What factors influence street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) tendency to promote social equity and how do they do it? Social equity is one of the four pillars of public administration. It has been studied extensively, due to the important role of public administrators in correcting instances of unfairness and injustice and ensuring long-term socially equitable governance.

SLBs are frontline workers of the public sector who use their discretion to influence policy outcomes. Social equity is often regarded as a potential outcome of their use of discretion and their coping strategies. Previous research has established that SLBs either reproduce social inequity or try to reduce it. However, why and how they engage in such activity remains systematically unstudied.

Our goal is to understand what SLBs believe can and should be done in the face of social inequities. We will investigate how their organization supports or deters their attempts at mitigating social inequities, and how they cope with the emotional demands of the mismatch between the practices they are required to follow and the everyday struggles of their clients.

Using qualitative methods and based on grounded theory analysis, we will explore this topic using a sample of two types of street-level professions: caring professions and enforcing professions. Thus, we will demonstrate how street-level workers and their organizations differ in their tendency to combat social inequities.

We expect this study to make two main contributions. First, it will examine the relationship between personal and organizational factors and SLBs' tendency to promote social equity. Second, by focusing on two types of SLBs, we can learn more about how different organizational conditions play a role in the ways SLBs exercise their discretion and in their behavior. More broadly, this comparison may reveal which types of professions can be used when generalizing research conclusions on SLBs.

Equal treatment of citizens is often associated with uniform rule application. This has become more difficult because in many policy contexts, the structural constraints on street-level decision-making are loosened to allow for individualized treatment. While responsiveness towards citizens’ circumstances is a core aspect of street-level work, now responsiveness is also embraced as a central value in implementation policies of Dutch law enforcement and welfare agencies in order to help citizens more effectively. Street-level professionals are encouraged to use their professional leeway to assess differences between cases that warrant different treatment. As reliance on rules is less straightforward, the assessment of similar cases warranting equal treatment can become more precarious, making it relevant to study how frontline professionals themselves define and value equal treatment. Equal treatment could refer to the distribution of resources in a decision, but also to the process through which a decision is made (Cropanzano & Ambrose, 2001). There is no insight into street-level professionals’ perceptions of equal treatment and how these could be explained. Therefore, this paper asks: how do street-level professionals define and value equal treatment, and how are these perceptions shaped by their organizational core task?

A comparative study on law enforcers and social workers in different policy domains in the Netherlands, involving semi-structured interviews is conducted. Two theoretical contributions are made: 1) it will provide a conceptualization of equal treatment grounded in the perceptions of street-level professionals, and 2) by comparing law enforcers with social workers, this research gives insight into how core task matters in perceptions of equal treatment.

References

Cropanzano, R., Ambrose, M. L., Greenberg, J., & Cropanzano, R. (2001). Procedural and distributive justice are more similar than you think: A monistic perspective and a research agenda. Advances in Organizational Justice, 119(151), 351-360.

Following recent work investigating civil servant stereotypes and their potential consequences (De Boer 2020, Willems 2020), this study dives into how street-level bureaucrats respond to the negative stereotypes that exist about them. Negative stereotypical ideas about civil servants abound (Goodsell 2004), but we do not know how civil servants, and street-level bureaucrats in particular, make sense of and cope with the existence of such negative civil servant stereotypes.

We draw on insights from social psychology. Research on, for example, gender and ethnicity stereotypes shows that being confronted with negative stereotypes about one’s identity can bring about different coping mechanisms (Berjot & Gillet 2011). These can range from psychologically distancing oneself from the stereotyped identity aspect (Derks et al. 2016), to distancing oneself from the person exhibiting the stereotype beliefs, to trying to deny or disprove the stereotypes (Major et al. 2000). A key aspect before coping is the appraisal of stereotypes (Lazarus & Folkman 1984). In appraisal, people assess whether something is in fact a stressor to them or not, and the way in which people appraise situations can subsequently affect their coping.

Understanding how street-level bureaucrats appraise and cope with negative stereotypes is relevant because, especially in their direct contact with citizens, certain types of coping can have a negative impact on service delivery. For example, disengaging with the stereotyped identity can reduce motivation in street-level bureaucrats; distancing oneself from the stereotyper could impact interactions with citizens or discretionary choices; denying or opposing stereotypes may lead to blind spots in the evaluation of one’s own performance. Such effects would complicate effective and constructive contact between citizens and the state, and hamper the quality of public service provision.

To investigate how street-level bureaucrats appraise and cope with negative civil servant stereotypes, we will perform approximately 25 semi-structured interviews with Dutch municipality workers. We include two types of employees: those working in welfare assistance and those who perform more logistic services, such as passport issuing and marriage registrations. While the work of the former type often involves long lasting and emotionally loaded contact between street-level bureaucrats and citizens, the work of the latter is more business-like and one-off. We will investigate (1) how street-level bureaucrats attribute and appraise negative stereotypes, and (2) how they cope psychologically with the stereotypes when they encounter them during and outside of their work (Major et al. 2000). Data will be collected in the summer of 2023.

References

Berjot, S., & Gillet, N. (2011). Stress and coping with discrimination and stigmatization. Frontiers in Psychology 2: 1-13.

De Boer, N. (2020). How do citizens assess street‐level bureaucrats’ warmth and competence? A typology and test. Public Administration Review, 80(4): 532-542.

Derks, Belle, Colette van Laar, & Naomi Ellemers. 2016. The queen bee phenomenon: Why women leaders distance themselves from junior women. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(3): 456-469.

Goodsell, C. T. (2004). The case for bureaucracy: A public administration polemic. Chatham: Chatham House Publishers.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer.

Major, B., Quinton, W. J., McCoy, S. K., & Schmader, T. (2000). Reducing prejudice: The target's perspective. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 211–237). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Willems, J. (2020). Public servant stereotypes: It is not (at) all about being lazy, greedy, and corrupt. Public Administration, 98(4): 807-823.

The aim of this paper is to better understand the experiences of frontline public professionals with new policies aiming to digitally transform public administration, including the introduction of automated-decision making and artificial intelligence. It focusses on the extent and causes of the perceived added value – meaningfulness – for the street-level bureaucrats themselves, their clients and the society. Thereby, the following conditions are taken into consideration: (1) if the digital tools are designed to augment or replace human activities, (2) if SLBs perceive the functionality of the applied digital tools as informating or automating, and (3) if SLBs are powerful in influencing the implementation in their organization and at their workplace.

Based on survey data from 1,753 public professionals in German street-level bureaucracies with different core tasks and digital tools in use (vehicle registration, building permit and tax authorities) and a set-theoretic configurational analysis using Crisp-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), I analyze to what extent und under which configurations of conditions SLBs perceive digitalization and automation contributing to a greater purpose. The results show that SLBs evaluate digitalization and automation as somehow to fully meaningful. They assess the added value for themselves and their clients more positively than for the society at large. Several configurations produce the outcome of perceived meaningfulness, emphasizing the automating functionality and operational powerfulness of SLBs.

However, the results have considerably weak explanatory power (coverage) and are not robust to model specifications (consistency threshold, frequency cut-off, cases). The lack of robustness indicates a diverse set of cases with different perception of meaningfulness by SLBs and additional causes not included in the analytical model. This calls for further qualitative research on the highly diverse experiences of digital transformation in street-level bureaucracies.