UNDERSTANDING BUREAUCRATIC REPORTING BEHAVIORS AND EXTRA-JUDICIAL DECISION-MAKING

Abstract

In this dissertation, I leverage literature from public administration and public policy to understand the ways in which bureaucrats decide to engage with the misconduct offices and processes of their organizations, be they client-sanctioning or HR/employee-reporting offices. I utilize three studies that involve reporting behaviors of some type. The first chapter serves as a baseline for describing the general prevailing theories of public administration surrounding bureaucratic behavior. This baseline allows me to understand how street-level bureaucrats make the decision of whether or not to formally report the clients that they serve for misconduct. The second chapter is closely related and furthers the prior chapter’s work by focusing on a more particular time-period, in which the organization a street-level bureaucrat works for is facing a period of disruption, a punctuation. The third and final chapter examines how bureaucrats decide to report sexual harassment in the workplace in light of both the clarity of managerial expectations and past experiences with the reporting process. Overall, I expected to find that the clarity of guidance and perceived appropriateness of sanctions—as well as a few other chapter-specific variables—play significant roles in the decision-making processes for bureaucrats. However, I only find some support for the role of clarity and sanction-perceptions; instead, I find that the decision-making processes bureaucrats use in determining when to formally report misconduct is highly contextualized based on the type of misconduct, the proximity of the potential reporter to the individual potentially being reported, and the influence of a disrupting exogenous shock to the overall organization.