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This research addresses the professional logics of street-level managers (SLMs) and bureaucrats (SLBs) working in the Brazilian National Social Security Agency (INSS) through their perceptions of distributive justice and discretion. Since SLMs have the authority to influence SLBs' actions, we investigate whether these two groups hold similar viewpoints.

We integrate the administrative data and survey responses (n = 678) with earlier thematic content analysis (n = 350) in three stages: mean-testing, regression analyses and complementary qualitative analysis, integrated through a mixed-methods matrix.

Whilst no significant differences emerge in distributive justice ideas between groups, SLMs demand wider benefit-granting discretion, praising professionalism whilst adopting managerial posture and jargon.

The study adds to the theoretical discussions concerning SLM’s influence on SLB’s decision-making, suggesting that other factors outweigh it. The finding concerning the managers’ demand for wider discretion asks for further in-depth approaches.

Findings supply valuable insights for policymakers and managers steering administrative reforms, by questioning whether some roles SLMs play are limited to symbolic levels. Further, SLBs’ heterogenous formations might be more relevant to policy divergence than managerial influence and perhaps an underutilised source of innovation.

By approaching street-level management professional logics within a Global South welfare state through a mixed-methods approach, this study offers a holistic understanding of complex dynamics, providing novel insights for public sector management.

Social media have become a key part of placemaking. Placemaking revolves around collaboration between multiple stakeholders, which requires ongoing two-way communication between local government and citizens. Although social media offer promising tools for local governments and public professionals in placemaking, they have not lived up to their potential. This paper aims to uncover the tensions and challenges that social media bring for public professionals at the street level in placemaking processes.

This study aims to fill this gap with a case study of area brokers engaged in online placemaking in Amsterdam. In total, 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, focusing on area brokers’ social media practices, perceptions and challenges. The authors used an open coding strategy in the first phase of coding. In the second phase, the authors regrouped codes in thematic categories with the use of sensitizing concepts derived from the theoretical review.

The use of social media for placemaking imposes demands on area brokers from three sides: the bureaucracy, the affordances of social media and affective publics. The paper unpacks pressures area brokers are under and the (emotional) labour they carry out to align policy and bureaucratic requirements with adequate communication needed in neighbourhood affairs on social media. The tensions and the multidimensionality of what is required explain the reluctance of area brokers to exploit the potential of social media in their work.

Several studies have addressed the use of social media in placemaking, but all neglected the perspective of street-level bureaucrats who shape the placemaking process in direct contact with citizens.

This study aims to investigate the role of relational asymmetries in influencing the coping strategies adopted by frontline workers to deal with the policy–client role conflict.

A comparative analysis of three different services highlights the role of the service relationships characteristics in explaining similarities and differences in the strategies adopted by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). The research is based on the secondary analysis of three case studies conducted in Italy: the reception system for homeless people, the job brokerage service in the public employment service and the dispute settlement procedure in the labour inspectorate.

The results underline the interaction between the characteristics of the service relationship and the different coping strategies adopted to deal with the policy–client conflict.

The contribution of this study is threefold. Firstly, the authors focus on the influence of the characteristics of the service relationship in terms of agency resources over SLBs’ strategies to face with users’ expectations. Secondly, the authors intend to discuss these issues analysing SLBs not only as agents with individual preferences. Thirdly, the research design allows the authors to return to the street-level bureaucracy theory its comparative essence, proposing a comparative strategy with an explorative intent.

The paper aims to analyse the meaning and extension of discretionary power of social service professionals within network-based interventions.

Empirically, the paper is based on a case study of a network-based policy involving private and public organisations in the Northeast of Italy (Province of Trento).

The paper identifies netocracy as a social policy logic distinct from bureaucracy and professionalism. What legitimises netocracy is neither authority nor expertise but cooperation, the activation of connections and involvement, considered “good” per se. In this framework, professionalism and discretion acquire new and problematic meanings compared to street-level bureaucracy processes.

Based on a case study, the research results cannot be generalised but pave the way to further comparative investigations.

The paper reveals that the position of professionals in netocracy is to some extent trickier than that in a bureaucracy because netocracy seems to have the power to encapsulate them and make it less likely for them to deviate from expected courses of action.

Combining different literature streams – street level bureaucracy, professionalism, network organisations and welfare governance – and building on an original case study, the paper contribute to understanding professionalism in welfare contexts increasingly characterised by the combination of bureaucratic, professional and network logics.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the issues and variables that influence the bureaucracy’s role and work in the transitional period, which is known with its complexity, uncertainty, instability, ambiguity and asymmetry. This paper highlights the transition from theoretical perspective, giving examples from the Polish experience in transition.

This paper describes the changing roles of public bureaucracies in transitional periods by highlighting their ecology with the transitional period and analyzing the determinants of bureaucracy’s role and functions in terms of participation in policy-making policies, providing consultations to executives and elected officials, working as a mediator in communication and acting as an active participant in the development process giving examples from Poland. Finally, it highlights the way the bureaucracy manages its functions and the internal and external variables that constitute various levels affecting this role in the transition.

Bureaucracy is supposed to function naturally and stably in an unstable environment (transition) as its success in doing these functions and helping the new regime to exceed the transition and achieve its goals depends on many variables (bureaucracy capabilities and skills, history, power, experience, the nature of politics and bureaucratic functions, political support, policy environment, knowledge, cohesion, etc.). Most of these variables were demonstrative in the case of Poland.

This paper will be useful for scholars and policymakers interested in public administration role in the time of transition, especially countries that recently have been experiencing the transition.

In general, newly resettled refugees have poorer physical and mental health than native-born Swedes. This indicates that the society must make special efforts to enable refugees to attain health that is on a par with the rest of the population. The challenges rest primarily with employees in the public sector. But what resources do professionals need to meet the refugees’ health needs? This paper is about the need to develop strategies for professionals working with diversity and health, with a focus on the establishment of newly resettled refugees in Sweden. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify the needs and obstacles in working with diversity and health for the newly resettled.

The paper is based on focus group interviews with 40 professionals working in three large municipalities and one County Administrative Board, all of whom work with challenges related to migration and health on a daily basis.

The needs expressed by the interviewees are primarily about developing and improving communications. Three important areas of communication were expressed: how information can be transferred from sender to receiver, institutionalization and interactions at different levels.

This paper identifies important needs and obstacles when working with diversity and health in Sweden, with a focus on the establishment of newly resettled refugees. It is an important contribution because refugees in general have poorer physical and mental health than native-born Swedes and strategies to improve their health, therefore, need to be further developed.

This paper aims to highlight problems and opportunities for introducing digital automation in public administration (PA) and to propose implications for public value creation of robotic process automation (RPA) through the perspective of good bureaucracy as a guiding framework.

This conceptual paper addresses the purpose by applying three normative ideal types: Weber’s ideal type for a bureaucracy, new public management and public value management. This paper synthesizes an analytical framework in conducting case studies of the implementation of RPA systems in municipal administration.

This paper contributes to new insights into public value creation and digital automation. The following four implications are proposed: the deployment of RPA in municipal administration should emphasize that organizing administrative tasks is essentially a political issue; include considerations based on a well-grounded analysis in which policy areas that are suitable for RPA; to pay attention to issues on legal certainty, personal integrity, transparency and opportunities to influence automated decisions; and that the introduction of RPA indicates a need to develop resources concerning learning and knowledge in the municipal administration.

This paper is innovative, as it relates normative, descriptive and prescriptive issues on the developing of digital automation in PA. The conceptual approach is unusual in studies of digitalization in public activities.