Street-Level Workers as Institutional Entrepreneurs

Street-Level Workers as Institutional Entrepreneurs
Author: Olivia Mettang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2022-11-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3031174496

Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization – whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers’ institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds. The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective.

Human Service Organizations and the Question of Impact

Human Service Organizations and the Question of Impact
Author: Jennifer E. Mosley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2020-06-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000007901

This volume offers empirically based insights and findings on the question of how human service organizations are reacting to the increasing need for greater impact, effectiveness, and performance. As demand for increased impact outstrips our knowledge of how best to achieve these goals, the book’s contributors discuss the innovative strategies being used to ensure that multiplex goals are being met and the degree to which client and staff concerns are being sacrificed for the organizational bottom line. Taken together, these discussions demonstrate that specific management strategies and collaboration based on trust and consideration of mission may help improve the quality of some services; however, many of the pressures which organizations and managers experience are resulting in lower staff morale, compromised missions, and inefficiencies. This book will be of interest to those researching human service agencies, as well as those with a broader concern for how organizations react to doing more with less. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Human Service Organizations journal.

Policy Entrepreneurship at the Street Level

Policy Entrepreneurship at the Street Level
Author: Nissim Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2021-05-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108875238

This Element aims to connect the literature of street-level bureaucrats with that of policy entrepreneurship in order to analyze why and how bureaucrats operating at the street level can promote policy change in public administration at the individual level. I demonstrate how street-level bureaucrats act as policy entrepreneurs in different contexts around the globe to promote policy change and analyze what they think of policy entrepreneurship and what they do about it in practice. For this purpose, I use multiple research methods: a survey, in-depth interviews, focus groups and textual analyses. I also offer recommendations to decision-makers to promote street-level policy entrepreneurship, highlighting the benefits of doing so. Lastly, I critically discuss the normative aspects of street-level policy entrepreneurship: ultimately, is it desirable?

Research Handbook on Street-Level Bureaucracy

Research Handbook on Street-Level Bureaucracy
Author: Peter Hupe
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2019
Genre: Bureaucracy
ISBN: 1786437635

When the objectives of public policy programmes have been formulated and decided upon, implementation seems just a matter of following instructions. However, it is underway to the realization of those objectives that public policies get their final substance and form. Crucial is what happens in and around the encounter between public officials and individual citizens at the street level of government bureaucracy. This Research Handbook addresses the state of the art while providing a systematic exploration of the theoretical and methodological issues apparent in the study of street-level bureaucracy and how to deal with them.

Street-Level Bureaucracy in Weak State Institutions

Street-Level Bureaucracy in Weak State Institutions
Author: Rik Peeters
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1447368746

In this book, street-level bureaucracy scholars from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America analyse the conditions that shape frontline work and citizens ́ everyday experience of the state. Institutional factors such as political clientelism, resource scarcity, social inequality, job insecurity, and systemic corruption affect the way street-level bureaucrats enforce rules and implement policies. Inadvertently, they end up implementing inequities in citizens’ access to rights and services — despite efforts to repair organisational deficiencies and broker relations between vulnerable citizens and a distant state. This book illuminates these realities and challenges and provides unique insights into critical themes such as resource scarcities, bureaucratic corruption, control practices, and the complexities of dealing with vulnerable population groups.

Street-Level Bureaucracy

Street-Level Bureaucracy
Author: Michael Lipsky
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 263
Release: 1983-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1610443624

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

When the State Meets the Street

When the State Meets the Street
Author: Bernardo Zacka
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-09-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0674545540

Street level discretion -- Three pathologies: the indifferent, the enforcer, and the caregiver -- A gymnastics of the self: coping with the everyday pressures of street-level work -- When the rules run out: informal taxonomies and peer-level accountability -- Impossible situations: on the breakdown of moral integrity at the frontlines of public service

The Academy of Management Annals

The Academy of Management Annals
Author: James P. Walsh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 750
Release: 2007
Genre: Administrative agencies
ISBN: 080586220X

The Academy of Management is proud to announce the inaugural volume of The Academy of Management Annals. This exciting new series follows one guiding principle: The advancement of knowledge is possible only by conducting a thorough examination of what is known and unknown in a given field. Such assessments can be accomplished through comprehensive, critical reviews of the literature--crafted by informed scholars who determine when a line of inquiry has gone astray, and how to steer the research back onto the proper path. The Academy of Management Annals provide just such essential reviews. Written by leading management scholars, the reviews are invaluable for ensuring the timeliness of advanced courses, for designing new investigative approaches, and for identifying faulty methodological or conceptual assumptions. The Annals strive each year to synthesize a vast array of primary research, recognizing past principal contributions while illuminating potential future avenues of inquiry. Volume 1 of the Annals explores a wide spectrum of research: corporate control; nonstandard employment; critical management; physical work environments; public administration team learning; emotions in organizations; leadership and health care; creativity at work; business and the environment; and bias in performance appraisals. Ultimately, academic scholars in management and allied fields (e.g., sociology of organizations and organizational psychology) will see The Academy of Management Annals as a valuable resource to turn to for comprehensive, up-to-date information--published in a single volume every year by the preeminent association for management research.

Institutional Work

Institutional Work
Author: Thomas B. Lawrence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2009-07-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0521518555

This book contains a series of essays and empirical case studies exploring the nature of institutional work.

Handbook of Public Administration

Handbook of Public Administration
Author: B Guy Peters
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2007-05-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1446204782

The past two decades have been marked by a period of substantial and often fundamental change in public administration. Critically reflecting on the utility of scholarly theory and the extent to which government practices inform the development of this theory, the Handbook of Public Administration was a landmark publication which served as an essential guide for both the practice of public administration today and its on-going development as an academic discipline. The Concise Paperback Edition provides a selection of 30 of the original articles in an accessible paperback format and includes a new introduction by B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre. It is an essential point of reference for all students of public administration.