Session: Equity in Street-level Social Work: Exclusion through Bureaucratic Decision Making (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

This symposium explores the equity implications of street-level discretion across three social policy domains: the safety net, public education, and child welfare. Extensive literature documents the substantial role of street-level discretion at both the organizational and individual worker levels, with scholars making a compelling case that street-level decision makers, like caseworkers, social workers, or teachers, directly define the meaning of public policies as well as constituents’ experiences with frontline policies and public institutions through their use of discretion (e.g., Lipsky, 2010; Brodkin, 2012; Brodkin & Marston; 2013). The four papers in this symposium examine what both organizational and individual discretion means for equity in constituent experiences as well as policy and practice outcomes. Using both qualitative and quantitative data and assessing perspectives from both constituents and workers, the authors explore equity implications of discretion use by race, ethnicity, income, gender identity, parenting status, and geography.

The first two papers on the symposium examine the use of discretion in public sectors aimed at children and parents: public education and child welfare. The first of these two papers takes a novel street-level approach to examine race and income disparities in the U.S. child welfare system, employing a comparative case study method to analyze decision-making by street-level investigators and their supervisors in a public child welfare agency. Findings highlight how place-based variations in agency settings directly shape the nature of equity concerns that public child welfare workers face, and their use of discretion varies substantially across these contexts. The second paper analyzes data from 31 narrative interviews in public schools to extend research on institutional change and policy enactment. It does so by emphasizing workers as embedded agents whose street-level discretion facilitates or constrains the impact of racially-conscious policy for minoritized students.

The next set of papers explore the use of discretion in public benefits spaces. The first of these papers examines how states vary in implementing discretionary exemptions that extend the program eligibility of able-bodied adults without dependents in SNAP. The findings show considerable cross-state variation in how bureaucrats granted discretionary exemptions to ABAWDs, and state characteristics such as higher shares of racially minoritized and conservative citizens adversely affect ABAWDs’ discretionary opportunities for program eligibility. The next paper explores how transgender constituents navigate bureaucratic discretion when applying for safety net benefits. Findings show that trans people view street-level bureaucrats as the gatekeepers of much-needed services, and are often willing to experience misgendering, answer invasive questions, and give up other forms of autonomy to be granted benefits by a caseworker.

Taken together, these four papers engage diverse methods and data to assess how worker and organizational discretion impacts individual experiences with different frontline social policies for diverse and minoritized populations. In conducting analysis across different policy fields and identity areas, the authors’ findings highlight the ways that discretionary decision making is conducted and how it broadly impacts equity in social policy outcomes across the U.S.