Creaming among Caseworkers: Effects of Client Competence and Client Motivation on Caseworkers’ Willingness to Help

Abstract

Frontline employees cope with high workloads and limited resources by directing their work attention and efforts toward particular clients. Yet, the role of client attributes in frontline employees’ efforts to help clients remains undertheorized and empirically understudied. Using a survey experimental vignette design (2 × 2 factorial) among 1,595 Danish caseworkers, the authors of this article provide new knowledge on how two generic nondemographic client attributes—competence and motivation—shape frontline employees’ willingness to help their clients. We found that both the competence and motivation of clients affect caseworkers’ willingness to exert extra time and effort helping clients. Specifically, caseworkers are most willing to help a client appearing both competent and motivated. Moreover, our data suggests that client motivation is more important than client competence for caseworkers’ willingness to help. We end the article with a discussion of policy implications and directions for future research.

Repairing the State: Policy Repair in the Frontline Bureaucracy

“…Research on coping assumes that resource scarcity results in experiences of stress for SLBs (Tummers et al 2015), leading them to ration resources for more competent and motivated clients (Guul et al. 2020). Our data adds to this research by indicating that resource scarcity can also result in bricolage, creativity, and improvisation, where SLBs combine knowledge, processes, and structures in real time to solve unforeseen problems or substitute old order.…”

“…We offer two possibilities. First is straightforward political: We want to rethink frontline bureaucracy as a place of kindness, where compassion is not premised on being biased toward (or against) a group (Guul et al 2020; Tummers et al 2015), but on propinquity, as part of belonging to the same (broken) situation and the inescapable condition of collective existence. We accept that every citizen–state interaction is in many ways disciplined, open to biased decision making, and coerced discretion (Lipsky 1980[2010]; Maynard‐Moody and Musheno 2000; Lavee and Strier 2019), but we also believe that frontline practices have the potential to exceed this discretionary envelope.…”

Discretion of the Future: Conceptualizing Everyday Acts of Collective Creativity at the Street‐Level

“…The studies that followed Lipsky's work further analyzed the use of discretion and rule deviation as coping mechanisms: Street‐level bureaucrats do what they can, given the conditions in which they work (Brodkin 1997, 2008; Guul, Pedersen, and Petersen 2020; Tummers et al 2015). Examples are abundant, ranging from routinizing, modifying goals, rationing services, redefining or limiting the clientele to be served, and asserting priorities.…”

The Intersectionality of Deservingness for State Support

“…Street‐level bureaucrats' judgments of clients and their cases are guided by a combination of rules and cues for moral deservingness (Guul, Pedersen and Petersen 2020; Jilke and Tummers 2018; Maynard‐Moody and Musheno 2003, 2012; Schram et al 2009; Soss, Fording and Schram 2011; Thomann and Rapp 2018). As race and ethnicity are patent candidates for the cues that bias bureaucratic judgments, a proliferating research body, most of which is experimental, examines bureaucrats' responses to vignettes and “correspondence audits,” that is, field experiments that measure administrators' response to fictitious email information requests given random assignment to majority versus minority sounding aliases (Adman and Jansson 2017; Andersen and Guul 2019; Einstein and Glick 2017; Giulietti, Tonin, and Vlassopoulos 2019; Grohs, Adam, and Knill 2016; Hemker and Rink 2017; Jilke, Van Dooren and Rys 2018; Oberfield and Incantalupo 2021; Pedersen, Stritch and Thuesen 2018; Schram et al 2009; White, Nathan and Faller 2015).…”