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New perspectives on street-level bureaucracy: Using naturally occurring interaction to study digital frontline work
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Centre for Social Work - CESAR.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4497-6614
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Centre for Social Work - CESAR.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1751-1918
2022 (English)In: The 4th Street-Level Bureaucracy Conference, Copenhagen, June 14-16, 2022., 2022Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Previous research on street-level bureaucracy has acknowledged the increased use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for service delivery. But although textual media (e.g., email, chat, text messages, forums, posts in social media) have become common for interacting with clients – what has been termed “screen-level” encounters – such interactions have received marginal attention from researchers in this field. At the same time, the study of street-level bureaucracy has largely refrained from examining naturally occurring institutional encounters. This means that relatively little is known about the fine, interactional details of how policy is practically realized in encounters with clients. This paper contributes to developing the street-level bureaucracy framework in both these areas by empirically examining naturally occurring, textual interaction on the “screen-level”. The study uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine about 900 textual exchanges between clients and Swedish Social Insurance Agency officers over email and on Facebook. The exchanges consist of information-seeking questions and subsequent responses (regarding for example processes, regulations, and policy) from insurance officers on the topic of parental leave. The analysis shows how professionals – in applying the affordances and constraints provided by the textual environment – manage organizational goals, standardization, and responsiveness in text-based interaction. For example, officers’ responses to individual clients’ questions tend to not follow conversational norms of recipient design relating to question/answer formatting and person reference, making encounters more standardized and de-personalized. We also show how the technical design of interactional arenas can affect and shape textual service delivery in street-level work, such as possibilities or lack of possibilities to ask follow-up questions, and discuss implications in light of the development towards less face-to-face contact in welfare services.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022.
Keywords [en]
street-level encounters, digitalization, naturally occurring data, conversation analysis, information and communication technologies, textual interaction
National Category
Social Work
Research subject
Social Work
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-477149OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-477149DiVA, id: diva2:1669741
Conference
The 4th Street-Level Bureaucracy Conference
Available from: 2022-06-14 Created: 2022-06-14 Last updated: 2022-06-14

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Höglund, FridaFlinkfeldt, Marie

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  • apa
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