A NIVEL DE NORMAS LEGALES Y REGLAMENTARIAS

The street-level bureaucracy literature developed around a central notion in Weber’s work, namely, the irrational, or in other words the not legally rational,

exercises of discretion that epitomise pre-bureaucratic ideal types and how they can be curtailed and bureaucratised (Brodkin, 2012; Lipsky, 2010). For Weber, bureaucracy in the guise of formal rules and a structure of control is supposed to curtail individual discretion that deviates from the logic of formal rationality hence overcoming the pre- bureaucratic. Nonetheless, as the street-level bureaucracy literature shows, exercises of discretion remain; especially in the context of public service delivery, despite bureaucratisation (Brodkin, 2007; Evans, 2015; Evans & Harris, 2004).

The notion of street-level bureaucracy was first introduced by Lipsky (1969) in his study of the behaviour of policemen in the United States. Street-level bureaucratic organisations according to Lipsky are bureaucratic organisations that deliver public services to citizens. Examples of such organisations “are the schools, police and welfare departments, lower courts, legal services offices, and other agencies whose workers interact with and have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits or the allocation of public sanctions.” (Lipsky, 2010, p. xi). Street-level bureaucratic organisations are

thus at the frontline of the public bureaucracy where most government-public interactions take place (Prottas, 1979; Weatherley, 1979). Along those lines, street-level bureaucrats are the “people who represent an organization via face-to-face encounter with its clients.” (Prottas, 1979, p. 2). Typical examples of street-level bureaucrats are

front-line staff in public organisations, case officers, police officers, teachers, nursing homes workers, and other workers whose work entails direct interaction with the public (Lipsky, 2010).

In this respect, the ‘street-level’ is a context of social interactions and practices;

a unique one according to Lipsky because it is where formal policies clash with complex street-level realities (Hupe et al., 2015; Weatherley, 1979). It is in this context that street-level bureaucrats find the space to exercise discretion, improvise and devise alternative rules as they process clients’ cases and interact with them (see also Bartels, 2013; Evans, 2015; Fineman, 1998; Radoynovska, 2018). In this regard, “the street- level perspective recognizes that front-line workers retain extensive discretion in the sense of the freedom to make decision in a work role, despite manager’s attempts to curtail their freedom” (Evans, 2015, p. 3). Such discretion, as Lipsky (1983; 2010)

argued seems to be an inevitable aspect of street-level work:

[T]he essence of street-level bureaucracies is that they require people to make decisions about other people. Street-level bureaucrats have discretion because the nature of service provision calls for human judgment that cannot be programmed and for which machines cannot substitute. (Lipsky, 2010, p. 161).

Such inescapable exercises of discretion at the street-level became a conduit for the persistence of the pre-bureaucratic. Lipsky, for instance, viewed street-level discretion as constitutive of a “corrupted world of service” (2010, p. xv) where formal

policy is routinely side-lined in a context where the practices and decisions of street bureaucrats ‘“become, or add up to, agency policy,” and that their actions effectively “become” the public policies they carry out”’ (Lipsky, 2010, p. 221). Street-level

elusive of traditional bureaucratic control and accountability mechanisms. Lipsky’s assertion is similar to Strauss’s finding on the pre-bureaucratic, reviewed earlier, that

showed how workers negotiate and fashion new rules and arrangements in practice.

One distinctively pre-bureaucratic element that emerges through exercises of discretion at the street-level is bias and favouritism in the delivery of public services (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000; Radoynovska, 2018). Through his extensive observations of street-level bureaucrats, Lipsky contended that “the work of street-level bureaucrats could hardly be farther from the bureaucratic ideal of impersonal detachment in decision making” (2010, p.9). This is because street-level bureaucrats

use discretion to develop personal routines and practices, which while, on the one hand, help them to deal with complexity in their jobs, are, on the other hand, not free from “personal biases, including the prejudices that blatantly and subtly permeate society”

(Lipsky, 2010, p.85). Street-level work, according to Lipsky, thus becomes a context where:

[D]ifferentiating among clients may take place because of workers’ preferences for some clients over others. They may prefer some clients over others, despite official norms to the contrary [….] workers [ …] may favor clients with similar ethnic backgrounds, as when racial or ethnic favoritism prevails in discriminatory decision making. (2010, p.108).

Empirical illustrations of such favouritism are many in the literature on street- level bureaucracy. For example, Wenger and Wilkins (2009) illustrated how that female applicants were subject to discrimination by street-level bureaucrats in the Unemployment Insurance claims process in the US showing how “women were perceived as less deserving of benefits” (ibid., p.216). Radoynovska’s (2018) also

discussed how street-level bureaucrats exercises of discretion constitute “micro- practices that (re)produce inequitable resource allocation” (ibid., p. 1). She studied the

work of street-level bureaucrats at a French social service organisation where she found that staff exercised discretion in deciding for whom should the formal rules regarding the provision of social services be bent and for whom they should be enforced. She found that rules are routinely bent in a systemic manner resulting in what she called ‘rules of exceptionalism’ (ibid., p.3). Fineman (1998) also examined the work of street-

level bureaucrats as environmental regulations inspectors in the UK. He found that “[f]ormal rules and roles are likely to be more plastic than they appear” (ibid, p.954)

and that the inspectors as street-level bureaucrats fashioned their own informal rules underpinned by subjective feelings and emotions in their attempts to ensure environmental protection. He argued that “[w]hat an inspector feels about an operator

and the operator about him/her (e.g. anger, rage, embarrassment, fear, pride, admiration, shame), is intrinsic to rule making and the control process.” (ibid., p.970).

These are few illustrative examples from the literature on street-level bureaucracy that illustrate how street-level bureaucratic work is a distinctive expression of practices characterised as ‘pre-bureaucratic’ in Weber’s (1978) work. Indeed, as Fineman had argued “street-level bureaucracy is a far cry from the Weberian image of monolithic rules and standardized procedures.” (Fineman, 1999, p. 969). The general

assertion in this literature is that street-level “discretion may be inevitable” (Hupe & Hill, 2007, p. 281), and it remains elusive of traditional bureaucratic control structures thus sustaining street-level bureaucracy as an expression of the pre-bureaucratic.

It is worth mentioning at this juncture that not all writers on the topic of street- level bureaucracy seem to be keen on finding ways to curtail and control discretion or

adopt a negative stance toward it. Tummers and Bekkers (2014) for instance argued that “it is important to note that when drafting policy programme it can be beneficial to give

the implementing street-level bureaucrats some (perceived) freedom to adjust the policy programme in order to be effective and legitimate” (2014, p.541). Another interesting

line of thought is provided by the works of Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000, 2015; 2003), which paints a more positive image of street-level bureaucrats. Maynard-Moody and Musheno, reporting on street-level organisations in the US, provided a different picture of street-level work as imbued with positive emotions that at times provided a desirable break from the rational bureaucratic formality. Such a view is illustrated through the metaphor of ‘State Agent or Citizen Agent’ (2000, p.329). They posited that

some street-level bureaucrats made sense of their role as agents for the citizens instead of agents of the state hence exercising discretion in the pursuit of ensuring equity for each citizen even if that meant deviating from formal rules (see also Tummers & Rocco, 2015). Nonetheless, the overall focus in the literature remains concerned with finding ways to curtail discretion, or in other words, eliminate the pre-bureaucratic in favour of ensuring formalisation, efficiency and adequate fulfilment of the function of public bureaucratic organisations in modern societies (Brodkin, 2012).

At this juncture, it is important to highlight that the street-level bureaucracy literature, while succinctly reveals the persistence of the pre-bureaucratic, remains limited by the fact that it is confined to Western developed cultural contexts. Street- level bureaucratic work is understudied in non-Western contexts. In Middle Eastern contexts, unique practices such as wasta and the use of Tracers are, in theory, predicated on street-level bureaucrats’ exercises of discretion; nonetheless, these dynamics have not been studied empirically before from a street-level bureaucracy perspective. Moreover, street-level bureaucracy has not been studied in relation to post-bureaucracy

either in Western or non-Western contexts. This thesis aims to fill these gaps in knowledge.

To recapitulate, thus far I have reviewed the work of Weber on the shift from the pre-bureaucratic to rationalisation and bureaucracy. Then, I reviewed the literature that indicates the continuing relevance of the pre-bureaucratic from ethnographic studies conducted in Western contexts (e.g., Gouldner, 1954; Strauss, 1978), cultural practices in non-Western contexts (e.g., wasta, guanxi, jeitinho) to the literature on street-level bureaucracy as an expression of the pre-bureaucratic. In the next section, I will review the literature on the shift from bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy. While there are different definitions and forms of post-bureaucracy, specific attention will be given to those relevant to the public sector such as New Public Management and eGovernment on which the thesis focuses. This literature will be reviewed as an instance of the broader debate on bureaucracy versus post-bureaucracy in the field of organisation studies. References to and juxtapositions with the elements of pre-bureaucracy and bureaucracy from which the post-bureaucratic departs will be drawn on to further crystallise the focus of the thesis.

2.3

The Post-bureaucratic age: Deterministic prescriptions