The everyday quality of interactions between citizen and state, and the grievances they generate, should not be taken to denote a relationship that is simple and easily construed as one of inherent oppression. Street-level bureaucracy is a site of complexity, governed by its own fragile ecosystem. Individual grievance is similarly complex and socially embedded, situated in a social context that requires the cultivation of an ‘art of complaining’ that is a function of civic maturity. For those agencies charged with the task of responding to citizen grievance, constructive intervention that adds value and achieves an accountability dividend must be attuned to the complex relationships it encounters at street-level. Retreat behind a legal framework that too readily finds in law an autonomous instrument of control, insulated from complex and changing social reality, is an evasion that diminishes the possibility of transformational intervention in the name of administrative justice.

Bureaucracy and citizenship

‘A problem in relationships’

While the COVID-19 pandemic has turned the spotlight on ‘key workers’ and their undervalued social contribution, the wave of support for supermarket cashiers and delivery drivers has scarcely extended to those whose daily tasks are seen as tainted by state bureaucracy. The heroism attributed to those on the frontline of service delivery has remained largely inaccessible to those whose encounters with the public take place across a desk, office counter or, more often, mobile phone-call or computer video-link. Despite the advance of modern technology, the ‘desk’ remains a significant metaphor in the context of encounters between street and state, the site, in a small place, of their separation and of their different roles, identities and levels of power: in short, ‘the desk is a physical place where state–citizen encounters occur, but it is also a symbol of state authority’ (Dubois, 2016; Maynard-Moody, 2016: ix). Even in the contemporary world of virtual and digital bureaucracy, the notion of street-level encounter between frontline workers and individual citizens remains valid. In their contact with citizens as consumers and clients, pupils and parents, patients, tenants and vehicle drivers, street-level bureaucrats continue to function as the bearers of inherent discretion, policy co-producers and exponents of a distinctive occupational craft (Hupe et al, 2016: 16).