Governing Street-Level Bureaucracies

This book examines how caseworkers are governed in today’s street-level bureaucracies. It redefines our understanding of public sector governance by highlighting the subtle, informal, and everyday forms of organizational governance that shape caseworkers’ subjectivities beyond formal policies and professional identities. Based on four distinct types of normative governance – ‘governance by discourse’, ‘governance by emotions’, ‘governance by peers’, and ‘governance by numbers, colours, and symbols’, the book shows how caseworkers are shaped as organizational staff members alongside their roles as welfare professionals and welfare state bureaucrats.Governing Street-Level Bureaucracies will be of interest to scholars and students in organizational sociology, street-level bureaucracy research, public administration, and critical management studies. It also provides valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand caseworkers’ responses to public governance and public sector reforms.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Kerstin Jacobsson is a Professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has published extensively on discourse and governance in the field of social and labour market policy, as well as on street-level bureaucracy.Håkan Johansson is a Professor of social work at the School of Social Work at Lund University, Sweden. He has published extensively on topics related to comparative social policy and activation reforms and their implementation in Nordic welfare states.