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Inspectors and Enforcement at the Front Line of Government pp 205–226Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

A Micro-Level Perspective on Joint Inspections: How Teamwork Shapes Decision Making

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Abstract

In street-level bureaucracy studies, inspectors are often seen as frontline workers with individual discretion. Inspectors, however, increasingly operate in intra- or inter-organizational teams and perform joint inspections to more effectively tackle the complexity of multi-problems and wicked issues in society. Nevertheless, how street-level bureaucrats work together in teams, and how teamwork shapes decision making on the ground has not been given much scholarly attention in public administration. Based on findings from the few published studies on this topic, this chapter argues that the social dynamics and decision-making processes in joint inspections may be different than those in one-on-one inspector–inspectee encounters. It therefore calls for more research to better understand how teamwork shapes decision-making at the micro-level, and how challenges can be dealt with.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The JIY is a multi-disciplinary cooperation between the Health Care Inspectorate, Inspectorate of Education, Inspectorate for Youth Care, Inspectorate for Safety and Justice, and Inspectorate of Social Affairs and Employment, and focuses on problems involving young people which are difficult to tackle by one organization or sector (such as child abuse, youth crime, and poverty among young people) (Rutz et al. 2017).

  2. 2.

    The five Belgian labor inspectorates organize monthly joint anti-fraud inspections (Loyens 2012). These inspection teams do not have collective discretion, but make decisions together and then divide the administrative work among each other. We refer to this practice as delegated discretion, because the team has no formal collective discretionary power and only one inspector in the team takes the case. Technically this team member can in her report deviate from the team decision, but this is not common in practice.

  3. 3.

    ZSM is an abbreviation that literally refers to ‘Zo Snel, Slim, Selectief, Simpel, Samen en Samenlevingsgericht Mogelijk’ (hence the S refers to different nouns) or ‘As fast, smart, simple, together and society oriented as possible’. It is a collaboration between chain partners like the public prosecutor, police, child protection service, victim assistance service and probation service to deal with criminal cases in a multi-disciplinary way (see https://www.om.nl/@24445/factsheet-zsm).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, School of Governance (USG), Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Kim Loyens

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  1. Kim Loyens
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Correspondence to Kim Loyens .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Steven Van de Walle

  2. Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Nadine Raaphorst

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Loyens, K. (2019). A Micro-Level Perspective on Joint Inspections: How Teamwork Shapes Decision Making. In: Van de Walle, S., Raaphorst, N. (eds) Inspectors and Enforcement at the Front Line of Government . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04058-1_11

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