Governing Street-Level Bureaucracies: The Organizational Shaping of Caseworkers

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.