Between breaking and restoring boundaries: conceptualizing responsiveness in street-level decision-making

Abstract Street-level responsiveness is often framed as an individual binary decision: frontline workers either prioritize client needs or strictly adhere to institutional boundaries. This ethnographic study of three home care organizations in Amsterdam challenges this assumption by examining how frontline actors balance responsiveness with rules, resource limitations, and role expectations. Drawing on 140 hours of shadowing and 15 interviews with home care workers and managers, we analyze responsiveness as an organizational achievement. Frontline workers and managers often collaborate in boundary work when being responsive—not just crossing institutional boundaries around rules, resources, and roles, but subsequently also reinstating them. We identify three shared practices—response repertoires—through which responsiveness takes shape: temporary boundary work (addressing acute needs), structural boundary work (managing ongoing vulnerabilities), and performative boundary work (building trust while clarifying service limits). This study contributes to the street-level literature by (1) identifying diverse forms of and motivations for responsiveness linked to different client needs; (2) unpacking the sequenced nature of responsive decision-making, offering the boundary work lens to study street-level decision-making processually; and (3) offering a dialectic understanding of responsiveness, where frontline actors are as much breakers as conservers of institutions. Together, these insights deepen understanding of how responsiveness is enacted, constrained, and institutionalized in everyday public service work.