L'utente insoddisfatto. Strategie di coping e relazione burocratica: una comparazione allo street-level

Within the bureaucratic relationship, the users of public services meet the street-level bureaucrats: those professionals who deal with the specific needs of citizens, interpreting and adapting formal regulation tools. This interpretative and adaptive process often involves different types of conflict that can be generated with the interaction, including the policy-client conflict, which emerges when the rules of the service do not match user’s expectations. When the user is dissatisfied, street-level bureaucrats implement different strategies to make the public service possible. In particular, the article investigates the way in which the different relational asymmetries within the public services affect the street-level bureaucrats’ strategies in the management of the dissatisfied user. A comparative approach was chosen by selecting three services that constitute three cases of bureaucratic relations with different relational asymmetries. Principal findings highlight that the distribution of agency resources between operator and user influences the ways in which the former faces any dissatisfaction with the latter. Furthermore, the results show that the same strategy takes on peculiar nuances within different bureaucratic relationships.