Public Management Review

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Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government

Aurélien Buffat

To cite this article: Aurélien Buffat (2015) Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government, Public
Management Review, 17:1, 149-161, DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2013.771699

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 Public Management Review, 2015
Vol. 17, No. 1, 149–161, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2013.771699

Abstract
STREET-LEVEL
With the intensive use of information and
communication technologies, governments
BUREAUCRACY AND
are transforming into e-governments. While
public management research has given E-GOVERNMENT
increased attention to this subject lately,
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this article reviews the limited literature that

deals with the impacts of e-government tech-
Aurélien Buffat
nologies on street-level bureaucracies. A
twofold argument is being developed. First, Aurélien Buffat
what can be called the ‘curtailment thesis’, Institute of Political and International Studies
stressing the reduction or disappearance of Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
frontline policy discretion, is addressed. University of Lausanne
Second, the ‘enablement thesis’ gets atten- Lausanne
tion, highlighting how technologies provide Switzerland
frontline workers and citizens with additional E-mail: [email protected]
action resources. The article concludes with
propositions for a future research agenda on
the topic.

Key words
E-government, street-level bureaucracy, dis-
cretion, accountability

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 150 Public Management Review

INTRODUCTION

Governments are increasingly using information and communication technologies

(ICT). This phenomenon, scholarly labelled as ‘e-government’ or sometimes ‘e-gov-
ernance’, mainly refers to the intensive use of electronic tools and applications in public
administration and the provision of governmental services (Garson, 2006; Snellen,
2005). While the implementation of new technologies brings important changes for
civil servants’ work, the study of e-government has been ‘more or less sidelined’ within
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public management research (Lips and Schuppan, 2009: 739) where it occupies a
somehow ‘ghettoized’ position (Hood and Margetts, 2010; Pollitt, 2011: 378). This
seems to reflect the overall lack of consideration regarding the role technological
change plays in public administration (Pollitt, 2011). Nevertheless, increasing attention
has been given to e-government in the past fifteen years (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998;
Henman, 2010; Homburg, 2008; Snellen and van de Donk, 1998).
In that regard, Dunleavy et al. (2005) see an overall movement of public sector organiza-
tions towards a ‘digital-era governance’ conceived as ‘the central role that IT and information
system changes now play in a wide-ranging series of alterations to how public services are
organized as business processes and delivered to citizens or customers’ (468). The new web-
based technologies are seen as deeply changing the relations between government agencies
and citizens through large-scale use of emails for external communications, the rising
influence of agencies’ websites or the massive development of electronic services for clients.
Interestingly for our topic, public service organizations tend to transform into ‘digital
agencies’ (479) through the partial or full digitization of their administrative processes
and interactions with citizens: various services are nowadays delivered online (e.g.
request a birth certificate or fill in a tax return); new forms of automated technologies
are implemented based on a ‘zero touch’ logic (the ideal of no human intervention in an
administrative operation) and potentially creating a ‘radical disintermediation’ (486)
that allows citizens to directly connect to state systems – e.g. with mobile phones
applications – without having to pass through the usual universal gatekeepers (the
agency personnel). Digitization also implies a movement towards ‘self-government’
(citizens increasingly involved in the co-production of outputs through electronic
processes) and towards ‘open-book government’ (citizens’ access to their administrative
files and electronic possibilities to intervene in the process).
This being said, with some noticeable exceptions presented hereafter, e-government has
remained relatively un-researched from a street-level bureaucracy perspective (Lipsky, 1980),
i.e. from a perspective focused on the impacts and uses of these important changes at the
frontline level. This is regrettable for our understanding of contemporary street-level organisa-
tions functioning in such an increasingly computerized and technologized work environment.
Traditionally, street-level bureaucrats are defined as public service workers who
directly interact with citizens (often in face-to-face encounters) and have considerable
discretion in the execution of their work, particularly in the way they process people
 Buffat: Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government 151

and the decisions they make. Several factors account for this discretionary power: the
inadequacy of available resources, the ambiguity of policy goals, the difficulties of
managerial control, the structural weakness of clients and the intrinsically human (and
hence complex) nature of the cases to be handled are considered as work conditions
particularly conducive to discretionary behaviour. As Lipsky put it:

The essence of street-level bureaucracies is that they require people to make decisions about other
people. Street-level bureaucrats have discretion because the nature of service provision calls for human
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judgment that cannot be programmed and for which machines cannot substitute (1980: 161).

However, the advent of a ‘digital-era governance’ makes it nowadays relevant to ask if

and how ICT would be able to impact the well-established policy discretion of street-
level bureaucrats depicted in the literature (e.g. Maynard-Moody and Portillo, 2010;
Meyers and Vorsanger, 2003). Given the control potential of new technologies allowing
managers to supervise frontline agents directly and permanently, it is equally important
to investigate the consequences of ICT on street-level accountability relationships, i.e.
on ‘accountability regimes’ (Hupe and Hill, 2007).
The goals of this paper are hence twofold. First, it aims at discussing the works that
connect e-government, street-level bureaucracy and discretion. Second, based on the
latter, propositions for a future research agenda on the subject are made.

FRONTLINE DISCRETION IN E-GOVERNMENTS: CURTAILMENT VERSUS

ENABLEMENT ARGUMENTS

Little research exists that addresses the impacts of ICT on street-level discretion. As a
consequence, available empirical results and insights are relatively limited. In addition,
existing works do not provide conclusive statements. On the one hand, initial research
considered that street-level discretion decreases or disappears in the case of large
bureaucratic informatisation. Since an insistence is put on the negative impact of ICT
over discretion, the label ‘curtailment thesis’ is relevant. On the other hand, other
studies point out more nuanced effects of ICT. These studies indicate that new
technologies constitute only one factor among others shaping street-level discretion
and that they provide both frontline agents and citizens with action resources. This is
why we label this orientation the ‘enablement thesis’.

The curtailment thesis

A first contribution was made by Snellen (1998, 2002) according to whom street-level
discretion disappears with informatisation. For him, the power of street-level bureaucrats
 152 Public Management Review

lies in their intermediary position between information streams coming from the state and
the citizens. Snellen argues that ICT deeply challenge their ability to manipulate
information:

It is not by bureaucratic but by infocratic means that the street-level bureaucrat can be prevented from
manipulating the information streams between organization and client. It is because of ICT applications
that street-level bureaucrats have lost what Prottas called their intermediary or central position between
information streams (1998: 500).
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In addition, ICT exclude agents from decision making since computer applications
provide automated assessment of cases. Human ‘interference’ in cases is eliminated.
Such automation of decisions ‘will increasingly define the decision-making premises of
street-level bureaucrats’ and, where it occurs, ‘the characteristic street-level bureaucrat
disappears from the pages of public administration and public policy’ (Snellen, 1998:
503). The focus is put on the ‘downgrading’ of street-level work (Snellen, 2002:
194–5). With the shift from bureaucracy to ‘infocracy’ (Zuurmond, 1998), street-level
bureaucrats lose their influence on policy implementation.
Other authors, like Bovens and Zouridis (2002), argue that the street-level dimen-
sion stricto sensu vanishes with ICT: ‘contacts with citizens no longer take place in the
streets, in meeting rooms, or from behind windows, but through cameras, modems,
and Web sites’ (2002: 180). Agencies progressively transform into screen-level or system-
level bureaucracies.
While in the former type, ICT are used for data entry and information storage, in
the latter, human judgment is fully replaced with software and predefined algorithms.
Decisions are not made by caseworkers but generated through automated programmes:
agents do not decide any longer to allocate a grant to a student or send a traffic fine; the
programme does it automatically. Street-level bureaucrats disappear almost totally from
the organisations: ‘Apart from the occasional public information officer and the help
desk staff, there are no other street-level bureaucrats as Lipsky defines them. The
process of issuing decisions is carried out – virtually from beginning to end – by
computer systems’ (2002: 180).
Therefore, frontline discretion decreases with the increasing role of ICT. In a screen-
level bureaucracy, new technologies support case assessment. Human intervention
occurs only partially. Limited discretion exists. In a system-level bureaucracy, the
whole decision-making process is automated. Caseworkers’ intervention disappears and
so does their discretionary power. Discretion shifts to other actors. In terms of policy
making, system designers, legal policy staff and IT experts become the functional
equivalent of the ancient street-level bureaucrats: ‘they are the persons whose choices
can affect the practical implementation of a policy’ (2002: 181).
Even though Bovens and Zouridis argue for a ‘discretion-disappearance’ thesis, they
remain cautious regarding the generalisation of this transformation pattern. A first
 Buffat: Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government 153

reason is the limitation of their study to specific types of street-level bureaucracy, i.e.
large decisional industries that handle large amount of formalized transactions (2002:
184). Automating decisions is particularly likely here. It remains uncertain whether
‘similar transformations can be observed in non-legal, non-routine, street-level inter-
actions, such as teaching, nursing, and policing’ (180). There are also restrictive
necessary conditions for the advent of system-level bureaucracies, such as policy outputs
being easily formulated in ‘if, then’ programs and a legal culture emphasising formal
equality.
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The authors grouped here share a common central argument: ICT has a negative and
curtailing effect on frontline discretion. In computerized public service delivery, street-
level bureaucrats partially or totally lose their discretionary power. This power shifts to
other actors.
With this thesis, several critical notes can be made. First, a certain technological
determinism is implied in the argument: technologies arrive and frontline discretion
decreases or vanishes. Since implementation and public administration literature have
constantly shown the inherent and resilient existence of discretion at the street level,
the power of ICT may be overestimated here.
A second problem is the use of a too-narrow definition of discretion, particularly by
Snellen, who defines it as the agents’ ability to manipulate information streams (1998:
500). Such a definition does not consider the various sources of frontline discretion.
Evans and Harris (2004: 883–90) identify three possible sources: when policy goals
appear unclear (discretion in nebulous policy), when frontline agents resist undesired
policies (discretion as subversion) or when policy officials voluntarily grant caseworkers
with substantial room for manoeuvre (professional discretion). The latter clearly shows
that managerial strategies cannot be reduced to the curtailment of discretion. In
addition, discretion is a complex phenomenon that depends on a multitude of factors
(Hupe, 2006; Hupe and Buffat, 2012); one shall not assume unilateral and mechanical
influence of technology.
Third, the argument suffers from an obvious empirical limitation. The typology is
only suitable for very specific street-level organisations but, as Bovens and Zouridis
acknowledge themselves (2002: 184), is hardly transferable to the core types of street-
level bureaucracies (police departments, schools or social welfare departments).
Classical street-level bureaucrats will continue to patrol, teach or provide resources
for other human beings despite the existence of new technologies. Public goods like
education, security or health cannot be provided through algorithms.
The fourth weakness is an insufficient interest in the concrete uses of technologies by
frontline workers. How do caseworkers use software and other new technologies?
What about citizens? Taylor and Kelly (2006: 637) argue that ICT have become ‘the
tool of the professional’ and have to be considered as a further ‘step in the process of
street-level activity’ rather than its end point. Such an argument exists in a second
range of works we present in the following section.
 154 Public Management Review

The enablement thesis

The ‘curtailment thesis’ is challenged by other research. Instead of unilaterally assuming

curtailing effects of new technologies on discretion, other works have considered the
question differently. They consider new technologies as only one contextual factor
among others shaping discretion, focus their attention on various effects of ICT and
highlight how both frontline agents and citizens use technologies as action resources.
Dubious about the infocratic argument, Jorna and Wagenaar (2007) study two
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subsidy allocation processes in The Netherlands. They show that ICT provide increased
managerial control over formal aspects of the daily organizational life (quantity of
applications handled and number of inconsistencies) but that such supervision is unable
to capture informal dimensions of the decisions made by operators (meaning of data for
workers, content of the applied standards, etc). Instead of eliminating discretion
through tightened control, informatisation has rather created more ‘inanimate artefacts’
(2007: 210), i.e. information makes it impossible for managers to see how much
discretion agents effectively use. The authors argue that ICT ‘obscure the informal use
of discretion’ (210) and therefore stress the limited capacity of ICT to provide relevant
information on frontline’s daily decisions. The informality of work practices is very
difficult to approach through automated monitoring, such an ability being highly
dependent on the definition and nature of the task to be controlled.
Buffat (2011) provides similar results in a study looking at the impacts of New Public
Management and ICT tools on policy discretion and street-level accountability in a
Swiss unemployment fund. Buffat highlights the paradoxical effects of a new electronic
document management system. On the one hand, the new programme has provided
managers with much more quantitative information on workers’ decisions and com-
pliance to legal criteria. On the other hand, the introduction of a remote control
through the software has weakened the quality of the supervision: middle managers are
not located within the field agencies and work teams any longer and have therefore lost
a refined vision of caseworkers’ decisions. Besides, time to control and close attention
remain limited organizational resources. As a consequence, managers might see much
more regarding street-level work, but this does not mean they see things better; the
level of street-level discretion has therefore not diminished after the introduction of the
new office technology. Here, the managerial ability to control workers through ICT
tools depends on other contextual factors that the technology stricto sensu, i.e. work
organization and available resources.
Other authors focus on how new technologies are used by frontline agents. In a
study on the implementation of the French agricultural policy, Weller (2006) provides
an ethnographic account on how a farmer (called ‘Poulard’) is saved by a street-level
bureaucrat (a local farming inspector) against a judgment automatically issued through
satellite detection (suppression of the public subsidies granted to Poulard). The satellite
has automatically measured some parcels in an incorrect way. Interestingly, it is a
 Buffat: Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government 155

human agent, using his judgment and intimate local knowledge of the field, who was
able to correct the machine’s decision. Here, the automatically generated interpretation
of reality is counterbalanced by a human interpretation, which ultima ratio prevails.
Analytical lessons consist in the key discretionary role frontline agents continue to play
even in highly technologized and automated work contexts. The study also demon-
strates that opposing ICT and discretion is not relevant, since it is rather a complex and
dynamic interaction that exists between the technical device and its users, in a specific
context. Weller’s study indicates that technological influence is not automatic because
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street-level agents can successfully oppose automated decisions by applying their own
judgements. In that case, discretion does not depend only on technology but also and
more importantly on contextual factors such as task distribution among agencies or the
professional skills of agents.
Other works have investigated the impact of new technologies on the nature of the
service encounter and relations between frontline workers and citizens, in particular
when ICT seek to replace face-to-face human interactions with virtual ones. The
starting point often referred to in these works is the ‘public encounter’ (Godsell,
1981) or the ‘bureaucratic encounter’ (Hasenfeld et al., 1987) as being the previously
traditional modes of interaction between state agents and citizens: based on face-to-face
meetings in government offices, human interaction and usually taking place at a
reception desk.1 What fundamentally characterizes such a bureaucratic encounter is
‘an information exchange and a negotiation and conflict management process through
which the applicant’s normative framework and expectations are brought in line with
the organization’s’ (Hasenfeld et al., 1987: 402). This type of encounter represents a
key moment in ‘people-processing’ (Prottas, 1979) or in the ‘social construction of a
client’ (Lipsky, 1980: 59), i.e. the process through which ordinary citizens are being
transformed into preformatted legal-administrative categories. Besides, these encoun-
ters are conceived as ‘power-dependence relations’ because both state officials and
citizens exchange information, depend on each other and mobilize their own resources
to ‘negotiate favourable outcomes’ (Hasenfeld et al., 1987: 406). But what does happen
to the administrative relationship when such a human interaction is being replaced by a
virtual one?
In an ethnographic study on how beneficiaries of the French social aid use website
applications of their welfare state department, Vitalis and Duhaut (2004) show the
existence of ambiguous and complex effects of the new technology.
First, the beneficaries’ choice to electronically interact with the organization is
closely depending on the degree of simplicity/complexity of the matter at hand. The
Internet is especially used for cases that both workers and citizens perceive as simple,
but users prioritize direct contact with state agents for more complex matters requiring
more elaborated explanations and discussions. This is typically the case for conflicting
situations, for which the use of the website is perceived as being poorly relevant.
Interestingly, virtual interaction does not replace direct interactions between actors but
 156 Public Management Review

get rather integrated into pre-existing and still existing practices (face-to-face contact,
phone calls, etc.). This indicates that the administrative relationship remains ‘multi-
modal’ (318). Besides, remote web-based technologies have a limited capacity to
translate clients’ needs into administrative outputs and a restricted ability to function
as a negotiation area of rules or as a conflict management tool. For negotiating or
solving conflicts, actors favour direct contact modes of interaction.
Another result regards the effects of the new technology on welfare agents. On the
one hand, while in face-to-face interactions agents can easily alternate between a
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personalized-flexible and a distant-rigid strategy towards their clients, this game is

less possible within the formatted internet system. Here, agents see a restriction in
their discretionary power. But on the other hand, they also use the same internet
system as a way to re-introduce some distance in their relationship with reluctant
clients and legitimize their decisions by protecting themselves behind the formal rules
and computerized procedures.2 Besides, the IT system provides agents with a whole
range of data on clients, allowing them to exert closer control over the beneficiaries. In
these two cases, the new technology has both a restraining and an enabling effect on the
agent’s discretionary power over clients.
Finally, Vitalis and Duhaut (2004) convincingly argue that the beneficiaries can
successfully use the new internet applications to their own advantage: websites provide
clients with increasingly better information regarding their rights and clients are
therefore able to reduce their asymmetry of information vis-à-vis state agents; they
can also get more benefits by remotely cheating in the information they transmit to the
welfare department3: ‘for clients, online resources constitute means to break down the
administrative opacity and therefore rebalance the administrative relationship. In some
cases, exchanges through the internet might even reverse the asymmetry’ (Vitalis and
Duhaut, 2004: 322).4 Here, new technologies do clearly provide citizens with addi-
tional resources in their relationship to the state.
On the latter aspect, consistent empirical evidence in that direction has been recently
produced by Bekkers et al. (2011). In their analysis of two successful micro-mobiliza-
tions in The Netherlands (protest of secondary school students and dissenting voices of
Dutch soldiers involved in Afghanistan), the authors show that Web 2.0 technologies
(social networks, weblogs, YouTube, etc.) have provided individuals and small groups
with powerful resources for rapid and important political mobilization against contested
policy programmes. In that case, public professionals (managers here) were ‘caught by
surprise’ and restricted in their action and room for manoeuvre. New technologies do
not only enhance transparency of information for citizens, they do also provide them
with powerful action resources due to their facilitating character.
In conclusion, the common characteristic of the publications referred to in the
previous paragraphs is the suggestion of an alternative view of discretion in digital
street-level bureaucracies. First, discretion is not suppressed at the frontlines despite
ICT tools and continues to exist in the daily street-level activity. This result is linked to
 Buffat: Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government 157

contextual factors such as the inability of ICT tools to capture the whole picture of
frontline work and choices, limited resources for managers to control (time, attention),
work organization or the skills possessed by street-level agents. Analytically speaking,
this means that technology (and its use) is only one of the factors influencing the
discretion of frontline agents and that a variety of non-technological factors shape it as
well. This is why no unilateral effects of technology can be assumed. Furthermore,
these works reach nuanced conclusions regarding the effects of digitization on the
administrative relationship. New technologies have mixed and ambiguous impacts
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because they simultaneously enable state agents to better control their clients while
clients also get empowered through the strategic use they can make of ICT. At the
opposite of the rather deterministic argument on technology in the ‘curtailment thesis’,
this second thesis focuses its attention on how technology is used both by state agents
and citizens in their power-dependence relationship, thus insisting more on the enabling
aspect of ICT considering the action resources they provide to actors involved at the
street level. It appears that complex interactions occur between new technologies,
frontline workers and citizens.

TOWARDS A FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA

Curtailment and enablement arguments represent first encouraging steps of the inquiry
into interactions between technological change and street-level bureaucracy. Taking
stock of these works, I would like to make propositions for future research on the
topic.
First, existing knowledge being inconclusive regarding ICT impacts on frontline
discretion, more empirical research is needed. In particular, issues of discretion (power
dimension) and accountability (control dimension) in digitized street-level agencies
must be placed at the heart of future research efforts.
Second, the issue at stake can hardly be separated from the more general debate on
the causal links between technology and society. An intermediary position between the
two ‘extreme theoretical positions’ (Pollitt, 2011) – the dominance of technology on
the one hand (‘technological determinism’) and the social shaping of technology on the
other hand (‘social determinism’) – is relevant here. There is a growing agreement
regarding the relevance of a pragmatic and complexity-aware approach of technological
change within public administration (Homburg, 2008; Lips and Schuppan, 2009;
Pollitt, 2011). This emerging view pushes scholars to fully account the complex
sociotechnical nature of e-government. Lips and Schuppan (2009: 742) think e-govern-
ment is ‘an outcome of the interplay between ICTs, the public sector, and individuals
who are using ICTs’, and Pollitt (2011: 380) similarly states that ‘the uses and
consequences of information technology emerge unpredictably from complex social
interactions’. Taking complexity seriously implies that probably no big theory is
 158 Public Management Review

relevant here and that future research projects shall be able to address a whole range of
contextual factors. This has implications both at a theoretical and methodological level.
In terms of theoretical propositions to be explored in future research, it has now
become clearer what still need to be explored. Actually, the two thesis presented above
teach us that new technologies exert both constraining and enabling effects on street-level
bureaucrats. What remains unclear so far is to discover under which specific conditions do
new technologies function, rather as what Hupe and Buffat (2012) call an ‘action
prescription’ (limiting the room for manoeuvre) or an ‘action resource’ (enhancing the
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room manoeuvre) for street-level agents. This obviously regards an empirical matter,
implying an investigation of the main contextual factors influencing the phenomenon at
stake. As noted earlier, important factors to be considered in the analysis would be
(among others): citizens and managerial use of the new technologies, work organiza-
tion, types of task at hand or degree of agents’ professionalization.
Besides, future research must unpack e-government, i.e. empirically disaggregate it.
E-government involves a large variety of ICT ‘with different technical functions and
capabilities, and as a consequence, different possibilities for influencing processes and
structures in the public sector’ (Lips and Schuppan, 2009: 742). Unpacking the variety
of e-government technologies is important because different consequences are to be
expected on street-level discretion and accountability according to the type of technol-
ogy. Following Snellen’s (2005: 399) distinction of ICT into five different types,
different impacts might be expected whether a database technology, a work-tracing
device or an automated decision-making software is implemented in a frontline agency.
Finally, what would be suitable methodologies for such a research agenda?
Concluding a special issue dedicated to existing methods in public management
research, Hood (2011: 322) refers to the ‘James Bond approach to methodology’ to
describe the current interest for combining different methodological approaches, a
perspective which seems relevant here as well.
Among the methods toolkit, ethnography would be particularly adapted to account for
contextual factors and complexity. Besides, participant observation of the daily func-
tioning of organisations is a good way to empirically assess how state agents and citizens
do concretely use new technologies. Besides, ethnography is particularly adapted
‘where the challenge is to develop theory rather than to test hypotheses from already
fairly well-developed theory’ (Hood, 2011: 325), this being the case regarding our
knowledge on the links between new technologies and street-level work. In addition, as
Huby et al. (2011) argue, the ethnography to be practised has to be ‘multi-site’ and
‘mobile’ – new ways of ‘being there’ – in order to capture the relationships that are
nowadays not just between people, ‘but also between people and human artefacts such
as IT products and systems’ (210). Nevertheless, ethnography has its own limitations in
terms of generalization of identified causal mechanisms. This is why I suggest to rely
also on methods such as comparison (Wilson, 2011) and longitudinal designs (Wond and
Macaulay, 2011).
 Buffat: Street-Level Bureaucracy and E-Government 159

Comparative analysis would be a suitable approach to assess the effects of e-government

in a systematic way: the same technology might have very different consequences for street-
level bureaucracies whose characteristics significantly vary at the individual, organisational,
professional and institutional levels. As Pollitt (2011: 380) put it, ‘The impact of
technological change varies with the particular activities under consideration, the institu-
tional context and culture, the legal and financial rules and, not least, the inherent
characteristics of the particular technology itself’. In such a comparative perspective, the
dependent variable could be the amount of street-level discretion observed in two or more
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agencies (with identical tasks) but varying on the presence or absence of a given new
technology. Comparison could also be diachronic, implying to compare discretion before
and after a technological change. Here, comparative methods are useful to empirically
establish differences and similarities between cases, to systematically ‘capture context’
(Hupe and Buffat, 2012) and develop causal arguments about the relationship between
contextual factors and the outcome under study (discretion).
In particular, a diachronic comparison might take the form of a longitudinal design.
Extending the temporal sequence of comparison would compensate the rather short-term
perspective of ethnography and allow research projects to get a deeper appreciation of the
‘contextual milieu in which public managers operate’ (Wond and Macaulay, 2011: 311).
These are theoretical and methodological suggestions considered useful for the develop-
ment of a future research agenda. More generally, it can be hoped that linking the study of
e-government to the study of contemporary street-level bureaucracy will lead to a fruitful
dialogue and cross-questioning between these two separated subfields of public administra-
tion. Analysing the interaction between new technologies and street-level work remains a
necessary task to capture the transformations of public management.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and also Peter Hupe
(Erasmus University, Rotterdam) and Yannis Papadopoulos (University of Lausanne)
for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

NOTES
1 Or a guichet in the terminology used by French sociologists like Weller (1999) or Dubois (2010).
2 The same empowerment of frontline agents towards their clients through IT systems has also been observed in
a study by Dennis (2006) conducted in a US welfare state department: ‘This way (showing budget screens to
the client to explain adverse actions), they seem to question the authority and the decisions less than before.
I mean “the computer says what the computer says” is the way we can present it and they seem less willing to
protest against the outcomes’ (574), quoted from an interview with a frontline worker.
3 For example, the website provides claimants with the possibility to calculate precisely how much social
benefits they would get depending on various criteria, such as marital status or other conditions of resources.
 160 Public Management Review

Some claimants have therefore presented themselves as being single instead of married, because they knew
from the website calculator it would be more beneficial for them.
4 Our own translation from French.

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