Healthcare workers are street-level bureaucrats (H-SLBs) who are expected to perform according to specific roles. The COVID-19 pandemic has strained healthcare systems to unprecedented levels. The acute scarcity of medical resources has left H-SLBs exposed to a higher risk of personal harm and has them making an increased number of decisions in the apportionment of scarce life-saving treatment. The article studies the case of H-SLBs in Mexico to understand the impact of the crisis on their roles. The pandemic provides an opportunity to observe role changes during crisis. Their roles, derived from two policy guidelines, and from the de facto roles that H-SLBs shared in the storytelling interviews, are coded, analyzed, and compared. Findings suggest two main roles, client-processing and resource-rationing, guide the set of sub-roles H-SLBs perform to cope with the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.Note: In the interests of space, street-level theory and the pandemic context underpinning the articles for this Special Issue are discussed in detail in the Introduction to the Issue.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the knowledge of managing emotional labor during a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disrupting event, particularly affecting frontline healthcare workers and their supervisors who faced pressures to manage emotions during their interactions with patients. Emotional labor has been studied in emergencies; however, the case of Mexico offers insights into an understudied context and a long and singular crisis. Drawing from multi-level storytelling interviews with medical managers, physicians, and nurses in hospitals in different states of Mexico, this article argues that COVID-19 blurred relationships between performance and outcomes of emotional labor. As the organizational goal focused mainly on saving lives, some workers intensified and performed emotional labor innovatively, but others deviated from feeling rules. Managers’ role became crucial for employees to abide by affective requirements facing disruption.

Digital platforms are suitable alternatives to help governments open policy-making and public service delivery to external ideas. Platforms are very flexible and customizable, which makes them effective for a variety of participatory purposes, such as co-creation, co-production, innovation, or transactions. However, this diversity makes it difficult to define how different technical designs could shape the performance of these platforms. Literature has described different types of platforms, based on their participatory goals, but we still do not know enough about the diversity of platforms in terms of technical design. To address this gap, we conducted a cluster analysis to find patterns in the technical design of 52 participatory platforms worldwide. We observed three main architectures: Ideas for the City; Decisions and Debates; and Mapping. These findings are one step forward to better understanding how digital platforms could impose certain dynamics on the participatory processes.

Although reactions to reputational threats have been studied before, there is still an opportunity to understand the dynamics of reputation management facing a crisis. This study seeks to understand how the legal‐procedural, moral, performative, and technical dimensions of reputation change during the management of an extended crisis in a public health organization. We explore the communication of the Mexican Health Secretariat by analyzing its press conferences and releases before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Building on the situational crisis communication theory and considering public interest, we conducted two exploratory examinations based on text‐as‐data methods to capture reputation‐related language. Our analysis suggests that factors influencing reputational threat, such as crisis severity, legitimacy, leaders' individual reputation, and coalition support, may be important for choosing between strategies. We argue that the Secretariat radically changed its reputation management strategy during the pandemic—they first stressed the technical and, as damage rose, the performative dimensions.

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