Between breaking and restoring boundaries: conceptualizing responsiveness in street-level decision-making
通过对阿姆斯特丹三家居家护理机构的民族志研究，发现一线工作者和管理者通过临时、结构和表演性三种边界工作实践来平衡回应性与规则、资源限制，挑战了回应性是个体二元决策的传统观点。
Abstract Street-level responsiveness is often framed as an individual binary decision: frontline workers either prioritize client needs or strictly adhere to institutional boundaries. This ethnographic study of three home care organizations in Amsterdam challenges this assumption by examining how frontline actors balance responsiveness with rules, resource limitations, and role expectations. Drawing on 140 hours of shadowing and 15 interviews with home care workers and managers, we analyze responsiveness as an organizational achievement. Frontline workers and managers often collaborate in boundary work when being responsive—not just crossing institutional boundaries around rules, resources, and roles, but subsequently also reinstating them. We identify three shared practices—response repertoires—through which responsiveness takes shape: temporary boundary work (addressing acute needs), structural boundary work (managing ongoing vulnerabilities), and performative boundary work (building trust while clarifying service limits). This study contributes to the street-level literature by (1) identifying diverse forms of and motivations for responsiveness linked to different client needs; (2) unpacking the sequenced nature of responsive decision-making, offering the boundary work lens to study street-level decision-making processually; and (3) offering a dialectic understanding of responsiveness, where frontline actors are as much breakers as conservers of institutions. Together, these insights deepen understanding of how responsiveness is enacted, constrained, and institutionalized in everyday public service work.