Organization matters. Policy entrepreneurship among Street-Level Bureaucrats in public employment services. Insights from an Italian case-study

ABSTRACT In this paper we seek to overcome the knowledge gap in street-level bureaucracy (SLB) literature on labour market policies, focusing on a specific public employment service (PES). In the context of active labour market policies (ALMP), PES are seen as strategic because they have a direct effect on reducing unemployment in both the short and long run and an indirect effect on reinforcing long-term training programmes. However, recent reforms of public employment services in many European countries have generated divergent trajectories in SLBs' practices. In this heterogeneous and unclear picture, to better grasp the different mechanisms influencing policy outcomes at a micro level it seems promising to merge street-level bureaucracy with the policy entrepreneur (PE) approach focused on the way caseworkers (conceived as policy entrepreneurs) influence policy design far beyond the resources they hold. In this article we consider if there are certain organizational configurations that favour the emergence of policy entrepreneurship among street-level bureaucrats. To test this hypothesis, the paper investigates an Italian public employment service. The Italian context is particularly interesting in that it underwent a process of decentralization followed by a more recent push towards re-centralization.