From the Phone Call to the Card: In Search of Discretion among the Operators of the Emergency Number 112

Аннотация

One of the classic questions in research into street-level bureaucracy is that of discretion, i.e. the employee’s freedom of action in taking decisions. The discussion of street-level bureaucracy has undergone changes during recent decades. Researchers’ attention has been concentrated on its new forms, in particular “screen-level bureaucrats” — the various call handlers, dispatchers and operators who answer calls and contacts from the public. It has traditionally been considered that such employees are almost entirely deprived of any possibility of acting independently, and that their work is reduced to a strict algorithm. Using data from interviews and participant observation at two municipal call-handling centres for the 112 emergency number, the article attempts to show how the dispatchers’ everyday life is organised and how they succeed in attaining a greater freedom of action while remaining within their formal limitations. The call handlers’ discretion is presented as twofold. The nature of their work — constant contact with representatives of other emergency services — is dictated by frameworks of procedural discretion (regulations and instructions). However, in certain cases, as they work on an incident, they may reclassify the situation from “routine” to “emergency”, thereby extending their possibilities. Moreover, the existing frameworks may be transformed when there is a relationship of trust between the call handlers of different services. Then, when in contact with representatives of other agencies, the call handler’s actions are limited not so much by the rules as by an unspoken convention, which will differ in different interactions according to the degree of trust between the interlocutors.