Social Equities and Inequities in Practice: Street‐Level Workers as Agents and Pragmatists

Abstract

Street‐level workers’ judgments, decisions, and actions touch on questions of social equity, a dominant theme of H. George Frederickson's deep contributions to public administration scholarship. Based on empirical work, the authors question the dominant implementation‐control‐discretion narrative and suggest an alternative framing based on the concepts of agency and pragmatic improvisation. Street‐level workers are often conservers of institutional norms and practices, but their work surfaces tensions between practice and the goals of social equity.

Europe at the frontline: analysing street-level motivations for the use of European Union migration law

“…As a result, motivational patterns observed in this study might be specific to several scope conditions, such as the presence of a multilevel legal context with ambiguity between national and EU obligations, the high level of discretion in the German administrative setting and the normatively laden policy field that requires considerable client interactions at the frontline. Yet, from the street-level bureaucracy literature, we can expect that other client-intensive and normatively laden fields comparable to migration, such as social policies, might reveal similar motivational mechanisms as found in this study (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2012). The study might be less representative for more technical fields of EU law which may trigger less normative motivations.…”

“…Second, in line with the street-level literature (Lipsky 1980;Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2012) and studies on migration management (Ellermann 2006;Eule 2014;Jordan et al 2003), the implementers investigated in this study were creative and flexible in their use of legal tools. While the limited literature on practical EU implementation has treated administrations as yet another source for non-compliance (Versluis 2007) or ignored the street-level of EU implementation (Treib 2014), this study has shown that lower level implementers are surprisingly aware of the multilevel legal context in which they operate.…”

“…By relying on the insights of social psychology (Tyler 2006) and the behavioural street-level bureaucracy literature (Lipsky 1980;Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2012), two perspectives on implementation motivations were identified. First, from an instrumental perspective, one could expect that there are few incentives for street-level implementers to use EU law.…”

Inter-District School Choice: Transfer Policy and Practice in a Fragmented Metropolitan Region

“…While discretion addresses "the notion of decision-making within the structure of rules" (Feldman 1992, p. 164), this new citizen-agent narrative does not limit worker decision making to the application of existing law and rules. Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2012) suggest that concepts of agency and pragmatic improvisation better describe worker decision-making. The citizen-agent narrative identifies cases of workers going above and beyond procedural guidelines to help or harm citizens based on judgments about identity, behavior, character, and worthiness (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003).…”

Flows, leaks and blockages in informational interventions: A field experimental study of Bangalore's water sector

“…In our specific case, we might have explored the incentives and sanctions in the system or whether valvemen faced conflicting mandates from different ''principals" (see Gailmard & Patty, 2012;Shapiro, 2005;Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2012).…”