ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a novel approach to the study of normative governance in street-level bureaucracies, by integrating critical management studies and the street-level bureaucracy framework. Traditional perspectives on street-level bureaucrats emphasize caseworkers’ autonomy, but contemporary public sector governance increasingly involves complex organizational structures. The chapter introduces a conceptual framework to examine the normative infusion of caseworkers’ subjectivities through discourse, emotions, peer dynamics, and visual governance elements. These four governance mechanisms – governance by discourse, governance by emotions, governance by peers, and governance by numbers, colours, and symbols – shape caseworker identities, aligning them with organizational goals. However, this governance is not unidirectional, as caseworkers exercise agency, potentially resisting or reshaping organizational norms and visions. Despite being presented as analytically distinct, the conceptual framework stresses that the four types of normative governance are interrelated. How and the extent to which they reinforce or counteract each other in organizational governance are an empirical question.
