The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society

ARTS ORGANIZATIONS AND STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRACY

The concept of street-level bureaucracy was developed by Michael Lipsky (1980), who sought to highlight the importance of front-line professionals in the delivery of public services. According to Lipsky, street-level bureaucrats are not merely mechanical units for implementing policies. In fact, street-level bureaucrats make operational decisions and attempt to respond to the constraints of their environment by developing bureaucratic strategies and routines that enable them to implement public policies. In a way, this contact with the reality of policy implementation, far from the political and administrative elites, constitutes in itself a new space for policy formulation. Street-level bureaucrats use their discretionary power to respond to resource shortages or policy design problems that sometimes compromise implementation. The use of this power can be mobilized to protect professionals; it can sometimes lead to dysfunction.

Nearly fifty years later, the concept of street-level bureaucracy remains relevant in administrative science and public policy literature (Chang and Brewer 2023; Peeters and Campos 2023; Santoso and Lionardo 2024). This concept has been widely used to understand the dynamics of policy implementation in the social services sector, in hospitals, in education, and in policing. Today, the literature is expanding not only in terms of the professions and fields of activity studied, but also in terms of the issues addressed. The issue of street-level bureaucracy is being discussed in order to rethink the design and co-creation of policies (Gofa et al. 2025), the effects of AI (Marienfelt 2024; Gillingham et al., 2025) and this reality is being documented through the intersection of issues such as gender (Dunrose and Lowndes 2024). We are also seeing recent mobilizations of this concept to study administrations and the implementation of public services in countries in the global south (Lotta et al. 2022). Despite the existence of some works documenting the street-level bureaucracy in arts education (Shaw and Bernard 2023; Shaw 2023), the literature on street-level bureaucracy and arts organizations remains relatively limited.

For this special issue of the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society (JAMLS), we are looking for contributions that engage with the concept of street-level bureaucracy in arts and heritage organizations. We invite full papers (5000 to 7000 words), commentaries, and research notes (not exceeding 5000 words) that offer analysis and critical reflection on this topic. In particular, we are looking for papers that engage with the following sub-themes:

Street-level bureaucracy and care work in arts and heritage organizations

For several decades now, cultural policies have been encouraging artists, cultural and heritage professionals, and cultural organizations to contribute to social projects. While some believed that economic thinking was turning artists into workers, today we could go so far as to say that cultural policy is turning cultural professionals into social workers. Artistic and heritage organizations are called upon to increase the number of projects aimed at social cohesion, the integration of vulnerable populations, and contributing to some of the most difficult and sensitive social debates. How are street-level bureaucrats of culture prepared for this care work? What strategies do they implement to respond to the moral or emotional issues they encounter in their practice with audiences?

Work, routines and coping mechanisms

Thinking about arts management from the perspective of the street-level bureaucrat concept means approaching cultural organizations through their professions. This approach also means considering the importance of these professions in the implementation of cultural policy. In other words, cultural professions and occupations leave their mark on cultural policy through their intervention and discretionary power. Here, we seek to find analyses that illustrate the creativity of cultural professions in their approach to cultural policy. What does it mean in concrete terms to democratize culture, engage in cultural diplomacy, or integrate vulnerable populations in order to meet the expectations of cultural policies?

Conceptual analysis

How can the concept of street-level bureaucracy contribute to our understanding of arts management and arts organizations? How well does this concept travel across the diverse environments of cultural policies across the globe? What are the connections or differences between this concept and others that we commonly encounter in the literature. For instance, how does street-level bureaucracy intersects with the concept of artistic/cultural intermediaries?

References

Chang, A., & Brewer, G. A. (2023). Street-level bureaucracy in public administration: A systematic literature review. Public management review, 25(11), 2191-2211.

Durose, C., & Lowndes, V. (2024). Gendering discretion: why street-level bureaucracy needs a gendered lens. Political Studies, 72(3), 1026-1049.

Gillingham, C., Morley, J., & Floridi, L. (2025). The effects of AI on street-level bureaucracy: A scoping review. Digital Society, 4(1), 22.

Gofen, A., Rønning, R., & Sønderskov, M. (2025). Street-level bureaucracy and Co-creation: towards theory synthesis and cross-fertilization. Public Management Review, 27(8), 1912-1937.

Lotta, G., Pires, R., Hill, M., & Møller, M. O. (2022). Recontextualizing street‐level bureaucracy in the developing world. Public Administration and Development, 42(1), 3-10.

Marienfeldt, J. (2024). Does digital government hollow out the essence of street‐level bureaucracy? A systematic literature review of how digital tools' foster curtailment, enablement and continuation of street‐level decision‐making. Social Policy & Administration, 58(5), 831-855.

Peeters, R., & Campos, S. A. (2023). Street-level bureaucracy in weak state institutions: a systematic review of the literature. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 89(4), 977-995.

Santoso, A. D., & Lionardo, A. (2024). A bibliometric analysis of thematic developments in street-level bureaucracy research. Public Administration and Policy, 27(2), 206-219.

Shaw, R. D. (2023). Interrogating policy diffusion in the arts education sphere. Educational Policy, 37(7), 2026-2050.

Shaw, R. D., & Bernard, C. F. (2023). School culture change through the arts: a case study of the turnaround arts program. Arts Education Policy Review, 124(3), 171-186.