Street-Level Bureaucrats in a Catch-All Bureaucracy

• Author: Margo Trappenburg,Thomas Kampen,Evelien Tonkens
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221104679
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221104679

Administration & Society

2022, Vol. 54(10) 2021 –2047

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997221104679

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Article

Street-Level Bureaucrats

in a Catch-All

Bureaucracy

Margo Trappenburg1,2 , Thomas Kampen2,

and Evelien Tonkens2

Abstract

Since 2015 Dutch street-level bureaucrats have ample discretionary

space to determine how to help clients. Simultaneously, resources

were reduced. According to Zacka SLBs should avoid three pathological

positions: indifference, caregiving, and enforcing. At the individual level SLBs

supposedly accomplish that by a gymnastics of the self. We observed SLBs.

They avoided the pathological positions by (1) reframing the reigning policy

for clients (enforcing caringly) and (2) managing clients’ self-image, bolstering

their confidence, or tempering their expectations (caring forcefully). SLBs

practice a gymnastics of the client alongside a gymnastics of the self. SLBs

thus make the reigning policy palatable for clients.

Keywords

street-level bureaucrats, catch-all bureaucracy, Zacka, decentralization, the

Netherlands

Introduction

In 2015 the delivery of welfare services in the Netherlands was decentralized

to the local level. Youth care, care for people with disabilities and psychiatric

problems, long term non-residential care for frail elderly, welfare policy for

1Utrecht University School of Governance, The Netherlands

2University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Margo Trappenburg, Utrecht University School of Governance, Bijlhouwerstraat 6, 3511 ZC

Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Email: M.J.Trappenburg@uu.nl

1104679AAS0010.1177/00953997221104679Administration & SocietyTrappenburg et al.

research-article2022

2022 Administration & Society 54(10)

the long-term unemployed, and sheltered work for people with disabilities,

all became the responsibility of municipalities. This decentralization went

hand in hand with a drastic budget cut of 20% on average (De Rijk, 2018; Van

Nijendaal, 2014).

The implementation of these significant policy changes is done by street-

level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980) working together in “integrated neighbor-

hood teams.” Street-level bureaucrats (from now on: SLBs) are public

employees who interact directly with citizens and have substantial discretion

in the execution of their work (Lipsky, 1980; Weatherley & Lipsky, 1977, p.

3). When Lipsky wrote his seminal book in 1980 he observed a tendency to

reduce SLBs’ discretionary space, but he did not think this was desirable or

even feasible. The nature of SLB work was such that it could not be reduced

to programmatic formats (Lipsky, 1980, p. 15). Nor should it be divided into

specialized packages, as this would lead to SLBs who would only see seg-

ments of their product and would not be confronted with the full outcomes of

their decisions (Lipsky, 1980, p. 77).

Yet in the 1980s policy-makers were inclined to disregard this advice and

introduce ways and means to monitor and direct their SLBs. Under the ban-

ner of New Public Management (Hood, 1991), policy-makers decreased

SLBs’ discretionary space and urged for specialization in the name of exper-

tise and efficiency, as we will explain in Section 2.

Recently, however, the tide has changed once more, away from specializa-

tion and toward integration and wider SLB discretion. Present-day SLBs (or

at least the ones that we study in this article) operate in what is referred to as

a catch-all bureaucracy, an institution charachterized by wide leeway on the

one hand and tight budgets on the other. Watkins-Hayes (2009) defines a

catch-all bureaucracy as “an institution whose work is intimately tied to

responding to a variety of individual- and family-level issues and concerns

that are directly or indirectly related to severe economic and social disadvan-

tage” (p. 13). In a catch-all bureaucracy, SLBs resist specialization and frag-

mentation; they have a broad range of integrated tasks for the same clients,

ranging from support with finding work and health care to dealing with debts,

and problems with parenting.

SLBs working in the US agencies tasked with assisting the poor in the first

decade of the 21st century that Watkins-Hayes (2009) studied resemble those

working in the Dutch neighborhood teams we studied. Both the American

and the Dutch SLBs have been granted large discretionary space, much more

than they used to have in previous decades. Watkins-Hayes (2009) observed

that her SLBs were subject to “seemingly contradictory impulses of surveil-

lance and support” (p. 13), as the enlarged discretionary space came along

with budget cuts; SLBs were supposed to meet their clients’ needs as they