By Lasse S. Hansen.

Published in 2021 (Phd. thesis), in Aarhus: Forlaget Politica.

Abstract :

Street-level bureaucrats such as frontline welfare workers, police officers, and doctors are the “face” of public policy. Although situated at the ground-level of policymaking, frontline workers’ actions become the realization of public policy (Lipsky 1980). How do clients then experience their encounters with frontline workers? Research shows that clients find it difficult to separate their perceptions of frontline workers from their perceptions of bureaucratic organizations and from government as a whole: In their view, they all become “one big system” (Soss 1999a).
This dissertation investigates a phenomenon of street-level bureaucratic
organizations that captures clients’ perceptions of their encounters with frontline workers. It is a phenomenon I define as “bureaucratic decoupling.” Contrary to the assumption in public administration that clients identify the frontline workers with the policies they enforce, bureaucratic decoupling means that clients decouple frontline workers from their official bureaucratic role as ground-level policy-makers. In other words, bureaucratic decoupling means that clients place frontline workers outside of street-level bureaucratic organizations and do not consider them as the “face” of public policy. As a result, clients do not hold frontline workers accountable for their decisions. Bureaucratic decoupling is therefore a micro-level phenomenon of bureaucratic organizations with broader macro-level effects: It reshapes the distance between clients, bureaucratic organizations, and government…

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