Professor, Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg
Governing Street-Level Bureaucracies: The Organizational Shaping of Caseworkers in Contemporary Forms of Public Management
Based on the book Governing Street-Level Bureaucracies: The Organizational Shaping of Caseworkers (Routledge, 2025, OA), this talk addresses how caseworkers are governed in today’s street-level bureaucracies. Combining critical management studies and street-level bureaucracy research, it redefines our understanding of public sector governance by highlighting the subtle, informal, and everyday forms of organizational governance that shape caseworkers’ subjectivities beyond formal policies and professional identities. Based on four distinct types of normative governance – ‘governance by discourse’, ‘governance by emotions’, ‘governance by peers’, and ‘governance by numbers, colours, and symbols’, the talk explores how caseworkers are shaped as organizational staff members alongside their roles as welfare professionals and welfare state bureaucrats.