This workshop will chart the ‘state of the art’ of the emerging field on public encounters: interactions between citizens and the State. Its significant growth over the past decade has expanded the field into new empirical and theoretical terrains and uncovered conflicting perspectives on how to conceptualise and analyse public encounters. The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars working on public encounters to:
• Map the key contours, approaches, and debates of the field;
• Articulate a shared vision for its future direction;
• Prepare papers for a special issue in a high-ranking public administration journal.
The pervasive influence of public encounters on the daily lives of citizens and public officials has been widely acknowledged since the 1980s. However, it was mainly treated as a subset of street-level bureaucracy, a key field in the discipline, and did not develop into a field of its own. In 2013, Bartels published an article that revived the concept, developed a novel conceptual framework, and set an agenda for its study. A recent systematic literature review has revealed that, 10 years on, there has been a steady and increasing growth of studies of public encounters, with over 125 new peer-reviewed publications citing the 2013 article, including a recent edited volume (Hupe, 2023).
Three developments are noteworthy. First, a move beyond the traditional focus on service delivery encounters to participatory, digital, and emotional encounters. Second, broad agreement on the need to understand the relational dynamics of public encounters, both in terms of the in-between of citizens and public officials and ‘the bigger picture’. Third, a deep dividing line between conceptual and methodological approaches that echo wider disciplinary concerns about the due influence of relational philosophical assumptions (Bartels & Turnbull, 2020), a focus on the agency of public officials or citizens (Boswell & Smedley, 2022), and the connection between micro-level relational practices and macro-level structural issues of democracy, social justice, and sustainability (Verloo, 2023).
Marshalling these developments and debates is critical in the contemporary context of the complex and tense relationships between governments and citizens.
Bartels, K.P.R. 2013. Public Encounters: The History and Future of Face-to-Face Contact between Public Professionals and Citizens. Public Administration, 91(2), 469–483.
Bartels, K.P.R. & Turnbull, N. 2020. Relational Public Administration: A Synthesis and Heuristic Classification of Relational Approaches. Public Management Review, 22(9), 1324-1346.
Boswell, J. & Smedley, S. 2022. The Potential of Meta-ethnography in the Study of Public Administration: A Worked Example on Social Security Encounters in Advanced Liberal Democracies, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muac046
Hupe, P. (Ed.) 2023. The Politics of the Public Encounter. What Happens When Citizens Meet the State. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Verloo, N. 2023. Ignoring people: The micro-politics of misrecognition in participatory governance. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231182985
1: In what ways is public encounters becoming a field of its own?
2: How to bridge different approaches to conceptualising and studying public encounters?
3: How to analyse and improve the agency of both public officials and citizens?
4: How to connect micro-level relational practices and macro-level structural issues?
5: What is the real-world value of studying public encounters?
| Title |
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| Equal access to equal rights? Tackling street-level discrimination against mobile EU citizens across four national administrative contexts |
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| Unravelling gender biases in public service delivery: The role of gender in frontline communication |
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| Becoming Accountable: Relational Power in Public Encounters for Tax Credit Services |
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| “Charity’s the cream on the top”: public encounters at the edge of state-provided healthcare |
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| Public Encounters as Venues for Citizen Participation: Probation in Belgium as an Extreme Case to Study the ‘In-Between’ |
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| What Makes a Democratic Public Encounter? A Systems Approach |
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| Re-emphasising the importance of public encounters, ten years on: a review and an agenda |
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| Holding space for meaningful disagreement during participatory processes. |
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| The Black Box of Public Encounters: Adopting a biopsychosocial model for interactions between citizens and the State |
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| Tensions and Coherence in Balancing Risk in the Public Encounter – a case study of addressing antimicrobial resistance in healthcare |
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| Administrative Literacy – Developing a Scale to Understand People’s Ability to Engage with Public Encounters |
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| Frontline interactions on inequal treatment of clients: an analysis of (in)equality talk |
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| Digital First? Citizen-Government Interactions in Benefit Application Processes |
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| ‘I know I am not supposed to, but I just want them to feel cozy’ |
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| To politicize or to de-politicize, that is the question! On public encounters’ dynamics in collaborative governance processes |
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