituting characteristics of street-level work. One particular outcome of a wide room for discretion is the practice of rule-bending and -breaking; in other words, that discretion is expanded beyond the boundaries intended by the rule-makers. When this is done intentionally, we can speak of sabotage, which is here defined as one form of discretion. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence of and explanations for sabotage among SLBs in a Norwegian activation program targeting newly arrived refugees. Several studies have identified significant individual (SLB) and organizational variation in how services are shaped at the street level. Our ambition is to shed light on how these factors interact: what does context mean for how SLBs exercise discretion? Based on survey interviews with 350 SLBs in the Norwegian Introductory Programme for refugees, we develop a typology of SLB practices. We draw on two dimensions: support or opposition to the policy in question, and effectuation or not of the same policy. The policy in question is an explicit but debated directive to economically sanction refugees who have illegitimate absences from set program activities. We find that while the most common practice is to effectuate sanctions, both supporters and opponents of the policy sometimes fail to effectuate it. We describe four categories of SLBs based on these dimensions: implementers may be either consenting or compliant, while those who fail to implement may be either ‘ideological shirkers’ who bend or break rules that they find to be wrong or ineffective, or ‘contextual shirkers’ that support the policy but for a variety of contextual reasons still do not implement them. In the analysis we investigate the interactions between support for the policy and contextual factors at the individual, the organizational and the policy level, and their impact on SLB practices.

ABSTRACT. Digital service provision has been argued to “compress” time and space (Buffat, 2015), which can enable new forms of closeness between street-level bureaucrats and citizens. But when new technologies, such as digital chats, enable actors who previously met in public offices to reach each other in their living rooms – when does closeness become problematic? Drawing on qualitative data from two different ph. d projects, we explore frontline workers’ experiences with digital technologies from both the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration and the Norwegian Child Welfare Services. We use Tummers, Bekkers, Vink, and Musheno’s (2015) concepts of “moving towards,” “away from” and “against” clients to show how digital technologies create new dilemmas and coping responses in digital frontline work. First, our findings indicate that frontline workers use digital technologies to move both towards and away from clients. For example, while digital communication enables frontline workers to check up on and support their clients, workers also hide behind the screen to protect them from the same clients. Second, the latter example illustrates how digital technologies themselves become devices in the coping response. Third, digital devices seem to blur the distance between public and private domains. For example, street-level bureaucrats in both lines of service use informal channels, such as social media, to extract information about clients. In this paper presentation, we will discuss these emerging dilemmas and subsequent coping strategies, including the line between moving “close” and “too close” to the client.

ABSTRACT. AI is launched as – if not the panacea – then a very good remedy for making ends meet in the public sector, with demand for more services, fewer hands to do the job and more complex tasks. Several countries (e.g. New Zealand, China and Denmark) have experimented with using AI with varying degrees of success. Hence, the use of AI in the public sector has sparked both public and scholarly debate about the ethical considerations and the quality of data among other things. However there seems to be more talk than action.

The research community is eager to study the new phenomenon and during the last decade, several articles have been published, followed by a stream of literature reviews (see e.g. Bernd et al 2019; Weslei et al 2019). However, the review articles take a wide focus on the use of AI focusing on types of AI, sectorial differences and challenges with using AI. We need to know more about the extent to which AI influences the work of the frontline worker. Theories of Street-level bureaucracy, system level bureaucracy and streams within Science Technology Studies pose many assumptions (Lipsky 2010; Bovens & Zouridis 2005; Orlikowski 2000), but we lack empirical evidence. Hence, the aim of this study is to shed light on the existing knowledge about how AI has consequences for the street-level bureaucrat (SLB) in the public sector.

Based on a scoping literature review where 15 articles were included (out of 4277 articles), the paper contributes with insights into the consequences of AI for the frontline worker including the degree of discretion in decision making, the structure of their everyday work, and their relations to clients and managers. Additionally, we contribute to the somewhat still immature theoretical understanding of SLB’s interaction with technology- in this case AI.

ABSTRACT. Previous research on street-level bureaucracy has acknowledged the increased use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for service delivery (Busch & Henriksen, 2018). But although textual media (e.g., email, chat, text messages, forums, posts in social media) have become common for interacting with clients – what has been termed “screen-level” encounters (Bovens & Zouridis, 2002) – such interactions have received marginal attention from researchers in this field (cf., Løberg, 2021). At the same time, the study of street-level bureaucracy has largely refrained from examining naturally occurring institutional encounters (Caswell, 2020). This means that relatively little is known about the fine, interactional details of how policy is practically realized in encounters with clients. This paper contributes to developing the street-level bureaucracy framework (Lipsky, 1980/2010) in both these areas by empirically examining naturally occurring, textual interaction on the “screen-level”.

The study uses conversation analysis (CA; see Sidnell & Stivers, 2014) to examine about 900 textual exchanges between clients and Swedish Social Insurance Agency officers over email and on Facebook. The exchanges consist of information-seeking questions and subsequent responses (regarding for example processes, regulations, and policy) from insurance officers on the topic of parental leave. The analysis shows how professionals – in applying the affordances and constraints provided by the textual environment – manage organizational goals, standardization, and responsiveness in text-based interaction. For example, officers’ responses to individual clients’ questions tend to not follow conversational norms of recipient design relating to question/answer formatting and person reference, making encounters more standardized and de-personalized. We also show how the technical design of interactional arenas can affect and shape textual service delivery in street-level work, such as possibilities or lack of possibilities to ask follow-up questions, and discuss implications in light of the development towards less face-to-face contact in welfare services.

ABSTRACT. In the last two decades, internal rural-urban migration was exacerbated as pastoralist Mongolian herders aspired to educate their children and access better services in the capital city. This development has resulted in a rapidly increasing number of internal migrants settling formally and informally in peri-urban settlements referred to as ger areas, where many of them live in situations of poverty and social inequality. However, little is known about how front line workers at the local administration address and experience the challenges of providing resources and support to the growing number of ger residents, whose lived citizenship evolves as a mixed sense of belonging of both rural herder relationships and urban citizens1.

Based on an ethnographic study conducted in Tahilt area of Ulaanbaatar city (Mongolia), consisting of biographical interviews, socio-spatial mapping and participant observations, this paper focuses on the discrepancies between the lived citizenship of residents and the current administrative and social work strategies to support aspirations of residents.

Findings show that the local administrative staff are willing to embrace the individual and collective lifeworlds and aspirations of ger residents, but also face uncertainties about how to support and mobilize ger residents’ sense of belonging. Most social work and public administration interventions consist of top-down decisions, regulations and rules approved at the District or even at the Municipality level, and, their strategies of discretion therefore do not manage to embrace ger residents’ interests2. In this regard, some level of discretion is used at local level service delivery to facilitate limited resources among the growing number of population including hiring additional unofficial community officers to liaise between the administration and the residents where it opens space for discrepancies for both negative and positive prospects.

ABSTRACT. In West Africa, where state institutions tend to be weak, the delivery of migration services often entails the involvement of international organisations. Perhaps more surprisingly, the recent emergence of programmes such as IOM’s “Migrants as Messengers” involves also migrant returnees, in an international effort to help locals make “informed decisions” regarding migration and curb irregular migration from Africa to Europe. In this role, migrant returnees interact directly with local citizens and have considerable room for discretion in terms of information provision and, consequently, policy outcomes. This research investigates further the role of migrant returnees in West Africa as de facto policy implementers. It looks at how they understand and handle the conflicting role expectations, where they are meant to represent both the interests of the IOs they work for and those of their compatriots. Theoretically, this research combines perspectives from street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980) and representative bureaucracy (Krislov, 2012). In terms of methods, it takes a qualitative research approach, based on approx. 15 in-depth interviews with migrant returnees in West Africa, particularly Senegal, as well as key informants from the Senegalese government and the IOM. This paper contributes further to the scholarly accounts that discuss non-traditional street-level bureaucrats (Brodkin, 2012), including private service employees (Sager et al. 2014), NGO employees and volunteers (Humphris 2019, Glyniadaki, 2021). It speaks to the increased diversification of front-line actors, in the less explored context of a developing country, and investigates how migration management is carried out in practice, including how knowledge on immigration is produced locally. In parallel, it contributes to the literature of representative bureaucracy, and the idea that street-level bureaucrats are more likely to meet the needs and interests of their target population when they share key demographic characteristics with them.

ABSTRACT. While much street level bureaucracy literature and theory has emerged from the Global North, the literature and theory developing from the Global South is still incipient. Of particular interest is the manner in which historical, political, economic, social, and cultural contexts shape service provision and the manner in which street level bureaucracy is conceptualized. Within the Global South, Chile is a particularly interesting case to study due to the neoliberal reforms implemented during the country’s 17-year dictatorship and which remain largely untouched despite the country’s return to democracy over 30 years ago. These reforms include the privatization of the country’s health, pension and education systems and the outsourcing of social services to third sector parties. These reforms have had lasting impacts on social policies as well as on the SLB’s responsible for their implementation. Specifically, SLB’s implementing social services have historically faced precarious employment conditions, little to no influence on policy and program formulation, and minimal levels of discretion. Nevertheless, despite facing such restricted contexts, studies in other countries have identified the use of resistance strategies by SLB’s in order to defy policies and programs considered unethical or unjust. The following study sought to fill an important gap in the literature by exploring the use of resistance strategies by SLB’s in Chile employed in three key social programs. Using a mixed qualitative quantitative sequential study that included semi-structured interviews with first-line professionals (N=36) and a representative survey of program implementors (N=1,764), results indicate that resistance strategies employed by SLB’s are primarily performed on an individual level and hidden from superiors. Collective and overt resistances were rare and in general directed towards improving precarious employment conditions rather than the implementation of the program and social policy. Additionally, the results show that individual characteristics and work conditions are relevant to explaining resistances.

ABSTRACT. Uncertainty is considered an inherent condition of the encounter between street-level bureaucrats and citizens. Street-level bureaucrats do not have full information about the cases they work on, criteria for decision-making are often ambiguous and the interaction with citizens can be unpredictable . Similarly, citizens may also experience uncertainty due to lack of information or difficulties interpreting information from street-level bureaucrats . Several studies point to the importance of trust for managing uncertainty. Relying on trust involve drawing on knowledge often in the form of practice-based experience, but at the same time it also entails an affective element. Whom we trust, is also a matter of emotions, norms, and ideas about other individuals. Trust is thus embedded within social relations and shaped by the socio-cultural and political context of the individual . Until recently, the street-level bureaucracy literature has mainly focused on frontline work in the US and Northern Europe and studies of the street-level bureaucracies in Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa is hence still scarce. Moreover, the literature has only to a limited extent engaged in cross country comparative studies of frontline work including the relationship between street-level bureaucrats and citizens. The question of how the socio-cultural and political context shape relations of trust between frontline workers and citizens thus remains underexplored. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of how context shapes relations of trust between frontline workers and citizens through in-depth qualitative analysis of 30 narrative interviews with health professionals and COVID-19 patients or their relatives in a Scandinavian and a Southern European country namely Denmark and Italy.

ABSTRACT. Street-level bureaucrats face dilemma’s which require the weighing of alternatives and conflicting norms, or as Zacka (2017) has put it, gymnastics of the self. Reflective practice is a well-established and broadly studied way of collectively dealing with such normative dilemma’s in various professional fields like social work, education and nursing. In this paper we explore the merits and pitfalls of organized ‘reflective practice’ as part of the professionalization of activation work. Drawing on action research in a Dutch municipality, this article presents first insights into how reflective capacity by activation workers may be enhanced within a context of pressure on fast results, fluidity within the organisation and different perspectives on ‘good’ activation services. These results are discussed in terms of broader debates on (re-)professionalization and organizational learning in the field of activation.

ABSTRACT. The integrated Employment and Welfare service in Norway (NAV) has implemented two strategies to strengthen the in-house services for benefit recipients in disadvantaged and vulnerable situations: the evidence-based approach of Supported Employment (SE) and caseworker specialisation for young service users. We ask how these two distinct approaches of activation represent organisational strategies contributing to develop professional practices of activation work.

The paper reports on 28 interviews and five focus groups conducted between 2018 and 2021 with frontline workers and managers in NAV offices across different regional areas. The findings suggest that SE and the caseworker specialisation towards young users constitute two distinct ways of practising professionalism, as suggested by van Berkel, de Vries and van der Aa (2021). SE is a resource demanding approach that required a lot of time spent outside the office to engage employers, thus representing a radical new way of working in a government agency. SE required systematic follow-up to adhere to the evidence-based manual. Thus, SE represents a ‘knowledge-oriented’ aspect of practising professionalism (ibid.). Caseworkers who specialised on young users were equally committed to relational work, directing their efforts at the users who they provided with close follow-up. The youth caseworkers emphasised creativity and the freedom to think ‘out of the box’ when providing services. Specialised caseworkers could therefore be considered to pursue a ‘service-oriented’ aspect of practising professionalisation (ibid.).

The paper argues that within the non-professionalised field of activation work, it is challenging to foster critical assessments of evidence-based approaches. Caseworker specialisation can stimulate professional practice through autonomy, but a main challenge is how to develop the professional approach in systematic manners.

ABSTRACT. Implementation of evidence-based supported employment services in public service organizations is characterized by tensions between different logics. Previous studies have pointed to contradictions between the Danish employment service and the SE models (Bonfils et al., 2020). Danish job centers traditionally support job development through subsidized on-the-job training and internships that build on a “train-place” logic, whereas SE builds on a ‘place-train’ logic (Bonfils, 2021). Employment services are organized in accordance with the administrative client categories defined by law, which has led to a functional differentiation of job functions between statutory tasks, employer contact and mentoring (Andersen & Larsen, 2018). In contrast, SE job coaches support clients in all phases of job development and with a combination of tasks. Furthermore, frontline staff traditionally works as generalist counselors, whereas in SE they are specialized in supporting people with mental health problems or disability.

In this presentation we highlight the role of middle managers and frontline supervisors (Bonfils et al., 2017; Keulemans & Groeneveld, 2020) in implementing an SE intervention targeted NEET’s with less severe mental health problems. The research context is a case-study of three Danish municipalities. The study runs from 2019-2024 and builds on document analysis and interviews with four middle managers and three supervisors. Data is analyzed using a thematic analysis approach.

Preliminary findings suggest that middle managers and supervisors play a substantial role in implementing the SE model into the existing organizational framework, procedures, norms, and beliefs. In case A, they experience an organizational fit between the SE model and the traditional organizational framework, whereas in case B, they experience tensions between standard procedures and the SE model. In case C, the team developed towards an independent unit, however, they still experience role ambiguity due to the different logics in the SE-model and the traditional employment service.

ABSTRACT. Frontline workers in health services have the authority to make decisions that concern peoples´ health, whether it is to set a diagnosis or initiate the right kind of treatment. These decisions are largely made on the grounds of professional autonomy and discretionary judgment, and healthcare professionals are perceived to be the experts on what kinds of health interventions that are the most appropriate.

However, the expert position held by healthcare professionals, is currently challenged by policy goals and initiatives favouring patient empowerment and shared decision-making, e.g. through the adoption of new, evidence-based standards providing guidelines for organizational set-up and professional practice. One such standard is the vocational rehabilitation method Individual Placement and Support (IPS). The method builds on evidence from many countries and is currently adopted by a growing number of healthcare organizations, usually as a cross-sectoral collaboration between healthcare and employment services. This paper explores how healthcare organizations in Norway relate to the introduction of this evidence-based vocational rehabilitation method.

The IPS method favours users´ empowerment by leaving it to the patients themselves to decide when to initiate return-to-work measures, regardless of their current health situation. This is called the “zero exclusion”-principle. The findings show, however, that this principle is difficult to implement because it challenges the healthcare services´ established practices and mindsets. For example, healthcare professionals may question certain patients´ ability to work – and therefore recommending work-oriented measures to take place later in the rehabilitation process. Considering the expert role of healthcare professionals, the current article argues that they serve as gatekeepers to the IPS service and that established understandings of patients´ ability to work may hinder the implementation of work-oriented rehabilitation methods like IPS.

ABSTRACT. In Denmark, the legislated active labour market policy mediates through local jobcenters, leading to both similarities and differences in the policy delivery (Bredgaard & Rasmussen 2022:80). Local jobcenter organizations mediate national policies and affect the frontline, with effects for both the professional street level worker and the needing citizen (Brodkin 2012, Berkel 2019). New reforms are incorporated in to local strategies and decisions on how to manage the new or different tasks.

Many crucial decisions about entitlement to benefits are increasingly left to local jobcenters to decide upon. These discretions are very complex and difficult to manage, and jobcenters in many cases employ professional social workers to do the tasks. This leaves the local jobcenters to construct a room for discretion between managerial steering and professional autonomy.

The aim of this paper is to discuss processes of how frontline discretions are constructed in the tension between managerial steering and professional autonomy. I suggest a typology on how discretion are organizationally constructed in Danish jobcenters, and reflect upon dilemmas in constructing discretion. It is shown, that professionalism plays an important role in the delivery of policy, but organizational decisions shape the room for professional engagement.

The analysis draw upon three minor comparative case-studies in Danish Jobcenters addressing three different kinds of benefits with a complex discretion structure. (Braun & Christensen 2018; Christensen, Schaldemose & Frandsen 2019; Christensen, Eistrup, Braun, Luth & Sørensen 2021).

ABSTRACT. In many countries, the history of active labour policy reform over the past 30 years has been marked by two parallel trends; the social policy turn towards activation, and the governance turn towards reconfiguring the frontline delivery of employment services through performance measurement and contracting-out. In Australia, this latter governance turn has quickly evolved into a privatisation turn that has significantly redrawn the boundaries between the market and the state in delivering social security. Today, all public employment services in Australia are delivered by private providers competing in a market for clients, contracts, and performance payments. In the process, welfare recipients have been turned into a commodity to be acquired and traded for profit on Australia’s lucrative welfare-to-work market.

Drawing on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork with four of Australia’s best performing employment services offices, we examine how the commoditisation of the unemployed shapes organisational strategies and frontline practices, and the reasons why long-term unemployed jobseekers have been consistently left behind in Australia’s privatised system.

We examine how the privatisation turn and associated commoditisation of clients generates at least two key governance challenges. The first is managing the tension between public value and private profit in market-style systems, which gives rise to a series of performance paradoxes. The second is the issue of maintaining public accountability for policy outcomes when delivery agents are no longer directly answerable to public officials. This challenge is amplified in the context of market governance arrangements, where frontline staff are tasked with growing organisational balance sheets and hitting performance targets rather than delivering public value. Paradoxically, this leads to the ‘deactivation’ of harder-to-help clients who are recategorized in various ways to reduce their work obligations, suspend them from participation, or transfer them out of welfare-to-work programs so as to preserve organisational and individual performance ratings.

ABSTRACT. Welfare services in Nordic countries has since the last three decades been marked by ideas from New Public Management (NPM), focusing on efficiency and performance measurements. For the homecare services for elderly, implementation of NPM-principles resulted in organisational arrangements which separated the function of allocating services from the function of providing care to individual service users, in the so-called purchaser-provider split model. The separation of decision and provision of care and the lack of autonomy and authority for the frontline care workers was problematic due to service users’ ambiguous and shifting needs. Hence, there has been a turn towards more trust-based models in service provision, including self-governance of frontline care teams, with the aim of reinstalling professionalism in frontline care work. In this paper we explore how the care work with elderly home-dwellers in a local area of a larger Norwegian municipality plays out under the trust-based model. The aim with the article is to discuss the challenges for frontline care workers who under the trust-based model are granted professional autonomy in care provision, but also the responsibility for organising themselves and the care work within the teams. The study is underpinned by theoretical understandings of self-governing of care work from organizational studies, and professional care work as street-level practice that is performed in the squeeze between demand and resources. The study draws on data from four months of fieldwork with observations and interviews with frontline care workers in Norwegian municipal homecare services. The analysis demonstrates how the considerable amount of time spent on coordination of tasks within the team, render care workers collectively responsible and accountable to each other, but also “steals” time from encounters with the service users, putting the individual care worker in a moral dilemma of deciding ‘who-gets-what-when?’.

ABSTRACT. ‘Outcomes-based contracting’ (OBC), a particular form of marketisation that promises innovation and performance improvement of activation services (Carter & Whitworth, 2015), is gaining international significance in different policy domains. When OBC is combined with a non-prescriptive ‘black box’ delivery model, the expectation is that service providers have the freedom to innovate and provide tailored support to each individual participant. However, “few studies have empirically examined how frontline service delivery changed over time following the introduction of stronger marketisation” (Considine et al., 2020, p. 875) and there are questions as to whether the adoption of OBC is consistent with meaningful personalisation at the frontline.

One of the challenges in investigating the implications of OBC for frontline practice is that such reforms have typically been introduced alongside other, large-scale shifts in market stewardship and commissioning, such as heavy price competition and reduced involvement of specialist voluntary sector providers. This study provides a rare opportunity to investigate the introduction of a black box outcomes contract within the same service delivery organisations. We present findings from longitudinal analysis of a support service for adults with multiple, complex disadvantages as the contracting arrangement shifts from bilateral fee-for-service arrangements to the adoption of a 'prime' outcomes contract. Our data are drawn from surveys of frontline staff conducted in 2019 prior to the introduction of the outcomes contract and in 2021 following the substantive contractual shift. This is complemented by semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis of contract terms.

By tracing the contractual shift alongside ‘outcomes orientation’ at the frontline, we show that caseloads have dramatically increased but that the language used by frontline staff to describe their work emphasises ‘person-centredness’ and co-production. The work underscores the importance of governance and management conditions in mediating frontline workers’ discretion.

ABSTRACT. In the Swedish context, social assistance (SA) is a municipally organized means-tested subsidy, intended for when all other sources of incomes have been exhausted. As such, the SA benefit is traditionally based on street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) exercising a high degree of discretion when considering beneficiaries’ personal circumstances as well as national and local rules and regulations in their decision-making. However, in the latest few years, Swedish policy actors have pushed for the increased use of automated decision support-systems (DSS) when making decisions on the eligibility of SA. In such policies, ideals of increased efficiency, transparency and legality prompt the removal of factors associated with human agency and discretion from decision-making on SA eligibility. Moreover, the handling of SA is often framed as a predominantly administrative and routine procedure, constructing it as appropriately enacted via the sociotechnical specifications of the relatively simple automation system – Robotic Process Automation (RPA). While the use of RPA has increased rapidly in Swedish municipalities, it is yet to be addressed if – and if so, how – actual decisions on SA eligibility change when supported by DSS. Based on quantitative data on SA decisions collected in three Swedish municipalities before and after implementing RPA, this paper presents preliminary results on generosity and/or the extent and patterns on decisions made with the support of digital automation.

ABSTRACT. Since the 1990s, the street-level governance of welfare-to-work has undergone numerous reforms. Public employment services have repeatedly been restructured in Australia, the UK and other nations. Our research into changing governance modes tracked these shifts on the frontline. We first postulated four ideal-types in the 1990s: Traditional bureaucracy was characterized as using laws and rules to deliver services (bureaucratic). New Public Management (NPM)-driven variants rely on strengthening central direction through plans and targets (corporate), using competition and performance contracts to motivate actors (market), or emphasising the mechanisms of joint working (network) to achieve results (Considine and Lewis 1999; 2003). Our research has demonstrated that transformation has unfolded through a gradual process of institutional layering, displacement, and conversion. Instead of replacing a single governance mode with each reform, mixed modes of governance with no single mode dominating frontline work has resulted (Lewis et al 2021).

A new wave of governance reform is gathering pace: the digitalisation of employment services. This new digital governance is purported by some to replace NPM (e.g. Dunleavy et al 2005). They argued that ‘‘digital-era governance’’ (DEG), in replacing NPM, would allow government to deliver more holistic and interconnected services and administration. They also argued that a broad shift to DEG would generate hybrid forms of governance. A ‘‘digital NPM’’ outcome might see DEG changes very selectively adopted, to (for example) save money on staffing but not to improve the quality of services.

Using a case study of Australia’s proposed digitalised employment services system and interviews with experts from European countries that have pursued digitalised delivery, this paper unpacks multiple forms that digital welfare-to-work takes, from digitally mediated to machine bureaucracies. We use this empirical work to ask: Does digitalisation reflect a novel street-level governance mode that can be distinguished from our earlier four types?

ABSTRACT. Based on the case study of profiling algorithm implemented in local Public Employment Services in Poland (e.g. Sztandar-Sztanderska, Zielenska 2018), the article analyses frontline oversight over the automated decision-making system (ADM). Putting humans in the decision-making loop is implemented as an accountability mechanism (Green 2021) in a digital welfare state (Alston 2019). Using evidence coming from interviews, documents, and statistics, the article takes a closer look at whether and why – despite critical attitude towards the algorithm – street-level bureaucrats were reluctant to say “no” to a computer. Research indicates that the reluctance to override automatic results at street-level is a context-dependent phenomenon, in which policy and organisational factors play a role, alongside invisible discretionary practices of working around ADM without overtly correcting it.

ABSTRACT. Although judges are included in the seminal list of SLB professions by Lipsky himself, academic research has rarely focused on this professional group adopting such a perspective. Even more rare are studies and research applying this perspective to judges in Southern European countries. This because the SLB-driven approach to the judiciary is in open contrast with the formalistic vision of the role of judges (judge as la bouche de la loi), still permeating the analysis of judicial systems in Southern Europe. The paper aims to fill this gap by reflecting on how SLB approach is suited to grasp the concrete functioning of judicial system, especially in relation to some fields of law deciding on fundamental individual rights. As many other public service domains of Southern Europe, judicial systems experienced important changes bringing it closer to a quasi-bureaucratic and managerially-driven organization with an increased pressure towards individual and organizational performance. The only available pioneer studies have already shown that several factors can drive the judiciary closer to the SLB model, such as quasi-bureaucratic organization of justice, with direct and frequent contacts with clients, a routinized study of cases and a massive amount of workload. The present study contributes to this literature starting from the example of judges deciding on asylum adjudication in Italy. Presenting data gathered through interviews and observation in Italian courts, the paper shows that these professionals meet all the characteristics of the SLBs. As other SLBs, they deal with a complex task which requires specific knowledge and training but they face a chronic lack of resources and the ambiguity of norms. Finally, the paper traces for new research paths pointing out good reasons to apply SLB also to comparative studies on the judicial systems of other Southern European countries.

ABSTRACT. In April 2020, the Indonesian government rolled out a new welfare program, Pre-employment Card, with a total budget of US$340 million. This represents a further evolution in the development of the welfare state in Southeast Asia’s largest democracy. What differentiates this program from its predecessors are two central features more typical of OECD countries’ ALMPs. They are the activation of benefit recipients who now have to complete training as a condition of benefit receipt; and the creation of a service that includes private local agents and new public regulators.

Using semi-structured interviews with policymakers and contracted providers and an online survey with jobseekers, this study explores the complex intentions and values underpinning the government’s new approach to addressing the unemployment problem, and how the dynamics of this new frontline reaches the intended targets.

We found that the program was born out of the intersection of three key drivers: the breakout of the pandemic, the government’s long-term emphasis on workforce capacity and its political ambition. The governance of the program has shown some important features of a genuine policy experiment, which however proves to be a particular challenge for contracted providers due to frequent rule changes. From jobseekers’ viewpoint, the program provides much-needed financial support while attracting groups of participants who arguably benefit significantly from further training. The program seems to hit the target of activation where almost all participants attended at least some classes, and subsequently either got a new job or started a new business. However, caution is needed in interpreting this result, as at the time of data collection, approximately 70 percent of jobseekers were working, which raises the question about employment sustainability. Also, our data don't support an association between the training undertaken and employment outcomes, hence necessitating identification of factors driving employment outcomes in future research.

ABSTRACT. The SLB approach has proved to be particularly important to bring out dynamics of service provision that often remain invisible. For this reason, it is interesting to adopt it in contexts still poorly investigated. Italy perfectly fits the Southern welfare regime characterised by low levels of social spending and the activation of numerous territorial actors to meet the increasing needs of the population. The combination of these factors designs different functioning of services at the local level. Looking at the collaboration between municipal social services and the third sector, the study aims to contribute to the understanding of service provision at the micro-level, investigating the relations between street-level workers belonging to different street-level organizations, in still mostly unexplored contexts. In this regard, the study focuses on the local system of three municipalities of Central Italy with different characteristics: among these, both urban and rural areas, usually neglected in studies of this type. If the larger urban realities are often privileged, the case of smaller municipalities and, especially, rural and so-called “internal areas”, of which Italy but also other countries of Mediterranean Europe are mostly composed of, is argued to be of particular relevance to test the dynamics of service provision in territories traditionally considered disadvantaged for the limited accessibility to essential services. To this aim, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted to (professional/non-professional) social workers of different background and decision makers in the context of the three case studies. Results revealed the existence of "street-level systems" in which street-level workers horizontally compensate for the structural lack of resources through a shared exercise of discretion between operators belonging to different organizations and through both formal and informal practices. In particular, the analyzed rural areas show accentuated processes of activation of the local community which outlines specific dynamics of services.

ABSTRACT. Enhancing professional discretion of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) is essential to public service delivery. As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves around the world, community health workers (CHWs) serve instrumental roles in educating their fellow community members and alleviating capacity constraints on the existing medical workforce by sustaining routine primary healthcare services and treating common illnesses among the vulnerable and rural populations. CHWs straddle two identities: first as citizens who receive training and supervision by the local health authorities and second as frontline service providers who confront the challenges of street-level bureaucracy.

Professionalism is believed to provide SLBs with a psychological mechanism to balance autonomy and accountability. Therefore, professionalism or professional discretion improves SLBs’ performance of public services and maintains a healthy working relationship between SLBs and managers. Yet, how to increase SLBs’ professional discretion remains unclear. This study seeks to fill the lacunae in current research on street-level bureaucracy by examining how to influence SLBs’ professional discretion in crisis situations.

Specifically, this study contributes to an understanding of the professional discretion of an important group of SLBs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand: community health workers (CHWs) or Village Health Volunteers (VHVs). This study uses psychological empowerment theory to investigate the processes by which transformational leadership and public service motivation shape professional discretion among VHVs.. Based on survey data from 798 VHVs in Thailand, transformational leadership positively influences VHVs’ professional discretion by enhancing two dimensions of psychological empowerment: competence and self-determination. Meanwhile, public service motivation increases CHWs’ professional discretion by enhancing two dimensions of psychological empowerment: meaning and impact. Based on these findings, public health agencies should develop training programs that equip CHWs’ supervisors with leadership skills and pay close attention to potential VHVs’’ public service motivation level during the recruitment process.

ABSTRACT. Within the frame of the discourse on professionalisation about social services, organisational professionalisation strategies play an increasingly important role. This is especially applies in areas, that are characterised by a strong ambivalence with regard to goals and success factors, a high degree of discretion and a high importance of the working alliance between employees and clients (Heite 2012). One such area is employment support for unemployed people with mental illnesses and addictions, which is the responsibility of the job centres in Germany (Kupka und Osiander 2016). Empirical findings on the labour market and counselling situation show, that this target group often does not find the necessary support options in the job centre, resulting in a growing group of people who are permanently excluded from opportunities for participation (Oschmiansky et al. 2017). In a German pilot project, the implementation of peer support (Solomon 2004; Walker und Bryant 2013) presents an alternative access to this group of clients: People, who have overcome a mental illness, are qualified to support the project participants and enhance the consultation process between Job Centre employees and participants. In the sense of a street-level bureaucracy perspective, this expands the scope for organisational decision-making and action in the project context (Lipsky 2010; Zacka 2017). With a shift in focus, away from the realm of demanding to opportunities for participation, organisational members including peers essentially shape the organisation. This paper examines empirical data in the context of employee professionalization. The central question is: How do they define professional behaviour and goals in the organisation while incorporating the user perspective, also about working with peers? Initial results show that the new role constellations lead to increased uncertainties (for example decision-making), which are overcome through negotiation processes between the involved stakeholders. Furthermore, employees use the available time to intensify the relationship.

ABSTRACT. Citizens with long-term consequences after child sexual abuse (CSA), are overrepresented in unemployment statistics (Socialstyrelsen, 2016). The long-term consequences after CSA take many forms and shapes from anxiety, PTSD to diverse somatic diseases (Fisher H. L., 2018), and as such the group is quite heterogenous. However, as a group they are at larger risk of struggling with social and health issues during adulthood, including but not limited to issues of homelessness, addiction, criminality, suicidal tendencies and self-harm or non-suicidal self-injury. Consequently, this group have a multitude of encounters with street-level bureaucrats (SLB), whether it be social service, employment agencies, health care, diverse outreach programs, police, or others. The object of this research is to examine how meetings with SLB, primarily, but not solely, meetings with social workers in employment services, are experienced by citizens who have long-term consequences after CSA, subsequently shedding light on how policy is translated in these interactions. I examine this through a multi-sited fieldwork approach, entailing semi-structured interviews, desk research and participant observation. The findings suggest that most informants experience encounters with SLB as a threat to their livelihood and existence. Some informants even experience the interaction as retraumatizing. An interaction where they seldomly feel seen or heard, threated merely as an object. They experience the encounter rather as an evaluation according to a standardized superficial checklist, where they don’t seem to fit. The SLB is described as unaccountable, lacking both training, sufficient time and discretion to do their job meaningfully. This research fosters a discussion on whether the professionalization and standardization of services, equates the best circumstances for SLB to provide services for citizens with long-term consequences after CSA, and whether SLB have the resources, discretion and competencies needed to do their job, or if they should take a trauma-informed social policy approach (Bowen, 2016).

ABSTRACT. Employer engagement (EE) is increasingly emphasized in policy efforts to bring more (disadvantaged) people into work. EE in in street-level organizations (SLOs) constitute a novel area of frontline work, where EE staff become ‘boundary spanners’ (Ingold 2018) or ‘brokers’ (Aksnes 2019) working at the interface between public employment services (PES) and employers.

In this paper, I examine the (potentially) emerging professionalism of EE staff in SLOs through the lens of connective professionalism (cf. Noordegraaf 2020). The paper draws on interviews with 36 EE staff in Danish PES and 15 clients with experience from EE efforts.

The EE staff share no educational background or training, has no occupational organization and no formalized control over their work, thus falling short of any traditional understandings of so-called ‘pure’ or ‘protective’ professionalism (cf. e.g. Freidson 2001). Nevertheless I find, that they do constitute an occupational group emerging in response to changing policy, managerial and organizational landscapes. The very foundation of EE work is to connect actors across state and market boundaries around unemployed individuals, and staff do so by relying heavily on relational and processual modes of work. As such I argue that the EE staff practices a connective professionalism, emphasizing ‘market knowledge’ and co-producing relations to employers as part of professionalization efforts.

Overall the paper contributes to our understanding of professionalization strategies embedded in the networked governance strategies following post-New Public Management reforms.

ABSTRACT. Professional discretion is necessary among front-line workers in child welfare services (CWS). Exercising discretionary judgment about the child's best interest in welfare cases is both a morally and an epistemologically complex and challenging task. Following Lipsky's perspectives on street-level bureaucracy, professional discretion involves several dilemmas when professionals must interpret general rules and policies on a case-by-case basis. Studies have demonstrated that there are several ways in which street-level bureaucrats manage these dilemmas. Casuistic reasoning is one way to resolve the dilemmas, often leading to reductive discretionary judgment practices (Zacka, 2017). Our presentation will discuss how organised peer discussions in the CWS can develop innovative strategies promoting accountability in discretionary judgment in child welfare cases.

Based on observations of peer discussions in fifteen meetings in a child welfare office, we discuss how peer groups can increase the quality of discretionary assessments, especially when dealing with the complexities and uncertainties that often characterise child welfare cases. We will use Bernardo Zacka’s (2017) perspective on moral reasoning and peer-level accountability to discuss how interaction among peers can provide accountability in discretionary judgement and how this depends on an organisational culture characterised by heterogeneity. Two different types of interactions among peers that we identified in our analysis of the peer discussions will be presented. One type illustrates ways of standardising casuistry, while the other shows ways of adjusting them, thus representing a greater degree of reflection about practice. We argue for the importance of peer discussions in child welfare cases in which peers with different knowledge backgrounds, skills and values take part to promote reflection, and thus strengthen professional discretion.

ABSTRACT. In a democracy, the individual in public services of street-level bureaucracy (SLB) has a certain agency to choose among different possible courses of action to cope with clients, but how and why may such freedom of bureaucratic behavior be achieved during public service delivery? The first argument is that such coping is either affiliative (i.e., moving towards, approaching clients), or avoidant (i.e., avoiding clients by moving away from/against). Yet, a remaining theoretical issue concerns the question of why the frontline worker employs such freedom, expressed by a specific set of dominating strategies to cope, given these two forms of coping. The second argument is that freedom of bureaucratic behavior in a SLB is restricted to the set of individual coping strategies available, given its Moral Practice Regime (MPR) of the State. Thus, in social work, because of its "attachment-detachment” MPR, coping to approach most clearly involves bending/breaking of rules for clients, or to avoid them by routinizing. In the police, because of its "force-non-force" MPR, coping to approach most clearly contains prioritizing motivated plaintiffs, or to avoid them by aggression. In health, due to its "ethics of care centered" MPR, it mostly concerns patient approach by instrumental action. To approach by using personal resources, or to avoid by rationing, represent common SLB strategies; the former tied to personal traits, and the latter to the SLB position of the individual. The conclusion includes a discussion on client coping as freedom of bureaucratic behavior depending on moral practices rather than just being a stress-reducing tool, further explained by moral practice regimes founded on new institutional theory, prior to a common moral agency regardless of sector as offered by rational theory. Theoretical arguments are empirically supported by an explorative Swedish survey -- previously presented by the author at the 3rd SLB2019 Conference -- of coping strategies and work-related overload stress among social work, health care, and police frontline workers.

ABSTRACT. Purpose: This research aims to identify and rank the organizational factors that facilitate the condition of law enforcement by Iranian traffic police officers as street-level bureaucrats. Methodology: We used a qualitative method for this research. We interviewed 35 police officers in order to understand what kind of organizational factors can help them to use their enforcement power at the street level and interviews continued to the saturation point. Findings: The results have shown that there are ten organizational strategies to optimize the traffic police officers and improve their situation to use their enforcement power at the street level. These factors include: improving work conditions, a variety of tools for officers, transparency in the cost of fines, use of female officers, no police presence, the offender being informed, need for an authoritative appearance, use of native officers, and need for more police, and the need for better learning and training. Originality/Value: This paper is based on the original data gathered from 35 interviews with traffic police officers in Tehran as street-level bureaucrats and the results contain a number of factors that facilitate the enforcement of traffic laws. Keywords: Street-Level Bureaucrats, Law Enforcement, Traffic Police Officers

ABSTRACT. Despite the abundance of research on implementation and street-level bureaucracy, our knowledge of the importance of leader communication in fostering implementation of policy reforms among street-level bureaucrats remains limited. Theories of change management and transformational leadership focus on leader communication as a key to organizational change and effectiveness. In contrast, studies of self-other agreement and communication highlight the limitations of leader communication because leaders’ communication is perceived differently by leaders and their employees.

Using an unprecedented five-year-panel of more than 200 school leaders and 2,000 teachers collected during the implementation of a major Danish public school reform, we show that teachers’ perceptions of leader communication are related to teachers’ implementation behavior. However, leaders’ perception of their own communication is not correlated with teachers’ perceptions of the communication nor with their implementation behaviors. The lack of self-other agreement is not only due to biases among leaders but also among teachers. Teacher perceptions of leaders also do not correlate with their colleagues’ perceptions. These novel findings have both substantial and methodological implications for future research.

ABSTRACT. Although being one of the most pervasive forms of gender violence, street harassment has not been the target of great academic attention. As the experience of the countries where this type of harassment is considered a crime suggests an inefficiency of existing laws, studies regarding its criminalisation’s flaws are particularly scarce. The present investigation helps to fill this gap by looking at street-level-divergence in the implementation of the legislation that criminalises street harassment in Portugal. This legislation derives from Article 170.º of the Portuguese Penal Code that, since 2015, criminalises “exhibitionist acts”, “proposals of sexual content” and “sexual contact”. Specifically, this research assesses the existence, or lack of thereof, of obstacles to the implementation of said Article at the street level of the Portuguese Public Security Force - Polícia de Segurança Pública (PSP). By conducting 14 semi structured interviews with 14 police officers, it was possible to assess that these street-level-bureaucrats not only face, but also create, obstacles to the implementation of Article 170.º of the Penal Code. The implementation of this legislation, itself hindered by street harassment’s inherent characteristics, seems to take place within a masculine culture, with interviewees showing adherence to myths and a devaluation of the severity of street harassment. The gender of the bureaucrats and their experience with prior victimization by this type of harassment also seem to play an important role in the implementation of the Article under analysis. This research thus offers not only new insights on the perpetuation of gender violence but also new applicabilities of the street level bureaucracy theory.