Background: The care of clients with complex psychosocial problems involves diverse frontline professionals such as general practitioners, psychiatric nurses, police officers, social support... Show moreBackground: The care of clients with complex psychosocial problems involves diverse frontline professionals such as general practitioners, psychiatric nurses, police officers, social support consultants and debt counselors. As these professionals have different professional backgrounds and work in different organizations, their health conceptions, or beliefs about what constitutes health and how this should be pursued, may also differ. Having an understanding of various frontline professionals' health conceptions is relevant, as these may affect interprofessional collaboration in their work with clients with psychosocial problems. Objective: To understand various frontline professionals' health conceptions. Design: Inductive qualitative approach. Setting: The Hague, the Netherlands. Participants: Various frontline professionals from social welfare, general healthcare and mental healthcare, working with clients with complex psychosocial problems. Methods: Between September 2020 and April 2021, 23 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with frontline professionals in social welfare, general healthcare and mental healthcare. Based on these interviews, this paper analyzes frontline professionals' health conceptions. After transcription, all interviews were imported into ATLAS.ti for analysis. An iterative process of thematic analysis was used to identify health conception dimensions. Results: The paper found that frontline professionals' health conceptions differ in three main aspects: 1) health definitions, 2) alignment with clients and 3) contextualization of clients' health. Conclusions: The main implication of this research is that this inductive analysis of health conceptions provides a first building block in theorizing frontline professionals' health promotion practices. Tweetable abstract: Knowing about professional's health conceptions gives insight into how health is understood and how good health can best be achieved, which is important in caring for vulnerable clients. Show less
Existing research on bureaucratic encounters typically studies how bureaucrats’ and clients’ characteristics influence frontline decision making. How social interactions between street-level... Show moreExisting research on bureaucratic encounters typically studies how bureaucrats’ and clients’ characteristics influence frontline decision making. How social interactions between street-level bureaucrats and between officials and citizens could directly affect case-related decisions largely remains an underexplored field of study, despite the fact that new forms of governance introduce social dynamics in the form of trust and collaboration as tools to increase legitimacy. Relying on in-depth qualitative data of the Belgian labor inspectorate and the Dutch tax authorities, this study scrutinizes how decisions about cases could be affected by their immediate social context. Show less
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,... Show moreDrawing 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. Show less
This article provides scholars studying frontline judgements an analytical framework—the signaling perspective—that could be used to examine how street‐level bureaucrats evaluate unobservable... Show moreThis article provides scholars studying frontline judgements an analytical framework—the signaling perspective—that could be used to examine how street‐level bureaucrats evaluate unobservable citizen‐client properties. It proposes to look not only at the kind of signals and cues officials gather, but also at the interpretive frames used to make sense of them. This offers a valuable contribution to the street‐level bureaucracy literature, which largely focuses on explaining discretionary decision making by looking at the influence of officials' personal preferences or client characteristics, but less on officials' interpretive frameworks to make sense of client characteristics. The analytical framework is illustrated by applying it to existing literature on trustworthiness judgements of social workers and police officers. Different interpretive frames were found from which frontline officials interpret citizen characteristics as signals. The article concludes by offering several avenues for future research. Show less
Raaphorst, N.; Groeneveld, S.; Walle, S. van de 2017
In line with psychological and economic discrimination theories, street-level bureaucracy studies show a direct effect of citizen characteristics on officials' judgements, or show how street-level... Show moreIn line with psychological and economic discrimination theories, street-level bureaucracy studies show a direct effect of citizen characteristics on officials' judgements, or show how street-level bureaucrats employ stereotypical reasoning in making decisions. Relying on sociological double standards theory, this study hypothesizes that citizen-clients' status characteristics influence officials' evaluations not only directly, but also indirectly and more pervasively by influencing the interpretation of other signals. By means of a policy-capturing study among Dutch frontline tax officials, this study takes a first step in testing double standards propositions in the context of official–citizen encounters. The findings support only some hypotheses, but indicate that citizen-clients' level of education could serve as a moderating context affecting the interpretation of cues. The article provides important theoretical and methodological guidelines for future research on stereotyping at the front line. Show less
Moyson, S.; Raaphorst, N.; Groeneveld, S.; Van de Walle, S. 2017
Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach, we conducted a systematic review of 58 public administration studies of organizational socialization.... Show moreUsing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach, we conducted a systematic review of 58 public administration studies of organizational socialization. Organizational socialization is the process of mutual adaptation between an organization and its new members. Our findings demonstrate a growing but geographically disparate interest in this issue. Public administration studies contribute to this research area with novel insights into the determinants of organizational socialization and its effects on employees’ public service motivation, Eurocrats’ support of supranational institutions, person–organization fit, and differences in the socialization of male and female public employees. The review also shows that the effects of organizational socialization on the homogenization of employees’ attitudes should not be exaggerated, especially relative to other homogenizing factors such as attraction or selection effects. The reviewed articles are methodologically eclectic, with a recent but growing interest in longitudinal designs. There are also weaknesses in the operationalization of organizational socialization. We conclude with an agenda for future studies on organizational socialization in public administration research. Show less
This study examines the kind of uncertainties frontline tax officials working with a trust based inspection approach experience in interacting with citizen-clients. The classical literature on... Show moreThis study examines the kind of uncertainties frontline tax officials working with a trust based inspection approach experience in interacting with citizen-clients. The classical literature on bureaucracy and the street-level bureaucracy literature suggest frontline officials face two kinds of uncertainties: information and interpretation problems. Analysing stories of Dutch frontline tax officials collected through in-depth interviews, this article shows that these two kinds of uncertainty only explain a part of the uncertainties experienced. Respondents also face action problems requiring improvisational judgements. The study furthermore finds that different sources underlie these uncertainties, pointing to possible explanations. Show less
Against the background of studies about the domestication of complementary and alternative medicine into biomedical settings, this article studies how biomedicine is integrated into holistic... Show moreAgainst the background of studies about the domestication of complementary and alternative medicine into biomedical settings, this article studies how biomedicine is integrated into holistic settings. Data from 19 in-depth interviews with Dutch holistic general practitioners who combine complementary and alternative medicine with conventional treatments demonstrate that they do not believe that conventional biomedicine ‘really’ cures patients. They feel that it merely suppresses the physical symptoms of a disease, leaving the more fundamental and non-physical causes intact. As a consequence, they use conventional biomedicine for strictly practical and instrumental reasons. This is the case in life-threatening or acute situations, understood as non-physical causes of disease having been left untreated with complementary and alternative medicine for too long. More mundane reasons for its use are the need to take patients’ demands for biomedical treatment seriously or to obey authoritative rules, regulations and protocols. The integration of biomedicine into complementary and alternative medicine, then, follows the same logic of domestication of complementary and alternative medicine into biomedicine: it is made subordinate to the prevailing model of health and illness and treated as a practical add-on that does not ‘really’ cure people.Show less
