A Public Service Gap: Capturing contexts in a comparative approach of street-level bureaucracy

Searching for managerial discretion: how public managers engage managerialism as a rationalization for increased latitude of action

“…Managers that have knowledge about their latitude of actions and that are ready to use it even though there might be discretionary constraints from environment or organization (Hambrick and Finkelstein 1987;Williamson 1963;Hambrick and Abrahamson 1995) are perceived as high discretion managers (Finkelstein and Peteraf 2007), characterized by high internal locus of control (Rotter 1966;Tummers and Bekkers 2014;Wynen et al 2014). Drawing on Hupe and Buffat (2014) who make a distinction between granted and used discretion, I argue that high discretion managers acknowledge and use existing latitude of actions or will resist attempts of limiting it.…”

“…In this article, I draw from a rich body of literature of economics (Migue and Belanger 1974;Crew and Kleindorfer 1979;Williamson 1963), strategy (Hambrick and Finkelstein 1987;Hambrick and Abrahamson 1995;Finkelstein and Peteraf 2007), and public management research (Sandfort 2000;Brodkin 1997;Brodkin 2011;Lipsky 2010Lipsky [1980; Hupe and Buffat 2014;Tummers and Bekkers 2014) in order to outline my understanding of the concept. Although the literature is diverse in regard of ontological underpinnings, it carries many similarities.…”

Insertion as an alternative to workfare: Active labour-market schemes in the Parisian suburbs

“…shared norms of what constitutes fair behaviour vis-à-vis service users (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2000;Hupe and Buffat, 2014), which likely diverge from quantitative job-outcome targets of work-first services. We therefore expect to find French insertion providers acting in ways that preserve insertion norms and obstruct marketisation and workfarist principles.…”

Interaction styles of street-level workers and motivation of clients: a new instrument to assess discretion-as-used in the case of activation of jobseekers

“…In order to shed light on the (non-)variation in interaction styles between street-level workers, the notion of the 'public service gap' (Hupe and Buffat 2014) is a promising heuristic device, particularly since it distinguishes between objective situations and how they are subjectively experienced. For instance, street-level workers in similar 'objective' situations may apply different interaction styles because of e.g.…”

“…the antecedents of interaction styles). In the same vein, more recently, Hupe and Buffat (2014) proposed to investigate how the gap between action prescriptions (demands) and action resources (supply) resulting from the constellation of enabling and constraining micro, meso, and macro factors affects how street-level workers use their discretion. Brodkin (2016) proposed to take an enabling rather than a curtailing approach to discretion by investigating the conditions that are required for street-level workers to deliver qualitative and responsive services.…”