Ignoring by complying: How public officials handle hybridity to pursue the goals of new public governance

Abstract

The article draws on insights from the literature on street-level bureaucracy to analyze how public officials experience and deal with challenges arising from hybrid governance. Empirically, we focus on managerial staff and front-line workers employed in Danish employment service delivery organizations, respectively. We develop the term “ignoring by complying” to describe how informants pursue ideals associated with new public governance (NPG) in settings dominated by more than one governance logic. They comply with the minimum standards associated with the logics of public administration (PA) and new public management (NPM) in order to ignore such logics most of the time. The article thereby contributes to the growing bodies of literature on cross-pressures in public bureaucracies, particularly by putting recent street-level bureaucracy research in touch with literature on hybrid governance.