Investigating Policy's 'Practical' Meaning: Street-Level Research on Welfare Policy

Abstract

In the post-reform era, the production of welfare policy is taking shape in an increasingly devolved and discretionary environment. Street-level workers are making reform through their day-to-day practices in public, quasi-public, and private agencies, extending even into the private workplace. In order to adequately understand the meaning of reform as it is made in specific organizational settings, it is necessary to utilize research methods that permit deep dish analysis. That is, analytic methods must enable the researcher to probe beyond visible policy constructs to assess production routines, how they develop in alternative organizational contexts, and how they shape the policy experience. The street-level approach described in this paper is grounded in a theoretical logic designed to assess how street-level practice and, ultimately, social politics is structured within specific organizations. In a practical sense, this approach also addresses critical gaps in our understanding of policies and how they work. It is most valuable when policy implementation involves changes in organizational practice, discretion by front-line workers, and complex decision-making in a context of formal policy ambiguity and uncertainty. By focusing on specific institutions and the informal, lower-level routines through which they create policy at the point of delivery, it is possible to give greater transparency to policies that are otherwise opaque and to provide a fuller picture of how policy is produced and experienced. The first section of this paper reviews the analytic foundations of implementation research and traces the evolution of the street-level perspective as an alternative to hierarchical analytical models. The latter sections consider the application of the street-level approach to research on welfare policy.

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