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Deliberation is ubiquitous in street-level work. Scholars and practitioners increasingly promote it, as it has the potential to improve existing practices and procedures and provide customized, yet consistent, services. Little is known, however, about the situated performance of deliberation in street-level work. Drawing on Routine Dynamics Theory and based on an ethnographic study of street-level decision-making in child and family services in the Netherlands (including document analysis, ~300 hours of observations, and interviews in two teams in one organization), we uncover the performance of deliberative routines and their development over time. Demonstrating how contextual factors and the prioritization of particular ends play a role in these routines, we contribute to a better understanding of the dynamic and reflective performance of street-level deliberation. In addition, providing a more nuanced view of routines and elaborating on some possibilities for enabling management thereof, we contribute to a better understanding of the complex and iterative organization of street-level work.

In this chapter we start from the idea that ethnography, as it has been used in the social sciences, has three complementary meanings: it involves a particular set of methods, it comes with a certain sensibility toward the field, and it entails a certain written product. We discuss these three meanings as aspects of ethnography in the light of the history, development, and controversies in the ethnographic study of the police as well as more contemporary manifestations. In order to do so, we assessed well-known texts from before 2000 and conducted a study of works (all in English) from 2000 to 2020. In our description of the development of fieldwork, sensibility, and writing in ethnographies of the police, we touch upon a range of issues such as gender, multi-sitedness, street-level decisions, and the concept of police culture, among others.

Samenwerking met partijen die actief zijn in kwetsbare wijken en duurzame ondersteuning vanuit grote instellingen zijn cruciale voorwaarden voor het werk van ‘best persons’ in kwetsbare wijken, ofwel mensen die goed zijn in het op pragmatische en innovatieve wijze oplossen van problemen. Dat is een van de belangrijkste bevindingen van de onderzoekers Merlijn van Hulst en Maaike Matelski van Tilburg University in het nieuwe onderzoeksrapport ‘Mensen die een verschil maken in kwetsbare wijken. Best Persons, tien jaar later’. Onderzoekers van Tilburg University volgden ruim tien jaar geleden een groep mensen die zich inzetten voor kwetsbare wijken in Nederlandse steden, zogenaamde ‘best persons’, en in 2020 zochten Van Hulst en Matelski hen weer op. Tien jaar later blijkt dat de uitdaging waarvoor best persons staan veelal groter is geworden, hoewel ze desondanks resultaten bereiken en erkend worden voor hun werk. Best persons werken vaak over domeinen heen zoals zorg, huisvesting en sociaal werk, om op pragmatische en innovatieve wijze problemen op te lossen. Toch voelen ze zich regelmatig in hokjes geduwd door beleid, ambtenaren en financieringsinstrumenten. Samenwerking met andere partijen en duurzame ondersteuning vanuit grote instellingen zijn volgens deze sleutelfiguren in kwetsbare wijken cruciale voorwaarden voor het bereiken van stabiliteit in tijden van aanhoudende dynamiek. Grote instellingen die in de wijken actief zijn, zouden kunnen helpen door stabiele partners te zijn en bijvoorbeeld langlopende projectondersteuning te bieden. Ook zouden ze het vormen van nieuwe, evenwichtige bondgenootschappen van kleine en grote spelers in de wijk kunnen bevorderen. Best persons werken vaak relatief autonoom, maar samenwerking is tegelijkertijd een noodzaak. Best persons hebben naast stabiliteit ook behoefte aan ontwikkeling in hun werk. Hoewel onderzoek keer op keer bevestigt dat best persons ertoe doen, lijkt het beleid zich vooral te richten op initiatieven en projecten en weinig oog te hebben voor hun dragers. Om dit te veranderen zou er meer aandacht moeten komen voor de leerbehoefte van best persons en overdracht van kennis en vaardigheden op nieuwe generaties.

Samenwerking met partijen die actief zijn in kwetsbare wijken en duurzame ondersteuning vanuit grote instellingen zijn cruciale voorwaarden voor het werk van ‘best persons’ in kwetsbare wijken, ofwel mensen die goed zijn in het op pragmatische en innovatieve wijze oplossen van problemen. Dat is een van de belangrijkste bevindingen van de onderzoekers Merlijn van Hulst en Maaike Matelski van Tilburg University in het nieuwe onderzoeksrapport ‘Mensen die een verschil maken in kwetsbare wijken. Best Persons, tien jaar later’.Onderzoekers van Tilburg University volgden ruim tien jaar geleden een groep mensen die zich inzetten voor kwetsbare wijken in Nederlandse steden, zogenaamde ‘best persons’, en in 2020 zochten Van Hulst en Matelski hen weer op. Tien jaar later blijkt dat de uitdaging waarvoor best persons staan veelal groter is geworden, hoewel ze desondanks resultaten bereiken en erkend worden voor hun werk. Best persons werken vaak over domeinen heen zoals zorg, huisvesting en sociaal werk, om op pragmatische en innovatieve wijze problemen op te lossen. Toch voelen ze zich regelmatig in hokjes geduwd door beleid, ambtenaren en financieringsinstrumenten.Samenwerking met andere partijen en duurzame ondersteuning vanuit grote instellingen zijn volgens deze sleutelfiguren in kwetsbare wijken cruciale voorwaarden voor het bereiken van stabiliteit in tijden van aanhoudende dynamiek. Grote instellingen die in de wijken actief zijn, zouden kunnen helpen door stabiele partners te zijn en bijvoorbeeld langlopende projectondersteuning te bieden. Ook zouden ze het vormen van nieuwe, evenwichtige bondgenootschappen van kleine en grote spelers in de wijk kunnen bevorderen. Best persons werken vaak relatief autonoom, maar samenwerking is tegelijkertijd een noodzaak.Best persons hebben naast stabiliteit ook behoefte aan ontwikkeling in hun werk. Hoewel onderzoek keer op keer bevestigt dat best persons ertoe doen, lijkt het beleid zich vooral te richten op initiatieven en projecten en weinig oog te hebben voor hun dragers. Om dit te veranderen zou er meer aandacht moeten komen voor de leerbehoefte van best persons en overdracht van kennis en vaardigheden op nieuwe generaties.

This briefing will be of relevance to anyone interested in:• how people make a difference in neighbourhoods• what enables or hinders this kind of local action in a range of European cities• what can be done in terms of capacity building, governance and resources• the role of policy-makers, politicians, non-governmental organisations and funders in supporting smart urban intermediationThe briefing is part of the project Smart Urban Intermediaries, which focusses on how social and democratic innovation can provide a much needed corrective to the overly technological focus of the 'smart city' model.

The liveability and resilience of many European cities is under pressure from growing inequalities, persistent poverty, political polarisation, fiscal uncertainty and environmental threats, such as the climate crisis. At the same time, cities offer multiple opportunities for people to address these concerns, but we need to be ‘smarter’ in our analysis and problem-solving strategies. This report draws on a trans-European research, learning and action project conducted between 2017 and 2019 called Smart Urban Intermediaries. We wanted to better understand how positive change can happen in our cities and generate dialogue on the role of intermediaries in such change. The project offers an alternative narrative to the mainstream 'smart cities' approach. We argue that technological innovation must be balanced by social and democratic innovation.

Participation in neighbourhoods is a highly valued phenomenon. Participation is the basis of a shared social life, but it also makes everyday life, and the lived experience of people participating in it, political. From a public administration perspective, governance and formal policy-making are increasingly reaching out to citizens, instead of drawing solely on representative mechanisms of local government. This paper investigates how practitioners working in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Dutch cities enhance participation. Using empirical data from research in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in The Netherlands, the paper shows that these practitioners either start projects that connect people in their own life world or connect policy-makers and policy to initiatives on the ground. As a result, they create the opportunity for many to develop their citizenship and become a more active participant in their local communities.

In recent decades, organizational scholars have set out to explore the processual character of organizations. They have investigated both the overtly ephemeral and sometimes dramatically unstable aspects of contemporary organizing and the social flux and flow of everyday organizing hiding beneath organizations’ stable surface appearances. These studies manifest a range of different approaches and methods. In this chapter, we evaluate the use and usefulness of one of these – ethnography – for studying organizational processes. As ethnographers draw close enough to observe the precariousness of such processes, stay long enough to see change occurring, and are contextually sensitive enough to understand the twists and turns that are part of organizational life, ethnography is well suited for such study. Ethnographers are commonly aware that ‘… incremental shifts and repositioning are the rule, not the exception, in organizational life’ (Morrill and Fine, 1997: 434). ‘By virtue of its situated, unfolding, and temporal nature’, then, as Jarzabkowski et al. (2014: 282) put it, ethnography ‘is revelatory of processual dynamics’. Ethnography or, to emphasize the processual nature of doing ethnography itself, ethnographying (Tota, 2004; de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, 2013), typically means three things: (i) doing research (fieldwork), (ii) understanding the world with an orientation towards sensemaking (sensework), and (iii) articulating and presenting those understandings (textwork). The first of these refers to research done through prolonged and intensive engagement with the research setting and its actors, combining different fieldwork methods (observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people, including interviewing; and/or the close reading of researchrelevant documents). Second, ethnography embraces a sensibility towards meaning and meaning-making processes, and this shapes the ways its observations and interpretations are carried out. Third, ethnographic analyses are commonly presented through a written text presenting data that give voice to the minutiae of everyday life, in their social, political, and historical contexts, thereby conveying to readers a sense of ‘being there’. This fieldwork, sensework, textwork trio may remind one of other treatments of field research methods (e.g., fieldwork, headwork, and textwork in Van Maanen, 1988; 2011; fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork in Yanow, 2000), which Wilkinson (2014) supplements with preparatory legwork. We replace the middle term with ‘sensework’ to encompass a broader range of analytic activity that is sensitive towards organizational actors’ meaning making, the complexities of the everyday, and the tacitly known and/or concealed dimensions of organizational life. More is involved, in our view, than just the ‘headwork’ of theory-informed interpretation and distanced analysis. Although previous work has typically not made a process focus explicit, the history of organizational studies shows ethnographic research being sensitive to a key feature of organizing processes unfolding over time: the intersubjective processes of ‘social reality’ construction. Ethnography has commonly required a prolonged period of researcher immersion in the research setting in which fieldwork is being carried out. This has inspired many influential organizational studies, both in the discipline’s early days and in more recent years (Fine, Morrill and Surianarain, 2009; Ybema, Yanow, et al., 2009; Yanow, 2013). Earlier studies delved into the dynamics of, for instance, bureaucratic control and resistance (e.g., Selznick, 1949; Blau, 1955; Kaufman, 1960; Roy, 1960; Crozier, 1964; Kunda, 1992), organizational performances and dramatics (Goffman, 1959), and the unofficial workarounds brought into play through processes of power struggles and local meaning making of labour relations (Dalton, 1959). Some of these studies also covered longer-term developments, such as Gouldner’s follow-up account of worker–management relationships in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Although these studies show that an ethnographic approach is well equipped for doing process analyses, processes themselves were not often their explicit concern. More recent ethnographic studies, however, have taken a more explicit ‘process turn’, focusing on the instability and dynamics of organizational life on the ground (e.g., Feldman, 2000; Jay, 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013). We begin this chapter with a sketch of studying organizational processes which provides the conceptual footing to argue for the relevance of ethnographying for this kind of study. To bring the processual qualities of ethnographic work into sharp focus, ethnography can be seen as ‘following’ actors, interactions, and artefacts over time and space. Ethnographers go along with actors, interactions, and artefacts on the move or stay in one place observing things that move around them. Next, we explain in more detail what ethnographic fieldwork, sensework, and textwork entail, and how these relate to process. We discuss two different foci in process analysis – long-term developments and microdynamics – and present two recent examples of ethnographic work which illustrate what ethnography can do for the study of process. We conclude with a few suggestions as to how ethnographers could become more processsensitive in their field-, sense-, and textwork. That is, although ethnography has something to contribute to process studies, ethnographers could themselves learn from taking the issues engaged in this handbook into consideration.