La discrezionalità degli street-level bureaucrats a confronto in diversi contesti organizzativi: evidenze da una survey in un’area metropolitana italiana

In recent years studies on Street Level Bureaucracy (SLB) have increased in number and diversified their approaches. In 2011 Brodkin suggested extending the analysis to organizations, to also include those non-public actors who implement public policies and work front-line. The dimension of discretion has remained central, declined in a conflictual way between management and workers, and put to the test by new organizational practices, such as accountability and digitization, and work practices, such as multi-professional teams. The main perspective on discretionality, however, has been and continues to be subjective. In this paper we propose an analysis which instead considers discretion as a specific dimension, that finds its application at an organizational level. We have chosen an urban case study (Rome) and distinguished the sample organizations between public institutions, specifically Local Health Authorities (ASL) and Local Government Districts (social assistance branches of the City Municipality), and Third Sector institutions (Cooperatives that manage the service after winning the bidding process) and administered a semi-structured questionnaire to 75 social workers. The main research hypothesis, confirmed by the results, is that discretion depends on the type of organization in which the worker is inserted: that is, discretionality can be defined as organizational-led and not just predominantly subjective-led.