1. Primary frontline control decision-making
Frontline decision-making involves authorities that have regular, direct
interaction with those being serviced or processed. Termed “front-line
bureaucrats” (Smith 1965), “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 1980), “frontline”
workers or officials (Dingwall et al 1983; Gubrium & Jarvinen 2013), these agents
include “teachers, police officers and other law enforcement personnel, social
workers, judges, public lawyers and other court officers, health workers, and
many other public employees who grant access to government programs and
provide service within them” (Lipsky 1980:3-4). Direct frontline contacts with
clients create common work features, including broad discretion in applying
general rules and policies to specific cases, persistent concern with husbanding
and allocating time, energy and resources, and having to “deal with clients’
personal reactions” to decisions affecting their fates (Lipsky 1980:9).
Many situations of frontline decision-making are secondary in character,
involving the intervention of agents located outside the indigenous settings in
which the relevant troubles arose. In contrast, primary frontline decision-making
is carried out in the local settings in which troubles arise and are initially
responded to.
I am currently working on identifying the distinctive processes that
characterize primary frontline decision-making. Initially I note that there are at
least two types of primary frontline decision-makers -- control specialists and
occasional control agents. The former possess formal authority to supervise,
intervene in, and restrict the actions of people in a particular social or institutional
setting. Police patrolling the streets and other public places provide the prime
instance, but guards controlling inmates in prisons and jails, psych techs keeping
order on mental wards, security staff working in bars, clubs and other settings,
confront the same kinds of local, on-the-spot decision-making demands. In
contrast, other primary frontline workers carry out broader mandated
institutional or professional activities -- often providing service or care -- but at
times undertake specific control actions in order to maintain these activities.
Examples include teachers in their classrooms; group home workers supervising
the activities of troubled youth (Kivet & Warren; Wasterfors); hotel desk clerks
(Prus); case workers who provide in the home supervision of parents of pre-
mature infants (Heimer); the floor staff in nursing homes (Diamond); and
caregivers providing hospice and other home care (Leppanen 2008).
Primary frontline decision-making of both types inevitably requires high
levels of discretion. Such agents deal with a current trouble in the “here and
now,” having to “do something” about an immediate problem at just this
moment. They must recognize and deal with emergent troubles in ways that are
keyed to emergent circumstances, idiosyncratic situations, and established
personal relationships. As a result their response efforts often rely on
idiosyncratic actions intended to control or remedy an immediately problematic
situation. In this way primary frontline decision-making takes on a distinctly
reactive, local, highly varied and situational character.
2. The institutional transformation of “messy,” highly idiosyncratic troubles
into organizationally processable, “tidy” cases.
As Scott (1988) has emphasized, “early modern European statecraft seemed …
devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a
legible and administratively more convenient format.” In particular, state
“officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as
land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it
could be centrally recorded and monitored” (2). The result was “to arrange the
population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation,
conscription and prevention of rebellion.” State procedures rendered daily social
life increasingly legible through a distinctive narrowing of vision. “The great
advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited
aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very
simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision
more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and
calculation.” (11)
Of course, these processes of simplification and regularization characterized
the development of official professional and control bureaucracies. Indeed, in
processing troubles, contemporary authorities simplify and transform previously
indigenous disputes and problems into organizationally processable matters. One
way that they do so, as Hughes emphasized, is by treating what lay parties
experienced as personal and exceptional troubles as instances of known,
recurrently encountered cases. These cases are then processed in institutionally
accountable ways: here officials give close attention to the organizational history
and implications of particular decisions, to local distinctions between “normal”
and “extreme” or “serious” cases, and to the conventionalized set of responses
considered appropriate for responding to these types of cases.
I am currently assembling my published and unpublished writings on these
topics in a book tentatively titled Social Messes, Tidy Cases: Trouble, Frontline
Decision-Making and People Processing. This collection will include earlier
articles including ”On Last Resorts” (1981), “Holistic Effects in Social Control
Decision-Making” (1983), “Case Processing and Interorganizational Knowledge:
Detecting the ‘Real Reasons’ for Referrals” (1991), “Organizational Horizons in
Complaint-Filing” (1992), and “Constructing Serious Violence and Its Victims:
Processing a Domestic Violence Restraining Order” (1994). In addition, the
volume will include the in-progress article on primary frontline decision-making
(above), a recently published article with Mel Pollner, “Contingent Control and
Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home” (2019), and two
previously unfinished and unpublished papers, “Processing Lay Complaints:
Assessing Motives and Commitment,” and “Typification and Normal Case
Categories.”