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Social service outreach workers serving homeless populations exemplify what Michael Lipsky calls street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) who exercise discretionary power in the performance of their professional roles. This dissertation draws on over 200 hours of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban center in the Mountain West to examine the challenges faced by homeless outreach workers and case managers in serving the needs of homeless clients and the practices they use to manage those challenges. Using a grounded theory analysis of participant observation and interview data, this dissertation focuses on what is termed “aggressive advocacy” in which social service SLBs creatively and actively pursue work arounds and solutions to potential barriers to homeless services for their clients. The analytic concept of “fitting stories” is used to describe the ways in which SLBs assist their clients in developing service-worthy narratives. They implement the Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool in ways that probe clients’ conditions and experiences to capture potentially missed vulnerabilities and enhance service-eligible vulnerability scores. Homeless SLBs also invoke discretionary power in negotiating with other agency gatekeepers and landlords, and they may go beyond their official job descriptions to spend time helping homeless clients who are resistant to services or at risk of losing them. In each of these aggressive advocacy activities, homeless SLBs demonstrate discretionary power in supporting their clients and fulfilling their agencies’ mission to serve homeless clients. Several implications of these findings for better understanding social services for the homeless are addressed as well as the broader implications of this study for understanding street-level bureaucracy more generally.

This dissertation addresses a question fundamental to democratic government: Under what conditions are bureaucrats responsive to citizens and elected officials?

This study aims to show how teachers talk about their teaching with regards to gender in relation to literature.We have interviewed four teachers of Swedish for upper secondary school to discover how they feel about, and understand, the fact that gender is a factor in the teaching of literature and that they should present to the students literature written by both male and female authors. To analyze the interviews we use Sannersted's (1991) theory about teachers as street-level-bureaucrats ("närbyråkrater"). He states that teachers are persons who have to follow what politicians have decided but they are fairly free to choose how they do it, but to be able to follow a decision as closely as possible three qualifications have to be met. The teachers have to understand the decision, be able to follow it and want to follow it. We find that the teachers that we have interviewed are aware that they discuss gender issues with their students and they all claim that they present a variation of authors to their students. However, they all express concern that there might be some problems with regards to the material availble, it being very dominated by male authors.

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<p><p>When speaking about service encounters, one most often speaks about encounters in the private sector and about customers. This study explores the public sector and the service encounter between street-level bureaucrats and clients as opposed to the encounter between salesmen and customers. The focus lies on the conflicting demands that the bureaucrat is experiencing and how she handles the emotional labour that this conflict brings. The conflicting demands have been identified as commercial, bureaucratic and social, all of which are put into the context of the opposing demands of client and organisation.</p></p>

When speaking about service encounters, one most often speaks about encounters in the private sector and about customers. This study explores the public sector and the service encounter between street-level bureaucrats and clients as opposed to the encounter between salesmen and customers. The focus lies on the conflicting demands that the bureaucrat is experiencing and how she handles the emotional labour that this conflict brings. The conflicting demands have been identified as commercial, bureaucratic and social, all of which are put into the context of the opposing demands of client and organisation.

This paper studies how organizational mission influences policy implementation. Interagency conflicts and bureaucratic challenges affecting implementation are largely due to different missions and different assessment measures. The focus of this investigation is the relationship between humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR) agencies and associated Department of Defense (DOD) medical components. Access point theory is important to this study, for it helps us understand how successful policy implementation is enabled in the midst of bureaucratic conflicts and challenges. The notion of access points has traditionally involved lobbyists and interest groups accessing elected officials and their staffs. I ask what is the effect of lobbyists and interest groups accessing bureaucrats directly in the policy implementation process and its subsequent evaluation. More importantly, I argue that bureaucrats take advantage of access points to other bureaucrats during policy implementation proceedings. This study offers the novel perspective that access points for HA/DR bureaucrats, to include those in the DOD, are readily available during the punctuating event (i.e., the natural disaster itself) and may be evaluated through the notions of timing, efficiency, and the information and capabilities they possess and can leverage during these punctuations. Simply stated, bureaucratic access points theory helps us understand how policies are successfully implemented in the midst of bureaucratic conflicts and challenges. / text

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organi zations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front-line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Aus tria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gender ing of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work pat terns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activa tion paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect-neutral male bureaucratic work.

This study aimed to investigate how teachers work methodically in subjects such as social studies and mathematics in high school, with the educational task of educating students to become good democratic citizens. According to the National Agency for Education's curriculum, the educational task of educating students to become adequate democratic citizens should permeate all subjects in school. In addition, the study aimed to investigate how these teachers worked to implement fundamental value issues in their teaching. The results of the survey indicate that there are no major differences between the subjects in how teachers work with various assignments in education and values. It rather reflects the personal values, personality, and interests among teachers. Therefore, clearer guidelines for teachers would have been preferable when it comes to the upbringing assignment and fundamental value issues in order to gain an increased understanding and meaning of the assignments themselves, both for students and teachers.