How social networks affect policy implementation: An analysis of street-level bureaucrats' performance regarding a health policy

Policy implementation is an interactive process between citizens and street-level bureaucrats. Although the literature has already addressed different factors that influence discretion, there is still a gap in understanding if and how bureaucrats' relational profiles affect policy implementation. This article analyses bureaucrats' interactions and the relational environments in which they exercise their discretion. The hypothesis is that bureaucrats' different relational profiles specify policy implementation at the street level. We study bureaucrats in a Brazilian health care programme involving community workers that requires regular visits to beneficiary families' homes. The research departs from ethnography and network analyses with workers from three very different contexts. We analyse bureaucrats' practices, the discursive styles mobilized in their interactions, and their personal networks. The results show that organizational factors are central to explain variations in practices, and their relational profiles highly influence the discursive styles used by bureaucrats in their interactions with citizens. The article concludes that relational elements can affect the exercise of discretion and influence interactions at the street level and should be incorporated more systematically in the implementation literature.     

Going the Extra Mile? How Street‐level Bureaucrats Deal with the Integration of Immigrants

Dutch immigration and integration policies are being interpreted and implemented by local street‐level bureaucrats. We carried out 28 semi‐structured interviews with integration coaches, integration teachers and client managers in order to understand the dilemmas they face, and to explain their subsequent behaviour. The results show that although organizational characteristics such as the bureaucratic burden made street‐level bureaucrats reluctant to enlarge their discretionary space at the expense of policy rules, their willingness to help clients often transcends these boundaries under a combination of three conditions: high client motivation, extreme personal distress of the client, and negative assessment of existing policies and policy instruments (both in terms of fairness and practicality). Furthermore, street‐level bureaucrats were found to be constantly reinterpreting and revising their roles.     

从“官吏分途”到“群体三分”:中国地方治理的人事结构转换及其政治效应——对周雪光《从“官吏分途”到“层级分流”:帝国逻辑下的中国官僚人事制度》一文的一个补充

官吏分途作为古代中国国家治理的人事制度安排,依然具有其延续性和再生性。中国地方和基层治理中官僚群体、派生群体和雇佣群体的三分,与官吏分途有着异曲同工之妙。本文作为对周雪光《从“官吏分途”到“层级分流”:帝国逻辑下的中国官僚人事制度》一文的一个补充,提出群体三分是更接近官吏分途的延续者与变异者。层级分流与群体三分,共同构成了地方和基层治理的主干。官吏之间在数量和规模上的不对称与目前官僚群体、派生群体和雇佣群体在数量和规模上的不对称是相通的。雇佣群体是影响地方和基层治理绩效的重要因素。进入层级分流的精英群体或干部群体,除了具有经济学和社会学意义上的理性之外,还拥有政党所赋予的使命。使命政治是对晋升锦标赛政治的一个补充,它是解释中国的巨变和崛起的重要视角之一。     

Market stewardship of quasi‐markets by street level bureaucrats: The role of local area coordinators in the Australian personalisation system

With the rise in popularity of market‐based responses to social policy challenges, the stewardship of quasi‐markets or public service markets, is a key concern for governments worldwide. Debates about how to manage quasi‐markets have focussed on high‐level decision‐making processes. However local actors, in particular street level bureaucrats, are a key part of the complex work of managing quasi‐markets. We examine how street level bureaucrats act as local market stewards in a new quasi‐market for disability care, the Australian National Disability Insurance scheme. We find that the street level bureaucrats, known as local area coordinators, act as shapers of local markets but that their contributions are informal and often restricted by formal structures and processes. For example, we found evidence that the use of key performance indicators can disrupt effective local stewardship efforts towards a procedural approach. We conclude that introducing principles of the polycentric governance approach can improve connections between local market knowledge holders and central decision‐making agencies, thereby improving market stewardship and outcomes.     

Frontline social service as a battlefield: Insights from street-level bureaucrats' interactions with violent clients

How do different types of social service providers experience and respond to violent clients? The street-level social service environment is a fertile ground for manifestations of violence by dissatisfied clients. This study examines the violence, verbal, and physical, to which street-level bureaucrats are exposed, and the different coping strategies they adopt. We explore these issues using interviews with 71 Israeli social service providers. Our results indicate that while some street-level bureaucrats are tolerant of client violence, others refuse to accept it. The former weigh their words, express empathy and seek to satisfy demands. The latter recruit the support of additional players and server relationships.     

The Impact of Presidential Speeches on the Bureaucracy*

Objective. Scholars have long held that presidents use various tools to control the federal bureaucracy. Yet, despite their importance to presidents in achieving their policy goals in Congress, few scholars have examined the impact of presidential speeches on bureaucratic activity. This article analyzes the impact of both positive and negative policy signals on civil rights policy in the bureaucracy. Method. I test this hypothesis using speeches coded from the Public Papers of the Presidents and their impact on criminal cases filed by the Civil Rights Division over time. Given heteroskedasticity in the dependent variable, log‐linear time‐series methods are appropriate. Results. The president's positive speeches increase the number of criminal civil rights cases filed in U.S. District Court. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also has had a significant, positive impact on bureaucratic activity. Conclusions. In part because bureaucrats have discretion to resist presidential preferences that oppose an agency's core task, negative signals do not affect the implementation of civil rights policy. Yet, positive presidential speeches are available to presidents who may wish to influence the bureaucracy.     

“官场+市场”与中国增长故事

本文运用和拓展了“官场+市场”理论,重新解析中国独具特色的经济增长机制以及政府与市场的互动模式。地方官员之间围绕着辖区经济发展的官场竞争嵌入在不同辖区企业之间的市场竞争之中,而辖区企业参与的市场竞争又嵌入在官场竞争之中。作为一种分析框架,“官场+市场”的理论贡献在于揭示了政府与市场的良性互动、政企的有效合作必备的三个条件,即内部的政治激励（“把事做对”）、外部的市场约束（“防止做坏事”）和必要的信息反馈（“做对的事”）。中国“官场+市场”的增长模式在总体上提供了这三个关键条件,在最积极的意义上实现了辖区内政治企业家与民间企业家精神的结合,政治精英与经济精英的结合,中国历史悠久的官僚政治传统与西方国家市场经济传统的结合,为我们揭示中国增长之谜开辟了新的视角。     

Left to Market and Family – Again? Ideas and the Development of the Rural Pension Policy in China

The rural pension policy in China is characterized by a high degree of instability. In the past 15 years since the introduction of pilot schemes in some regions, the state has been unable to establish a stable institutional framework for rural old‐age security. This article seeks to integrate the theoretical insights from a growing body of international literature on the role of ideas in social policy reform in order to shed new light on the study of Chinese rural pension policy. I argue that the rise of the rural pension scheme and its eventual failure to make consistent progress towards a comprehensive system is directly related to conflicting ideas among bureaucrats with respect to what sort of welfare provision the rural elderly actually need. The fluctuations in this policy realm vividly illustrate the predominance of the policy idea that peasants could still rely on their land and family, supplemented by private commercial insurance, in their old age. Given this alleged self‐reliance on the part of rural residents, the state is very reluctant to set up a comprehensive rural pension scheme. As a result, the old‐age security of the peasants in rural China is standing on very thin ice, and the prospect for more active state involvement in the near future remains dim.     

ECONOMIC RATIONALISM: AN IDEOLOGY OF EXCLUSION

Policies to rely on market forces instead of government responsibility were effected by techniques of exclusion. Political leaders, senior Federal bureaucrats and the managers of State bureaucracies advocated one version of economics. Critics were ignored or removed. The welfare state was derided and a two tier society encouraged. Only a re-vitalized politics and economics of social justice can challenge the economic rationalists' promotion of individualism, greed and intolerance.     

天主教早期在中日两国传教策略比较

从16世纪中叶开始,耶稣会士携天主教先后进入日本与中国。当时,处于战国末期“下克上”风潮中的日本是由“轻文重武重商”的武士阶层所主导的封建割据社会,中国则是“重文轻武轻商”的士大夫所主导的中央集权社会。中日两国社会文化传统的大相其异,迫使远东耶稣会采取了不同的传教策略——“商教一体”与“科教一体”。     

Activation,Public Employment Services and their Clients: The Role of Social Class in a Continental Welfare State

This article fills a gap in the existing literature by investigating how public employment service (PES) staff actually deal with their clients under a continental regime of activation. The results reported here are based on interviews both with PES staff and their unemployed clients in Germany. We argue that due to its Bismarckian origins as an insurance‐based system of ‘unemployment protection’, Germany's system of unemployment compensation is attractive not only for the marginalized, but also for core workers. As a result, PES staff deal with clients from very heterogeneous class backgrounds. We demonstrate that social class is a significant factor in client outcomes, and that earlier research has perhaps overemphasized the role of frontline staff as ‘street‐level bureaucrats’. While staff do have considerable power, the result of the encounters between the administration and clients also depends on the capabilities of the clients, which, in turn, are strongly related to social class.     

REGULATING WORKERS COMPENSATION: THE MEDICO LEGAL EVALUATION OF INJURED WORKERS IN VICTORIA

Sociological research on occupational injury has been dominated by perspectives from the social organisation of work and the labour process. What is missing from this literature is an explanation of the actual experiences at the individual worker within the processes of legitimation of occupational injury. This study explores the experiences of injured workers as they move through the medico-legal process. Medical reports and clients perspectives were used to expose the positions of doctors, insurance companies, lawyers and workers compensation bureaucrats as they form a complex intersection of power and interest in the regulation of injured workers. In particular, the conflicting roles of doctors as both gatekeepers and service providers were highlighted in the maintenance of stigmatised damaged workers.     

平等主义国家理想与区隔主义官僚体系：一个社会分层结构的新模型

通过重新分析“再分配”的概念,本文跳出以往社会主义国家社会分层研究中,对于精英与普通民众区隔的过分关注,提出了一个新的社会分层模型。本文认为,社会主义社会的分层结构是由平等主义（egalitarian）国家理想与区隔主义（particularistic）官僚体系间的矛盾所决定的。1 再分配本身并不产生不平等,而是再分配过程中的官僚及官僚政治行为造成了社会主义的社会不平等。与再分配中心的距离远近不仅决定了在再分配体系中的地位高低,也决定了遭受官僚政治影响的程度大小。在社会转型时期,基层官僚在再分配时期的优势将进一步继续,而整个社会分层结构上的差异也将逐步扩大。     

Determinants of Social Expenditure in Sri Lanka

The study examines the determinants of social expenditure in Sri Lanka for the period 1970–2010. The data are from a new data set assembled by the authors. The social spending data are collected from the Central Bank of Sri Lanka on education, health, and also on welfare spending. The study explains the determinants of social spending considering the demand‐side and the supply‐side driving forces and finds that inequality issues have been a major concern of social policy in Sri Lanka. Similarly, this study implies the influence of political behavior to satisfy voters as explained by the fiscal illusion theory. The globalization is not significant for social expenditure as commonly assumed in developed countries. Even the consequences of the self‐interested behavior of bureaucrats are not evident in the Sri Lankan welfare sector.     

Voluntary Organizations as New Street‐level Bureaucrats: Frontline Struggles of Community Organizations against Bureaucratization in a South Korean Welfare‐to‐Work Partnership

In recent years, the role of voluntary organizations in welfare partnership has received considerable critical attention from scholars working in the field. While mainstream debates have valued state–voluntary sector partnership as participatory governance, critical studies have argued that it leads voluntary organizations to serve as a shadow state. The present study, however, contends that partnership does not necessarily entail participatory welfare or the complete subordination of the voluntary sector to the state's bureaucratic system. Rather, as new street‐level bureaucrats, voluntary organizations can exercise a degree of autonomy on the frontline despite the bureaucratic constraints engendered by partnership. Through an ethnographic analysis of Korean community organizations engaged as frontline agencies in a welfare‐to‐work partnership, this study unveils how the former have recreated democratic and inclusive environments in a particular policy setting by organizing non‐work activities and transferring administrative authority to recipients. Delineating such street‐level practices, this article demonstrates that state–voluntary sector partnerships may be sites of struggle where voluntary organizations continuously strive to actualize participatory governance in diverse and indirect ways.     

Documentary analysis of the legal and policy framework of transracial adoption in South Africa

Transracial adoption was legalized in South Africa through legislative reform as South Africa moved into a post-apartheid era of non-racialism. Transracial adoption offers one option of placement for Black children in need of alternative care. However, adoption continues to face obstacles to implementation, including cultural obstacles which impact on placement of Black African children. This paper reports on adoption statistics on national adoption in the period 2013–2021 and a documentary analysis of the current legal and policy framework governing transracial adoption. We cover international instruments, local laws, including the Children's Act of 2005, and relevant policy documents designed to facilitate the implementation of adoption. We show that the law is supportive of transracial adoption, but that policy documents offer a somewhat contradictory stance to the practice. The lack of success of transracial adoption as a child protection strategy does not lie within the legal framework but may lie in the difficulties in interpreting and implementing the range of different policies by those implementing these policies. More research into the implementation practice of these bureaucrats is required to understand the underutilization of transracial adoption as a placement option for Black children in South Africa.     

Testing Alternative Theories of Bureaucratic Corruption in Less Developed Countries*

Objective. Recent studies offer myriad explanations for why bureaucratic corruption is more pervasive in certain countries than others. However, relatively little empirical work has been done comparing competing explanations of bureaucratic corruption. In this article, I test informal, formal, and cultural control explanations against one another in an effort to understand cross‐national variation in bureaucratic corruption. Methods. Using cross‐sectional and longitudinal data, this article tests the hypotheses with ordinary least squares (OLS), tobit, ordered probit, and fixed‐ and random‐effects models. Results. Democracy, strong judiciaries, and parliamentary democracy in particular reduce the prevalence of bureaucratic corruption. Conclusions. This study proposes that electoral accountability and judicial efficacy produce “good” politicians, and “good” politicians monitor bureaucrats well enough to reduce bureaucratic corruption. Future research should attempt to create a direct measure of the quality of politicians variable.     

'To live this poor life': Remembering the Hottentots Huisie squatter fishery,Cape Town,c.1934-c.1965

The paper provides a social history of a Cape Town squatter fishing settlement, Hottentots Huisie, drawn primarily from the oral histories of its inhabitants before their forced removal under apartheid Group Areas legislation in the mid 1960s. Such use of oral history has fallen into disfavour with South African social historians, increasingly suspicious of the 1980s orthodoxy that all underclass biography is reducible to the essences of 'community' and 'resistance'. The life histories of Hottentots Huisie's inhabitants defy such easy categorization. Family not 'community' sustained the fishing economy. The tenuous economic base of squatter families, however, produced a robust patriarchy seeking to maintain male control over the labour of women and children through monopolization of the folk biology of fishing and its cash rewards, backed up by violence. Second generation squatter girls, however, refused domestic indenture to fishermen by deserting Hottentots Huisie for the greater freedom and opportunity of Cape Town's urban economy, dooming the settlement to extinction regardless of forced removal. Similarly, squatter 'resistance' to bureaucrats and bosses can also best be characterized as 'everyday' and took the form of squatting and crayfish poaching whose aim was 'working the system to their minimum disadvantage'. Ironically, the act of forced removal created the surviving Hottentots Huisie 'community' of memory.     

‘Street‐level Bureaucracy’ Revisited: The Changing Face of Frontline Discretion in Adult Social Care in England

This reassessment of the continuing significance of Lipsky's (1980 ) work on ‘street‐level bureaucracy’ for frontline decision making is based on a retrospective review of the author's research on assessment practice in adult social care in England. The studies span the past two decades during which time successive governments have restructured and modernized social services departments. When these were established in 1970, they represented the high watermark of bureau‐professionalism – a mode of administration which dominated social welfare at the time Lipsky was writing. The subsequent dismantling of bureau‐professionalism calls into question the validity of his findings, and the author draws on her own research to assess conflicting views about the impact of social care reforms on the discretion which social workers exercise as street‐level bureaucrats. She concludes that the distinct types of discretion to emerge from her findings, represented in a taxonomy, are shaped by the differing micro environments of frontline practice which, in turn, affect the relative force of managerialism, professionalism and user empowerment in countering the defensive exercise of discretion described by Lipsky. Whilst her analysis affirms the continuing significance of Lipsky's analysis, it also points to the need for some revision to accommodate major shifts in welfare administration since the publication of his work. She highlights the potential relevance of these insights for investigating the next planned transformation of adult social care, personalization, as well as for the implementation literature more widely.