Dealing With Questions of Responsiveness in a Low-Discretion Context: Offers of Assistance in Standardized Public Service Encounters

AuthorMats Ekström,Anders Bruhn,Elin Thunman
Published date01 October 2020
Date01 October 2020
DOI10.1177/0095399720907807
Subject MatterArticles
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907807AASXXX10.1177/0095399720907807Administration & SocietyThunman et al.
research-article2020
Article
Administration & Society
2020, Vol. 52(9) 1333 –1361
Dealing With Questions
© The Author(s) 2020
of Responsiveness in
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a Low-Discretion
DOI: 10.1177/0095399720907807
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Context: Offers
of Assistance in
Standardized Public
Service Encounters
Elin Thunman1 , Mats Ekström2,
and Anders Bruhn3
Abstract
A key theme in the research on bureaucratic encounters pertains to
street-level bureaucrats’ opportunities for responsiveness when discretion
is constrained by the introduction of standardized service delivery
regulations, such as information communication technology (ICT). This
article contributes to existing scholarship by exploring how low-discretion
officials at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency Customer Center manage
competing demands of making decisions that are built on regulations and
simultaneously responding to the situation at hand and individuals’ needs.
Analyzing real-time interactions using the conversation analytical concept
of “offers of assistance” enables us to discover new aspects of interactional
practices of responsiveness in standardized service encounters.
1Uppsala University, Sweden
2University of Gothenburg, Sweden
3Örebro University, Sweden
Corresponding Author:
Elin Thunman, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Box 624, 751 26 Uppsala,
Sweden.
Email: elin.thunman@soc.uu.se

1334
Administration & Society 52(9)
Keywords
discretion, offers of assistance, responsiveness, service encounter, social
dynamics, standardization
Introduction
Lipsky (2010) initiated a major research field when claiming that street-
level bureaucrats often work in situations that are too complicated to reduce
to programmatic formats and that regularly require responses to situations’
human dimensions. Therefore, discretion in citizen interactions is widely
deemed essential for street-level bureaucrats to ensure the effective func-
tioning of service delivery, combining rule compliance (compassion or con-
sistency) with consideration of specific circumstances and individuals’
needs (flexibility or responsiveness; Hupe & Buffat, 2014; Lipsky, 2010).
Demonstrating responsiveness to individuals’ needs and providing a per-
sonalized and flexible service to citizens are regarded as key aspects of the
state government’s trust and legitimacy (Lipsky, 2010). Accordingly,
researchers today debate the consequences for street-level bureaucrats’ dis-
cretion in the form of responsiveness to the situation at hand when a range
of measures to standardize practices such as information communication
technology (ICT) and other service delivery regulations are introduced
within the public sector. In a research overview, Buffat (2015) has called
for more empirical research regarding ICT’s impacts on frontline discretion
to provide a deeper understanding of this complex phenomenon, specifi-
cally through examining how contextual factors other than technical solu-
tions affect responsive decision making. In particular, it considered as
essential that more studies are developed that account for contextual factors
and complexity by observing actual interactions between officials and citi-
zens to capture how the impacts of constraints due to developments within
ICT and management are negotiated (Buffat, 2015). In addition, research-
ers put forth the necessity of gaining more insights into the experiences and
practices of lower discretion officials of responsiveness in regulated
encounters (Raaphorst, 2017).
This article heeds these calls by examining low-discretion officials’
phone conversation with citizens at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency’s
(SSIA) national call center. With the help of recorded telephone calls, we
study actual service encounters, not their outcome, but how service and
responsiveness in the form of interactional practices are performed in
strictly standardized contexts. With the help of recent developments in ICT,
the SSIA “Customer Center” has, akin to many of its counterparts, been
established as part of New Public Management–influenced reforms that seek

Thunman et al.
1335
to improve service by placing greater emphasis on efficiency, consistency,
and responsiveness toward citizens’ or “customers’” needs (e.g., Bartels,
2013; Coleman & Harris, 2008). Such customer-oriented restructurings have
helped to render frontline service delivery more prevalent in public organi-
zations. In a comparative report based on public call center case studies,
Dunkel and Schönauer (2008) have concluded that this frontline service
workforce is an occupational group of increasing importance in the execu-
tion of the welfare state.
The SSIA Customer Center is a typical public call center in that it is
characterized by high-volume, highly standardized procedures. At the same
time, an important guiding principle is service delivery tailored to the situ-
ation and the circumstances of each individual. This aim places call-takers
in a situation where they are expected to provide quality service at the same
time as they, due to strict regulations, have limited mandate to deliver these
services. The dilemma is not unique for the SSIA call center workers but
applies to many other frontline service officials. As described by Lloyd and
Payne (2009, p. 628), call center frontline work seeks “to deliver a very
restricted service with anything outside of the job boundary being passed
on elsewhere,” with “imposed strict limits on what workers could actually
do when interacting with customers.” Hence, the job design reduces discre-
tion and gives rise to difficulties associated with providing situation-ori-
ented services, involving responsiveness to individual circumstances
(Bélanger & Edwards, 2013). In Korczynski’s (2002) well-known concep-
tualization of this call center dilemma, an inherent conflict exists in “cus-
tomer-oriented bureaucracy” between endeavors to combine the two
conflicting principles of rationalization and standardization, and delivering
a personalized service. In fact, the contradictory logics of standardization
and customization constrain the call-taker’s core task to provide service by
assisting callers (Korczynski, 2002, pp. 81–84). This conflict of interest “is
a lived reality for participants within these service encounter contexts”
(Kevoe-Feldman, 2015, p. 512).
At call centers, this lived reality of conflicting interests takes place in
numerous daily conversations with citizens, characterized by the unpredict-
ability that always accompanies human interactions (Schuppan, 2015).
Conversations at a call center like the Customer Center appear to provide
fruitful departure points for a deeper examination of street-level bureaucrats’
work when their resources for situation-orientedness and flexible responses
are limited. With the aim of contributing to the scholarship on how con-
strained discretion due to standardizing service delivery regulations is man-
aged, we are particularly interested in how these low-discretion officials
perceive and deal with questions of responsiveness to citizens’ requests and


1336
Administration & Society 52(9)
the situation at hand in a highly standardized service encounter context. To
this end, we conducted a systematic analysis of recorded call center conver-
sations and interviews with this group of officials. The recordings of actual
conversations enable us to study how the immediate social context affects
responsive decision making. Inspired by conversation analysis (CA), we
analyzed the call center conversations at a micro level using the concept of
“offer of assistance.” By acts of responsiveness in citizen encounters, we
mean acts that not only apply the authority’s regulations, but also consider
the individual’s need for help in a particular situation. Offers of assistance
are central interactional practices of this responsiveness (Hofstetter &
Stokoe, 2015). Not the least, this centrality is evident from the fact that, in
accordance with the authority’s routines, the Customer Center official
always answer the calls by asking how (s)he can help the caller. Of course,
there are other forms of responsive practices in service calls, but offering
help is a vital part. The article examines (a) how the officials experience
their opportunities to be responsive to callers’ requests or needs when ser-
vice delivery is strictly regulated
; (b) what the officials offer to do as a
response to a request or need
; and (c) how these offers are made and formu-
lated, as well as in what situations and how they are answered.

With empirical attention to what happens “in-between” officials and citi-
zens (Bartels, 2013, p. 475), the study also addresses calls for research on the
role of the immediate social context and situational dynamics in frontline
decision making (Bruhn & Ekström, 2017; Bartels, 2013; Nielsen, 2007).
Despite the emphasis on interaction processes between street-level bureau-
crats and citizens within this field, little research has systematically examined
how the actual enactment of service delivery is made and how social interac-
tion might affect decision making (Bruhn & Ekström, 2017; Bartels, 2013;
Hand & Catlaw, 2019; Monteiro, 2016).
Previous Studies: The Impact of Standardized
Developments for Frontline Discretion
The question of how standardized...

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