Managing how street-level bureaucrats make sense of the past: a case study of managerial sensegiving and its limits for policy intervention

Original

Managing how street-level bureaucrats make sense of the past: a case study of managerial sensegiving and its limits for policy intervention

Graeme Currie, Ila Bharatan

Abstract

Our study examines how frontline managers attempt to manage how street-level bureaucrats make sense of the past when implementing policy reform, using Family Hubs in England as an empirical case. Drawing on sensemaking theory, we identify three modes of managerial sensegiving: discursive, material, and people management practices. We show how: retrospective anchoring limits discursive sensegiving as professionals remember previous reforms; material inertia limits material sensegiving as legacy infrastructures constrain the credibility of new spatial cues; and normative filtering limits people management sensegiving as embedded professional identities lead staff to selectively resist managerial interventions in roles and routines.