From Call to Emergency Card: Looking for Discretion of “112” Operators

Abstract

One of the classic research questions of street-level bureaucracy studies is the question of the discretion of the officials when making a decision. In recent decades, the discussion about such bureaucrats has changed. Research has focused on new forms of bureaucracy, e.g., screen-level bureaucrats — various dispatchers and operators who receive calls and messages from citizens. Traditionally, such employees are considered to be almost completely deprived of the ability to act independently, and their work is reduced to following a strict algorithm as much as possible. This article employs data from 20 semi-structured interviews and three participant observation sessions in two cases of municipal emergency call centers of the unified “112” hotline. It attempts to elucidate the daily operations of dispatchers and the mechanisms through which they manage to operate within formal constraints while gaining a broader degree of discretion. The discretion exercised by dispatchers has a dual nature. Their core task involves constant communication with representatives from other emergency services, governed by procedural discretion (regulations and instructions). However, in certain circumstances when dealing with incidents, they can shift a situation from “routine” to “emergency”, thereby expanding their operational possibilities. Moreover, the existing frameworks can undergo transformation when there is a higher level of trust between dispatchers from different services. In such cases, when interacting with other authorities, the dispatcher’s actions are constrained less by rules and more by unspoken conventions, which can vary in different interactions depending on the level of trust between the conversing parties.