"easy" and "difficult" users: classification practices and judgement in policy implementation Resumo The goal of this paper is to understand the "social effects of implementation", both theoretically and empirically. It seeks to explore the different processes through which service interactions between users and workers might reinforce social inequality, – – especially in the case of government programs formally designed to reduce it. We take level encounters as critical for the reproduction of social inequalities and as situations loci simultaneously conditioned by and producing effects upon existing forms of social inequality. Besides the theoretical review, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the Brazilian family health care program and its street-level-bureaucracy. Based on 87 interviews with workers, the empirical analysis focused on how the interactions unfolded, the processes and resources mobilized by service workers to make sense of users' characteristics, demands, and behaviors, and finally to what extent these processes involved risks of inequality reproduction. The findings indicate that service workers classify users according to their perceptions of personal characteristics and types of demands. Far from being merely an attribution of administrative categories to real people and situations, we reveal that service workers’ decisions about how to proceed in each case rested largely on their judgments about the of the users. “deservingness” Introduction Public policies possess a complex relationship with issues related to inequalities among the given population. On one hand, they represent the main tool available for the government to face problems associated with social, economic and regional inequalities. On the other hand, some policies work on the opposite direction, enhancing these inequalities (e.g: regressive tax system, monetary and land policies) or creating new ways of exclusion (e.g: immigration policies) (Pires, 2017). Even if we focus solely on social policies, explicitly related to the mitigation of the effects of socioeconomic exclusion to balance citizenship levels, there is still a dual risk regarding their purpose realization. The first risk, extensively addressed by the literature, points out that policies can be insufficient, underfunded or unarticulated, which contributes to the inclusion’s low coverage, quality and effectiveness. The second risk,
"easy" and "difficult" users: classification practices and judgement in policy implementation Resumo The goal of this paper is to understand the "social effects of implementation", both theoretically and empirically. It seeks to explore the different processes through which service interactions – between users and workers – might reinforce social inequality, especially in the case of government programs formally designed to reduce it. We take encounters as critical loci for the reproduction of social inequalities and as situations simultaneously conditioned by and producing effects upon existing forms of social inequality. Besides the theoretical review, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the Brazilian family health care program and its street-level-bureaucracy. Based on 87 interviews with workers, the empirical analysis focused on how the interactions unfolded, the processes and resources mobilized by service workers to make sense of users' characteristics, demands, and behaviors, and finally to what extent these processes involved risks of inequality reproduction. The findings indicate that service workers classify users according to their perceptions of personal characteristics and types of demands. Far from being merely an attribution of administrative categories to real people and situations, we reveal that service workers’ decisions about how to proceed in each case rested largely on their judgments about the “deservingness” of the users. Introduction Public policies possess a complex relationship with issues related to inequalities among the given population. On one hand, they represent the main tool available for the government to face problems associated with social, economic and regional inequalities. On the other hand, some policies work on the opposite direction, enhancing these inequalities (e.g: regressive tax system, monetary and land policies) or creating new ways of exclusion (e.g: immigration policies) (Pires, 2017). Even if we focus solely on social policies, explicitly related to the mitigation of the effects of socioeconomic exclusion to balance citizenship levels, there is still a dual risk regarding their purpose realization. The first risk, extensively addressed by the literature, points out that policies can be insufficient, underfunded or unarticulated, which contributes to the inclusion’s low coverage, quality and effectiveness. The second risk, level
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