Taming the Beast: Managers’ Tactics to Change Frontline Workers’ Adversarial Interaction with Policy Targets

ABSTRACT

This article explains how manager’s face noncompliance problems with the use of implementation tactics affecting the relational nature between frontline workers and policy targets. In the argument, the concept of bounded rationality is helpful to explain a set of mechanisms that affect individual’s decision-making, although overlooked in some recent streams in the literature by yielding greater importance to rationalistic models of human behaviour. A case study provides the empirical foundation in the effectiveness of the implementation tactics and its underlying rationale. A mixed method approach was used to fulfill the research objectives. Findings support the idea of a set of tactics that managers use to positively engage between frontline workers and citizen in correct(ing) policy implementation gaps.

KEYWORDS:

• Compliance
• implementation
• bounded rationality
• local government

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thanks to the anonymous referees and the editor of the journal. Also acknowledge the help provided by a number of colleagues who commented previous versions of this paper. Authors appreciate the help of “Demoskopica” during the fieldwork and the help of our research assistants along the whole project.

Notes

1. According to INEGI, an urban AGEB is a territorial extension occupied by a number of blocks, generally 1 to 50, bounded by streets, avenues, walkways or any other easily identified ground-level feature, where the land is used primarily for housing, industry, services or commerce (INEGI, 2010).

2. The independent survey team is different from the street-level operational team (the traffic agents), but they were previously trained to be able to identify infractions correctly.

3. The amount of the fines depends on the exact law infringement. Details are available here http://portal.guadalajara. gob.mx/programa-banquetas-libres. The monthly average income level in Mexico according to the National Statistics Office INEGI in 2015 was 9.6 thousand pesos, equivalent to 533 US dlls. https://www.inegi.org.mx/app/indicadores/?ind=6204482539#divFV6204482698#D6204482539.

4. Interviews with Managers: Interview D-1 and D-3 were the Legal Affairs Manager and the Field Operations Manager correspondingly. Other verbatims came from unstructured questions made to operators along the semi-structured survey.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Public Policy National Laboratory (LNPP) in CIDE, within the Democratic Governance Project launched in the year of 2015. The research project was then titled and submitted as “The Small Policy Research Project”.