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Administrative burden research has highlighted the multiple costs imposed by public policies and their impact on citizens. However, the empirical understanding of citizens’ responses to such burdens remains limited. Using ethnographic data of doctors applying for maternity leave in Pakistan, this article documents strategies used by citizens to navigate the administrative burden faced by them. Our findings suggest that these strategies are based on an individual’s cache of social, cultural capital, and economic capital. Based on our data, we also theorize the significance of another form of capital for navigating administrative burden. This administrative capital is defined as an individual’s understanding of bureaucratic rules, processes, and behaviors. Our findings further illustrate that the different costs imposed by public policies can be interchangeable, which may be used by citizens to their advantage. Propositions for future research on the intersection of different forms capital and administrative burden are also included.

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Despite the importance of peers in forming role expectations, fostering group identity, and facilitating job learning, limited theory and empirical evidence exist on the antecedents of street-level peer relationships. To address this gap, the authors draw on social capital and social exchange theories to develop hypotheses about the micro-social foundations of street-level bureaucrats' peer selection. The hypotheses are tested using a rich data set from an intraorganizational network of teachers in a large urban school implementing a reform that strongly promoted frontline innovation. Both structural and instrumental considerations, such as seeking peers possessing characteristics and resources valued by the reform, figure prominently in the work relations of street-level bureaucrats. These results imply that the introduction of improvement initiatives requiring frontline participation, in addition to altering work practices, may also alter social networks within the frontline of an organization in a manner that favors some frontline workers over others. Practitioner Points• Peer interactions help frontline workers implement improvement initiatives and make sense of desired changes. • Instrumental considerations play an important role in determining peers in the workplace. • Frontline workers are more likely to form work relationships with peers possessing locally valued resources.• The design and implementation of policies aimed at organizational change, in addition to potentially changing the way work is done within an organization, can also impact who is important inside an organization. • Failure to take networks of work relations into account could limit the impact of human resource practices and organizational reforms within organizations.

There has been a general resistance to resistance studies in public administration (PA) research.Although previous research has documented instances of selective policy implementation by PA practitioners that put minority groups at a comparative disadvantage, we still have a limited understanding of the different ways in which these groups contest discriminatory administrative practices especially within non-western developing countries. To address this gap, in this article, I discuss the various strategic responses the Khawaja Sira-a genderqueer group of Pakistanemploy in their interactions with the frontline police workers to contest their hyper-surveillance and moral policing. The discussion illustrates that while Khawaja Sira mostly rely on individual acts of contestation in their interactions with police officers, the emerging leadership of the Khawaja Sira is enabling emergence of new forms of resistance based on social capital and collective protests. In addition to contributing to the limited literature on citizen perspectives and LGBT issues in PA research, the theoretical framework of resistance presented here can serve as a good template to analyze citizen responses to discriminatory frontline practice in other sociopolitical contexts as well.