ALMADIA: Active Labour Market Policies and Street-Level Bureaucracy: Discretion in Action

Principal Investigator: Roberto Rizza

The research project ALMADIA falls within the field of study of street-level bureaucracy. The concept of street-level bureaucracy (SLB) was developed by Michael Lipsky and draws attention to the understanding of how discretionary decisions and daily practices implemented by frontline workers in public services – the Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) – shape public policies and their outcomes. The policy field selected for the research is that of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) and specifically the GOL (Garanzia Occupabilità Lavoratori) program. ALMADIA is driven by the following research questions: 

1) Focusing on the interaction between Public Employment Services (PES) SLBs and policy users, how is the reorganization of ALMPs transferred into practice? 

2) What type of discretion most frequently arise within PES policy implementation processes? 

3) What are the most important aspects that influence the way in which PES SLBs exert their discretion? 

This project adopts a multi-level framework for the study of PES and investigates how PES frontline workers exert their discretionary power over the way interventions are organised. These issues will be explored via shadowing technics in a first step and via a survey on a representative sample of Italian PES in a second step. Through the reconstruction and classification of different clusters of SLBs’ discretionary practices, the survey will develop an original (and replicable) street-level database. In this way, the research project aims to map -for the first time in Italy - what kind of activities SLBs carry out, their characteristics and the way in which SLBs use their discretionary power to adapt formal rules to specific situations while implementing the GOL program.  

In order to achieve the aim of unpacking the policy implementation process, the project has three main goals: 

1) a descriptive objective, to define and classify what types of discretion frontline workers use; 

2) an analytical objective: the survey leads to a PES street-level workers database, to understand what activities they carry out, the conditions of their everyday work, the interaction with users and the way in which they use their discretionary power, adapting formal rules to specific situations; 

3) the co-design of a replicable research model to fill the gap in international comparative studies in this field. 

Members of the Department

Prof. Roberto Rizza

Prof. Giancarlo Gasperoni

Dott.ssa Rebecca Paraciani (assegnista)

Other members