Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government

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Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-GovernmentAurélien Buffat aa Institute of Political and International StudiesFaculty of Social and Political Sciences, University ofLausanne, Lausanne, SwitzerlandPublished online: 19 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Aurélien Buffat (2013): Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government, Public Management Review, DOI:10.1080/14719037.2013.771699

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STREET-LEVELBUREAUCRACY ANDE-GOVERNMENT

Aurélien Buffat

Aurélien BuffatInstitute of Political and International StudiesFaculty of Social and Political SciencesUniversity of LausanneLausanneSwitzerlandE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

With the intensive use of information andcommunication technologies, governmentsare transforming into e-governments. Whilepublic management research has givenincreased attention to this subject lately,this article reviews the limited literature thatdeals with the impacts of e-government tech-nologies on street-level bureaucracies. Atwofold argument is being developed. First,what can be called the ‘curtailment thesis’,stressing the reduction or disappearance offrontline policy discretion, is addressed.Second, the ‘enablement thesis’ gets atten-tion, highlighting how technologies providefrontline workers and citizens with additionalaction resources. The article concludes withpropositions for a future research agenda onthe topic.

Key wordsE-government, street-level bureaucracy, dis-cretion, accountability

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

Public Management Review, 2013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2013.771699

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INTRODUCTION

Governments are increasingly using information and communication technologies(ICT). This phenomenon, scholarly labelled as ‘e-government’ or sometimes ‘e-gov-ernance’, mainly refers to the intensive use of electronic tools and applications in publicadministration and the provision of governmental services (Garson, 2006; Snellen,2005). While the implementation of new technologies brings important changes forcivil servants’ work, the study of e-government has been ‘more or less sidelined’ withinpublic management research (Lips and Schuppan, 2009: 739) where it occupies asomehow ‘ghettoized’ position (Hood and Margetts, 2010; Pollitt, 2011: 378). Thisseems to reflect the overall lack of consideration regarding the role technologicalchange plays in public administration (Pollitt, 2011). Nevertheless, increasing attentionhas been given to e-government in the past fifteen years (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998;Henman, 2010; Homburg, 2008; Snellen and van de Donk, 1998).In that regard, Dunleavy et al. (2005) see an overall movement of public sector organiza-

tions towards a ‘digital-era governance’ conceived as ‘the central role that IT and informationsystem changes now play in a wide-ranging series of alterations to how public services areorganized as business processes and delivered to citizens or customers’ (468). The new web-based technologies are seen as deeply changing the relations between government agenciesand citizens through large-scale use of emails for external communications, the risinginfluence of agencies’ websites or the massive development of electronic services for clients.Interestingly for our topic, public service organizations tend to transform into ‘digital

agencies’ (479) through the partial or full digitization of their administrative processesand interactions with citizens: various services are nowadays delivered online (e.g.request a birth certificate or fill in a tax return); new forms of automated technologiesare implemented based on a ‘zero touch’ logic (the ideal of no human intervention in anadministrative operation) and potentially creating a ‘radical disintermediation’ (486)that allows citizens to directly connect to state systems – e.g. with mobile phonesapplications – without having to pass through the usual universal gatekeepers (theagency personnel). Digitization also implies a movement towards ‘self-government’(citizens increasingly involved in the co-production of outputs through electronicprocesses) and towards ‘open-book government’ (citizens’ access to their administrativefiles and electronic possibilities to intervene in the process).This being said, with some noticeable exceptions presented hereafter, e-government has

remained relatively un-researched from a street-level bureaucracy perspective (Lipsky, 1980),i.e. from a perspective focused on the impacts and uses of these important changes at thefrontline level. This is regrettable for our understanding of contemporary street-level organisa-tions functioning in such an increasingly computerized and technologized work environment.Traditionally, street-level bureaucrats are defined as public service workers who

directly interact with citizens (often in face-to-face encounters) and have considerablediscretion in the execution of their work, particularly in the way they process people

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and the decisions they make. Several factors account for this discretionary power: theinadequacy of available resources, the ambiguity of policy goals, the difficulties ofmanagerial control, the structural weakness of clients and the intrinsically human (andhence complex) nature of the cases to be handled are considered as work conditionsparticularly conducive to discretionary behaviour. As Lipsky put it:

The 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 (1980: 161).

However, the advent of a ‘digital-era governance’ makes it nowadays relevant to ask ifand how ICT would be able to impact the well-established policy discretion of street-level bureaucrats depicted in the literature (e.g. Maynard-Moody and Portillo, 2010;Meyers and Vorsanger, 2003). Given the control potential of new technologies allowingmanagers to supervise frontline agents directly and permanently, it is equally importantto investigate the consequences of ICT on street-level accountability relationships, i.e.on ‘accountability regimes’ (Hupe and Hill, 2007).The goals of this paper are hence twofold. First, it aims at discussing the works that

connect e-government, street-level bureaucracy and discretion. Second, based on thelatter, propositions for a future research agenda on the subject are made.

FRONTLINE DISCRETION IN E-GOVERNMENTS: CURTAILMENT VERSUSENABLEMENT ARGUMENTS

Little research exists that addresses the impacts of ICT on street-level discretion. As aconsequence, available empirical results and insights are relatively limited. In addition,existing works do not provide conclusive statements. On the one hand, initial researchconsidered that street-level discretion decreases or disappears in the case of largebureaucratic informatisation. Since an insistence is put on the negative impact of ICTover discretion, the label ‘curtailment thesis’ is relevant. On the other hand, otherstudies point out more nuanced effects of ICT. These studies indicate that newtechnologies constitute only one factor among others shaping street-level discretionand that they provide both frontline agents and citizens with action resources. This iswhy we label this orientation the ‘enablement thesis’.

The curtailment thesis

A first contribution was made by Snellen (1998, 2002) according to whom street-leveldiscretion disappears with informatisation. For him, the power of street-level bureaucrats

Buffat: Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government 3

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lies in their intermediary position between information streams coming from the state andthe citizens. Snellen argues that ICT deeply challenge their ability to manipulateinformation:

It is not by bureaucratic but by infocratic means that the street-level bureaucrat can be prevented from

manipulating the information streams between organization and client. It is because of ICT applications

that street-level bureaucrats have lost what Prottas called their intermediary or central position between

information streams (1998: 500).

In addition, ICT exclude agents from decision making since computer applicationsprovide automated assessment of cases. Human ‘interference’ in cases is eliminated.Such automation of decisions ‘will increasingly define the decision-making premises ofstreet-level bureaucrats’ and, where it occurs, ‘the characteristic street-level bureaucratdisappears from the pages of public administration and public policy’ (Snellen, 1998:503). The focus is put on the ‘downgrading’ of street-level work (Snellen, 2002:194–5). With the shift from bureaucracy to ‘infocracy’ (Zuurmond, 1998), street-levelbureaucrats lose their influence on policy implementation.Other authors, like Bovens and Zouridis (2002), argue that the street-level dimen-

sion stricto sensu vanishes with ICT: ‘contacts with citizens no longer take place in thestreets, in meeting rooms, or from behind windows, but through cameras, modems,and Web sites’ (2002: 180). Agencies progressively transform into screen-level or system-level bureaucracies.While in the former type, ICT are used for data entry and information storage, in

the latter, human judgment is fully replaced with software and predefined algorithms.Decisions are not made by caseworkers but generated through automated programmes:agents do not decide any longer to allocate a grant to a student or send a traffic fine; theprogramme does it automatically. Street-level bureaucrats disappear almost totally fromthe organisations: ‘Apart from the occasional public information officer and the helpdesk staff, there are no other street-level bureaucrats as Lipsky defines them. Theprocess of issuing decisions is carried out – virtually from beginning to end – bycomputer systems’ (2002: 180).Therefore, frontline discretion decreases with the increasing role of ICT. In a screen-

level bureaucracy, new technologies support case assessment. Human interventionoccurs only partially. Limited discretion exists. In a system-level bureaucracy, thewhole decision-making process is automated. Caseworkers’ intervention disappears andso does their discretionary power. Discretion shifts to other actors. In terms of policymaking, system designers, legal policy staff and IT experts become the functionalequivalent of the ancient street-level bureaucrats: ‘they are the persons whose choicescan affect the practical implementation of a policy’ (2002: 181).Even though Bovens and Zouridis argue for a ‘discretion-disappearance’ thesis, they

remain cautious regarding the generalisation of this transformation pattern. A first


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reason is the limitation of their study to specific types of street-level bureaucracy, i.e.large decisional industries that handle large amount of formalized transactions (2002:184). Automating decisions is particularly likely here. It remains uncertain whether‘similar transformations can be observed in non-legal, non-routine, street-level inter-actions, such as teaching, nursing, and policing’ (180). There are also restrictivenecessary conditions for the advent of system-level bureaucracies, such as policy outputsbeing easily formulated in ‘if, then’ programs and a legal culture emphasising formalequality.The authors grouped here share a common central argument: ICT has a negative and

curtailing effect on frontline discretion. In computerized public service delivery, street-level bureaucrats partially or totally lose their discretionary power. This power shifts toother actors.With this thesis, several critical notes can be made. First, a certain technological

determinism is implied in the argument: technologies arrive and frontline discretiondecreases or vanishes. Since implementation and public administration literature haveconstantly shown the inherent and resilient existence of discretion at the street level,the power of ICT may be overestimated here.A second problem is the use of a too-narrow definition of discretion, particularly by

Snellen, who defines it as the agents’ ability to manipulate information streams (1998:500). Such a definition does not consider the various sources of frontline discretion.Evans and Harris (2004: 883–90) identify three possible sources: when policy goalsappear unclear (discretion in nebulous policy), when frontline agents resist undesiredpolicies (discretion as subversion) or when policy officials voluntarily grant caseworkerswith substantial room for manoeuvre (professional discretion). The latter clearly showsthat managerial strategies cannot be reduced to the curtailment of discretion. Inaddition, discretion is a complex phenomenon that depends on a multitude of factors(Hupe, 2006; Hupe and Buffat, 2012); one shall not assume unilateral and mechanicalinfluence of technology.Third, the argument suffers from an obvious empirical limitation. The typology is

only suitable for very specific street-level organisations but, as Bovens and Zouridisacknowledge themselves (2002: 184), is hardly transferable to the core types of street-level bureaucracies (police departments, schools or social welfare departments).Classical street-level bureaucrats will continue to patrol, teach or provide resourcesfor other human beings despite the existence of new technologies. Public goods likeeducation, security or health cannot be provided through algorithms.The fourth weakness is an insufficient interest in the concrete uses of technologies by

frontline workers. How do caseworkers use software and other new technologies?What about citizens? Taylor and Kelly (2006: 637) argue that ICT have become ‘thetool of the professional’ and have to be considered as a further ‘step in the process ofstreet-level activity’ rather than its end point. Such an argument exists in a secondrange of works we present in the following section.


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The enablement thesis

The ‘curtailment thesis’ is challenged by other research. Instead of unilaterally assumingcurtailing effects of new technologies on discretion, other works have considered thequestion differently. They consider new technologies as only one contextual factoramong others shaping discretion, focus their attention on various effects of ICT andhighlight how both frontline agents and citizens use technologies as action resources.Dubious about the infocratic argument, Jorna and Wagenaar (2007) study two

subsidy allocation processes in The Netherlands. They show that ICT provide increasedmanagerial control over formal aspects of the daily organizational life (quantity ofapplications handled and number of inconsistencies) but that such supervision is unableto capture informal dimensions of the decisions made by operators (meaning of data forworkers, content of the applied standards, etc). Instead of eliminating discretionthrough tightened control, informatisation has rather created more ‘inanimate artefacts’(2007: 210), i.e. information makes it impossible for managers to see how muchdiscretion agents effectively use. The authors argue that ICT ‘obscure the informal useof discretion’ (210) and therefore stress the limited capacity of ICT to provide relevantinformation on frontline’s daily decisions. The informality of work practices is verydifficult to approach through automated monitoring, such an ability being highlydependent on the definition and nature of the task to be controlled.Buffat (2011) provides similar results in a study looking at the impacts of New Public

Management and ICT tools on policy discretion and street-level accountability in aSwiss unemployment fund. Buffat highlights the paradoxical effects of a new electronicdocument management system. On the one hand, the new programme has providedmanagers with much more quantitative information on workers’ decisions and com-pliance to legal criteria. On the other hand, the introduction of a remote controlthrough the software has weakened the quality of the supervision: middle managers arenot located within the field agencies and work teams any longer and have therefore losta refined vision of caseworkers’ decisions. Besides, time to control and close attentionremain limited organizational resources. As a consequence, managers might see muchmore regarding street-level work, but this does not mean they see things better; thelevel of street-level discretion has therefore not diminished after the introduction of thenew office technology. Here, the managerial ability to control workers through ICTtools depends on other contextual factors that the technology stricto sensu, i.e. workorganization and available resources.Other authors focus on how new technologies are used by frontline agents. In a

study on the implementation of the French agricultural policy, Weller (2006) providesan ethnographic account on how a farmer (called ‘Poulard’) is saved by a street-levelbureaucrat (a local farming inspector) against a judgment automatically issued throughsatellite detection (suppression of the public subsidies granted to Poulard). The satellitehas automatically measured some parcels in an incorrect way. Interestingly, it is a


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human agent, using his judgment and intimate local knowledge of the field, who wasable to correct the machine’s decision. Here, the automatically generated interpretationof reality is counterbalanced by a human interpretation, which ultima ratio prevails.Analytical lessons consist in the key discretionary role frontline agents continue to playeven in highly technologized and automated work contexts. The study also demon-strates that opposing ICT and discretion is not relevant, since it is rather a complex anddynamic interaction that exists between the technical device and its users, in a specificcontext. Weller’s study indicates that technological influence is not automatic becausestreet-level agents can successfully oppose automated decisions by applying their ownjudgements. In that case, discretion does not depend only on technology but also andmore importantly on contextual factors such as task distribution among agencies or theprofessional skills of agents.Other works have investigated the impact of new technologies on the nature of the

service encounter and relations between frontline workers and citizens, in particularwhen ICT seek to replace face-to-face human interactions with virtual ones. Thestarting point often referred to in these works is the ‘public encounter’ (Godsell,1981) or the ‘bureaucratic encounter’ (Hasenfeld et al., 1987) as being the previouslytraditional modes of interaction between state agents and citizens: based on face-to-facemeetings in government offices, human interaction and usually taking place at areception desk.1 What fundamentally characterizes such a bureaucratic encounter is‘an information exchange and a negotiation and conflict management process throughwhich the applicant’s normative framework and expectations are brought in line withthe organization’s’ (Hasenfeld et al., 1987: 402). This type of encounter represents akey moment in ‘people-processing’ (Prottas, 1979) or in the ‘social construction of aclient’ (Lipsky, 1980: 59), i.e. the process through which ordinary citizens are beingtransformed into preformatted legal-administrative categories. Besides, these encoun-ters are conceived as ‘power-dependence relations’ because both state officials andcitizens exchange information, depend on each other and mobilize their own resourcesto ‘negotiate favourable outcomes’ (Hasenfeld et al., 1987: 406). But what does happento the administrative relationship when such a human interaction is being replaced by avirtual one?In an ethnographic study on how beneficiaries of the French social aid use website

applications of their welfare state department, Vitalis and Duhaut (2004) show theexistence of ambiguous and complex effects of the new technology.First, the beneficaries’ choice to electronically interact with the organization is

closely depending on the degree of simplicity/complexity of the matter at hand. TheInternet is especially used for cases that both workers and citizens perceive as simple,but users prioritize direct contact with state agents for more complex matters requiringmore elaborated explanations and discussions. This is typically the case for conflictingsituations, for which the use of the website is perceived as being poorly relevant.Interestingly, virtual interaction does not replace direct interactions between actors but


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get rather integrated into pre-existing and still existing practices (face-to-face contact,phone calls, etc.). This indicates that the administrative relationship remains ‘multi-modal’ (318). Besides, remote web-based technologies have a limited capacity totranslate clients’ needs into administrative outputs and a restricted ability to functionas a negotiation area of rules or as a conflict management tool. For negotiating orsolving conflicts, actors favour direct contact modes of interaction.Another result regards the effects of the new technology on welfare agents. On the

one hand, while in face-to-face interactions agents can easily alternate between apersonalized-flexible and a distant-rigid strategy towards their clients, this game isless possible within the formatted internet system. Here, agents see a restriction intheir discretionary power. But on the other hand, they also use the same internetsystem as a way to re-introduce some distance in their relationship with reluctantclients and legitimize their decisions by protecting themselves behind the formal rulesand computerized procedures.2 Besides, the IT system provides agents with a wholerange of data on clients, allowing them to exert closer control over the beneficiaries. Inthese two cases, the new technology has both a restraining and an enabling effect on theagent’s discretionary power over clients.Finally, Vitalis and Duhaut (2004) convincingly argue that the beneficiaries can

successfully use the new internet applications to their own advantage: websites provideclients with increasingly better information regarding their rights and clients aretherefore able to reduce their asymmetry of information vis-à-vis state agents; theycan also get more benefits by remotely cheating in the information they transmit to thewelfare department3: ‘for clients, online resources constitute means to break down theadministrative opacity and therefore rebalance the administrative relationship. In somecases, exchanges through the internet might even reverse the asymmetry’ (Vitalis andDuhaut, 2004: 322).4 Here, new technologies do clearly provide citizens with addi-tional resources in their relationship to the state.On the latter aspect, consistent empirical evidence in that direction has been recently

produced by Bekkers et al. (2011). In their analysis of two successful micro-mobiliza-tions in The Netherlands (protest of secondary school students and dissenting voices ofDutch soldiers involved in Afghanistan), the authors show that Web 2.0 technologies(social networks, weblogs, YouTube, etc.) have provided individuals and small groupswith powerful resources for rapid and important political mobilization against contestedpolicy programmes. In that case, public professionals (managers here) were ‘caught bysurprise’ and restricted in their action and room for manoeuvre. New technologies donot only enhance transparency of information for citizens, they do also provide themwith powerful action resources due to their facilitating character.In conclusion, the common characteristic of the publications referred to in the

previous paragraphs is the suggestion of an alternative view of discretion in digitalstreet-level bureaucracies. First, discretion is not suppressed at the frontlines despiteICT tools and continues to exist in the daily street-level activity. This result is linked to


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contextual factors such as the inability of ICT tools to capture the whole picture offrontline work and choices, limited resources for managers to control (time, attention),work organization or the skills possessed by street-level agents. Analytically speaking,this means that technology (and its use) is only one of the factors influencing thediscretion of frontline agents and that a variety of non-technological factors shape it aswell. This is why no unilateral effects of technology can be assumed. Furthermore,these works reach nuanced conclusions regarding the effects of digitization on theadministrative relationship. New technologies have mixed and ambiguous impactsbecause they simultaneously enable state agents to better control their clients whileclients also get empowered through the strategic use they can make of ICT. At theopposite of the rather deterministic argument on technology in the ‘curtailment thesis’,this second thesis focuses its attention on how technology is used both by state agentsand citizens in their power-dependence relationship, thus insisting more on the enablingaspect of ICT considering the action resources they provide to actors involved at thestreet level. It appears that complex interactions occur between new technologies,frontline workers and citizens.

TOWARDS A FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA

Curtailment and enablement arguments represent first encouraging steps of the inquiryinto interactions between technological change and street-level bureaucracy. Takingstock of these works, I would like to make propositions for future research on thetopic.First, existing knowledge being inconclusive regarding ICT impacts on frontline

discretion, more empirical research is needed. In particular, issues of discretion (powerdimension) and accountability (control dimension) in digitized street-level agenciesmust be placed at the heart of future research efforts.Second, the issue at stake can hardly be separated from the more general debate on

the causal links between technology and society. An intermediary position between thetwo ‘extreme theoretical positions’ (Pollitt, 2011) – the dominance of technology onthe one hand (‘technological determinism’) and the social shaping of technology on theother hand (‘social determinism’) – is relevant here. There is a growing agreementregarding the relevance of a pragmatic and complexity-aware approach of technologicalchange within public administration (Homburg, 2008; Lips and Schuppan, 2009;Pollitt, 2011). This emerging view pushes scholars to fully account the complexsociotechnical nature of e-government. Lips and Schuppan (2009: 742) think e-govern-ment is ‘an outcome of the interplay between ICTs, the public sector, and individualswho are using ICTs’, and Pollitt (2011: 380) similarly states that ‘the uses andconsequences of information technology emerge unpredictably from complex socialinteractions’. Taking complexity seriously implies that probably no big theory is


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relevant here and that future research projects shall be able to address a whole range ofcontextual factors. This has implications both at a theoretical and methodological level.In terms of theoretical propositions to be explored in future research, it has now

become clearer what still need to be explored. Actually, the two thesis presented aboveteach us that new technologies exert both constraining and enabling effects on street-levelbureaucrats. What remains unclear so far is to discover under which specific conditions donew technologies function, rather as what Hupe and Buffat (2012) call an ‘actionprescription’ (limiting the room for manoeuvre) or an ‘action resource’ (enhancing theroom manoeuvre) for street-level agents. This obviously regards an empirical matter,implying an investigation of the main contextual factors influencing the phenomenon atstake. As noted earlier, important factors to be considered in the analysis would be(among others): citizens and managerial use of the new technologies, work organiza-tion, types of task at hand or degree of agents’ professionalization.Besides, future research must unpack e-government, i.e. empirically disaggregate it.

E-government involves a large variety of ICT ‘with different technical functions andcapabilities, and as a consequence, different possibilities for influencing processes andstructures in the public sector’ (Lips and Schuppan, 2009: 742). Unpacking the varietyof e-government technologies is important because different consequences are to beexpected on street-level discretion and accountability according to the type of technol-ogy. Following Snellen’s (2005: 399) distinction of ICT into five different types,different impacts might be expected whether a database technology, a work-tracingdevice or an automated decision-making software is implemented in a frontline agency.Finally, what would be suitable methodologies for such a research agenda?

Concluding a special issue dedicated to existing methods in public managementresearch, Hood (2011: 322) refers to the ‘James Bond approach to methodology’ todescribe the current interest for combining different methodological approaches, aperspective which seems relevant here as well.Among the methods toolkit, ethnography would be particularly adapted to account for

contextual factors and complexity. Besides, participant observation of the daily func-tioning of organisations is a good way to empirically assess how state agents and citizensdo concretely use new technologies. Besides, ethnography is particularly adapted‘where the challenge is to develop theory rather than to test hypotheses from alreadyfairly well-developed theory’ (Hood, 2011: 325), this being the case regarding ourknowledge on the links between new technologies and street-level work. In addition, asHuby et al. (2011) argue, the ethnography to be practised has to be ‘multi-site’ and‘mobile’ – new ways of ‘being there’ – in order to capture the relationships that arenowadays not just between people, ‘but also between people and human artefacts suchas IT products and systems’ (210). Nevertheless, ethnography has its own limitations interms of generalization of identified causal mechanisms. This is why I suggest to relyalso on methods such as comparison (Wilson, 2011) and longitudinal designs (Wond andMacaulay, 2011).


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Comparative analysis would be a suitable approach to assess the effects of e-governmentin a systematic way: the same technology might have very different consequences for street-level bureaucracies whose characteristics significantly vary at the individual, organisational,professional and institutional levels. As Pollitt (2011: 380) put it, ‘The impact oftechnological change varies with the particular activities under consideration, the institu-tional context and culture, the legal and financial rules and, not least, the inherentcharacteristics of the particular technology itself’. In such a comparative perspective, thedependent variable could be the amount of street-level discretion observed in two or moreagencies (with identical tasks) but varying on the presence or absence of a given newtechnology. Comparison could also be diachronic, implying to compare discretion beforeand after a technological change. Here, comparative methods are useful to empiricallyestablish differences and similarities between cases, to systematically ‘capture context’(Hupe and Buffat, 2012) and develop causal arguments about the relationship betweencontextual factors and the outcome under study (discretion).In particular, a diachronic comparison might take the form of a longitudinal design.

Extending the temporal sequence of comparison would compensate the rather short-termperspective of ethnography and allow research projects to get a deeper appreciation of the‘contextual milieu in which public managers operate’ (Wond and Macaulay, 2011: 311).These are theoretical and methodological suggestions considered useful for the develop-

ment of a future research agenda. More generally, it can be hoped that linking the study ofe-government to the study of contemporary street-level bureaucracy will lead to a fruitfuldialogue and cross-questioning between these two separated subfields of public administra-tion. Analysing the interaction between new technologies and street-level work remains anecessary task to capture the transformations of public management.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and also Peter Hupe(Erasmus University, Rotterdam) and Yannis Papadopoulos (University of Lausanne)for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

NOTES1 Or a guichet in the terminology used by French sociologists like Weller (1999) or Dubois (2010).2 The same empowerment of frontline agents towards their clients through IT systems has also been observed in

a study by Dennis (2006) conducted in a US welfare state department: ‘This way (showing budget screens tothe client to explain adverse actions), they seem to question the authority and the decisions less than before.I mean “the computer says what the computer says” is the way we can present it and they seem less willing toprotest against the outcomes’ (574), quoted from an interview with a frontline worker.

3 For example, the website provides claimants with the possibility to calculate precisely how much socialbenefits they would get depending on various criteria, such as marital status or other conditions of resources.


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Some claimants have therefore presented themselves as being single instead of married, because they knewfrom the website calculator it would be more beneficial for them.

4 Our own translation from French.

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Documents

Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government