Routines amid the unpredictable: A street-level organization’s robust response to COVID-19

Abstract

Street-level organizations, which implement public policy on behalf of the state, often operate under unstable conditions. Workers routinely face resource shortfalls, complex client interactions, and ever-changing rules, prompting them to develop coping strategies. These instabilities, while disruptive, tend to be predictable, allowing those coping strategies to stabilize into routines that effectively constitute de facto, as distinct from de jure, policy. But what happens when instability becomes unpredictable, such as during wars, disasters, or pandemics, where prior experience offers little guidance? This paper explores two questions: (1) Do street-level workers develop different coping strategies under unpredictable, as opposed to predictable, instability? (2) Can those strategies become routinized amid unpredictable flux? The second question poses a conceptual challenge. If instability unfolds too rapidly and erratically for coping strategies to form, those strategies may never stabilize into the kind of routines that matter—those that shape policy in practice. To explore these questions, I modify the street-level bureaucracy framework by incorporating concepts from the turbulence literature, particularly the notion of robustness: patterned responses that enable systems to maintain core functions and values under conditions of unpredictable flux. Empirically, I draw from six-months of in-person and virtual ethnographic data to examine how leaders from a single U.S.-based street-level organization navigated the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to scholarship emphasizing innovation during the crisis, the leaders’ response was surprisingly ordinary, grounded in pre-existing behaviors. Theoretically, these findings suggest that even amid unpredictable instability, street-level workers can still develop routines that matter for policy-as-produced—not by inventing new coping strategies, but by reusing old ones, including those employed by leaders.