Suchergebnisse

AbstractUsing qualitative data from frontline police organizations in Punjab, Pakistan, this article investigates the role of street level management on creativity and improvisation in the frontline. Our findings show that the professional identities and attitudes of the street level managers play an important role in mediating creativity by the frontline workers, especially in the hierarchal organizational structure. If the managers adopted rule‐following attitude, frontline workers often faced hindrances in the use of creativity, leading to alienation. In contrast, if managers adopted a defiant attitude, frontline workers engaged in moderated creativity as they assumed the risk of rule breaking. This shows that creativity and innovation in organizations with no formal mandate to improvize is a messy and political process. Our study indicates the need to extend the research on policy innovation to hierarchal bureaucracies and organisational contexts where team work is not encouraged.

AbstractAdministrative burden research has contributed to improved understanding of citizens' experiences while accessing state services. However, the significance of the material infrastructure within which citizen–administrator interactions take place remains largely absent from this line of research. To help address this research gap, this article uses ethnographic data to discuss the influence of material and virtual artifacts in bureaucratic offices on the administrative burden faced by citizens accessing social services. This significance of artifacts is further unpacked along their material, symbolic, and aesthetic dimensions. Our findings suggest that the instrumentality of certain artifacts (or lack thereof) can disproportionately decrease accessibility and usability of bureaucratic spaces for certain social groups thereby augmenting their administrative burden. Moreover, artifacts symbolizing power, prestige, and administrative easing are reserved for spaces occupied by the social elite while the underprivileged groups are relegated to bureaucratic spaces characterized by a general neglect of aesthetics and symbolism of decay.

Global public administration remains an incomplete project with contested notions of its aims and objectives. Given its disputed nature we focus on developing a negative definition of global public administration. We argue that a global public administration cannot be based on a singular ontology, western epistemology and Eurocentric research agenda. Moreover, a truly global public administration must not be committed to myopic limitations concerning its scope, historicity, objectives and research methods. To help foster discussion toward reimagining a different public administration, based on the postcolonial work of Khatibi, we argue for an otherwise thinking about global public administration. This would require looking with alterity for inspiration and insight, looking back to learn from history, looking differently to formulate new questions through new lenses, looking inwards at disciplinary exclusions, and looking dialectically to navigate the macro-micro research divide.

AbstractResearch on street‐level bureaucrats has identified their role as policy entrepreneurs through the adoption and advocacy of policy innovations. This article adds to this research by underscoring how street‐level bureaucrats use creativity and improvisation to find contextual solutions for emergent local policy problems in response to scarcity. We suggest that these practices of policy repair allow frontline bureaucracies to deal with personnel, process, and material scarcity and maintain public service delivery even in resource‐scarce environments. Using ethnographic data from Punjab, Pakistan, we show that this repair work is collaborative, client‐centered, and motivated by compassion and kindness. Our research indicates that emergent and improvised policy repair allows frontline bureaucracies to be resilient and responsive to scarcity and changing service demands. Our findings further suggest that inclusion of street‐level bureaucrats in formal policy decisions can help develop context‐specific solutions to emergent problems of public service delivery.Evidence for Practice

Street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) face multiple types of scarcity during policy implementation—material scarcity, where they do not have enough equipment or space for their work; process scarcity, where officially sanctioned menu of routines or procedures do not account for local situations; and personnel scarcity, where they do not have enough workforce or expertise for their tasks.
SLBs do policy repair—use creativity and innovation in their day‐to‐day work to find local and contextualized solutions for their localized service limitations, to overcome scarcity, and to deal with the vulnerability of bureaucratic systems.
Allowing SLBs to use creativity and improvisation for local and emergent problems can create more robust and resilient public service delivery systems.
Repair requires implicit and local knowledge of bureaucratic systems; inclusion of SLBs in formal policy decisions is necessary to develop context‐specific solutions to emergent problems of public service delivery.

Abstract
Administrative burden research has highlighted the multiple costs imposed by public policies and their impact on citizens. However, the empirical understanding of citizens' responses to such burdens remains limited. Using ethnographic data of doctors applying for maternity leave in Pakistan, this article documents strategies used by citizens to navigate the administrative burden faced by them. Our findings suggest that these strategies are based on an individual's cache of social, cultural capital, and economic capital. Based on our data, we also theorize the significance of another form of capital for navigating administrative burden. This administrative capital is defined as an individual's understanding of bureaucratic rules, processes, and behaviors. Our findings further illustrate that the different costs imposed by public policies can be interchangeable, which may be used by citizens to their advantage. Propositions for future research on the intersection of different forms capital and administrative burden are also included.

Bureaucracy is deeply implicated in the biopolitical regimes that create and render invisible social waste—individuals classified as abnormal, deviant, or useless—in contemporary societies. According to previous theorists, bureaucracy is able to carry out this critical task through moral distance and reliance on technical efficiency. By specifically focusing on street-level bureaucrats, a unique tier of bureaucracy which is often afforded neither moral distance nor clear directions, this article explains the microprocesses of classification, managing and recycling through which social waste management is carried out in contemporary society. In doing so, this article highlights that in addition to official policies, informal factors like social, organizational, and group norms are critical determinants of bureaucratic behavior in front-line organizations and problematize some of the key assumptions of Weberian bureaucracy. Unlike functional interpretations, we argue that, in some instances, the informal factors influencing street-level bureaucrats are more regressive than official public policies and help explain some of the dystopian features of contemporary bureaucracy and its impact on social inequity.

Brexit and Trump's victory in the United States has sparked renewed academic interest in far-right populism. However, this academic discourse remains remarkably orientalist in its tenor and rhetoric. The focus of academic debates remains restricted to dissecting the rise of far-right populism in the Global North West, while similar movements in Global South East remain largely ignored. We argue that the contemporary academic discourse about the far-right populism is based on the fundamental assumption that the 'normal' Global North West is becoming 'abnormal,' while the question of abnormality or lack thereof of the proverbial Orient is not taken up because in such othering discourse, the option of normality is foreclosed to the Global South East. Using the rise of the Bharatiya Janta Party in India as an example, we contend that far-right populist movements in the Global South East have developed and intersect with businesses and government in unique ways. The embrace of neoliberalism by the Indian far-right, a stark contrast to similar movements in the Global North West, further suggests that we might be witnessing a global reorientation of the capitalist order. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of far-right populism must account for and pay attention to the heterogeneities of these movements across the Global North West and the Global South East.

PurposeThis study investigates the integration of information technology (IT) competencies with organizational inclusion initiatives and its impact on firm performance. It examines the role of organizational inclusion in promoting knowledge management capability (KMC) and the moderating effect of approach and avoidance motivation on the relationship between KMC and operational performance.Design/methodology/approachThe study is grounded in the resource orchestration theory (ROT), which conceptualizes the integration of IT competencies and organizational inclusion. It employs hierarchical regression analysis on data collected from 204 firms and 374 managerial respondents to test the proposed hypotheses.FindingsThe results indicate that IT competencies enhance the relationship between organizational inclusion and KMC. Additionally, the relationship between KMC and operational performance is weaker when employees exhibit higher levels of avoidance motivation.Practical implicationsThis study offers theoretical and managerial insights for integrating IT competencies into organizational inclusion initiatives, providing guidance for organizations seeking to enhance their performance, with a specific focus on the relevance of China as the research context.Originality/valueThis study enriches the scholarly discourse by examining the underexplored integration of IT competencies with organizational inclusion, notably in the context of China. It illuminates the moderating role of motivation in the KMC-operational performance relationship, benefiting both academia and practitioners. Furthermore, this work extends the literature by demonstrating how combining organizational inclusion and IT competencies can enhance workplace KMC, connecting it to internal knowledge resources. Theoretical implications extend beyond organizational inclusion and IT to show the broader application potential of ROT in management and information systems.

In this book, street-level bureaucracy scholars from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America analyse the conditions that shape frontline work and citizens´ everyday experience of the state. Institutional factors such as political clientelism, resource scarcity, social inequality, job insecurity, and systemic corruption affect the way street-level bureaucrats enforce rules and implement policies. Inadvertently, they end up implementing inequities in citizens' access to rights and services —despite efforts to repair organisational deficiencies and broker relations between vulnerable citizens and a distant state. This book illuminates these realities and challenges and provides unique insights into critical themes such as resource scarcities, bureaucratic corruption, control practices and the complexities of dealing with vulnerable population groups