ABSTRACT. Research on street level bureaucracy has extensively examined how frontline workers treat citizens differently based on demographic characteristics, raising concerns about fairness and impartiality (Assouline et al., 2022; Pedersen & Nielsen, 2020; van Heteren et al., 2025). In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the reverse phenomenon—citizens’ differential treatment of frontline workers. Although emerging studies show that citizens sometimes express preferences related to workers’ gender, ethnicity, or other attributes (Alecu, 2020; de Boer, 2020), little is known about how such situations are experienced and handled at the frontline (Halling et al. 2025). This gap is important because accommodating citizen preferences can place key bureaucratic values in tension: responsiveness to individual needs may conflict with universalism, efficiency, and the protection and well being of employees. This paper explores how frontline workers and supervisors perceive and manage citizen requests or behaviors that treat workers differently based on personal characteristics. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from the street-level bureaucracy literature, it analyzes qualitative data from 25 semi structured interviews with home care assistants and supervisors in the Danish home care sector. This context—marked by high staff diversity, intimate work performed in citizens’ homes, and significant resource pressures—provides an extreme yet illustrative case for examining these dynamics. Findings show that frontline workers and supervisors rely on pragmatic, situational judgments that balance responsiveness, impartiality, professional norms, efficiency, and employee protection. Their decisions draw on legal guidelines, professional expertise, and normative assessments of what is appropriate. While such pragmatic workarounds help resolve immediate tensions, they may also lead to inconsistencies in service delivery, with implications for equity, organizational coherence, and the long term sustainability of frontline work.

ABSTRACT. This article analyses what shapes street-level bureaucrats’ responsiveness, i.e. the extent to which they are willing to adapt interactions to citizens’ individual situation. Although responsiveness is central to mitigate the exclusionary effects of administrative burdens, the literature offers only few profound insights on the conditions under which frontline bureaucrats behave accordingly. We therefore systematically test and compare three theoretical explanations for variation in frontline responsiveness. Firstly, we take into account the role of citizens’ need- and earned-based deservingness. Secondly, we assume that bureaucrats’ equity- vs. equality-attitudes determine their actions. Thirdly, we consider their demographic, professional and organizational socialization. Empirically, we use data from a survey experiment with 3,023 street-level bureaucrats in German local administrations. Germany, with its strong legalistic tradition emphasising formal equality and rule compliance, constitutes a ‘least-likely’ case for equity-oriented responsiveness. At the same time, German public administration has increasingly turned towards citizen-oriented service delivery, creating a normative conflict that is particularly visible in street-level work. In the experiment, responsiveness is measured by assessing how likely participants are to reschedule a meeting at the same day that a client fails to attend on time. The deservingness cues are experimentally varied through different reasons for the delay. Equity-orientations were operationalized through bureaucrats’ attitudes towards a series of statements regarding service provision principles. For capturing their socialization, we examine respondents’ gender, their education (law/social work), and their administrative domain (service-/regulation-oriented). The analysis firstly compares single effects. Secondly, we perform a moderated mediation analysis to test whether bureaucrats’ equity-orientation interacts with citizen attributes, and whether the socialization effects operate through shaping bureaucrats’ attitudes. Our comprehensive and integrated test of the independent and joint effects on frontline bureaucrats’ willingness to mitigate adverse impacts of formalized burdens holds important implications for comparative street-level bureaucracy research on equality and equity.

ABSTRACT. Public service encounters, where state representatives and citizens purposefully interact (Goodsell, 1981), are crucial for policy implementation and successful public service delivery. We posit that successful public service delivery depends on high-quality interactions as this facilitates outcomes such as necessary information sharing and mutual understanding. To date, public administration research on these citizen-state interactions focuses predominantly on the behaviours or experience from either the perspective of the citizen or the frontline professional (e.g. Nielsen, Nielsen & Bisgaard, 2021; Zacka, 2017; Tummers, Bekkers, Vink & Musheno, 2015). Although recent studies on administrative burden reduction acknowledge the role of the relational dimension, this literature studies one-way communication from state to citizen (Benish et al., 2024). The dynamics of interactions in public service encounters, therefore, remain underexplored, with no clear conceptual framework to study the quality of interaction . This article addresses this gap by asking: How can we conceptualise interaction quality in the context of public service encounters? In this paper, we classify public service encounters based on their service providing or regulatory organisational core task (Jensen, 2018) and a people-processing/people-changing procedural function (Hasenfeld, 1972) which informs a qualitative empirical study. We will observe a variation of public service encounters and supplement this with sequentially conducted semi-structured interviews with frontline professionals and citizen-clients about their experiences of the interaction quality of the encounter (Ritchie, 2003). We use a thematic analysis and axial coding strategy (Saldaña, 2013) guided by four sensitising concepts – rapport, mutual trust, psychological safety and feeling heard. By combining inductive and deductive analytic approaches, we empirically explore which themes and elements are relevant to the conceptualisation of the quality of interaction in the public service encounter.

ABSTRACT. Interactions between frontline workers and citizens typically occur under conditions of resource scarcity, time pressure, informational constraints, high workloads, and competing demands, which often expose frontline workers to situations of violence and aggression. Research has analyzed violence in policing, where risk, exposure to life-threatening situations, rights violations, and the use of force are intrinsic to the work of police. However, other frontline workers such as nurses, social workers, principals, and teachers also experience multiple forms of violence, including verbal abuse, threats, harassment, bullying, and physical aggression, that occur between citizens, against workers or due to the broader contexts marked by inequality, social vulnerability, and entrenched violence. This study seeks to contribute to this debate by analyzing how violence affects the interactions between frontline workers and citizens in social assistance, education, and healthcare. While the literature has advanced understanding of frontline workers’ coping strategies, it remains limited in explaining bureaucrat–citizen interactions, including interpretation of violence and client categorization. The analysis focused on highly vulnerable territories in São Paulo, which is the country’s largest city and characterized by high levels of inequality and violence. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of 140 semi-structured interviews with frontline workers in social assistance, education, and healthcare in Cracolândia, São Mateus, and M’Boi Mirim. The analysis is abductive, involving a two-stage coding process linking theory and empirical data and the identification of patterns of convergence and divergence across policies and territories. This study shows that when violence intersects encounters, frontline workers’ interpretations of violence and client categorization involved cultural expectations, relational and institutional powers, and practical knowledge and judgments, disciplining and controlling, potentially triggering other violent interactions, moralizing, or educating.

ABSTRACT. Even though explicitly prohibited by law from engaging in politics, civil servants in Turkey are widely viewed to be antagonistic to the party-in-power, instead supporting opposition actors with nationalist-secularist visions. In turn, pro-government media, too, often depicts bureaucrats as anti-democratic actors embedded within the state structure, claiming that bureaucrats’ archaic and self-aggrandizing visions conflict with the economically liberal and socially conservative agenda of Erdogan-led governments. While the legal code strived to keep politics out of bureaucratic praxis, how did it come to permeate all aspects of bureaucracies and how does this prevalence affect the subjectivities and agency of actors involved?

Drawing on field research with street-level bureaucracies in Istanbul, this presentation attends to the ways in which street-level bureaucrats engage with wider political contestations and debates. It notes two interrelated but diverging dynamics affecting civil servants' political views and engagements: polarisation, which incessantly animates political cleavages and compels ordinary actors to take political positions, and autocratisation, which immensely increases the "cost" of engagements antagonising the government. The presentation first details how street-level bureaucrats increasingly engage in politics, despite its potential risks under autocratic contexts, but reconfigure their politics not in conventional terms (e.g., support for one party’s political agenda) but as radical political demands for equality, transparency, and democracy. I trace this reconfiguration of politics to argue that bureaucratic engagements in political debates and contestations draw on their articulations around self-discipline, duty, and ethics and issue forth a new political subjectivity that reanimates bureaucratic ethos as a vanguard for social change.

The findings highlight how bureaucracies transfigure in the 21st century as a result of pressures from multiple fronts (e.g., deregulation, digitalisation, autocratization) and captures how the political articulations across street-level bureaucratic organisations signal a global shift in political trust and imagination.

ABSTRACT. What happens when street-level bureaucrats employed by the state are expected to carry out policies that conflict with the professional values and ethical commitments that drew them to the field? In Hungary’s post-welfare regime, this question is embedded in a broader boundary struggle over the profession itself. The regime shifts responsibility for social problems from the state to individuals and families and redefines who qualifies as an expert and what counts as legitimate knowledge in addressing societal needs. For many social workers, these transformations have made it increasingly difficult to practise in ways they consider central to the profession. Following Eiró (2022), this raises questions about how frontline workers navigate the contradictions between professional commitments and political directives, particularly when political debate is dominated by moralising and punitive welfare discourse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2023) in family support and child welfare institutions, this paper examines responses by social workers who experience this misalignment. These responses are shaped by social workers’ relationships with local political actors, whose interventions further constrain the space for professional practice. I argue that both professional exit and everyday non-compliance constitute political acts through which street-level bureaucrats contest the state’s projects. For those who experience their work as a calling, leaving becomes a painful rejection of a regime that no longer allows them to answer it. For those who remain, non-compliance takes varied forms – from a child welfare worker’s deliberate “not-writing” that refuses to participate in the over-surveillance of clients, to school social workers who consciously defy legislation that prohibits the discussion of sexual and gender minorities in educational settings because they consider its aims incompatible with their professional and ethical obligations. Following Ortner’s (1995) critique of oversimplified resistance narratives, I approach these acts as complex, embedded in structural constraints and professional commitments.

ABSTRACT. Street-level bureaucrats may obstruct or resist reforms, embrace new policies, or selectively implement them. Compliance and divergence are often linked to policy ambiguity, goal conflicts, organizational pressures, and professional values and moral judgments, leading bureaucrats either to adapt policies to citizens’ needs or to reinforce inequalities. However, little is known about how street-level bureaucrats deal with policy changes in contexts of conflictive and polarized policy ideas. Street-level bureaucrats are not passive in contexts of policy changes; they play a crucial role in representing, legitimizing, reinterpreting, and resisting to policy ideas. Ideas are understood as historically and contextually situated cognitive interpretations of the material world that give meaning to reality. From an ideational perspective, ideas help explain endogenous processes of policy change because they are embedded in institutions and social practices. Institutions are not external to actors; they are constructed and transformed by them. While institutions constrain action by establishing routines and shaping identities, interests, values, and beliefs, they are themselves molded by ideas that become routinized and institutionalized through rules. Moreover, this process is shaped and mediated by discursive practices, such as frames, scripts, myths, narratives, and collective memories, in contexts marked by asymmetries of power, capacities, and resources. Seeking to contribute to this debate, this study aims to deepen the understanding of the role of street-level bureaucrats in the implementation of an educational reform in Brazil characterized by a context of conflictive and polarized policy ideas. The study focuses on Brazil’s secondary education reform, analyzing teachers’ perceptions of this policy change, including how they represent, legitimize, reinterpret, and resist them through discursive practices. Empirically, it draws on document analysis and in-depth interviews with teachers in the state of São Paulo, which has a prior trajectory of secondary education reforms that could facilitate implementation.

ABSTRACT. The paper delves into Isaiah’s journey of attempting to secure government employment in the Prisons Service in Ghana for many years without success, until finally entering training in 2021. Starting as an apprentice he then continues to work for the Service for several years without pay. His failed attempts show that working like an officer and embodying a professional ethos does not enable him to enter the training to become a prison officer. Being identified as ‘hardworking’, Isaiah is advised by prison staff to ‘go and look for the protocol’.

The paper focuses on how Isaiah navigates ‘the protocol’. While the term references a bureaucratic laydown procedure, in the usage of prison staff it switches meaning, suggesting the need for ‘connections’ and political influence to secure a spot on ‘the list’ of accepted applicants for the training. Rather than viewing the messiness of ‘the protocol’ in terms of a binary official/unofficial, formal/informal, I explore how the involved actors interpret and navigate it. Navigating the recruitment process to become a prison officer and ‘following the protocol’ shows images of professionalism of prison staff and distinctions between entering the Service in a “genuine way” versus relying on the use of political influence. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018 and 2021/22 during the recruitment process of the Security Services in Ghana, the paper examines how state actors leverage connections to political actors, high-ranking prison staff and other actors, including myself. It also offers insights into how state actors uphold and reinforce notions of professionalism while distinguishing themselves from politicians. Understanding how prison staff perceive themselves and their professionalism is crucial for their subsequent interactions with clients in their daily work. The paper contributes to ongoing anthropological discussions on the state, (bureaucracies, the public service) and work ethics.

ABSTRACT. Building trust with service users is at the heart of street-level bureaucrats´ work in the welfare state of Finland (Heino et al. 2025; Sundbäck, 2024). A trusting relation is the foundation for street-level bureaucrats giving appropriate guidance and for service users to dare to provide sensitive data. Building trust among migrant background service users requires sensitivity to previous experiences of institutions, to providing accurate information and to working with interpreters and other family members (Schierenbeck & Spehar, 2021; Turtiainen, 2012).

However, despite emerging research on trust and distrust in a street level landscape, we still lack an analytical framework for understanding the “trust-work” street-level bureaucrats do. This article contributes to that research by first, suggesting a framework for understanding trust-work and second, applying the framework to an empiric case. As a starting point, we understand trust-work broadly entailing the strategies, including discretion, that street-level bureaucrats employ to enhance their service users´ trust.

Empirically, we draw on data consisting of individual interviews with 12 child welfare street-level bureaucrats and two group interviews. The bureaucrats worked in the same service unit in a metropolitan area, focusing exclusively on young people and families with an immigrant background. The team provides intensive family work (perhetyö), which is one of the most important preventive services in Finnish child protection and welfare (Ilmarinen et al., 2023).

We respond to the following research questions: what does trust-work entail for street-level bureaucrats? What strategies do they apply in their trust-work? How does the context impact their trust-work? According to the preliminary analysis we suggest a framework including a) meaning of trust-work b) mechanisms of trust-work c) context of trust-work and d) outcomes of trust-work.

ABSTRACT. This article explores the expanding psychologization of the Danish introduction programme, understood as part of a wider emotional and therapeutic turn in the welfare state. In this context, psychologization refers to the growing prominence of “mental health” including the use of psychological framings and therapeutic logics in refugee reception. Drawing on qualitative interviews with caseworkers in two municipalities, participant observations of encounters between refugees and caseworkers, and regulatory documents, the article examines the role of “mental health” in Danish introduction programmes and to what extent caseworkers consider it as part of their professional mandate to assess, monitor, and support the wellbeing of newly arrived refugees. Across municipalities, conversations about trauma, wellbeing, and psychosocial difficulties are gradually woven into encounters between caseworkers and refugees, for example through the implementation of trauma informed practice. While caseworkers often engage with genuine intentions to provide holistic care and address multifaceted post-migration challenges, the expanding focus on mental health produces new forms of intimacy within a system still oriented toward rapid labour market integration. This raises two concerns. First, it foregrounds questions about the kinds of personal disclosure and emotional transparency refugees must perform to access appropriate support. Second, it highlights the growing ambiguity surrounding the competencies expected from caseworkers, who are increasingly required to carry out mental health related assessments and provide emotional support which exceeds their traditional training. Building on scholarship on the care control nexus and street level bureaucracy, the article argues that the emerging emphasis on “holistic care” and “mental heath” embeds new forms of intimate welfare that simultaneously promise support and enact subtle modes of governance. It invites a critical reconsideration of what psychologized care practices entail in contemporary refugee reception, and what they demand—both emotionally and professionally—from caseworkers and claimants alike.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents doctoral research examining the role of welfare rights advice and racial inequalities in accessing social security. This working paper constitutes an initial phase of my project so will invite engagement with the conceptual framing, literature and the research design.

In the UK formal and informal welfare rights advice has proliferated within the context of austerity, welfare reform and an increasingly hostile, digital and bureaucratic social security system. This fragmented ‘ecosystem of support’ risks amplifying racial inequalities in access to social security (Edmiston et al., 2022). Within this fragmented landscape, minority-led voluntary and community organisations play an important yet under-resourced and poorly-understood role addressing gaps in mainstream services. These organisations often provide culturally competent and trust-based support and yet remain structurally marginalised within funding and partnership hierarchies.

It is actors within these organisations, as well as mainstream actors, with which this research is concerned, in particular their role supporting racially marginalised communities. By extending Lipsky’s (1980; 2010) account of street-level bureaucracy, the research foregrounds advisers’ roles as translators and interpreters of law and policy (Kirwan, 2017), exercising discretion under conditions of austerity, resource scarcity, and performance pressures. Their work entails ethical and affective labour, including prioritising vulnerability and crafting “ethical fixes” to secure support in constrained circumstances (Koch & James, 2022). In understanding their work as such, this research can explore how such practices may mitigate harm and challenge exclusionary decisions, but can also risk entrenching or amplifying racial inequalities.

ABSTRACT. Asylum adjudication in Switzerland has become increasingly judicialized, with decisions issued by the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) routinely appealed before the Federal Administrative Court (Kawar & Miaz, 2021). Historically, legal aid services (LAS) established by charitable and activist organizations have played a crucial role in enabling asylum seekers to contest SEM decisions and in levelling the odds of asylum appeals (Schnell & Miaz, 2025).

The 2019 reform of the Asylum Act fundamentally reconfigured this landscape by introducing state-funded “free legal advice” within the Federal Asylum Centers, where the accelerated asylum procedure is conducted. While officially intended to enhance asylum seekers’ legal protection and access to law, the reform simultaneously sought to shorten appeal deadlines and reduce the volume of appeals (and appeals’ rate). It also introduced new managerial standards and “quality requirements” tied to public funding (Eule, 2022), creating incentives for LAS to assume a less adversarial role.

This paper examines the tensions and dilemmas that emerged within the legal aid sector during and after the reform process––some LAS supported the reform and applied for state mandates, while others opposed it––, as well as how it impacted LAS’ practices and strategies. For those participating in the reformed procedure, new practices and identities have emerged as LAS navigate their transformation into SLOs formally integrated into policy implementation.

Drawing on research, participant observation 2010 and 2012, forty interviews (2010–2014; 2018–2019; 2025–2026), and document analysis, this paper continues the literature on how policy politics in SLOs (Brodkin, 1990) is pursued in juridical and judicial interactions with legal intermediaries and Courts impacting how law is eventually implemented. The paper finally argues that the reform didn’t achieve its goal of reducing the appeals’ rate, notably because certain LAS continue developing litigation strategies to change asylum law and its implementation.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the shifting role of social workers acting as street-level bureaucrats within the framework of Minimum Income Schemes (MIS). Drawing on a comparative empirical study conducted in Milan (Italy) and Strasbourg (France), the research investigates how practitioners navigate the structural tension between their professional ethic of care and the institutional imperative of control. Through 32 interviews with social workers, the study identifies diverse manifestations of discretion shaped by specific national policy designs and local organizational cultures. While both contexts exhibit what Dubois (1999) defines as the "normalization of control," significant divergences emerge, in the Italian context, specific systemic pressures often lead to an "aseptic approach", in addition to those already identified by Sánchez-Castiñeira (2024) towards beneficiaries, where the bureaucratic fulfillment of procedures overshadows the relational dimension of social work. Furthermore, the research highlights a crucial evolution in the logic of street-level bureaucracy: the transition from control aimed at work activation to new forms of "presence-based control." A key finding of this study is also the emergence of an "extension of conditionality" towards social workers themselves. In this new paradigm, beneficiaries risk being penalized not only for their own non-compliance but also as a result of the operational constraints or performance of their case managers. By analyzing these dynamics, the paper addresses how the professional mandate of social work is redefined under the weight of organizational imperatives. It argues that these new forms of conditionality limit the possibility for social workers to act as change-agents, instead pushing them towards a more technical and administrative role that challenges the core principles and ethics of the profession.

ABSTRACT. Street-level bureaucrats implement public policies in contexts marked by limited resources, organizational constraints, and ongoing uncertainty. In everyday practice, a key way of coping with these conditions is the use of administrative categories—such as eligibility labels, procedural statuses, thresholds, and standardized case types—that help make decisions manageable and defensible. This paper argues that these categories are not simply neutral tools for organizing information, but practical arrangements that shape how discretion is exercised at the frontline.

Drawing on street-level bureaucracy research, the paper focuses on what is here referred to as categorization work: the ordinary activity through which complex personal situations are translated into administratively workable cases. Forms, documentation requirements, eligibility criteria, and digital case-management systems play a central role in this process. Rather than merely supporting decision-making, they define what counts as relevant information, delimit available options, and structure how decisions can be justified within the organization.

The paper suggests that administrative categorization does not reduce discretion as such. Instead, discretion is reconfigured and, in many situations, displaced. Frontline judgement tends to move away from open-ended assessments of individual circumstances toward decisions about procedural alignment: determining which category applies, whether the available evidence is sufficient, and how to deal with borderline cases. This shift has consequences for how accountability is experienced in frontline work, as decisions are increasingly assessed in terms of consistency, traceability, and procedural robustness rather than contextual responsiveness alone.

By paying attention to categorization as an everyday practice, the paper contributes to discussions on discretion and accountability in street-level bureaucracy. It shows how seemingly mundane administrative arrangements shape the enactment of public policy and the concrete ways in which citizens encounter public services.

ABSTRACT. Street-level bureaucrats are often approached as guided by their professional identity, professional standards, and professional ethics. In contrast, the exercise of discretionary power among professional SLBs without profession is understudied. To better understand street-level implementation exercised by street-level bureaucrats without a profession, this study draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with School Attendance Officers (SAOs) in Israel (eliciting 109 case stories). Findings uncover how, through sensemaking, professional SLBs without profession, continuously establish their profession during street-level implementation. Additionally, findings emphasize how discretion becomes a key resource for constructing and legitimizing a role that operates without a fully-fledged profession behind it. Specifically, our analysis distinguishes frontstage and backstage aspects of street-level implementation without profession. Direct-delivery interactions with the target population encompass four frontstage orientations that reflect four different facets of SAO’s work, that is, individual therapeutic work, mediation and brokering, child advocacy and rights protection, as well as case management and coordination. Moreover, SAOs move between the four frontstage orientations depending on the situation, the perceived needs of the child, and the actors involved. Interactions with organizational partners encompass six distinct practices that combine sense-breaking and sense-giving, through which SAOs renegotiate the meaning of their role, establish shared procedures, and claim expertise. These practices illuminate how a marginal, weakly defined position is gradually reshaped into a meaningful professional role. A twofold contribution emerged from shifting attention to professional street-level bureaucrats without a profession. First, further emphasizes the reciprocity between the frontstage and backstage of street-level implementation. Second, a better understanding of discretion not only as an inherent feature of street-level work, but also as a generative force in building an emergent street-level profession.

ABSTRACT. Social equity has long been considered a foundational value of public administration, yet the behavioral drivers behind equity-oriented decision-making at the street level remain understudied. Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) exercise discretion under uncertainty, high workload, and emotional pressure, settings where psychological processes, lived experiences, and identity play central roles. Yet, the underling mechanisms for their decision to administer social equity remains understudied.

Drawing on 64 in-depth qualitative interviews and three focus groups with social workers, teachers, and police officers in Israel, this study explores how SLBs' personal backgrounds, particularly shared life experiences with their clients, shape their sense of responsibility toward social equity. 

Our findings suggest that SLBs who have experienced similar forms of disadvantage or marginalization are more attuned to related injustices in their clients' lives, as shared identity cues foster a strong sense of identification with those clients. These shared experiences function as a form of representative bureaucracy, evoking a “wounded healer” dynamic in which SLBs prioritize clients who mirror their own struggles as a way to “set things right.”

Although these actions may not always align with broader normative frameworks of equity, SLBs believe they are promoting justice through these targeted efforts. This research contributes new insight into the subjective and experiential foundations of equity promotion at the frontlines of public service, especially in the context of growing inequality and strained public systems in Israel.

ABSTRACT. Existing research on equal treatment by street-level professionals often starts from specific conceptualizations which are based on normative viewpoints. Equality is often conceptualized as treating similar cases alike, which is a normative principle which leads many scholars to study whether, how, and why street-level professionals discriminate. Equity is conceptualized as considering citizens’ unequal starting positions to achieve more equal outcomes. This is a normative principle which underlies studies on what motivates street-level professionals to go the extra mile for citizens in need. While invaluable, these studies typically overlook professionals’ own perspectives on what constitutes equal treatment in practice. It is important to consider this, as existing research has shown that professionals’ beliefs are consequential for their decision-making, and because current policies within the paradigm of public value governance emphasize the relevance of professionals’ discretion and own judgment to allow for responsive service delivery. This study adopts a cultural sociological approach to conceptualize equal treatment from the bottom-up. Interviews and focus groups among 46 street-level professionals with regulatory and service producing core tasks were conducted. This study has found four distinct heuristics of equality in frontline work: 1) maximizing consistent process; 2) reducing blind spots and biases; 3) achieving similar decisions on similar cases; 4) aspiring to more equal positions in society. The findings indicate that the heuristics are activated depending on different characteristics of the situation at hand, and that the content of the heuristics is shaped by organizational core task. This study contributes to existing literature by providing a more fine-grained conceptualization of equal treatment, which goes beyond the dominant equity-equality dichotomy, contributing to contextualized theorizing.

ABSTRACT. This scoping literature review, based on PRISMA-Scopus, focuses on how teachers can promote equity in the implementation of educational policies. Much is known about how street-level bureaucrats (SLB) can reproduce socio-economic inequalities. However, little is known about which of their practices can reduce inequalities among students. Search was conducted in Web of Science and Scielo using keywords referring to “Street Level bureaucrat”, “Teacher”, and “Equity”. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria, 117 papers were selected for inclusion in the review. The papers were analyzed by year of publication, main concepts and theories, and teachers’ practices towards equity promotion. Most papers focus on one dimension of inequality, such as gender, race, socioeconomic status, special needs, and territory. A smaller number of papers have an intersectional approach. Many papers analyze the impact of interventions on teacher practices on students. Some practices and pedagogical approaches relate to the promotion of equity by teachers, including critical pedagogy, student-centered teaching, classroom management strategies, anti-racist education, the integration of students' perspectives and languages, and alternative assessment practices. We conclude there is a gap in the current research on how teachers can promote equity in the implementation of educational policies. There are few studies investigating how teachers (who are not under a research intervention) can promote equity in their daily practices. The assumption in most papers is that teachers “naturally” reproduce inequalities; therefore, they are the objects of interventions. We propose that examining how some teachers address inequalities can enhance bottom-up strategies for promoting equity. This systematic mapping contributes to the field of equity studies by identifying and synthesizing teacher-led strategies. Furthermore, the findings are intended to inform subsequent research, particularly in contexts of high social and economic inequality, and to support evidence-based decision-making in educational policies aimed at reducing disparities.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the transformation of street-level bureaucracy in contexts where the state has retreated from local communities and formal frontline actors have withdrawn from welfare provision. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a deprived seaside town in England, I shift the analytical lens to a wider range of local state, private, and third-sector actors—such as foodbank volunteers, community workers, and librarians—who have moved from ancillary roles to becoming the "hidden social services" of the local state. It is argued that street-level bureaucracy does not disappear under austerity localism; rather, it is displaced, redistributed, and intensely moralised. In these improvised infrastructures, discretionary practice becomes a localised negotiation of "deservingness" and "localness," shaped by scarcity, organisational risk, and a persistent crisis mentality. The paper demonstrates how these actors navigate the "politics of non-presence." Here, the absence of statutory services acts as a governing force, structuring expectations of care and reorganising the ethical labour of those left to manage the gaps. Ultimately, this paper conceptualises street-level bureaucracy as a fragmented, improvised infrastructure that persists and transforms precisely through state withdrawal, redefining the boundaries of citizenship and responsibility at the margins.

ABSTRACT. This presentation discusses how street-level bureaucrats in three municipal labor market units in Sweden navigate between a caregiving rationality and a workfare-focused rationality in their daily interactions with people positioned as ”distant from the labor market”. The analysis shows a twofold professional practice where care is prioritized, while sometimes also aligning with workfare rationalities, thus functioning as a disciplining mechanism. Findings point to how these daily practices both reproduce and challenge welfare boundaries, and how an experience-based critique may emerge within specific institutional, organizational and political frameworks. Finally, the results highlight the importance of street-level knowledge for understanding welfare practices and renegotiations.

ABSTRACT. Over the last decades, activation and employment services have been reshaped by successive governance reforms, often strengthening conditionality and performance management at the street level. In contrast, Singapore’s new nationwide social empowerment programme, Community Link+ (ComLink+), appears to be a post-New Public Management (NPM) attempt to institutionalise an enabling, relational approach to activation for low-income families with young children. At the heart of ComLink+ is a new frontline role – the family coach – who accompanies families in working towards longer-term ambitions such as stable employment and home ownership.

The project examines family coaches as street-level bureaucrats operating within the social assistance system and explores how collaborative innovation and co-creation are enacted in their everyday work. Family coaches are empowered with incentive levers (for example, a cash incentive to stay on job and debt-matching scheme) and are expected to work with each family to co-develop customised action plans that are tailored to each family’s needs, and sometimes with the support of community partners. The study asks: how do family coaches balance soft activation logics with responsiveness to clients’ broader needs; how do they manage the encounter with families where ambitions, risks, and constraints are negotiated; and what organisational and governance conditions enable or constrain co-creation at the frontline?

The study will draw on interviews with family coaches, managers, policymakers and service users, complemented by document analysis and field observations. More broadly, the study situates ComLink+ within emerging post-NPM approaches to activation that emphasise enabling rather than demanding elements. It investigates how national-level ambitions for collaborative, relational support are translated – and sometimes diluted or reworked – in street-level practice, and discusses the implications for understanding innovation in frontline social support, particularly in a context that has not historically relied on strong benefit conditionality or faced intense social expenditure pressures.

ABSTRACT. For over two decades, Australian employment services have been dominated by a compliance driven model that prioritised surveillance and sanctions. This logic was reflected in ParentsNext, a compulsory pre employment program widely criticised for intensifying trauma and disproportionately disadvantaging women. In November 2024, the Commonwealth replaced ParentsNext with Parent Pathways, a voluntary, mentor led model signalling a broader ‘relational/affective turn’ in employment services (Penz et al., 2017). This paper examines what this shift means in practice at the street level. Drawing on ongoing research with Parent Pathways providers, frontline mentors, and participants, it asks: how does voluntary participation reconfigure the work of street level bureaucrats, and how do citizens experience this change? As sanctions recede as the primary policy tool, frontline workers must rely more heavily on relationships and care labour to secure engagement. This creates new forms of discretion, emotional work, and professional identity, while also reshaping accountability and performance pressures. Preliminary findings suggest that while voluntary participation can strengthen trust, it also generates significant tensions. Program uptake has been slower than expected, with recruitment and retention shaped by participants’ caring responsibilities, experiences of family violence and, critically, the quality of the mentor relationship. This raises important questions about how relational work is cultivated, institutionalised, and resourced within marketised employment services. Participants generally welcome the program, yet experience it as constrained by narrow definitions of ‘approved’ study and restrictions on paid work. Given that 96 per cent of participants are women, these limits have significant implications for women’s broader access to work, education, and community life. By treating Parent Pathways as a live experiment in post-compliance welfare, the paper offers insights of international relevance for jurisdictions moving toward voluntary, relational employment services.

ABSTRACT. In Italy, parents who resign within one year of childbirth can access NASPI unemployment benefits, yet they are simultaneously required to comply with activation conditionalities through Public Employment Services (PES) and the GOL programme. This policy design recognises care-related exit as legitimate while demanding immediate labour-market re-integration, producing a regulatory short-circuit that disproportionately affects mothers. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy theory and research on organisational discretion, we ask how frontline workers reconcile the coexistence of protective and conditionality logics and how these adjustments shape the motherhood penalty. The article combines longitudinal administrative evidence from the National Labour Inspectorate on validated parental resignations (2013–2024) with qualitative materials collected in three employment centres in Northern Italy (36 days of observation; 139 observed SLB-users interviews; 9 observed cases involving mothers who voluntary resigned after childbirth; and 21 interviews with frontline workers and coordinators). Observations show that mothers routinely contest the meaning and feasibility of “activation” when resignation was driven by the impossibility of reconciling work and care, generating policy–client conflict and role tension for operators. We show that discretion is not only individual but institutionalised. Employment centres develop bottom-up routines that classify these users as “light” cases: they keep them in-house rather than referring them to external providers, minimise appointments (often remotely), steer them toward the least demanding GOL pathway, and, when necessary, re-calibrate assessment scores to fit required categories. These practices ensure formal compliance while shielding mothers from sanctions and preserving benefit eligibility, thereby making organisational discretion a gendered safety valve within a familialist care regime. The article contributes to debates on welfare conditionality and policy incoherence by showing how frontline classifications and routines simultaneously mitigate harm and re-make activation policy in practice.

ABSTRACT. Recent scholarship has increasingly drawn attention to the political dynamics inherent to street-level work (e.g. Gofen, 2024; Lotta et al., 2025; Thomann et al.,2023). This literature has examined what specific targets or issues are subject to political pressure; the strategies street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) use to navigate, political influence; and how these dynamics shape citizens’ experiences. Research pays limited attention to the role of political actors themselves and to evolving political–administrative relations between political actors and SLBs, with few exceptions (Davidovitz & Cohen, 2023; Stauffer & Hadorn, 2024). This paper shifts the analytical focus of street-level work to political–administrative actors and asks how they balance responsiveness towards citizens with other objectives when governing street-level teams or organisations. Empirically, it examines the Dutch youth care system, a domain characterised by an emphasis on responsiveness, diverse service provision, complex referral processes, and persistently high costs. Drawing on qualitative research – including approximately 100 hours of ethnographic observation of four aldermen and interviews with an additional twenty – the study shows how local aldermen as political-administrative actors increasingly position themselves closer to street-level teams. Their steering practices include centralising guiding principles that partly replace detailed rules, using performance data as starting points for dialogue, and actively engaging with implementation problems. In some instances, aldermen are also informed about or involved in complex individual cases requiring customized services. The paper contributes to the literature on street-level bureaucracy by illuminating changing political-administrative relations between political actors and the street-level. It shows how the closer positioning of political actors to street-level organisations may support discretionary space, but – particularly under conditions of decentralisation – may also produce substantial variation in local practices and outcomes across municipalities.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how school principals operate as street-level managers in confronting processes of politicization in a politically sensitive and volatile wartime context. Prior research has demonstrated that the dichotomy between politics and administration is frequently blurred, showing how elected officials intervene in everyday bureaucratic decision-making, including the work of frontline public servants. While this scholarship has illuminated the permeability of the political–administrative boundary, less attention has been paid to how street-level managers actively regulate that permeability from within public organizations, particularly under conditions of heightened political polarization.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Israeli school principals conducted during wartime, the study investigates how principals interpret political discourse, respond to actions and statements by elected officials, and exercise managerial discretion to filter, translate, or block political content from permeating school spaces. The findings demonstrate that principals function as educational gatekeepers: they absorb external political pressures and strategically contain politicization in order to preserve pedagogical integrity and institutional neutrality. Through this boundary-regulating work, principals manage the flow of political influence into frontline educational settings.

By conceptualizing school leaders as street-level managers engaged in the containment of politicization under volatile wartime conditions, the study expands street-level bureaucracy theory beyond policy implementation to include managerial gatekeeping and the protection of institutional neutrality in politically charged environments.

ABSTRACT. How do newly elected politicians understand and navigate their relationship with public administration, particularly street-level bureaucrats, during the transition into local government? This paper examines how newly elected politicians perceive, interpret, and engage with street-level bureaucrats as they assume executive power. We focus on politicians’ expectations about bureaucratic capacity, loyalty, discretion, and resistance, and how these perceptions evolve during their first encounters with public administration. For new politicians, the executive transition poses significant challenges. Incoming leaders must quickly learn how to manage administrative rules, personnel, and routines while simultaneously advancing new policy priorities. In this process, street-level bureaucrats emerge as central actors, given their proximity to citizens, their discretion in policy implementation, and their capacity to enable or constrain political agendas. Yet, existing scholarship on political–administrative relations has largely overlooked this initial transition stage, particularly in subnational and comparative contexts and from the perspective of outsider politicians. We adopt a comparative subnational research design, drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with newly elected mayors in Brazilian municipalities and mayors and aldermen in Flemish municipalities following the 2024 local elections. Preliminary findings show that new politicians initially perceive street-level bureaucrats as both indispensable and problematic. Interviewees report difficulties in understanding complex administrative rules and express concerns about resistance, loyalty to previous administrations, and informal practices within the bureaucracy. In both contexts, politicians interpret bureaucratic resistance as taking subtle and creative forms, especially during early interactions. Over time, however, many outsiders report that relationships improve through informal negotiation and open dialogue. Overall, the paper highlights how outsider politicians make sense of street-level bureaucrats during democratic transitions of power, shedding light on the informal, relational, and interpretive dimensions of political–administrative interaction at the local level.

ABSTRACT. This working paper investigates the governance of small and minority religious communities in Sweden, with a particular focus on ethno-religious communities such as Mandaeans, Alevis, and Assyrians/Syriacs. While such communities play crucial roles in refugee reception, welfare provision, ritual continuity, cultural memory, and everyday moral support, they remain understudied and institutionally marginal compared to larger and more established religious organisations. Their hybrid position between religion, migration, ethnicity, and civil society makes them important actors in integration processes, yet their recognition and sustainability remain contingent on state-defined frameworks of legitimacy.

The analysis centres on the Swedish Agency for Support to Faith Communities (SST) and its merger into the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society (MUCF), arguing that this reform may signal a broader transformation of religious governance in Sweden. Religion is increasingly reframed through the language of civil society, democracy, and social cohesion, even as it becomes more politically salient in debates on migration, national identity, and public values.

Drawing on scholarship on religious governance, recognition, and street-level bureaucracy, the paper argues that recognition functions not only as a mechanism through which minority religions gain access to state support, but also as a framework that shapes how they must organise, represent, and justify themselves. Through membership thresholds, democracy criteria, and organisational requirements, state institutions shape how minority religions become visible and legitimate. For small ethno-religious communities whose membership is structurally limited, these frameworks may create particular vulnerabilities. The paper contributes to debates on secularism, diversity governance, and public religion by examining how minority faith communities negotiate recognition within a changing welfare-state context.

ABSTRACT. This article introduces the concept of strategic ambiguity as a theoretical lens for understanding how feedback mechanisms shape the formulation, implementation, and constraints of migration policy over time. It builds on research which shows that in areas marked by political contestation and normative uncertainty — such as migration — policymaking often becomes symbolic, designed to signal action rather than achieve stated goals. The strategic use of ambiguity allows policymakers to rely on deliberate vagueness and interpretive openness to navigate between competing pressures, facilitating political compromise and pleasing voters. While ambiguity can enable reform in the short term, we argue that it can also redistribute interpretive authority to frontline actors responsible for implementation, thereby reshaping power relations within migration governance. Ambiguity thus opens new and unexpected avenues for street-level bureaucrats and public servants in translating policy into practice.

Empirically, the paper analyses the introduction and implementation of access to health care for undocumented migrants in Sweden during 2010–2025. A highly contested issue, we focus on core elements of the policy: who should qualify as a patient, and what healthcare they should be able to access, issues which were left open to reach a political compromise. The analysis shows how health care professionals and unions have harnessed the discretionary authority and resisted subsequent attempts at governing the implementation of the law. These contestations can be understood as struggles between political and medical frames of classification, illustrating how strategic ambiguity not only facilitates political compromise but also reshapes the scope of discretion at the frontline, with significant consequences for migrants’ rights and access to services.

ABSTRACT. Large and unforeseen inflows of refugee claimants are nothing new, having occurred periodically in recent decades. In the Northern European context, the number of “spontaneous refugees” (the predecessor to the term ‘“asylum seekers”) increased considerably during the 1980s. Since then, the question of how states should respond to individuals claiming protection status has remained a source of political conflict – and an unresolved challenge.

Previous research has examined state responses to inflows of refugees from various perspectives. This paper seeks to contribute with new research insights by directing attention to the frontline organisations “in the middle.” In addition to fulfilling a vital role on behalf of the state in addressing the legal, humanitarian, and economic needs of individuals seeking refugee protection (Breidahl & Brodkin, 2024), the paper argues that frontline organisations can also be understood as crucial sites for knowledge production and political learning. Thus, the central aim is to cast light on how frontline organisations, under some circumstances, can serve as producers of so-called “tacit knowledge,” “downwards” though their everyday frontline practices and “upwards” as influencers of learning processes within the state bureaucracy (Gofen et al., 2023).

The article accentuates these analytical arguments by drawing on empirical historical case studies of two central humanitarian organisations that have acted on behalf of the state in managing refugee governance: the Danish Red Cross Asylum (RCA), which since 1984 has been responsible for managing asylum seekers’ everyday lives while they awaited a decision on their application for a residence permit, and the Danish Refugee Council, which from 1954 to 1999 served as the main operator of integration services for newly arrived (recognised) refugees.

ABSTRACT. Welfare states depend on the motivated, discretionary effort of public servants who genuinely engage with citizens and their problems — yet that engagement is severely strained. Experiences of meaninglessness and alienation in public service are well documented, but there is a gap in the literature when it comes to analytically identifying the elements at the most granular level of job design — that is, the tasks — which are experienced as either alienating or resonant. The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytical framework focused on public servants' experiences of what they do, whether they resonate with a given task or are alienated by it, and to explore the gray zones in between. The paper synthesizes Arendt's theory of the human condition, Rosa's concept of resonance, and the notion of alienation into a tripartite framework that analytically considers public service tasks as three modes of engagement: labour, work, and action. The framework distinguishes between (1) re-occurring, ostensibly pointless bureaucratic labour, which only functions to self-sustain the organization; (2) instrumental bureaucratic work, producing durable organizational artifacts, which may or may not "make sense" to the individual public servant depending on their perception of and alignment with institutional means-ends reasoning; and (3) resonating pluralist action, where public servants act with discretion and respond to situational circumstances and the individuals they stand face to face with. Tasks are coded along three analytical dimensions: temporality, product permanence, and relationality. The framework is applied to existing qualitative data from Danish unemployment caseworkers. The analysis indicates that relationality and goal alignment are crucial for public servants to resonate with their tasks and associate them with meaning and self-efficacy. The paper constitutes a first step in developing a research agenda on alienation and resonance in public service tasks and its consequences for recruitment and retention in the public sector.

ABSTRACT. As part of a broader paradigm of service user participation, participatory approaches have become increasingly central in social work documentation practices in both research and practice. Participatory recordkeeping is a rather loosely defined concept referring to approaches that take the service user into account in the documentation process and emphasize the individual’s right to the information written about them. However, the significance of language in this context has been almost entirely overlooked.

In this presentation, I introduce an article that examines how language is interpreted within the frames of participatory recordkeeping as understood by Finnish child welfare practitioners. The data consists of individual interviews with twelve practitioners and two group interviews, each involving five participants from the same multidisciplinary team. The team includes social instructors, nurses, a senior social instructor, and a project manager, all of whom work with children, young people, and families with migrant backgrounds.

Our analysis identified that practitioners draw on (1) the institutional frame as their primary lens for interpreting participatory recordkeeping, while simultaneously challenging this frame through (2) the ethical resistance frame, and (3) the language awareness frame. The institutional frame reflects a universalist work practice in which language is treated as a neutral instrument, whereas the ethical resistance frame adopts a rejecting stance toward the practice due to its distancing and technical‑administrative nature. The language awareness frame questions the so‑called language‑neutral character of participatory recordkeeping and reflects on how language shapes power relations and linguistic inequality. The frames reflect Nordic language ideologies and illustrate how overlooking language as a significant factor in recordkeeping practices creates tension for practitioners attempting to engage in participatory recordkeeping. There is a significant need to increase language awareness in social work and to develop language‑aware documentation practices that support the participatory documentation of minority‑language service users.

ABSTRACT. Community-level healthcare workers in India operate under significant constraints, including high caseloads, resource shortages, and inadequate formal communication systems. To address these challenges, many have adopted informal digital practices, using personal mobile phones and applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook to coordinate care, share information, and maintain real-time communication with peers and supervisors. Drawing on qualitative data from fieldwork conducted with frontline level healthcare workers in India, Anganwadi and ASHA workers, this paper examines how healthcare workers are making unregulated shadow IT systems to get their work done. Data were analyzed using abductive coding informed by Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy framework. The three major findings are as follows: First, workers are making their own WhatsApp groups to share quick updates for e.g. when a patient needs a referral or when medicines are running low, because the official system is too slow. Second, they’re using these apps to swap advice and help each other figure out tough cases right away, instead of waiting for formal instructions. And third, supervisors are using this to monitor work, using messages to check in and give fast feedback, often skipping the usual paperwork because it’s just easier and faster. We argue that mobile phone use represents a form of informal digital solution for these frontline healthcare workers that allows them to navigate systemic gaps and negotiate governance arrangements. These practices blur the boundaries between formal and informal systems, raising critical questions about formal healthcare governance structures, regulation, data privacy, and the institutionalization of grassroots digital solutions. The study contributes to understanding how discretion is exercised through technology in resource-constrained health systems.

ABSTRACT. Street-level work often conflicts with a pure logic of bureaucracy. Practitioners go beyond articulated rules and use discretionary reasoning in ways that are oriented towards care and treatment rather than simply rights and formal decisions. While such frontline behavior has been registered in much street-level literature, we lack an analytical framework for capturing and assessing breaks with the bureaucratic logic.

In this paper, we propose a framework of professionalism. We develop this through a reinterpretation of the case story “Parking Lot Therapy” told by a rehabilitation counsellor. The story was first introduced by Maynard-Moody and Musheno, and has been used by Zacka as an illustration of the shortcomings of perspective of bureaucracy. As Zacka sees it, bureaucratic modes of reasoning must be supported by a more complex set of role dispositions. The putative ideal is a form of cycling between various narrow role conceptions, particularly the modes of “indifference,” “caregiving” and “enforcing.” This is described as a kind of street-level pragmatism, built on intuition and experience.

We argue that this interpretive framework fails both analytically and normatively. It fails to capture how frontline work typically embeds theoretical knowledge, skills built on collaborative learning, and ethical principles. And it fails to explain how the role functions as normative framework that sets bounds to pathological modes of indifference, caregiving or enforcement. When practitioners go too far in pursuit of specific concerns, this does not reflect a failure to cycle between narrow modes of thinking. Rather, it reflects a failure to respect the role as an integrated set of concerns. By highlighting the virtues of integration, the framework of professionalism represents a way to think of frontline work potentially coherent realizations a societal mandate.

ABSTRACT. Democratic states promise equal treatment, yet street-level bureaucrats often reproduce inequality through discretionary decisions. This paper addresses a critical gap in public administration research: how to theorize and empirically study intersectionality, the fact that individuals hold multiple, overlapping social identities that shape their experiences of discrimination and representation. We develop three distinct quantitative approaches to modeling intersectionality: additive effects (disadvantages accumulate linearly), multiplicative effects (identities interact), and categorical effects (each intersectional configuration produces unique experiences), following the existing literature from different fields. Each carries different theoretical assumptions and policy implications for addressing inequality in bureaucratic encounters. Using retrospective survey data from Brazilian university students (n=629) on their current and high school experiences, we test these approaches and their feasibility for research on citizen-state encounters. Categorical models, capturing students' full intersectional positions, better explain discrimination patterns than additive or multiplicative approaches. We further examine how intersectional representation (demographic matches between students and teachers on multiple dimensions) protects against unfair treatment, with particularly strong effects for multiply-marginalized students. Our findings advance theoretical and methodological agendas for studying power and equity in citizen-state interactions. Effective anti-discrimination strategies must recognize how identity configurations create unique experiences of state power, moving beyond approaches that simply "control for" individual characteristics or increase diversity along single dimensions.

ABSTRACT. Much work on professionals’ differential treatment of clients has focused on coping, categoriza- tion, and organizational constraint as causes of differential treatment and discretion. We advance street-level bureaucracy theory by focusing on the internal reasoning that may—or may not— explain or justify differential treatment. We use a qualitative vignette experiment embedded in semi-structured interviews with 68 kindergarten professionals working in two very diverse coun- tries: Brazil and Denmark. The vignettes describe a misbehaving child and randomly varies the social status of the child. In the first part of the analysis we exploit an open, exploratory, and in- terpretive approach to study the discretionary linkage between problem explanation and proposed action. Surprisingly, results show that a substantial group of professionals do not interpret the misbehavior as caused by the social interactions within the kindergarten, but relegate the problem to external causes and externalize the children by requesting help from other professions rather than using their own professional judgment to help the child. In the second part of the analysis, small-N Fisher’s exact tests show that children of low social status are more subject to this mode of externalization than high status children. However, we do not find indications that this differen- tial treatment can be explained or justified by differences in the professionals’ problem diagnosis. Our findings thereby demonstrate that professional inference is status-contingent. Rather than uniformly enacting professional ideals, street-level professionals recalibrate their proposed actions in response to perceived social hierarchy. The study thereby broadens the traditional focus on discrimination based on gender and race. The results suggest a micro-mechanism through which civilizing institutions reproduce social hierarchies, and it advances street-level bureaucracy theory by specifying how professional judgment itself becomes stratified.

ABSTRACT. Equity and fairness are central concerns in street-level bureaucracy (SLB), traditionally exercised through frontline bureaucrats’ discretionary judgment. This paper argues that in digitalized welfare systems, discretion is increasingly embedded in system design and information architectures, creating new mechanisms through which equity is produced or undermined. As administrative systems structure citizens’ choices, fairness becomes not only a function of individual discretion but also of institutional and technological arrangements.

While research on digital SLB has predominantly relied on qualitative studies of frontline workers, we know considerably less about how citizens respond to digitally mediated institutional change. This paper addresses this gap through a quantitative, user-centered analysis of behavioral responses to reform.

Engaging with debates on digital SLB, system-level discretion, and power without interaction (Lipsky 2010; Bovens & Zouridis 2002), the study examines parents’ choices of parental benefit coverage in Norway before and after a regulatory reform implemented on 1 July 2024. Drawing on an early mover perspective and individual-level administrative register data, the analysis identifies which parents adjusted their choices immediately after the reform, before the new rules were fully institutionalized in guidance and social norms.

The findings show that early movers are disproportionately drawn from resource-rich groups, suggesting that digitalized implementation may reproduce inequities in practice despite formal equality in entitlements. Even in a universal welfare scheme, similar citizens are not necessarily treated alike when discretion is relocated from frontline bureaucrats to system design and citizens’ capacity to interpret and act upon information. The paper contributes to SLB scholarship both theoretically and methodologically and highlights the democratic implications of transferring responsibility for policy comprehension and navigation from frontline bureaucrats to citizens.

ABSTRACT. In recent decades, research on auditing has increased as a result of the need for increased knowledge and problematizing of the implementation side of politics due to, for example, New Public Management reforms and new governance. So far, however, research has mainly focused on so-called individual supervision where the focus has been on legal certainty and equal treatment for the individual, as well as on how auditing limits the discretion of the welfare professionals. Accordingly, the focus has been on how the public auditors exerts influence on the objects of supervision in different ways . What the previous research not has done to the same extent is to examine and problematize the audit relationship from the other side: how the objects of auditing affect the auditors – as examples of street level bureaucrats - room for action, integrity and independence. Consequently, we know very little about their strategies and ideals as street-level inspections bureaucrats. Thus, this paper explores whether the design and exercise of certain welfare auditing – so called soft inspections - can circumscribe the discretion of the audit agencies. Soft inspections differ from all other forms of auditing, in particular from regular inspections, as it lacks the auditor’s rights to sanction. Therefore, the relationship between the auditor and the auditee can become more horizontal, and the auditor may be dependent on the auditee in the auditing process. Thus, research of this inspection raises the questions how auditors and auditees are linked and interrelated, and whether the relationship can decrease possibilities to accountability. This paper explores this by a comparative case study of the Swedish Social Insurance Inspectorate's (ISF) and the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Inspectorate (IAF)' state inspections.

ABSTRACT. Over the last two decades, employment services across Europe have been profoundly reshaped by activation-oriented reforms and increasing conditionality (Knotz, 2019), also enhanced by increasing digitalization (Scarano & Colfer, 2022). These changes have fostered growing standardization of employment assistance, redefining the role and discretion of street-level bureaucrats (van Gerven & Ruckenstein, 2025). While the literature highlights the negative implications of standardization - particularly its tension with personalization and responsiveness to clients’ needs - less attention has been paid to its potential effects on service-delivery effectiveness, especially in territorially unequal contexts. This paper examines whether, and under what conditions, standardization enhances or undermines the effectiveness of employment assistance, understood as the capacity of employment services to provide access to and deliver assistance to eligible citizens (Regonini, 2001). The analysis focuses on the Italian Workers’ Employability Guarantee («Garanzia di Occupabilità dei Lavoratori», GOL), a national reform designed to harmonize employment services’ activation procedures leveraging on new digital tools in a country characterized by marked cross-regional disparities in administrative capacity and service provision (Sacchi & Scarano, 2025). The study adopts a mixed-methods research design, combining comparative regional data on service access and provision with semi-structured interviews (N=15) with regional coordinators, labour union representatives and IT service providers involved in the implementation of GOL. The findings show a “Matthew Effect” (Rigney, 2010) of employment assistance standardization. In fact, it enhanced service provision and access in already high-performing regions, where frontline workers integrated standardized tools into their already advanced practices. In contrast, low-performing regions displayed limited or no improvements, as standardized procedures reduced discretion without compensating for pre-existing structural and organizational weaknesses. The work argues that standardization alone is insufficient to reduce disparities in service provision, and provides new evidence on conditions and implications of standardized procedures for employment services’ delivery at the street level.

ABSTRACT. Data and performance measurements play a central role in Danish employment services. For many years, municipalities have been required to follow and meet national targets set by the Ministry of Employment (for instance increasing the number of citizens entering employment or ensuring the use of specific interventions). National authorities have also long used data to monitor and compare municipalities, for example through benchmarking of employment efforts and outcomes. Within municipal employment organisations, data and measurements are likewise widely used. The employment systems are permeated by measurement practices and a strong production oriented logic focused on activity and effect targets rather than on what creates value for the citizen.

A recent reform (Beskæftigelsesreformen) alongside ongoing local transformation processes—such as those within the Danish CUBB research practice collaboration—are shifting attention toward more citizen involving approaches. As municipalities begin to implement these approaches, a need emerges to document whether citizen involvement actually takes place, how citizens experience it, and what it means for their progression. However, it remains unclear how such dimensions can be measured meaningfully. From a research perspective, this is equally relevant: while some knowledge exists about types of citizen involvement, far less is known about citizens’ experiences of involvement.

This paper proposes a quantitative approach to measuring citizen involvement through a survey that captures both citizens’ experiences of involvement and the relationship between perceived involvement and perceived value of their interaction with the employment system. The survey was tested in two CUBB municipalities actively working with citizen involving practices. Findings show that citizens report a high degree of involvement and that perceived involvement is positively associated with perceived value—though the type of value varies across citizen groups.

The paper contributes to methodological discussions on standards for measuring citizen involvement and offers an approach to capturing this dimension.

ABSTRACT. Since February 2022, over 1.2 million displaced Ukrainians have received protection status, following the implementation the EU Temporary Protection Directive in Germany. Yet, beyond March 2027, when their temporary protection status elapses, their perspective to stay remains uncertain; employment being the most likely route to maintain residence status.

Against this backdrop, our article foregrounds the lived, emotionally laden experiences of Ukrainian protection-holders in encounters with the frontline of German state bureaucracy during settlement. Drawing on concepts of ‘street level bureaucracy’, and ‘rationales in social service organisations’, we examine the ambivalent perceptions of and strategies of Ukrainian protection-holders in navigating (unequal) benefit access and employability perspectives within the jobcentre context. Jobcentres’ operational logics of activation, since coming into existence in 2005, are marked through a tension between supporting and demanding (Fördern und Fordern), regularly swinging in different directions between a more supportive, enabling and a punitive state, based on ethical considerations what is fair and deserved.

Our research is based on a qualitative longitudinal sample of 21 cases (3 men and 18 women), of which 15 Ukrainians have been interviewed in Berlin or Munich, and 6 Ukrainians in rural Southern Germany. We interviewed our respondents twice (winter/Spring 2023 & 2024). As a group of refugees with partially advantageous social entitlements, yet an insecure residency perspective, we are particularly interested in how interactions with the institution ‘jobcentre’ staff shape or filter their work-life aspirations and trajectories under conditions of temporary stay und related uncertainty, and instability of their life circumstances.

The results are relevant not only for ethical reasons, but also politically, as a new regulation coming into force stipulates that Ukrainian refugees will be treated as all other refugees in the frame of the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act, with lower financial support and a more fragmented strategy towards labour market insertion.

ABSTRACT. “The administrative language is German” – this is what the German law says with reference to bureaucratic proceedings. However, migration societies are highly multilingual. This poses challenges for street-level organizations in welfare states: regardless of their legal rights, language barriers can impede immigrants' actual access to public services, thus risking indirect discrimination. Vice versa, public services face many dilemmas when they’re dealing with clients who do not (yet) speak the dominant national language.

The paper explores these tensions using the example of refugees receiving services by German job centres. It pursues an institutional focus on job centres as essential pillars of the employment administration and institutional gate keepers on people's path into the labour market and society. Job centres should provide their services in a way that they are accessible to all needy people. This also applies to counselling and placement services for refugees who do not (yet) speak German. Their successful integration into the labour market not least is necessary in view of the demographic change. Our research questions are: How do job centres as street-level organizations deal with linguistic diversity? How do street-level staff communicate with refugee clients in their everyday work?

Our interdisciplinary research project follows a mixed-methods approach, combining a standardized survey of all German job centres with qualitative in-depth case studies in selected job centres. The analysis is framed by concepts of institutional gate keeping and street-level bureaucracy.

The survey revealed that almost every job centre uses language mediation and considers this to be indispensable – whether it be language mediation via professional interpreters, multilingual colleagues, volunteers or relatives of clients, or technical translation tools. Against this backdrop, we investigate language mediation in its various forms, focusing on guideline-based interviews with street-level staff in seven job centres.

ABSTRACT. The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) represents one of the most legally elaborated domains of EU governance, characterised by detailed procedural directives, jurisprudential refinement, and increasing regulatory consolidation under the 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum. Yet persistent cross-national variation in recognition rates, credibility assessments, and procedural trajectories indicates that legal convergence does not eliminate discretion. Rather, discretion remains constitutive of asylum adjudication.

This paper investigates how institutional design mediates the production and organisation of discretion in first-instance asylum decision-making. It asks: How do different organisational architectures structure interpretive practices under conditions of regulatory convergence? And how does increasing proceduralisation reshape — rather than reduce — discretionary space?

Building on Lipsky’s (1980) theory of Street-Level Bureaucracy, discretion is conceptualised not as rule deviation but as structurally embedded in frontline governance. Subsequent developments in implementation theory (Hupe & Hill, 2016; Brodkin, 2011) emphasise that discretion is organised across institutional layers and shaped by managerial, legal, and political environments.

Asylum adjudication constitutes a paradigmatic case of structured indeterminacy: core legal categories such as “credibility,” “well-founded fear,” and “vulnerability” are inherently interpretive and evidentiary (Thomas, 2011; Gill, 2009). Decision-making thus involves cognitive shortcuts, routinisation, and coping mechanisms under conditions of uncertainty and throughput pressure — classic SLB dynamics (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003).

The proposed pape employs a “shared acquis–divergent architecture” design, comparing Italy and Portugal. Both differ markedly in first-instance institutional organisation: Italy relies on territorially distributed, Territorial Commissions embedded in a multi-actor field; Portugal centralises competence within a national administrative authority (AIMA).

The project combines semi-structured elite interviews with Q-methodology (Brown, 1980; Watts & Stenner, 2012) to systematically map patterned adjudicatory rationalities among caseworkers, judges, and legal intermediaries. Q-methodology enables identification of shared subjective configurations, bridging interpretive practices and institutional constraints.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I examine how social work professionals across the Nordic countries negotiate their moral responsibility and professional roles when supporting young people leaving out-of-home care who are at risk of homelessness. Drawing on Zacka’s (2017) concept of moral agency, I investigate the dilemmas social work professionals encounter and the strategies they employ within the institutional framework of the Nordic welfare states. The empirical material consists of 18 qualitative focus groups conducted across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden with a total of 82 participants. The analysis shows that social work professionals experience tensions between organisational mandates and personal moral commitments, prompting strategies such as prioritisation, advocacy, and emotional distancing. The article contributes to an understanding of how welfare state variations shape moral reasoning among social work professionals, offering insights for policy and practice aimed at preventing homelessness among young people leaving out-of-home care across the Nordic countries.

ABSTRACT. ***The paper will be presented by all three authors: Bjørn Kjetil Larsen, Siv Sæbjørnsen and Atle Ødegård ***

This paper explores how street-level bureaucrats navigate the dual mandate of control and support within the Norwegian Drug Court Program (ND). Positioned at the intersection of criminal justice and welfare services, ND represents a hybrid institutional arrangement where rehabilitation is pursued within a judicial framework. The study investigates how frontline staff in the Norwegian Correctional Service and participants in the program experience everyday practices, discretionary decision-making, and intersectoral collaboration. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with 31 informants: 16 staff members and 15 active participants. The analysis draws on street-level bureaucracy theory, complemented by perspectives on wicked problems and recognition theory. This framework enables an examination of how discretion is exercised under conditions of institutional complexity, fragmented service systems, and competing policy goals. Findings indicate that Correctional Service staff play a pivotal role as coordinating actors in a fragmented welfare landscape. Participants frequently describe the Correctional Service as a stable and predictable institutional presence, contrasting with experiences of discontinuity in other welfare services. Relational continuity and recognition in interactions with case workers appear central to participants’ motivation and compliance. At the same time, staff report tensions related to professional boundaries, role ambiguity, and the challenges of balancing judicial authority with supportive engagement. The study highlights how street-level practices shape the lived experience of penal-welfare interventions. It points to the need for stronger structural anchoring of intersectoral collaboration and greater clarity regarding the role of the judge within the program. By examining how control and support are enacted in practice, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions on discretion, hybridity, and the governance of complex social problems within contemporary welfare states.

ABSTRACT. How do everyday struggles shape the professional identity of street-level bureaucrats? Scholarship has extensively documented how frontline workers cope with the realities of street-level work and has recognized that identity orientations shape discretionary practice, yet how professional identity itself takes shape through repeated struggle has received less attention. Based on 33 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Israeli social workers in municipal social services, we investigate how professional identity is shaped at the street level. A finding that particularly captured our attention is that participants, across nearly all interviews, rarely described their work in routine language, instead repeatedly using the language of fighting in three interrelated arenas: fighting for service users through advocacy and efforts beyond formal role requirements; fighting against organizational constraints by navigating bureaucracy, bending rules, and stretching limited resources; and fighting with oneself as practitioners confront emotional exhaustion, moral distress, and perceived failures to live up to professional standards. We argue that professional identity develops not in spite of fighting but through it: by repeatedly engaging in these struggles, social workers develop a fighter identity that sustains commitment and meaning at the frontline. Yet this identity also carries cumulative costs. It can normalize invisible labor and self-sacrifice, create uneven access for service users as outcomes often hinge on who is able or willing to fight on their behalf, and heighten the risk of burnout. Conceptually, we contribute by reframing the identity-discretion relationship: rather than treating professional identity mainly as an antecedent of discretionary practice, we show how it is shaped through sustained frontline work under cross-pressures, including moral struggle and the demand to go beyond formal role requirements. We conclude by highlighting an organizational paradox: the fighter identity that sustains frontline commitment is cultivated through the very conditions that accumulate strain and increase burnout risk.

ABSTRACT. Relationships between public services and citizens are key to street-level bureaucracy analysis. However, research in this domain mostly considers these relationships from the viewpoint of the organization and professionals. SLB analysis teaches us more about how decisions are made than on their impact on people; on the way bureaucratic power and discretion are exerted than on how clients comply with them or challenge them; on how criteria are used by bureaucrats and how situations are officially defined than on their acceptance by those subjected to these practices. In this speech I will complement this literature by focusing on the second terms of these alternatives, and to do so, propose to explore SLB from the clients’ perspective. I will explore more precisely the case of the lower classes, which are both the most dependent on institutions and the most alienated from the norms they convey. I will draw on my fieldwork on deprived urban neighborhoods in France, and take some complementary examples from other countries studied by my colleagues of the Lower Classes and Public Institutions network (LoCI).