A signaling perspective on bureaucratic encounters: How public officials interpret signals and cues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article provides scholars studying frontline judgements an analytical framework—the signaling perspective—that could be used to examine how street‐level bureaucrats evaluate unobservable citizen‐client properties. It proposes to look not only at the kind of signals and cues officials gather, but also at the interpretive frames used to make sense of them. This offers a valuable contribution to the street‐level bureaucracy literature, which largely focuses on explaining discretionary decision making by looking at the influence of officials' personal preferences or client characteristics, but less on officials' interpretive frameworks to make sense of client characteristics. The analytical framework is illustrated by applying it to existing literature on trustworthiness judgements of social workers and police officers. Different interpretive frames were found from which frontline officials interpret citizen characteristics as signals. The article concludes by offering several avenues for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".