Previous research has studied both rule- and individual-level determinants of rule abidance of frontline workers, but the effect of managerial communication has not been adequately explored. Based on extant literature on street-level bureaucracy, managerial communication, and behavioral public administration, this study develops a novel framework to theorize the relationship between managerial communication and frontline workers’ willingness to abide by frontline rules. The framework highlights that managerial communication could improve frontline workers’ willingness to abide by rules by directly monitoring their behaviors or indirectly increasing their perceived rule clarity and risk of punishment. Moreover, as organizational size increases, the effect of managerial communication on frontline workers’ willingness to abide by rules decreases. The study uses unique data from a 2018–2019 survey covering 94 frontline managers and 717 frontline workers in local security agencies in mainland China to empirically test the hypotheses.
How is the discretion of police officers influenced by clients' gender and situational visibility under emergency regulations? To answer this question, this study uses the scenario-based-experimental-survey data collected from 878 police officers from three cities in China under the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that the effect of gender congruence on the leniency of officers is only significantly positive when police and clients are both female. However, situational visibility will weaken the gender effect, reducing the officers' leniency towards females. Moreover, visibility makes police even harsher towards male violators. The findings provide some practical implications.
This article explores how the Chinese government aims to maintain social stability by encouraging citizens to become volunteers. We propose that a new type of governance, namely, “state-enlisted voluntarism,” is being deployed in which public security volunteers are mobilized and monitored by the state. Analysis based on ten-year nationwide empirical data gathered from local areas in China suggests that the government intentionally enlists citizens into its hierarchical system to strengthen its administrative capacity and maintain a stable society without the risk of domestic threats. We find that direct enlistment approaches empower citizens as state proxies, and that indirect enlistment approaches ensure that various social stakeholders are comprehensively controlled. In general, the Chinese government has four reasons to institutionalize the state enlistment of voluntarism: to increase human resources at the grassroots; transform social organizations into subordinates; frame policy innovations as political credits; and to avoid blame. Our findings also suggest that China's party-state system mobilizes citizens into implementation-oriented activities rather than engages them in policymaking to maintain social stability at the grassroots.
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