Examining the “in-between” of public encounters: Evidence from two seemingly disparate policy contexts
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Author | Aritree Samanta,Laura Hand |
| DOI | 10.1177/09520767211020986 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2022, Vol. 37(2) 129 –153
Article
Examining the “in-
between” of public
encounters: Evidence
from two seemingly
disparate policy contexts
Aritree Samanta
School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, San Francisco
State University, USA
Laura Hand
Nistler College of Business and Public Administration,
School of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of North
Dakota, USA
Abstract
Face-to-face encounters, where public administrators and citizens interact, are one of
the primary ways the public experiences the state. Recognized as crucial to the rela-
tionship between citizens and government for decades, scholarship on public encoun-
ters has developed around understanding the legal, organizational, and individual factors
that affect the decision making of street-level bureaucrats. Research argues that what
happens within public encounters are important contributing factors influencing street-
level bureaucrats’ decision-making behaviors. This requires an approach examining the
conditions under which encounters come to be, how the encounters are designed, the
interpersonal and contingent communicative processes used, and the methods by
which they are created and maintained by public administrators and citizens alike.
We focus on these aspects through the concept of the in-between: the existential,
processual space where interactions happen and produce something. Drawing primarily
on Hannah Arendt’s writings on the human effort involved in creation of the in-between
Corresponding author:
Aritree Samanta, Environmental Studies Program, School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, San
Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, HSS Building Room 133, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA.
Email: asamanta@sfsu.edu
Public Policy and Administration
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DOI: 10.1177/09520767211020986
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130 Public Policy and Administration 37(2)
space, and Mary Parker Follett’s concepts of interweaving, we add to the conceptual
framework of the in-between.
Keywords
In-between, public encounters, public participation, street-level bureaucrats
Introduction
Face-to-face encounters, where public administrators and citizens
1
interact, are
one of the primary ways the public experiences the state. Recognized as crucial
to the relationship between citizens and government for decades, public encounters
have produced a great deal of scholarship, especially related to understanding the
legal, organizational, and individual factors that affect the decision making of
street-level bureaucrats and citizen outcomes (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody
and Musheno, 2003; Scott, 1997; Tummers et al., 2015). However, research
argues that what happens within public encounters, the interaction itself, are
important contributing factors influencing street-level bureaucrats’ decision-
making behaviors and resultant outcomes (Bartels, 2013; Hand and Catlaw,
2019). They are relational spaces where participants constantly interpret, react
to, and influence each other according to the situation at hand. This requires an
approach examining the conditions under which encounters come to be, how the
encounters are designed, the interpersonal and contingent communicative process-
es used, and the methods by which they are created and maintained by public
administrators and citizens alike (Stout and Love, 2017).
Scholars heeding this call see public encounters as fundamentally “relational,
situated performances,” rather than simply for providing and receiving public
benefits (Bartels, 2013: 476). They recognize that citizens and street-level bureau-
crats come to the encounter with engrained interactional habits, understanding of
the situation at hand, tacit knowledge, and interpersonal skills that are interwoven
during the encounter. Collaborative expertise, personal relationships, identity for-
mation, and meaning production are some of the possible outcomes of this inter-
weaving process (Bartels, 2013; Brodkin, 2013; Hand and Catlaw, 2019; Stout and
Love, 2017). Macro-level factors also play a crucial role as they make up the
context within which public encounters happen (Stout and Love, 2017). This com-
bination of micro-level relations and macro-level factors is often referred to as the
in-between: an existential, processual space where interactions happen and produce
something. It is this relational space that is at the heart of our inquiry.
Much of the in-between and relational public encounters literature has been
conceptual, with some exceptions (see Bartels, 2015, 2018; Bruhn and Ekstr€
om,
2017; Hand, 2018; Lens et al., 2013; Raaphorst and Loyens, 2020). This literature
has focused on the interpersonal aspect of the in-between, but has paid less
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