Double standards in frontline decision making: A theoretical and empirical exploration.

Raaphorst, N.; Groeneveld, S. (2018)

Article / Letter to editor

Drawing on status characteristics and double standards theory, this study explores how social categories may affect the standards tax officials use in evaluating citizen-clients’ trustworthiness, leading to differential evaluation. Whereas the street-level bureaucracy literature mainly focuses on the direct effect of social categories on officials’ judgments, this study shows how stereotyping in the public encounter could be much subtler and more pervasive than is hitherto studied. Based on semi-structured interviews containing forty stories of tax officials who inspect entrepreneurs’ tax returns, this study suggests that similar signals may indeed be interpreted differently for different social groups. This study suggests that indirect mechanisms of stereotyping may be of additional explanatory value in research on stereotyping by frontline officials.

• All authors: Raaphorst, N.; Groeneveld, S.
• Date: 2018-02-28
• Journal: Administration and Society
• Volume: 50
• Issue: 8
• Pages: 1175 - 1201
• DOI: doi:10.1177/0095399718760587