Exercising bureaucratic discretion through selective bridging: A response to institutional complexity in Bangladesh

Abstract

We attempt to reconcile top‐down and bottom‐up perspectives on bureaucratic discretion to understand how actors ‘caught in the middle’, such as middle level public managers, negotiate conflicting demands to exercise discretion in the Bangladesh public administration. To do this, we employ the institutional logics framework, a theoretical lens that conceptualises how regulative, cultural forces bear down on actors, and also acknowledges actor agency. Based on 32 interviews with current and former public servants and local public administration experts, supported by secondary documentary analysis, we identify a new way in which discretion may be enacted in institutionally complex settings, offering a way to reconcile top‐down and bottom‐up perspectives. We term this response selective bridging—a sense‐making approach to exploit the complementarities of competing institutional forces from the top to exercise discretion for bottom‐up needs.