Conference Agenda

This article explores tensions arising from professional collaboration among street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) during Finland's recent public sector reform in social and health services. The reform transferred responsibilities to newly established well-being services counties (WSCs) while leaving others—like student welfare—within municipalities. This shift resulted in complex collaboration demands among SLBs from different administrative and professional backgrounds.

Using mixed methods – document analysis, a survey, and a Delphi panel – the study identifies four primary tensions in SLB collaboration: (1) between teaching and promoting health and well-being, (2) between information flow and privacy protection, (3) between administrative steering and operational management, and (4) between children's agency and professionals' accountability. These tensions reflect competing expectations, values, and responsibilities SLBs navigate in everyday work.

The study builds on Michael Lipsky's (1980) concept of street-level bureaucracy and discretionary practices (see also, e.g., Hupe 2022, Chang & Brewer 2023; Gofen et al. 2024). It categorizes tensions using a framework of dualities, contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes (Putnam et al. 2016). The article links these forms of tension with three dimensions of discretion (EvansTaylor & Kelly 2006): rule, value, and task discretion.

Findings illustrate how SLBs cope with tensions by exercising discretion. For example, in managing education and health promotion demands, professionals balance standardized rules with local needs. Value discretion helps safeguard ethical principles while addressing practical needs in privacy versus information sharing. Dialectical tensions emerge when administrative mandates conflict with operational realities, requiring flexible task discretion. Contradictory tensions between child agency and professional responsibility highlight the need to combine different forms of discretion.

The article explores coping strategies, drawing on ‘either-or’, ‘both-and’, and ‘more-than’ approaches. The either-or strategy separates conflicting demands, potentially increasing organizational fragmentation. The both-and approach embraces paradoxical thinking (Smith & Lewis 2011), allowing professionals to shift between or integrate opposing priorities. The more-than approach reframes tensions as developmental opportunities.

The study argues that discretion enables SLBs to navigate reform-induced tensions without compromising service quality. These insights are relevant in collaborative governance, where SLBs shape policy through everyday decisions. The article concludes by calling for future research into discretionary practices, institutional work, complexity theory, and policy entrepreneurship at the street level.

Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) typically strive to meet the urgent needs of their clients under tight resource constraints. Following Lipsky (2010), most research on SLBs has focused on the coping practices they employ to alleviate the pressures of their everyday work (Dubois 2010; Brodkin 2012; Tummers et al. 2015). In this vast literature, coping practices are seen as flowing from occupational styles or cultures and applied in a relatively routine manner (Zacka 2017). Workers have been trained to “process” their clients without too much thinking, slotting them into categories that might not do justice to the uniqueness of their case.

However, recent research challenges this view, suggesting that SLBs both engage in reflection and, as a result, modify routines, learn from experience, and shape shared moral beliefs (Goldman & Foldy 2015; Moller 2022; Visser & van Hulst 2024). Despite these insights, two key gaps remain in the literature. First, reflection is rarely examined in depth, even though understanding how SLBs step outside routine work to reconsider their approaches and assumptions could offer valuable insights. Second, the common distinction between routine-driven action and reflective problem-solving oversimplifies how SLBs navigate their work. Instead of treating routines and reflection as opposites, we argue that SLB decision-making occurs on a continuum: from habitual coping to intentional problem-solving, from maintaining routines to reshaping policies.

To better conceptualize reflective practice, we propose a framework that examines when reflection occurs (moment), where it takes place (place), who engages in it (agent), what is being reflected on (object), how it happens (means), and why it occurs (purpose). These dimensions offer a structured way to study reflective practice in street-level work.

This paper makes several contributions. First, by framing reflection as multidimensional, it highlights its fluidity and adaptability to different organizational and situational demands. Our model acknowledges that reflective practices vary in form and impact, opening avenues for exploring their role in decision-making, moral reasoning, and public service adaptation (Forester 1999; Masood & Nisar, 2022; Visser & Kruyen, 2021). Second, this paper moves beyond the implied dichotomy between routine coping activities and reflective practices. Instead, it proposes a model that situates these on a continuum, emphasizing that there is a variety of activities in which some form of reflection takes place. It shows how the interplay of the various dimensions shape the gradation of the action between coping and critical reflection. This way, this paper aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how frontline workers navigate their complex and demanding environments.

Inequality effects of bureaucracies’ coping with overload

Alexa Lenz, Geschwister-Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, alexa.lenz@gsi.uni-muenchen.de

Jana Gomez-Diaz, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, jana.gomez-diaz@uni-konstanz.de

Eva Thomann, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz,, eva.thomann@uni-konstanz.de

Abstract

Globally, a steady growth in regulatrory demands without a corresponding increase in administrative capacities is leading to increasingly overburdened bureaucracies. Bureaucracies manage this overload through various strategies, including policy triage, where easy, quick, and salient cases are prioritized. While these dynamics are well documented, the impact of bureaucracies’ coping with overload on different population segments remains poorly understood. This paper argues that some forms of coping disproportionately affect disadvantaged citizen-clients who represent complex and/or time-consuming cases, often with little visibility in media and politics. By combing the literatures on street-level coping, social capital, and social construction of target groups, we theorize the effects of bureaucracies’ coping with overload on administrative burdens and perceived bureaucratic discrimination. Empirically, we triangulate and match a representative survey of public administrations (dataset 1) in the German states of Baden-Württemberg (N=676, response rate: 60%) and Rhineland-Palatine (N=211, response rate: 85%) with a representative population survey of citizen-clients with recent interaction with administrative units (dataset 2) in the same two Geman states (N= 1.400). The results show that even in a high-capacity country like Germany, certain coping mechanisms, such as policy triage, are already widespread and, importantly, exacerbate existing inequalities in the population. These inequality effects require more scholarly and political attention. Their ramifications for citizen-state relations are largely unknown, but unlikely to be trivial.

Street-level bureaucrats' coping mechanisms are an integral part of their interaction with clients, and as such have received much research attention. Since the last review of the behavioral coping mechanisms adopted by street-level bureaucrats, conducted more than 10 years ago, many researchers have focused on understanding these mechanisms and what influences them. The current study aims to update our understanding and explore the manifestation of the old and new coping mechanisms identified in the literature. More importantly, it seeks to identify the factors that are associated with such behaviors.

Based on a systematic review of 165 studies, we find several new mechanisms: street-level bureaucrats move towards their clients by creating a space for deliberation and cooperation with them, move away from clients by referring them to other agencies and creating distance from them, and move against their clients by breaking the rules. We also explore street-level cognitive coping mechanisms and identify the most salient ones in the literature, such as empathy and emotional detachment.

Our findings show that most of street-level coping behaviors are influenced by organizational and environmental factors. Personal factors, although highlighted frequently in the literature, are not associated with most coping behaviors. Instead, they are associated with cognitive coping mechanisms.

Exploring street-level coping mechanisms contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it will fill the gap in the literature about the antecedents of coping, and the relationship between influential factors and SLBs' behavior. Second, by exploring not only behavioral coping mechanisms, but also cognitive mechanisms, the results can add to our knowledge about street-level discretionary decision-making.

Although the empirical research and theory on the implementation of public policies has been around for about half a century, the dependent variable of this research, the implementation deficit, is surpri-singly undefined. This deplorable state is, firstly, of conceptual nature. Classic implementation studies at least implicitly understood implementation deficits as the divergence between policy goals and results but have rightfully been criticized as being overly normative. More recent studies instead focus on the variance of implementation outcomes. While this recognises that not all variance represents a deficit, it is not per se unproblematic either. However, hardly any study defines when an implementation outcome is an implementation deficit (and when it is not). The literature on policy success or failure is of little help, because the (non-deficient) implementation of policies can generally be considered a necessary condition for policy success, but it is by no means the same. Secondly, the topic is also methodologically undefined: methods used to identify implementation deficits are often selected ad hoc and applied with little reflection. There is no established canon of (either qualitative or quantitative) methods to distinguish situations with implementation deficits from situations without implementation deficits. However, a systematic, theory-driven analysis of the causes of implementation deficits – as would be state of the art – is questionable if already the dependent variable cannot be specified in a conceptually and methodologically sound manner. This leads, finally, to a situation in which even experts (in administration or science) in a policy field cannot state reliably how large implementation deficits are in their field and where the biggest problems exist beyond individual areas. The paper addresses this elephant in the room using the example of German environmental policy and focuses in particular on questions of concept and method, but also gives an empirical impression for this policy field.

Frontline work is characterized by complex dynamics that challenge standardized decision-making models. Frontline workers must balance priorities among citizens, organizational goals, societal values, and sometimes their own health. These characteristics of frontline work have implications for management and accountability: How can frontline workers be held accountable when their work cannot always follow strict criteria, rules, and procedures but inherently also requires responsiveness and pragmatic improvisation? Existing scholarship has largely focused on frontline workers' multiple accountabilities. In addition, recent studies emphasize the role of frontline managers in supporting responsible discretion. However, how frontline managers handle accountability in their daily interactions with frontline workers remains underexplored.

This study addresses this gap by examining how frontline managers manage accountability demands in their relationships with frontline workers. Drawing on literature on frontline accountability and management, we develop a theoretical framework highlighting frontline managers' dual role as account holders and account givers. Empirically, we analyze qualitative interviews with frontline managers and frontline workers across multiple agencies, incorporating both perspectives to capture potential discrepancies between managerial intent and employee perception.

Our findings reveal that frontline managers handle accountability by requesting information, explanation, and justification, which are central to their practice. Specifically, they exhibit three key behaviors: fostering collective discretion, questioning decisions, and justifying decisions. These align, in part, with prior research on explicating reasoning and stimulating collective responsibility, as well as research on the mediating role of managers. Frontline managers tend to approve decisions as long as workers can explain and justify them, allowing managers to relay these justifications to their superiors. We conceptualize this process as "narrative accountability," a practice that enables managers to articulate frontline practices beyond quantitative measures, thus strengthening their ability to advocate for frontline workers.

This study makes several contributions. First, it expands the literature on frontline accountability by centering on frontline managers, a crucial yet underexamined group, demonstrating how they shape accountability in practice. Second, it highlights the significance of narrative accountability as both a concept and practice, complicating traditional vertical and horizontal accountability distinctions by introducing informal elements into formal structures. Third, it enriches understandings of frontline managers' roles, particularly in ensuring responsible discretion and acting as boundary spanners and mediators. Lastly, our findings suggest that narrative accountability is a shared practice across different settings, reflective of professional norms. We propose a more practice-oriented approach to frontline accountability, supplementing existing behavior-focused models.