Extra-governmental advocacy organizations play an important role in shaping how public administration delivers good governance, especially when it comes to social equity on the part of historically marginalized groups and vulnerable populations. One area where advocacy is presumed to have an impact on governance is in altering how individual street-level bureaucrats make on-the-spot decisions in instances where discretion is allowed with little or no risk of challenge by a higher authority. Because extra-governmental institutions recognize that these kinds of discretionary acts have an immediate and long-term impact in the lives of individuals, street-level bureaucrats and upper-level front-line administrators have become primary targets for advocacy organizations. In response to this, it is felt that the way advocacy groups approach administrators and the way administrators respond needs more study.

In public administration, a discretionary act by a front-line administrator (a street-level bureaucrat who not only has direct contact with the public, but also has a degree of decision-making power related to conferring benefits or sanctions) is understood to be action taken where the street-level bureaucrat could have just as easily chosen from a range of alternative actions, or even inaction, with minimal challenge or consequence. The use of discretion by front-line administrators is important because, as Lipsky (2010) writes, “These are the sites of the provision of public benefits and sanctions. They are the locus of individual decisions about and treatment of citizens, and thus are primary targets of protest” (p. 10).

The debate over whether administrative discretion was either a problem for, or an integral feature of, public administration dates back to the Friedrich-Finer debates that started in the 1940s (Jackson, 2009). Friedrich argued that broad discretion would not be a problem so long as there was an expectation that the administrator could justify their decision with a “rational account” (p. 69). On the other side of the argument, in Finer's view, the proper relationship between a street-level bureaucrat and their superior "called for obedience of one to another” (p. 69), which would leave little room for discretion.

Friedrich, and those who followed him as advocates for a broad use of discretion, have argued that ideally there would emerge a “self-disciplined bureaucracy,” and integral to that was the proviso that “public bureaucrats should have two qualifications: ‘technical knowledge’ and ‘popular sentiment’” (Kang, 2005, p. 165; Friedrich, 1968, p. 341). This research argues that the “technical knowledge” qualification is being influenced by advocacy that is aimed both at expanding or constraining equity for marginalized groups, and that “popular sentiment” is, unapologetically, a product of cultural abidance. Progressive advocacy, which will be described in detail in Chapter II, has the dual purpose of enhancing technical knowledge while at the same time opening hearts and minds in overcoming popular sentiments that continue to mobilize bias against historically subordinated populations. The scope of what is meant by cultural abidance will also be narrowed to four concepts of interest that will be superficially examined in this study, with the hope that future research into the factors of cultural abidance might be more targeted.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this research is twofold: 1) explore and describe instances where public officials, serving as upper-level street-level bureaucrats or front-line administrators, have chosen to exercise administrative discretion in ways where the consequences are immediate, and 2) to test for relationships between bureaucratic decision making and the direct engagement advocacy efforts of progressive extra-governmental organizations. Assuming that an advocacy organization is well-established, nationally recognizable, and that their mission, purpose, and goals can be supported by respected research, it is anticipated that progressive advocacy by such an organization will predict that street-level bureaucrats may be influenced to alter how they use their administrative discretion in ways that are more favorable to the population represented by the advocacy organization.

Research Question

Underlying theory suggests that, among grassroots advocacy groups that are targeting street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators, direct engagement at the individual level within the target population is "the most effective way to communicate with people” when trying to earn legitimacy (Zherka, 2012, p. xvii). With this in mind, I propose the following research question:

Are certain actions, undertaken by advocacy organizations that target street-level bureaucrats, predictors of a more favorable use of administrative discretion, where favorable is defined as actions by street-level bureaucrats that advance the mission, purpose, or goals of the advocacy organization?

Extra-governmental organizations are already having an impact on how administrative discretion is applied, typically in one of two ways. Progressive organizations argue for changing how statutes, rules, and regulations are interpreted in keeping with the current period and social climate, while conservative organizations justify limiting the boundaries of acceptable discretion to historical norms, pointing to how habitus and doxa (Bourdieu, 1977), as trends of cultural abidance, need to remain in place. In addition to habitus and doxa, two additional factors of cultural abidance will also be explored in detail in Chapter II as it relates to the cumulative impact that cultural abidance has on vulnerable groups.

Were it not for the human tendency to marginalize those in society who are seen as the other, progressive advocacy would likely not be required to assist in the efforts of public administrators who strive to provide equitable treatment. However, bias, in one form or another, seems to be omnipresent. For his work, Foucault (Stangroom & Garvey, 2005) described how he saw bias as “…dividing practices [that] objectify people by distinguishing and separating them from their fellows on the basis of distinctions, such as normal and abnormal, sane and insane, the permitted and the forbidden” (p. 153). If Foucault is correct, then Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) underscore just one way this manifests by describing how street-level bureaucrats “convey a strong orientation toward faces, or who people are, and toward the workers’ own beliefs, their value systems, in explaining their decision making,” making it clear that these “beliefs about people continually rub against policies and rules” (p. 4). In spite of how the rules and regulations are written, and in spite of knowing that the “prevailing narrative – what [public administration calls] the state-agent narrative – portrays a democratic state as an edifice built on law and predictable procedures that insure that like cases will be treated alike” (p. 4), Maynard-Moody and Musheno are forced to admit “that law abidance and cultural abidance coexist in the everyday world of street-level work” (p. 4).

It is for this reason that when a public servant is willing to rise above a pull of cultural abidance and make a discretionary choice that favors the mission, goals, and purpose of a progressive advocacy group, then it is being argued here that this “more favorable” decision is a good proxy for decision-making that will improve a social equity outcome for the group represented by the advocacy organization. Identifying such a correlation between direct advocacy efforts and discretionary decision-making by street-level bureaucrats would point the way for targeted research into the nexus of government and third-sector advocacy organizations.

Summary

In spite of the decades that have passed since Lipsky, Friedrich, and Finer first wrote about their concerns over how much discretion front-line administrators have, or believe they have, there still seems to be very little to guide administrators and their superiors in how to deal with those individuals who choose to follow historical norms and perpetuate biased decisionmaking, or fail to intervene when they see such bias. It remains to be seen whether the third-sector, through effective advocacy, might already be in a better position than public administration to intervene and rectify this problem. This research offers a first step toward making an assessment of what has already been taking place in this arena by exploring whether or not there is a relationship between the type, structure, or strategies of a progressive advocacy group and the discretionary decisions made by individual street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators who are the targets of their advocacy.

I will begin by summarizing research on the intersection of social advocacy and public administration. I will next discuss research on the importance of bureaucratic decision-making, as discretionary acts, and its impact on marginalized groups. Finally, I will conceptualize a proposal and describe the methodology for a research study aimed at more fully exploring the probability of a relationship between advocacy efforts and the use of bureaucratic discretion.

CHAPTER II: PROGRESSIVE ADVOCACY

It was at the original 1968 Minnowbrook conference when social equity took center stage in the minds of many academics within public administration. Twenty years later, at Minnowbrook II, social equity was conspicuously absent, but in recent decades, progressive-minded scholars in public administration are once again arguing that social equity, in the “Minnowbrook tradition,” needs to be restored as a defining concept for public administration (Gooden & Portillo, 2011). In pursuit of that goal, this research proposes that extra-governmental advocacy will play a central role in reaching that objective. For this reason, it was felt that the topic of progressive advocacy needed to have its own dedicated literature review chapter due to how this study is so narrowly focused on what might be involved in expanding the use of administrative discretion so that the decisions of conservative-minded street-level bureaucrats are more mindful of equity for marginalized groups and vulnerable populations.

Progressive advocacy, in this research, is that which “seeks to address underlying structural and power inequities […and…] meaningfully engage … constituents in all aspects of the advocacy process” (Donaldson, 2008, p. 26; Kimberlin, 2010, p. 165). It is felt that any kind of advocacy that is aimed at influencing a street-level bureaucrat’s use of administrative discretion should be worthy of scrutiny, but in light of the dichotomous nature of conservative and progressive advocacy, it was decided that this study needed to be limited to an analysis of just progressive advocacy organizations.

Many conservative extra-governmental organizations proudly proclaim a cultural or religious purpose that is, among other things, focused on defending age-old traditions. This is why, for the purpose of this dissertation, habitus and doxa (Bourdieu, 1977) in general terms, are seen as the primary factor in how cultural abidance impacts a vulnerable population. Bourdieu’s use of habitus and doxa are a good fit here because of how habitus speaks to the tendency to stick with the traditional ways of doing things, which will preserve privilege in the hegemonic sense, and doxa speaks to the idea that historical ways of doing things are to be embraced as the unquestioned understanding of what “truth” is. With doxa and habitus buttressing their arguments, many powerful, culturally-motivated, extra-governmental organizations (notably religions, church congregations, and mega-church pastors with celebrity status) are expending a great deal of time, energy, and resources on defining behavior that conforms to what leaders within those organizations interpret as the original intent of texts (like the United States Constitution) and traditions (like the various sects of Christianity) that are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. This understanding of cultural abidance is important to this dissertation because progressive advocacy, in order to be successful, has to be able to deconstruct (or better yet, displace) the narratives of culturally-bound, conservative advocacy organizations (Miller, 2012).

Taking on governing narratives that are deeply entrenched in tradition is what progressivism is all about. Where the problem arises from, as it relates to street-level bureaucrats, is that in the United States conservative-minded intellectuals in law and public administration have long-used the concept of original intent of governmental texts to assist them in making culturally-motivated interpretations of discretionary boundaries. It is important to understand that, for these individuals, both the Constitution and modern government regulations were meant to be interpreted through a culture-specific lens. This is why Miller entitled his book Governing Narratives (2012), due to how habitus and doxa spill over into how government statutes, regulations, and even laws tend to be interpreted (Miller prefers the term performed) in their historical, cultural, and often even regional, context.

For the purpose of this study, the more general term, conservative ideology, will be considered synonymous with a generic understanding of what is meant by habitus and doxa. In the conceptualization and methodology chapters a mechanism for identifying instances where this aspect of cultural abidance informed the decision making of a street-level bureaucrat and front-line administrator will be set out.

This chapter next turns to the ongoing debate in public administration over efficient government vs. effective government. The efficient vs. effective debate will specifically be explored through the wider lens of which objective has greater legitimacy in the eyes of different populations, and which objective (efficient or effective) should be given primacy. Once the questions of legitimacy and primacy are answered the chapter concludes by coming full circle to a uniquely contextualized discussion of effective progressive advocacy for historically marginalized groups and vulnerable populations, all of which is being incorporated in order to hopefully improve social equity for these underserved individuals.

Public Administration as a Progressive Endeavor

Subsequent sections will provide some important background on what the current perception of public administration is in the United States, but first it was felt that a foundation be built by describing the history behind the ongoing debate between efficient vs. effective government. For the purpose of this study, the pursuit of efficiency at the expense of effectiveness will, in the context of the current era, be associated with regressive ideals, in spite of how efficiency first emerged as an integral part of the Progressive Era. Conversely, effective will be associated with progressive ideals. As one of the more notable feminist scholars in contemporary public administration, Stivers (2000, p. 3) affirmed the idea that many of the metrics of social equity can be measured by looking at how public administration defines its own effectiveness.

Stivers supports her defense of the idea that effective governance should have primacy over efficient government by tracing public administration practice back to its origins in the Progressive Era, when a fledgling municipal research bureau movement was emerging in New York City in 1905 (p. 1-2). Made up entirely of men, Stivers contrasted these bureau men to the founders of the Settlement House Movement, whose workers were primarily women following in the steps of Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), who modelled Chicago’s Hull House (founded in 1889) after London’s Toynbee Hall (founded in 1884).

Here it is important to underscore how progressive advocacy, especially in the context of this study, is a grassroots activity. According to Stivers (2000), both the “bureau men” and “settlement women” movements were vanguard progressive organizations in their own right, with the Hull House undoubtedly informing John Dewey’s research on civil society at the newly founded University of Chicago, where he arrived in 1894. Leaders in the settlement house movement were focusing on achieving their goals by changing hearts and minds as they set about to educate and integrate tens of thousands of new immigrants into America’s biggest cities (Stivers, 2000, p. ix). As Stivers points out, however, the bureau men, emerging at the same time as Frederick Taylor (1911), were focused almost exclusively on creating an efficient public administration and formulating the “one best way.”

Stivers’ work informs this dissertation because it underscores how progressivism, through effective advocacy tactics, can trace its origins to grassroots organizers in two seemingly incompatible movements. In both instances, advocacy was instrumental in creating dramatic and rapid change. Stivers’ work illustrates how, in the end, the field of social work, with a broad reliance on administrative discretion, seems to have emerged out of the Settlement House Movement, while public administration emerged out of the efforts of the municipal research bureau movement and their focus on strict obedience to rules and regulations (Stivers, 2000).

Stivers’ conclusion was that it was a mistake to have public administration focused so narrowly on Taylor’s idea that there has to be “one best way,” which in turn ended up stifling much of the administrative discretion that could have, historically, improved social equity for America’s vulnerable populations. As Stivers’ (2000, p. 37) put it, “From the beginning, the work of the research bureaus concentrated on administrative structures and processes.” So much so, in fact, that in many instances it approached the ridiculous and turned bureaucrats into punch-lines for comedians. Because this research will include school administrators in its analysis, it is telling to read an anecdote taken from the preface to a book by one of the leading current authors in educational leadership. The preface is written by a man named Apple, a colleague of the book’s author.

My first day as a teacher taught me a good deal about one of the dangers of defining the role of a school administrator in strictly bureaucratic terms. I was teaching in an inner-city school in a very poor city on the East Coast. The school buildings were aged and in disrepair. Many of the window didn’t open, which proved to be a serious problem since it was over 100o degrees in my classroom. Given the oppressive conditions that I and the students were experiencing, I took off my jacket. The principal walked by and looked in. She quickly entered my room and publicly berated me. In a stern voice that made it clear that I had broached a cardinal rule, she said “Mr. Apple, how can children learn if you do not dress appropriately?” (Anderson, 2009, p. vii).

Decades later, public administration is still struggling to overcome this same perception that Apple spoke of, where every action of a bureaucrat is dictated by a rule. Stivers (2000) proposes we overcome this deficiency in public administration practice by providing a clear definition of how effective governance can be measured when social equity is reconstituted as a primary purpose for public administration (pp. 36-38, 61). In this new environment, and as both Stivers and Anderson argue, administrative discretion (covered in depth in Chapter III) will almost certainly need to be steered in a progressive direction, and its use applied in ways ever-more-favorable to the vulnerable and marginalized.

The Legitimacy of Progressivism

Lipsky (2010) affirmed that the public trust in government hinges upon front-line administrators being allowed a significant amount of discretion. According to Lipsky, citizens would like to know that, “…administrators of public services [are] at least open to the possibility that a special case is presenting itself, or that extraordinary efforts of one sort or another are called for” (Lipsky, 2010, p. xii). Although discretion can certainly be used in both regressive and progressive ways, the tone of Lipsky’s writing is decidedly leaning to the progressive side, as is implied by suggesting that to turn away obviously needy citizens with cold and emotionless citations of a regulation would also greatly diminish the public perception of government.

Further to the legitimacy argument, and primarily due to efficiency having prevailed for the past century in the dichotomous battle with effectiveness, the premise here is centered on the idea that governance (or public administration, if you will) has, in the years since Minnowbrook I, spent more than 40 years wandering in the wilderness. Immediately following the success of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs, the general feeling was that social equity would remain in the forefront as a primary concern for all public administrators, and that regardless of the personal feelings of public servants, would remain neutral in the decisions they made regarding the provision of public goods and services.

To Stivers (2000), Anderson (2009), and others, this neutrality might have happened on the part of public servants dedicated to social equity, but it never happened on the part of the right-of-center conservatives that were following Friedrich’s economic views, nor on the part of those who subscribe to conservative morality policy, a concept that will be discussed in an upcoming section. On the economics side, at least, Anderson, like Stivers, is making an argument for an “alternative vision of the state’s role” that would “blend the innovations that markets can provide with the social protections of a more empowering state” (Anderson, 2009, p. xiii). As an educator, Anderson admits that this will require that school administrators (and by extension, public administration) boldly assume the role of advocate themselves, and become “engaged in the political processes shaping the conditions under which students are educated in U.S. public schools” (p. xiii). It follows then that advocating for a progressive use of administrative discretion at other sites in the public sector might be more effective at improving equitable outcomes than lobbying government, and, as will be discussed in Chapter III, will certainly be more expedient for the marginalized, when and where it works.

To the dismay of progressives, however, those with negative perceptions of public administration (those who no longer see “big government” as legitimate) will likely remain firmly on the efficient side of the argument along with social conservatives who feel that government has a role in preserving “traditional values,” however one defines those. Alternatively, on the progressive side, many will see an increasingly important (and legitimate) role for public administration in improving social equity. This dissertation argues that progressive advocacy organizations should play a role in this effort.

Progressivism and Privileged Populations

When conservative advocacy organizations are framing their message for consumption by a historically privileged audience, the progressive advocate needs to be aware that, due to a reliance on zero-sum thinking, this audience will typically be made to feel threatened by an increase in diversity. In similar ways, socially conservative parents are naturally protective of outside influences shaping the minds of their children in a public school environment. Recall the Foucault quote about “dividing practices” from Chapter I (Stangroom & Garvey, 2005, p. 153). Shields (2013), a scholar in educational leadership, argues that in order to change how the threat of diversity is perceived, our public schools need to lead on the issue.

[M]any of the dominant Eurocentric perspectives and assumptions that have guided and undergirded western education during the past decades need to be explicitly revisited to determine the extent to which they are still appropriate norms and/or the ways in which they have become hegemonic – marginalizing and disadvantaging some and advantaging and privileging others. I emphasize here a more global perspective, in the firm conviction that more global awareness is necessary for several reasons. Helping educators become more aware of multiple realities will provide the impetus for creating learning environments in which more students feel welcome and valued and in which they find space for the recognition of their unique lived experiences (Shields, 2013, p. ix).

The idea of “multiple realities” is still threatening for many in the United States, primarily because it challenges the notion that there is something as simple as “one truth.” This reliance on doxa, by extension, implies that there is also an overarching, singular, definition of “morally right.” The embedded threat to social conservatives is that an admission of multiple realities would affirm that historically, privilege, however it is defined, redounds from little more than an accident of birth. To be clear, Shield’s (2013) implicit point is that in the United States, to be born as a male with white skin, into a Christian home, with a heterosexual orientation, grants to one certain structural advantages that others will never experience. For a person born into privilege, admitting that there are structural disadvantages to be overcome if one is born African-American, gay, or female (to name just three traits out of many). Admitting this challenges the narrative that in the United States everybody, regardless of their station in life, has an equal opportunity to maximize their potential.

Legitimacy, Discretion and Decoupling

As Stivers affirmed, Weber was already arguing back in 1924 that the source of legitimacy in public administration was then shifting from “traditional values or a belief in the charismatic nature of the leader […] to a reliance on rational/legal underpinnings” (Scott, 2014, p. 184). It was from this thinking that emerged the idea that administrative discretion needed to be severely constrained. Scott (2014) then points to how, by the 1950s, the concept of legitimacy became associated with organizational goals, which were in turn expected to be “congruent with wider societal values” (p. 184). By the 1970s this thinking was adapted to “norms of rationality,” with the expectation that they would become isomorphic as “highly elaborated institutional environments […] and gain the legitimacy and resources needed to survive” (Scott, 2014, p. 184; Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 352). The isomorphism referred to is akin to the habitus and doxa aspects of the cultural abidance theme that has been used thus far in this dissertation.

This kind of isomorphism explains how regional offices of a national institution end up functioning in different ways when they are established in different cultural environments (Scott, 2014, p. 185). In other words, the human resource department for a federal prison in the South will operate under the same regulations as a federal prison in the Pacific Northwest, but an employee who transfers from the Northwest to the South will, in all likelihood, recognize a different climate for how administrative discretion is applied. While it might not be accurate to say that there is a question of legitimacy between two conflicting authorities, at the very least there is a question of whether or not cultural abidance has primacy over how the rules and regulations are defining the boundaries of bureaucratic discretion.

Scott, again citing Meyer and Rowan, explains how individuals experiencing a conflict over legitimacy (and primacy) tend to circumvent the challenge by “’decoupling’ from these formal structures” (Scott, 2014, p. 185). They decouple for one of two reasons. The first reason is not related in any way to cultural abidance, but instead is purely administrative in nature. In these instances, the individual encounters a conflict between “local demands for efficiency” and “externally generated pressures for ceremonial structural conformity” (p. 185). This kind of decoupling is the path taken by Kaufman’s forest ranger (1960), where the means to the end were seldom questioned by the distant upper-level administrators, so long as the organizational goals were met. It was the forest ranger’s commitment to the goals of the institution, and the unquestioned legitimacy of those goals, that motivated every decision. Thus there were many instances in which the forest ranger “decoupled” and did things his own way, but the motivation to decouple was never driven by the mission, purpose, or goals of an extra-governmental organization.

The second motive for decoupling that Meyer and Rowan gave is far more problematic and will be examined as the second classification for cultural abidance. In these instances, the individual feels there is a conflict between “the ceremonial rules” that trace their origins to one environment, and their own locally-derived rules (Scott, 2014, p. 185). Faced with this conflict, individuals tend to lean toward preserving the culturally-influenced status quo, or in other words, the local “way of life” is given greater legitimacy. Clear historical evidence of this is the fact that it took the threat of military intervention to force the desegregation of educational institutions in the South. This is precisely why the question of legitimacy strikes at the very heart of how administrative discretion can either contribute to, or diminish, the social equity goals of public administration.

As noted in the introduction to this section, progressive advocacy has an important role to play in legitimizing the use of discretion to improve equity by improving the perception of public administration. An effective use of progressive advocacy could also point the way toward what a more active role for government might look like. This kind of change requires a close look at which populations are granting extra-governmental advocacy greater legitimacy than agency rules and regulations. Furthermore, it also opens the door to the question of whether efficiency, when it is masked as “the way we’ve always done things,” should be given primacy over effectiveness. After all, the South had a strong argument that it was “more efficient” for them to keep their public schools and colleges segregated.

The Primacy of Effectiveness over Efficiency

The social equity goals of public administration will, according to the theory argued here, be more easily achieved if progressive advocates are taught to be effective in displacing the influence of conservative extra-governmental institutions that disingenuously argue that their primary motive is to find the most cost-effective way to deliver government goods and services. As noted above, buried in some of those arguments one can often find so-called “cost saving” measures that coincidently serve to perpetuate a mobilization of bias toward vulnerable populations. After all, if things are already working in ways where historically privileged groups are given primacy, what “efficiency” incentive is there on their part to get on board with progressives who want to change things? Effective progressive advocacy needs to find culturally-sensitive ways to expose this behavior, which first requires an exploration of a concept some refer to as “morality policy.”

Moral Values and Cultural Abidance

The theory behind this research argues that it is uniquely in the realm of “morality policy” (Mooney & Schuldt, 2008) where the tension surrounding the majority rule claim remains unresolved, primarily because of the inability of the “conservative” side to compromise when, culturally speaking, only their definition of morality has legitimacy when it comes to how the United States was intended to be governed (Mooney, 2001), which is a return to the “original intent” concern mentioned at the start of this chapter.

Progressives are not insisting that the conservatives be proven wrong, but rather that they merely compromise and concede that, based on social constructionism theory, there can be more than one truth (Burr, 2003), and that attempts to embody the “one truth” of the majority culture as the original intent of rules and regulations is the equivalent of direct violence against a minority culture (Galtung, 1990). Galtung addresses this “one truth” idea by asking the reader to imagine that the opposite of violence might be peace. In the academic field of Peace Studies, it would thus be tempting to suggest that if a “peaceful culture” could be found then it would be tempting to legislate all of the aspects of that culture into law, “making it obligatory with the hope of internalizing it everywhere” (1990, p. 291). The natural conclusion that Galtung draws from this is that if a culture is imposed upon society, then that act by itself is “direct violence,” regardless of how pure the motives. Galtung’s definition for violence, in this context, is instructive for this research because he refers to violence “as avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible (p. 292; emphasis in original). He goes on to write that “threats of violence are also violence” (p. 292).

As clearly implied up to this point, this research recognizes that extra-governmental advocacy is taking place on all sides of any argument, frequently where just two opposing sides are at odds with each other. In many, if not the majority of these dialectical battles (recall Foucault’s “dividing practices” from Chapter I), the conservative side wants their worldview to be used in defining and justifying what the “more favorable” uses of administrative discretion will be, casting their side as deserving while the other is framed as either undeserving, or worse yet, deviant (Goffman, 1961; 1974). The progressive side, for the most part, is just asking that the conservatives simply acknowledge an additional truth. For this study, this practice on the conservative side will be categorized as the bias and zero-sum aspect of cultural abidance, which introduces a third cultural abidance grouping of data, in addition to the conservative ideology and decoupling classifications mentioned above.

Representative of these kinds of long-standing, moral values arguments are the debates over the role of women in society (including the ongoing reproductive rights argument), the claim that atheists are not guided by moral principles because they do not fear a day of judgement in front of a god, and the question of whether homosexuality is a lifestyle choice or an immutable trait. Following Galtung’s structural violence argument (1990, p. 292), as it relates to the bias and zero-sum aspect of cultural abidance, this kind of conservative advocacy (aimed at preserving long-standing religious moral values by referring to them as traditions that are protected by the First Amendment) should not be seen as innocuous by those who study public administration as good governance.

In other words, while recognizing that there can be exceptions, a central premise to this research will be that in the vast majority of the cultural abidance conflicts in the United States, progressive advocacy will be on the side of the argument that seeks to improve social equity while cultural abidance, as described here, will be on the side that sees no problem with keeping things just as they are. To be clear, and tying this in to the previous section, there is one very important distinction to be made here. For those defending conservativism with a disingenuous argument that is masked as a need for “efficiency,” it circles back to a question of whose authority is legitimate, not whether efficiency should have primacy over effectiveness. It is an uncomfortable position to be in because, like racial tensions, questioning a person’s religious values is definitely a nervous area for government (Gooden, 2013). The threat to the social equity goal of public administration is that, in too many instances, the intention of those that fit in the bias and zero-sum classification is to block an expansion of equity, regardless of cost. It will take a skilled progressive advocate to convince such a person that, while they can retain their worldview, they cannot grant it primacy over the rules and regulations that are meant to establish the boundaries of their administrative discretion, and they certainly cannot decouple from those rules and regulations by discarding them as illegitimate.

Perhaps T.D. Jakes, the megachurch pastor of The Potter’s House Church in Dallas, best sums up the dilemma of primacy for the religiously-motivated administrator. When it comes to reconciling religion with the responsibilities of street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators, Reverend Jakes states, “Once you begin to understand that democracy, that a republic actually, is designed to be an overarching system to protect our unique nuances, then we no longer look to public policy to reflect biblical ethics” (Barksdale, 2015).

The Regressive Nature of Cultural Abidance

In summary, the three classifications for cultural abidance that have been proposed thus far in this chapter, and will be described in more detail as part of the methodology, are as follows:

i) Bias and Zero-sum Thinking (following Foucault’s dividing practices)

ii) Decoupling (granting legitimacy to an extra-governmental organization)

iii) Other Conservative Ideology (as habitus and doxa)

Having now identified cultural abidance in the above context as regressive, progressive advocacy can now be framed in a way where it can be seen as one of the best tools available to public administration in taking on these extra-government factors that play a role in marginalizing certain groups.

Two of Stivers’ most cited progressives, Allen and Bruere, held different views of progressivism, but together those views nevertheless shaped the Progressive Era reforms.

Allen’s answer was to “to get facts, verify facts, base our conclusions on facts, and then publish them so as to enlighten and convince public opinion” (Allen, 1917, p. 268). For Allen, educated public opinion was a tremendous resource for positive change, enabling a small cadre of leaders to marshal support for their recommendations by enlightening the citizenry: “To harness a whole community to an idea is infinitely better than to try to carry it alone” (p. 270). The possibility of disagreement about what to do seems never to have occurred to Allen, convinced as he was of the power of what he saw as indisputable information to rouse public support. […] Allen spoke consistently of a variety of approaches to civic work, with some citizens “urging, some protesting, some teaching, some blazing trails” (p. 87). […] Bruere […] thought that “civic intelligence need not depend upon making every public-spirited inhabitant of a city a fact depository regarding city business.” Organizations would mainly do the work of securing efficient government (Stivers, 2000, p. 72).

With extra-governmental organizations doing the work of “securing efficient government,” as Bruere suggested of the settlement workers, core advocacy organizations like the settlement house movement ended up providing an effective role for government, not just in helping government be more efficient. What that means for this research is that advocates can do much more than educate. It means that they are asking (almost to the point of demanding) that street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators take a leadership role on the issue of improving social equity for the population they represent.

The view that has been affirmed throughout this chapter is that progressive advocacy has played a role in the United States from a period that pre-dates the writing of the Constitution. Dibble, in writing the forward for Swan’s (2015) book that set out to prescribe a path forward in uniting a divided America with core advocacy group strategies akin to those described in this literature review, put it this way:

[The] founding principles [of the United States] are rooted in a larger belief of the dignity and inherent worth of humanity and every single person. So it has never been acceptable to treat anyone in the manner in which our country has seen fit to treat some of its citizens (even denying their citizenship) of African descent, women, people who didn’t own land, Japanese Americans, Native Americans, religious minorities, and so many others. These movements have not sought to change our system, but to hold it accountable to its very own inspiring and lofty ideals. And when there is success, no scarcity dynamic plays out. Just as is the case with love, when freedom and opportunity expand for others, it expands for everyone. It is the domain of “the commons,” where we all partake and benefit. No zero sum game, no loss for any other stakeholder – expansion of opportunity and prosperity for everyone (Swan, 2015, p. x).

To be clear, this study is not about research into changing policy, or even about changing the system within which public administration works. It is only about exploring how extra-governmental organizations are attempting to expand the use of administrative discretion so that more people can immediately benefit from the system that we already have.

Advocacy Organizations

To further expand on the specialized form of advocacy that will be examined in the context of this study, the practice will generally be interpreted as akin to what Zherka and others refer to as the “outside game,” which stands in contrast to the “inside game” (2012, p. xi). To Zherka, the “inside game” is a general reference to lobbying efforts aimed at legislators, and the “outside game” is a grassroots effort to earn legitimacy for a cause, issue, or policy proposal by engaging and empowering activists and advocates (2012, p. xi). Servaes and Malikhao clarify how “participatory-based advocacy” is a strategy that “focuses on ‘listening’ and ‘cooperation’ rather than on ‘telling what to do’” (2010, p. 43).

Direct engagement advocacy epitomizes the work of grassroots constituencies. The underlying theory here suggests that among grassroots advocacy groups engaged in an “outside game,” direct engagement is "the most effective way to communicate with people” when trying to earn legitimacy (Zherka, 2012, p. xvii). Making the distinction between which organizations are playing an outside game and which are playing an inside game is important to this research because the United States is a country where national advocacy efforts are extremely challenging and expensive, primarily because power within our governmental institutions is diffuse (Swan, 2015, p. xi). According to Swan, when our various institutions (federal, state, and local, supported by the third-sector) decide to lead on progressive issues and improve social equity outcomes for marginalized groups they typically end up doing it individually (i.e. direct-engagement), creating a kind of patchwork civil rights map across the country (p. xi).

The important point here is that advocacy organizations are part of the third-sector, making some advocacy organizations part of the problem but also putting other advocacy organizations into a position where they can be part of the solution. This section of the literature review will return to a more detailed discussion about advocacy organizations, but before that a review of what sets advocacy apart from activism is required.

In defining advocacy, as a concept, this research closely follows the work of Bemak and Chung (2005), who defined advocacy for their research as, “the belief that, to fight injustices, individual and collective actions that lead toward improving conditions for the benefit of both individuals and groups are necessary” (p. 196). To illustrate what activism is one could turn to Saul Alinsky’s seminal work, Rules for Radicals (1971). Alinsky opens his book by writing, “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away” (p. 3).

Note how both examples speak to the need for collective action, but the difference between the two examples is the intended audience. In what is admittedly an over-simplification, one could argue that Bemak and Chung are writing to those Haves who are seeking to improve the circumstances of the Have-Nots, and Alinsky is writing to the Have-Nots who want to organize to help themselves.

Continuing with this framing of the distinctions between the terms advocacy and activism, in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott (1990) opens up a unique role for advocacy when he writes about the “public transcript” and the “hidden transcript” (p. 18). Scott argues that the public transcript is what defines power (as well as who Alinsky’s Haves are). This public transcript is designed to justify why those with power deserve to be “dominant,” while the hidden transcript of the powerless percolates beneath the surface. Scott describes the hidden transcript this way:

A second and sharply contrasting form of political discourse is that of the hidden transcript itself. Here, offstage, where subordinates may gather outside the intimidating gaze of power, a sharply dissonant political culture is possible. Slaves in the relative safety of their quarters can speak the words of anger, revenge, self-assertion that they must normally choke back when in the presence of the masters and mistresses (Scott, 1990, p. 18).

If Scott’s and Alinksy’s (1971) concepts were to be merged, it could be stated that Scott is arguing that the Have-Nots will remain oppressed until there is a “rupture of the political cordon sanitaire between the hidden and the public transcript” (1990, p. 19; emphasis in original). Alinsky (1971), in his referencing the Haves and the Have-Nots, gets at Scott’s premise of a “rupture” when he writes, “In [Rules for Radicals] we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people” (p. 3).

The argument, then, for this research is that effective progressive advocacy seeks to prepare fertile soil so that when the hidden transcript is made public by the activists themselves it can take root. Without advocacy “plowing the field,” so to speak, the risk that the hidden transcript will be made public prematurely is greatly increased, and if that happens the retaliation aimed at the activists is likely to be swift and severe (Scott, 1990, p. 19). Advocates, on the other hand, are far less likely to become the targets of this retaliation if they themselves are members of the dominant group.

In summary, while there are certainly exceptions to what is being explained here, the important distinction being made between activism and advocacy is that activists seek power for themselves (typically as a subordinated group or population), while advocates are working within their own group (typically the dominant force) to broaden the minds of their peers (typically as to those things that relate to the treatment of the subordinated group).

Core Advocacy Organizations

Returning to the analysis of who advocates are and what kinds of organizations within the third sector attract them, Kimberlin (2010) is careful to point out that there are primarily two types of advocacy going on within the third sector. The first is advocacy that is done by “core advocacy organizations,” which this research is interested in, and the other is done by “direct service agencies, particularly human services nonprofits” (p. 167). This is a distinction that is seldom made, which has served to make it difficult to ascertain how many core advocacy organizations there are and how effective their efforts are. Complicating this is the fact that both widely-used classification systems; the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities, as well as the North American Industry Classification System, “categorize nonprofits on the basis of primary mission rather than activities” (Kimberlin, 2010, p. 168).

With this distinction made, it is important to ensure that the reader understand another element to Scott’s (1990) “hidden transcript” concept. The importance is derived from how the process of rupturing “the political cordon sanitaire between the hidden and the public transcript” (p. 19) is, in one form or another, what progressive-minded core advocacy organizations typically hold out as their mission, purpose, and goal.

Conclusion

As for the generalizability of this research to advocacy on behalf of other marginalized groups or vulnerable populations, it might be helpful to compare a core advocacy organization for the LGBTQ community to a core advocacy organization that is working to change how black men experience disparate treatment when they encounter the various elements of America’s criminal justice system. While the parallels between being gay or lesbian and being a visible minority are tenuous at best, the parallels of having an organization made up of heterosexual, cisgender advocates for LGBTQ people are expected to be quite similar to having a supportive organization of people who are not black males themselves advocating for the social equity goals of black men. While a white male cannot fully understand what it might be like to be black, their recognition of structural injustice can make them willing to learn more so that they will not only be a passionate advocate, but also an educated and well-informed ally.

Progressive advocates, properly trained by virtue of their new association with a core advocacy organization, and armed with their “science” of credible research that has been commissioned by a well-funded and politically connected parent entity, are thereby empowered to describe in detail how a shift in the use of administrative discretion could make all the difference in the world for a marginalized group, while at the same time acknowledge that they understand that there is a risk involved to the front-line administrator who is willing to depart from how the boundaries of discretion have historically been understood (Anderson, 2009, p. 14).

CHAPTER III: ADMINISTRATIVE DISCRETION

This literature review chapter, together with the previous, are intended to provide a dramatically different context for how legitimacy and primacy within public administration is perceived, both by those employed as street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators as well as marginalized groups and vulnerable populations. After reading Chapters II and III, advocates for improving social equity for certain individuals should have a much better understanding of what a conservative-minded street-level bureaucrat might experience when they encounter a well-prepared progressive advocate. For many front-line administrators who are faced with making a final decision that will profoundly impact the life of an individual, it must feel as if they, in their official capacity, are being pulled in opposite, mutually-exclusive directions. Rather than allowing these scenarios to play out as a zero-sum game, where one extra-governmental group’s gain is cast as a loss for another group, progressive advocacy organizations have the option – a responsibility even – to re-frame the discussion so that a “third way” emerges.

The first section of this chapter will focus on what administrative discretion is, how the limits of that discretion have historically been defined, and how those limits are interpreted when dealing with historically marginalized or vulnerable populations. The second section will explore the potential impact that direct-engagement advocacy might have on individual street-level bureaucrats who are in a position to significantly alter social equity outcomes for marginalized individuals by exploring alternative paths that can avoid being characterized in zero-sum terms.

Administrative Discretion

Fox & Cochrane refer to the meeting between a street-level bureaucrat and a member of the public as a “phenomenological moment of encounter” (Fox & Cochrane, 1990, p.257). Predicting outcomes for vulnerable groups and historically marginalized populations depends largely upon who the bureaucrat is, and the setting. As characterized in the previous chapter, from a cultural standpoint it could also depend upon the region of the country where the encounter takes place as well as the isolation of the locale from the progressive influences of large urban centers. For this reason, in spite of how we like to think that the rules are applied uniformly across the nation, that is seldom the case (Maynard-Moody & Mushino, 2003). This section will describe what informs how front-line administrators make the decisions that emerge as discretionary acts.

As Lipsky (2010, p. xii) put it, bureaucracy “implies a set of rules and structures of authority,” while street-level “implies a distance from the center where authority presumably resides.” Distance from authority, as well as instances of competing authority, make a use of discretion possible for a street-level bureaucrat or front-line administrator while at the same time presenting a unique set of ethical challenges for public administration. While this section will expand and provide historical context for some of those challenges, at the forefront for this research (as set out in Chapter II) is the propensity for a government employee to rely on personal moral beliefs or engage in some kind of profiling in their discretionary decision making (Maynard-Moody & Mushino, 2003, pp. 4-5).

Lipsky (2010) underscores the notion that discretionary decision-making is something that the public expects from good government, asserting, “The public wants administrators of public services to be at least open to the possibility that a special case is presenting itself, or that extraordinary efforts of one sort or another are called for” (p. xii). Friedrich distinguished the two camps of the politics-administration dichotomy by describing how, if politics (and strict obedience to elected officials and their designates) dominated the process, “particular individuals or groups [would be] gaining or losing power or control in a given area,” whereas if administration was in control, “officials [would be] act[ing] or propos[ing] action in the name of public interest,” which is where the "rational account" mentioned in Chapter I comes from (Friedrich, 1940, p. 117).

In the history of public administration, while there is agreement that administrative discretion is an integral part of good governance, there has been very little consensus on how much room for discretion front-line administrators should be allowed, leading to the formation of what is now known as the “discretion school” (Fox & Cochran, 1990, p. 249). In their book, Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) neatly summarize how today’s understanding is that administrative discretion be “the apparatus of public administration [that] is designed to confine and channel discretion to secure equal treatment to the extent possible” (p. 4). Notwithstanding, Maynard-Moody and Mushino are forced to conclude that bias still permeates decision making. This section of the literature will frame and contextualize the challenges that often derail an equitable use of discretion, in spite of decades of research into what could be done to improve social equity outcomes for the marginalized and vulnerable.

Background and Perspective

Writing about administrative discretion in 1689, John Locke asserted officials needed the ability to make choices about governance in cases where the law was unclear or too slow (Bryner, 1987). Alexander Hamilton followed Locke’s premise in his contribution to the Federalist Papers, writing that, “principle articles implied the definition of Executive Power; leaving the rest to flow from the general grant of that power, interpreted in conformity to other parts [of] the constitution and the principles of free government” (Bryner, 1987, p. 4). Woodrow Wilson reinforced this in 1885 with his work, Congressional Government, in which he wrote, “large powers and unhampered discretion seem to me the indispensable conditions of responsibility….There is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible” (pp. 4-5).

Recall from Chapter I that Friedrich and his colleagues argued that “public bureaucrats should have two qualifications: ‘technical knowledge’ and ‘popular sentiment’” (Kang, 2005, p. 165; Friedrich, 1968, p. 341). In his response to Friedrich, Finer questioned the viability of the “remedy by experts” concept (Finer, 1941). Finer’s position was that “the public should be able to voice its opinion about how social problems must be remedied” (Kang, 2005, p. 167), and he saw the legislative bodies as an extension of public opinion. Thompson (1975) picked up this torch and carried it, arguing “that public bureaucracy had to remain a machinelike tool that served and achieved its master’s goal” (Kang, 2005, p. 169; Thompson, 1975), where the “master” is the legislative body, not the executive branch.

Notwithstanding Thompson’s (1975) arguments for minimal administrative discretion on the part of street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators, the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was a seismic shift away from a top-down, top-heavy bureaucracy. With Watergate and its long shadow then hanging over elected officials, the polis had lost confidence that “big government” would adequately represent them, and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was the governmental response to upper-level, Capitol-based “bureaucrat bashing” of the Carter and Reagan years (Fox & Cochran, 1990). The trust of the people that their elected officials would be accountable to them had been eroded “by the image selling of candidates [and] the influence of money” (p. 250). With a decreasing trust in government regulations (and a high-level bureaucrat’s ability to define what is “best” in every instance), Friedrich’s arguments for expanded discretion returned to be the centrist view of the theoretical argument for how administrative discretion was to be applied (p. 257).

Discretionary Acts and Individual Motives

The range of administrative discretion is often determined by how the public policy and rulemaking process plays out, adding even more variability into the process. Friedrich (1940, p. 117) writes about how, “Public policy is being formed as it is being executed, and it is likewise being executed as it is being formed.” For his part, Kerwin (1994, pp. 3-4) argues that the broad degree of discretion that is enjoyed by street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators is due, first, to how the regulations were written by the agencies themselves, and second, due to how the regulations were operationalized at the local level and subsequently normalized by the actions of street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators.

Kerwin reminds his reader that, “It is to rules, not statutes or other containers of the law, that we turn most often for an understanding of what is expected of us and what we can expect from government” (1994, p. xi). He later expands on this, making it clear that agencies are more a product of the individual bureaucrats, and therefore enjoy far more discretionary latitude than higher levels of government.

It is significant that agencies are the sources of rules, because it means rulemaking is subjected to the external and internal influences that have been found to affect decision making in our public bureaucracies. Agencies behave differently from the constitutional branches of government. Their decisions cannot be explained simply by reference to the admittedly strong pressures they continually feel from Congress, the White House, the courts, interest groups, and the public at large. […] The organization, division of labor, culture, professional orientation, and work routines of bureaucracies affect the way they make decision. So too do the motives of individual bureaucrats (Kerwin, 1994, p. 4; emphasis added).

The final sentence has been emphasized because the level of analysis for this research is an individual, upper-level, front-line administrator, not the agency.

An example of the murkiness of modern arguments both for and against an expanded use of discretion is provided by criminal justice research into racial disparities in sentencing. Research published in 2012 referenced earlier research, now seen as flawed, that showed how, “Racial disparities [in sentencing] increased after recent Supreme Court decisions declared the Guidelines to be advisory.” The updated 2012 study found that those disparities were “due primarily to the increased relevance of mandatory minimums, which have a disparate impact on minority offenders” (Fischman & Schanzenbach, 2012, p. 729). The authors’ conclusion was, “that judicial discretion does not contribute to, and may in fact mitigate, racial disparities in Guidelines sentencing” (p. 729). This example underscores the importance of having theoretical guidelines for expanding discretion.

Fox and Cochran’s (1990) work in discretion advocacy from twenty-five years ago provides a good summary of how public administration arrived at the point it is today in defining theoretical limits for the street-level bureaucrat’s judicious use of administrative discretion. Their work focuses on four main reasons for the localized use of discretion. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Fox and Cochran first point to the strong reaction of public administration to “bureaucrat bashing,” which in turn implied that if bureaucrats in the upper echelons are untrustworthy, then unquestioned obedience to them by street-level bureaucrats would be foolhardy (1990, pp. 249-250). Further, with an increased focus in the 1980s on ethics, it necessarily implied that mid- and lower-level administrators have “sufficient autonomy to apply what they have learned” (p. 250). Finally, Fox and Cochran pointed to organization theory research of the mid- to late-1980s that called into question “functional or instrumental rationality” as a motivating force for administrative compliance (p. 250).

When Fox and Cochran’s work is read in the context of Maynard-Moody and Musheno’s work, which described how “faces are important,” the importance of the cultural lens through which the individual street-level bureaucrat sees the world enters the picture. Adopting this view underscores how susceptible discretion is to personal (and often subconscious) bias. Lipsky (2010) highlighted how the negative aspects of personal worldviews are often minimized among front-line administrators themselves by “the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures” (p. xiii). In communication terms, this is described as a “negotiated reading” (Hall, 1973). The use of such devices is problematic because, as alluded to in the previous chapter in the discussion on decoupling, the decisions that are made by these street-level bureaucrats “effectively become the public policies they carry out” (Lipsky, 2010, p. xiii; emphasis in original).

Kerwin’s work explains how the scope of rulemaking expanded dramatically by the early 1990s, and he described the relationship that a rule has today with a statute as either implementing the statute (when the mechanisms were already very clearly outlined), interpreting the statute (for “when law and policy are well established but confront unanticipated or changing circumstances”), or prescribing action when all the statute did was establish a societal goal or mandate (1994, pp. 5-6). An adaptation of these three relationships will be incorporated into the methodology of this study so as to see how each has influenced the discretionary acts that will be examined.

Legal Constraints that Fail to Require Equitable Treatment

The exercise of discretion in an administrative decision presents three common regulatory scenarios – each related to equity. The first two are closely related and are associated with a failure, on the part of a regulation or statute, to require equitable treatment. As explained by Swan (2015), these two failings come about either by not enumerating the protections, or by not having a mechanism to enforce a statute that does enumerate protections. The third scenario derives from a jurisdiction that actually dictates sanctions and unfavorable treatment of those deemed undeserving or deviant. These will be classified as follows:

i) Non-enumerated provisions for equity.

ii) Enumerated provisions, but not enforced.

iii) Codified disparate treatment.

An example of all three scenarios can be built around a case where a gay man is detained overnight in a county jail on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol. While reading these scenarios, the reader is asked to bear in mind how each of these accounts would likely appear on-line as data that could be retrieved through effective search engine queries, thus permitting research of similar events through the use of readily-available secondary data.

In the first scenario, imagine that it is very obvious to most observers that the detainee is gay based on the way he is dressed, how he carries himself, and the way he talks. Men already in the group holding cell have picked up on this and are taunting the man who has been placed in the cell with them. If, under the first scenario, there are no rules enumerated for the proper treatment of LGBTQ detainees, the deputy did nothing wrong, but he most certainly could have done something (used discretion) to keep the man separated from others that might do him harm.

For the second scenario it can be assumed that there is a policy that recommends that gay detainees not be held with a general population, if at all possible. Additionally, imagine that this event is taking place in a rural area of a county deep in the Bible belt somewhere. While there might be a significant LGBTQ presence in the county seat, where the policy was first implemented, this situation might have never come up before in this rural area, or, worse yet, local personnel might have discussed the policy and, as a group of peers, agreed that it was ridiculous. Imagine for this scenario that the detainee specifically requested that he not be placed with the general population in the group holding cell once the taunting started, but the deputy (in a use of discretion that has been justified in his own mind) answers by saying, “It’s never been a problem before. You’ll be okay with the rest of these guys.”

Imagine for the third scenario that a state law was passed that supersedes any local law. This is what recently happened in North Carolina when the state acted to negate action taken by the city of Charlotte when it passed local ordinances protecting transgender individuals (Associated Press, 2016). Imagine for this scenario that the state law specifies that LGBTQ detainees not be given any special consideration unless a psychologist has first certified that it is required. Incorporating a favorable use of administrative discretion in this scenario comes with a certain amount of risk on the part of fair-minded public servants, and would involve the deputy decoupling from the statute out of concern for the legitimacy of a rule that would put a detainee at risk.

On their face, the above three accounts seem similar because they all started with an identical situation: A gay man was going to be detained in a county cell, and a deputy sheriff was in a position of authority where, potentially, the very life of a citizen was in the balance. These are the kinds of decisions that are made hundreds of times a day across the country, where it is a reliance on administrative discretion alone that is creating widely disparate outcomes for vulnerable populations. The disparities, in such cases, are presumed to be strongly correlated to the cultural influences that street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators abide by, and this is what this study proposes to explore.

Denying Equity by the Structure of Alternatives

As a final topic in the discretionary behavior of street-level bureaucrats, notably those in higher-level, front-line positions who have the “final say” on the most difficult, high-impact decisions, this subsection explores one particular area that Lipsky wrote about. It is not so much about a decision that is made while standing in front of an individual at a service counter, but rather is about a decision that determines how that individual gains access to government goods or services. Lipsky called this the “structure of alternatives” (2010, p. 117).

Administrative discretion options, as mitigating alternatives to the harmful effects of doxa and habitus embedded in current interpretations of rules, are often carefully managed because it is through restricting alternatives that a social order “obtains the consent of its members” to be governed (Lipsky, 2010, p. 117). Lipsky expands on this by stating, “Typically, cooperation is neither actively coerced nor freely given, but, rather, it emerges from the structure of alternatives” (p. 117), which invokes an image eerily similar to what Scott (1990) explored as his “hidden transcript” (p. 18), as noted in Chapter II. In Cops, Teachers, and Counsellors (2003), the authors provided compelling evidence to reinforce Lipsky’s claim by illustrating how, in spite of a desire to be fair, street-level bureaucrats have devised mechanisms that allow them to distance themselves from the harsher outcomes that derive directly from some of their decisions (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003, pp. 23-24).

A brief summary of Lipsky’s “structure of alternatives” that are the product of discretionary decision making by upper-level street-level bureaucrats are listed below.

1) The choice of setting.

2) The isolation of clients from each other.

3) The services and procedures of street-level bureaucrat and front-line administrator “are presented as benign.”

4) Forcing clients to come in for service.

5) Structuring interactions so that “bureaucrats control their content, timing, and pace.”

6) Development of routines to make client control a precondition of the interaction.

7) Establishing sanctions to “punish disrespect to routines of order” (Lipsky, 2010, pp. 117-125).

In Chapter V it will be explained how the data collection process will incorporate mechanisms designed to determine whether or not the street-level bureaucrat or front-line administrator has resorted to any of the above practices that involve administrative discretion in these ways.

Cultural Violence and Moral Values

As the final point related to discretionary acts and the individual motives of front-line administrators it was felt that the topic of moral judgement needed to be addressed, primarily because of how it feeds into decoupling and the delegitimization of governmental authority to ensure equitable treatment. When a progressive advocate encounters a front-line administrator facing a moral judgement situation, they find themselves up against one of the most intractable problems in society.

Culture is an important element that contributes to a stable society, and progressive advocacy organizations that recognize this will attempt to work within such cultures, not against them. This is important because, specific to addressing claims that some cultures are, by their nature, “violent,” those making such claims need to be reminded that this is rarely the case. More than a decade before the religiously-motivated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Galtung (1990, p. 291) explained how “aspects of culture” are made up of “the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science.” It is relevant to this study that he included two forms of science in that grouping of cultures. This contextualization was necessary because, in discussing cultural violence, Galtung needed to be careful to distinguish that he was not going to be asserting that any culture in and of itself was violent, but rather that he preferred to write about how, “Aspect A of culture C is an example of cultural violence” (Galtung, 1990, p. 291). Notwithstanding, Galtung did grant that it might be possible that a culture could arguably embrace so many aspects that are violent that a case could be made that a given culture might earn the label, “violent culture.”

In Galtung’s paper he forms a two-by-two matrix by first separating out violence into two types; direct violence (killing, maiming, creating misery, relegating the group to secondary citizen status, repression, detention, or expulsion), and structural violence (segmenting the group, marginalizing them, or fragmenting them). Within this typology, and using the gay community as an example, direct violence to the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, and queer) population can be exemplified by events that span the murder of Matthew Shepherd (in 1998) to mandating reparative therapy for LGBTQ teenagers, which is now banned in four states and the District of Columbia (Bellware, 2015). Structural violence against the population is typified by the 1977 Save Our Children campaign, as led by Anita Bryant (Boren, et. al., 2014). The Save Our Children rhetoric focused entirely on framing gay men as pedophiles who were attempting to become school teachers so that they could prey on young, impressionable boys. As another example of structural violence, an in-force Alabama statute still mandates teaching adolescents that gay sex is a criminal act (ALA CODE§16, 1992). This current practice is mandated in spite of the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (1993).

Conclusion

Proponents of improving social equity recognize that the task of weaving the national patchwork of civil rights and social justice networks back together is monumental, but the goal, for numerous groups, is to emerge as a country where the access an individual has to public goods and services in a deeply-conservative Midwestern county is roughly equivalent to the access in a progressive metropolitan area on either coast. As state Senator Scott Dibble writes in introducing Swan’s (2015) book, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Civil Rights, “In very few instances will a larger external force bring about [this kind of] change. Advances can come about through enlightened and courageous leadership from the top down or be propelled at the grassroots by their key constituencies” (p. xi). Advocacy and activism are both about propelling these changes from the bottom up, where different worldviews often stand in stark contrast to each other.

Andrews and Edwards (2004) framed their definition of advocacy in the context of nonprofit organizations that inherently have goals that are in conflict with other organizations. They write that “advocacy organizations make public interest claims either promoting or resisting social change that, if implemented, would conflict with the social, cultural, political, or economic interest or values of other constituencies and groups” (p. 481). The idea that advocacy, as a practice, primarily exists only because there are conflicting senses of what is equitable for certain individuals or groups strikes at the very heart of this research.

The take-away of the above should be that, overall, administrative discretion is a good thing in a functional democracy, but there need to be constraints that mitigate how individual bias on the part of a street-level bureaucrat might enter into the mix. Without this, administrative discretion can work against the social equity goals of good governance, and in some instances even reach the point where it can be classified as “violence.” As explained, this is what happens when otherwise well-meaning public servants decouple and grant their own culture and traditions greater legitimacy than the rules and regulations that were intended to guide them in determining the range of their administrative discretion.

CHAPTER IV: CONCEPTUALIZATION

The intent of the two literature review chapters has been to underscore just how intractable the problem of structural inequality has been for public administration. By focusing the argument on the nexus of cultural abidance and the use of administrative discretion, even if well-intentioned, it is hoped that the reader might understand how the problem is seen by many to be a zero-sum game between two dialectical worldviews that pit progressives against conservatives. Against that backdrop it is hoped that the reader will see the importance of progressive advocacy by extra-governmental organizations as a viable way to displace the regressive narratives of cultural abidance where these narratives impede long overdue progressive change as public administration continues in its efforts to be more effective in the decades-old struggle to establish social equity for marginalized groups and vulnerable populations.

In recognizing that the scope of analysis for how administrative discretion is used is enormous, it is felt that it is important to set this out more clearly. Lipsky (2010) understood this broad scope for his own research on street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators, as evidenced by the opening paragraph of the preface to his book.

This book is in part a search for the place of the individual in those public services I call street-level bureaucracies. These are the schools, police and welfare departments, lower courts, legal services offices, and other agencies whose workers interact with and have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits or the allocation of public sanctions” (Lipsky, 2010, p. xi).

In keeping with the scope of Lipsky’s (2010) work, the institutions that have been included in this research into public administration include school administrators as well as street-level bureaucrats in local and county government.

As it relates to progressive advocacy, this chapter will quickly revisit how a core advocacy organization is different from others, and how, due to its combination of organization type, structure, and strategies, is predicted to be more successful than other organizations. This is an important first step because locations that will be studied will be determined by first enumerating chapter-level advocacy efforts of a core advocacy organization that, with very few exceptions, organizes its chapters to serve an entire county by holding monthly meetings in a central location.

The organization that will be studied is PFLAG, where PFLAG is an acronym that traces its origins to the founding period of the organization in the 1970s when it was called Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Today it is known formally as PFLAG – Parents, Families, Friends, and Allies United with LGBTQ People, where LGBTQ stands specifically for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. The research conceptualized in this chapter is focused on establishing whether or not chapter-level training and mobilization of PFLAG members is a predictor of front-line administrator decisions that favor the mission, goals and purpose of PFLAG.

Choosing an Ideal Type Progressive Advocacy Organization

Speaking specifically about the impact of advocacy, Zherka (2012) noted that advocacy is the cumulative effort of coalition-building, effective communication, popular mobilization, and shrewd compromising. It involves taking “positive purposes” and linking them with “effective techniques” (p. ix). PFLAG is a long-established national advocacy organization that has a track record of incorporating all of these strategies into their operations. PFLAG also has an organizational structure of semi-autonomous chapters that facilitates a nationwide expansion of these strategies as well as providing for some of the best training strategies known to grassroots organizations (Faulkner & Lindsey, 2004).

King and Walker (1992, p. 397) set out a typology for third-sector institutions in which they separate citizen groups from nonprofit groups. Their typology was largely based on Olson’s (1965) work, which separated groups based on what it was that attracted new members to seek membership in a group. King and Walker’s argument for this distinction was that nonprofit groups tend to attract other institutions as members and citizen groups tend to attract autonomous individuals. This research proposes to look exclusively at citizen groups because the unit of analysis is the individual street-level bureaucrat. Specifically, one that has been approached by another individual (an advocate from a citizen group) in an exchange that this research describes as direct-engagement advocacy.

At this point it is important to consider that perhaps the only thing members of a PFLAG chapter have in common is that a friend or loved one is LGBTQ. Now apply that to King and Walker’s (1992) idea that, in spite of all the other ways these individuals differ, this one thing is nevertheless enough to knit together a powerful interest group. With that in mind it is important to explain how PFLAG meets the requirement of being a core advocacy group that is both dense and diverse. Density, in the case of PFLAG, roughly equates to how many members and chapters there are, and as explained in the previous paragraph, diversity is a reference to the diversity of other interests chapter members have, not about the advocacy goals represented by the membership (Gray and Lowery, 1993, pp. 81-82).

PFLAG is an ideal interest group when measured by these metrics because, first off, as of July 2016, there are more than 400 chapters in all fifty states, and these chapters bring together local members from every walk of life. As noted, the only thing that they can be assured they have in common is that they all have a loved one who is struggling because they are LGBTQ. Other than that, the membership in any chapter might come from any religion, any socio-economic station, any race or ethnicity, and any age group from a teenage child of a parent who just came out to an aging grandparent trying to understand how a great-grandchild can want to go from being a “she” to a “he” in third grade.

As was explained in Chapter II, PFLAG also meets the requirement to be representative of progressive advocacy organizations in this study because its national parent entity is almost exclusively dedicated to the “outside game,” leaving it to the local chapters to play the “inside game” by interacting directly with street-level bureaucrats or front-line administrators. This organizational design, as a typology, is one where semi-autonomous local chapters exist as true affinity groups (Crass, 2013, p. 50) that determine their own priorities. This autonomy encourages each chapter to focus on unique local conditions through an individualized approach. Crass (2013) indicates that with some organizations this kind of autonomy can create conflict between the affinity groups (p. 50), but in the case of PFLAG the preliminary research done in preparation for this proposal indicates that the advocacy efforts of diverse chapters end up complementing each other.

In the case of PFLAG, locally-led chapters have the freedom to focus their efforts on the specific needs of the individuals who form the chapter and attend the meetings. Through the national web domain, chapter members also have unlimited access to the expansive peer-reviewed research material and other publications, all of which has been licensed for distribution by the national organization. PFLAG National is also very proactive in sending current news stories and emerging new research out to individual members and local leaders.

PFLAG’s track record of success includes their active involvement in almost every struggle for LGBTQ equality since the Stonewall Riots in 1969, in which Jeanne Manford’s son, Morty, was an active participant. Jeanne Manford founded PFLAG after seeing how much support she received from other parents who saw and /or heard that she had marched alongside her son in New York City’s 1972 Pride Parade, commemorating the third anniversary of Stonewall.

The Power of Testimony and the “Third Way”

An effective advocacy organization will also be one that can produce trained advocates that can truthfully invoke the axiom, “I used to be just like you, but I changed. Let me tell you what I learned.” Perhaps no other phrase better captures the idea that what PFLAG is doing, through their direct-engagement encounters, is outlining an alternative path forward for the conservative-minded, displacing the thinking that the “culture war” is dialectical and zero-sum. When engaging a street-level bureaucrat, and asking that a loved-on be “treated differently” when it comes to how administrative discretion will be applied, the stakes can be enormous, which is why it is so vital that the person “making the ask” be able to say, “I used to think that too.”

Gonzalez, Rostosky, Odom, & Riggle, (2013) aggregated the findings of numerous studies of PFLAG parents and their children, explaining why it is that PFLAG parents naturally emerge as some of the most skilled LGBTQ advocates in existence. One study in particular produced a three-stage model, in which the author reported how parents “react, recover, and then renew their bonds with their child” (p. 326). Specifically, in reference to the “recover” stage, among the parents who responded to the survey (recruited through a local PFLAG chapter and another LGBTQ support group), the findings support the theory “that parents’ initial negative emotional reactions eventually gave way to cognitive reappraisals and new commitments and behaviors. Education and social support were important to these outcomes” (p. 326).

PFLAG chapters create a seamless process for parents to not only experience a “recovery,” but the process itself organically generates a powerful advocacy organization full of energetic members who only need a nudge in order to expand the reach of influence that the organization has. This seamless conversion process was the subject of an examination of PFLAG’s motivational framing. Comparing his work to previous studies, Broad (2011, p. 401) reports that “this work is also unique from […] earlier studies because of the focus on support-group work and advocacy together and how they are framed as the interrelated work of PFLAG.” Stivers (2000) understood this important element of advocacy as she quoted Simkhovitch’s (1938) writing on the importance of the Settlement House movement during the Progressive Era. As Simkhovitch (1938) reported, “Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others” (Stivers, 2000, p. 94).

With over 400 PFLAG chapters nationwide, large and active PFLAG chapters exist in America’s biggest metropolitan areas, as well as some of the smallest rural towns. Where the large metropolitan chapters meet in rented halls and facilities and the weekly meetings are attended by dozens of people, on the opposite end of the scale the members could meet around the dining room table or in the living room of somebody’s home. With the exception of 131 chapters in the very largest of cities and metropolitan areas, this study proposes to look at these PFLAG chapters in a way that hopes to document the effectiveness of their advocacy strategies in the local chapters.

Secondary Data as Evidence for Administrative Discretion

An advocacy strategy that succeeds at permanently expanding or contracting who the beneficiaries of administrative discretion are carries the potential to have the same impact as a policy change. What this research proposes to test is what some of those effective advocacy strategies might be if one aim of that advocacy is, among other goals, to mitigate the impact of regressive cultural abidance on the part of front-line administrators. As was explained in the literature review chapters, cultural abidance may include sentiments such as deeply-held religious beliefs and other forms of bias.

What will be demonstrated in this section is how discretionary acts by front-line administrators almost always leave a clear trail of evidence, not only with regard to how administrative discretion played a role, but also as to how progressive advocacy preceded the discretionary act by altering how the rules and regulations were interpreted. The term interpreted, however, has the unfortunate dialectical connotation that there first had to be an incorrect interpretation, and that the task at hand involved proving an “old truth” wrong, in favor of a “new truth.” The preference for this study therefore is to adopt Miller’s (2012) language and describe the kinds of changes in governance that this study is interested in as a discretionary act that simply altered how the governing narratives were performed, thereby displacing the habitus and doxa of cultural abidance (p. 15).

As Miller (2012) describes the process of deconstructing narratives, changing an interpretation of the “old ways” is typically complex and time-consuming, and almost always involves fierce opposition as one tries to demonstrate that there was somehow an error in interpretation. Miller (2012) contrasts the two approaches as either an ostensive or performative view, where ostensive can be likened to a table setting that stays in place after everybody leaves the room, or performative, where nothing tangible remains once everybody stops performing the actions (pp. 15). As it relates to progressive advocacy aimed at altering discretionary acts, the distinction between interpreting government statutes and performing governing narratives is an important one to be made.

In spite of how conservative-minded street-level bureaucrats hold onto their preference for an ostensive view of regulations and statutes, many (if not most) fail to recognize how changes in the practice of governance happen regularly in government, which is where progressivism enters the picture. As a result of progressive advocacy and activism, the American people have seen new legal interpretations of the 14th Amendment every few decades as more and more marginalized groups and subordinated populations are granted equality under the law, guaranteeing them the right to improved social equity outcomes. The wording of the 14th Amendment has not changed, but as Miller (2012) argues, the changes came because progressive-minded bureaucrats and administrators changed how they performed the narratives (p. 15). This is why, from the perspective of a progressive advocacy organization that seeks to change the status quo, successful efforts will be measured by any change that is seen as a more favorable treatment of a population.

Secondary Data as Evidence – Scenario #1

Important at this point is an understanding of how secondary data will be relied upon to document discretionary acts by front-line administrators and street-level bureaucrats. The events leading up to the first fully-legal same-sex marriages in the world are instructive on both where the limits of administrative discretion can be found, and on perceiving how new and innovative governing narratives are performed as they displace old narratives (as opposed to saying they were re-interpreted as culturally-favored former interpretations were deconstructed by demonstrating how they “caused harm”). It was, in the end, a very simple act (i.e. performance) that ended up allowing two couples to secure marriage licenses in Ontario, Canada in January 2001 (Nicol, 2006).

The events pivot on the fact that, in Ontario, the statutes allow a pastor of a registered church congregation to perform a legal marriage after first publishing banns. The practice, historically associated with the Church of England, calls for the marriage to be registered with the provincial government after the pastor has performed the ceremony. In the Ontario marriage equality case, the banns of marriage were published by a gay-friendly, recognized, religious institution, and after the waiting period passed, the two couples were married. Those two marriages set in motion a legal battle that went on for years, eventually reaching the Supreme Court of Canada before those marriages were retroactively validated and the process of registering them was completed.

It is critical to note how the case in Canada all started with a creative reading on the part of a local official, in this case a pastor acting as an agent of the state. For centuries, doing what this official did was never contemplated, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century the process of publishing banns of marriage as a valid administrative step prior to any marriage was held by the Supreme Court of Canada to be within the bounds of the law as written. The fact that the resulting licenses were for the marriage of two same-sex couples ended up being a secondary argument. By the time the Supreme Court decision was made (in 2003), same-sex marriage was being recognized in various jurisdictions around the world and public opinion in Canada had evolved.[1] A new way of performing old governing narratives had simply displaced the old way. Nothing had to be deconstructed, and more importantly, the zero-sum arguments found little traction in the conservative claims that “traditional marriage,” as an institution, had suffered harm.

The case in Canada also underscores another important argument in defense of discretionary decision making. Not only is the impact felt immediately when it is administrative discretion that improves social equity outcomes, but in the event of successful legal action that it sometimes triggers, it can also be retroactive. Although the decision did not come down from the Supreme Court of Canada until 2003, the marriages were recognized retroactively, which meant that the two couples had been legally married since January 2001. The immediacy argument has also played a central role in the marriage equality battles across the United States, not the least of which was the landmark case, Obergefell v. Hodges.

Secondary Data as Evidence – Scenario #2

James Obergefell’s long-time partner, John Arthur, had a terminal illness, and they both wanted Obergefell to be listed as a surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. As residents of Ohio they could not be legally married in their home state. This meant traveling out-of-state to be married became their only option. A medically-equipped private jet was chartered (through a national fundraising campaign), and the couple were flown to Maryland on July 11, 2013, where they were married on the tarmac at the airport before returning to Ohio. The couple then took preemptive action and sought an opinion from Dr. Camille Jones, the vital statistics registrar for the City of Cincinnati, as to whether Obergefell could now be listed as the surviving spouse on Arthur’s death certificate. Jones, as the front-line administrator in this case, was willing to issue the death certificate, but state officials affirmed that Arthur’s death certificate would not be accepted for registration with the state if it named a same-sex spouse, precipitating a lawsuit that was filed on July 19, eight days after they were married, and three months prior to Arthur’s death.

The next events in the Obergefell case underscore how important it is that a front-line administrator be courageous, as well as have the support of a large advocacy network behind them, which is why this example has been included as part of the conceptualization chapter. In support of Dr. Jones’ willingness to issue the death certificate that named Obergefell as spouse, lawyers for the City of Cincinnati supported her decision and declined to defend the state law, forcing state officials to take the case. In a ruling issued three days later, Judge Timothy Black issued a temporary restraining order, writing that “the local Ohio Registrar of death certificates is hereby ORDERED not to accept for recording a death certificate for John Arthur that does not record Mr. Arthur’s status at death as ‘married’ and James Obergefell as his ‘surviving spouse,’” (Geidner, 2015; emphasis in original).

Arthur passed away in October 2013, and the case made its way all the way to the Supreme Court before a final decision was rendered in the case on June 26, 2015. Important to this research is the fact that Jones, as vital statistics registrar, had been within her rights to make that decision in July 2013, and the impact of that decision now stands as being in force at the time it was made.

Secondary Data as Evidence – Scenario #3

Since this study will involve school administrators at both the middle and high school level it is important to see how administrative decisions by school districts set up scenarios where administrative discretion plays a vital role in the lived experiences of students, thereby invoking advocacy activities by parents. This scenario builds upon the fact that in some jurisdictions, disparate treatment of a vulnerable population is actually written into the code, and a use of discretion that would favor the mission, purpose and goals of PFLAG would call for the front-line administrator to actually appear to be acting against the law.

In total, 29 states have yet to enumerate LGBTQ protections into their anti-bullying laws for students in public schools. In these 29 states without enumeration, while local school boards can, on their own, choose to enumerate the protections, many have chosen not to, and worse yet, in the conservative strongholds of Missouri and South Dakota, GLSEN (Gay and Lesbian School Education Network) reports that the state law (as of 2013) actually “prohibit[s] individual school districts from having enumerated policies” (Phariss, 2015, p. 263). As noted in the previous chapter, in Alabama, an in-force state statute still mandates that schools teach that gay sex is a criminal act (ALA CODE§16, 1992), in spite of the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (1993).

Hypotheses

It needs to be clear that the “outcomes for” the individual members of the population represented by the advocacy organization are not part of the analysis, and neither is the “outcomes of” the decision made by the street-level bureaucrat. The only measure will be whether or not the street-level bureaucrat “performed the action,” or “did not perform the action,” after a direct-engagement encounter with a representative of the progressive advocacy organization.

As noted in Chapter I, this dissertation hypothesizes that effective progressive advocacy strategies will be associated with street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators using their administrative discretion in ways that are favorable to the goals of the advocacy organization. Assuming that such an organization has an effective messaging campaign at the local level, and has engaged in public information campaigns, peer-to-peer conversations, face-to-face encounters with front-line administrators, and other passive and active measures, one question would be whether or not these actions, by themselves, are enough to influence the decision making of street-level bureaucrats and front-line administrators.

As it relates to establishing the study population, the study will be focused on activities that are demarcated in most states by county boundaries. The word county, however, is not uniform across all 50 states, and some states that joined the union after the Civil War created much larger counties than those states that were early joining the union. Therefore, in the hypotheses that follow, the word county will be defined as what the U.S. Census Bureau refers to as county equivalent, and the term locale will be used as the generic reference to the area of influence as it relates to the active PFLAG chapter.

With the understanding that the term more favorable use of administrative discretion is defined as a discretionary act that is aligned with the mission, purpose, and goals of PFLAG, the central hypothesis is as follows:

H1: The planning of direct-engagement advocacy activities aimed at front-line administrators is associated with a more favorable use of administrative discretion by front-line administrators in that city and/or county (as compared to a similar locale where there is no PFLAG chapter).

The planning of direct-engagement advocacy will be evidenced by minutes from PFLAG chapter meetings or newsletters. It will furthermore not be assumed that the lack of a PFLAG chapter in a county is equivalent to a complete lack of progressive advocacy in that county. The query mechanism allows for other kinds of direct-engagement progressive advocacy to be disclosed, and to identify it as originating with a non-PFLAG source where that information is disclosed in the secondary data

The null hypothesis for H1 is:

H0: The planning of direct-engagement advocacy activities is not associated with a more favorable use of administrative discretion by front-line administrators.

As a secondary test, in the event that there are numerous PFLAG chapters where there is evidence of monthly meetings, but no minutes or newsletters readily available, the following is the second (proxy) hypothesis:

H2: Holding regularly scheduled PFLAG chapter meetings is associated with a more favorable use of administrative discretion by front-line administrators in local government in that locale.

The null hypothesis for H2 is:

H0: Holding regularly scheduled PFLAG chapter meetings is not associated with a more favorable use of administrative discretion by front-line administrators in that locale.

Additionally, just in case there are numerous PFLAG chapters where there is evidence of the chapter forming, but where there are no records of monthly meetings, minutes, or newsletters, the following is the third (proxy) hypothesis:

H3: The formation of a PFLAG chapter in a county (or county equivalent) is associated with a more favorable use of administrative discretion by front-line administrators.

Evidence of a PFLAG chapter having been formed will be supported by seeing that chapter listed with a contact name on the PFLAG National web domain.

The null hypothesis for H3 is:

H0: The formation of a PFLAG chapter in a county (or county equivalent) is not associated with a more favorable use of administrative discretion by front-line administrators.

Moderator Variables

Assuming that at least one of the above hypotheses are supported, data to test four moderator variables will be included to see if can be determined what specifically worked in earning legitimacy for progressive advocacy, and to explore whether or not the strength of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables is impacted by any of the moderator variables. Table 1 provides a comprehensive listing of all variables, with definition and level of measurement.

Variable

Definition

Level of Measurement

Geographical Region

Groupings of contiguous counties, based on cultural similarities.

Nominal (six groupings)

Empowerment

Based on Swan’s (2015) classification

Nominal (dichotomous as shown in Appendix D).

Urbanization

Core population census designation.

Ordinal (six groupings as shown in Table 2)

Cultural Abidance

Variable based on whether data showed that cultural influences were evident.

Nominal (four dummy variables).

Table 1 - Moderator Variables

The final moderator variable, the nature of the cultural abidance that was identified in the data as a factor that impacted how the front-line administrator applied his or her administrative discretion, may not be apparent in the secondary data source in all instances, which is why the fourth null dummy variable is being proposed. Above all, evidence of these factors will be the test of whether or not progressive advocacy worked in earning legitimacy for the purpose, mission, and goals of the advocacy organization.

Specific to the region of the United States as the first moderator variable, and as noted in the literature review, the six regions of the United States that have been set out to provide a deeper analysis of how street-level bureaucrats respond to direct engagement progressive advocacy will further be annotated as either empowered or disempowered, adding an additional element for analysis that will tie this research to that of Swan (2015) and his contributing authors. Swan’s research established what he termed a disempowered state, which he found tended to be more religiously conservative (especially in the South), and tended to lean toward libertarianism in the mountain states (pp. 133-134). Similar to the goals of this research, Swan’s work took a keen interest in social equity outcomes for the LGBTQ population, especially insofar as how outcomes in disempowered states stood in stark contrast to outcomes in the empowered states such as California and the New England states, which have led the way on numerous progressive issues.

Roughly speaking, Swan’s disempowered states were geographically broken into four regions, which he referenced as the rust belt (Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia), the South (Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida), the Midwest (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas), and the mountain states (Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona) (2015, pp. 131-137). The six regions used for this study closely approximate the above four regions Swan describes, but allow for a bit more focused analysis of the data by keeping certain culturally-distinct areas of some states separated. For example, the inland counties of Oregon and Washington have far more in common with Idaho and Utah than they do with the more progressive coastline counties from the Canadian border down to Portland.

In order to ascertain whether or not front-line administrators in different regions of the United States respond differently to PFLAG advocacy, the fourth hypothesis is as follows:

H4: The strength of any relationship established in H1 to H3 above will vary based on region of the United States where the PFLAG chapter is located.

The null hypothesis for H4 is:

H0: The strength of the relationship established in H1 to H3 above will not show any connection to the strength of the relationship based on region of the United States where the PFLAG chapter is located.

As for the second moderator variable, Swan’s dichotomous analysis of empowered or disempowered will be used for the fifth hypothesis, as follows:

H5: The strength of any relationship established in H1 to H3 above will vary based on whether the state where the PFLAG chapter is located has been designated empowered or disempowered.

The null hypothesis for H5 is:

H0: The strength of the relationship established in H1 to H3 above will not show any connection to whether or not the state where the PFLAG chapter is located has been designated empowered or disempowered.

For the sixth hypothesis, the population density will be examined based on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) treatment of the county or locale as either a metropolitan CBSA (Core Based Statistical Area, which serves to group multiple counties together around a core metropolitan area that has a population of 50,000 or more), a micropolitan CBSA (typically a stand-alone county with a core population of at least 10,000 but less than 50,000), or a county with neither CBSA designation. Having neither CBSA designation means that there is no urban center in the county with a population greater than 10,000 (U.S. Census, 2013). This study further infers that most residents from a county with neither a metropolitan or micropolitan CBSA would not consider commuting to a major center for work, further limiting the cultural influence that a larger city might have on the residents.

Because a metropolitan CBSA would have many intervening variables that would foster the formation of progressive advocacy organizations in addition to PFLAG, an additional demographic separation has been made to allow for an analysis of PFLAG chapters that are located in seemingly independent cities that have been included in a metropolitan CBSA. From an urbanization standpoint, these locales would have to demonstrate features that set the community apart culturally from the more densely populated areas. Referenced for the purpose of this study as independent suburban metropolitan communities (ISMCs), these locales will be analyzed in four groupings, creating a total of six urbanization categories that can ordered by increasing population density.

Urbanization Category

U.S. Census CBSA

Core Population Range

Rural County

None

< 10,000

Small Town ISMC

Metropolitan

< 10,000

Micropolitan County

Micropolitan

10,000 to 49,999

Small City ISMC

Metropolitan

10,000 to 49,999

Medium City ISMC

Metropolitan

50,000 to 124,999

Large City ISMC

Metropolitan

125,000 to 200,000

Table 2 - Urbanization Categories

PFLAG chapters in ISMC urban centers larger than 200,000 residents, and PFLAG chapters in cities that cannot be classified as independent of their metropolitan CBSA will not be included in this study. There are 131 PFLAG chapters in the United States that will not be examined by reason of belonging to this seventh category of urbanization.

In order to ascertain whether or not the extent of urbanization in a county has any impact on the strength of the relationship supported by H1 to H3, the sixth hypothesis is as follows:

H6: The strength of any relationship established in H1 to H3 above will vary based on the degree of urbanization in the locale where the PFLAG chapter is located.

The null hypothesis for H6 is:

H0: The strength of any relationship established in H1 to H3 above will not show any relationship based on the degree of urbanization in the locale where the PFLAG chapter is located.

The nature of the data that will be collected to test the above two hypotheses will be enumerated in the methodology chapter, but early estimates indicate that at the time this study was prepared (July 2016) there were 246 PFLAG chapters suitable for analysis, which will be demographically matched with another 246 non-PFLAG locales for a total dataset of 492 counties, county-equivalents, and ISMCs.

The fourth moderator variable will be operationalized through four dummy variables. Structured to measure earned legitimacy, positive outcomes will be evidenced by favorable decision making by the street-level bureaucrat where the data demonstrates that one of three cultural abidance factors was also encountered. As was noted at the conclusion of Chapter II, the dummy variable classifications for cultural abidance were proposed as follows, with the fourth option being null:

i) Bias and Zero-sum Thinking (following Foucault’s dividing practices)

ii) Decoupling (granting legitimacy to an extra-governmental organization)

iii) Other Conservative Ideology (as habitus and doxa)

iv) Other cultural abidance influence, or factor not discernable

In order to ascertain whether or not the nature of the cultural abidance (where it can be identified by the data) has any impact on the strength of the relationship supported by H1 to H3, the seventh hypothesis is as follows:

H7: The strength of any relationship established in H1 to H3 above will vary based on the nature of the cultural abidance that could be identified as the impediment to change efforts by progressive advocacy.

The null hypothesis for H7 is:

H0: The strength of any relationship established in H1 to H3 above will not show any relationship based on the nature of the cultural abidance that could be identified as the impediment to change efforts by progressive advocacy.

Additional Tests

Based solely on additional descriptive statistics that will be collected in the process of gathering data to test the primary hypothesis it will be possible to explore for other correlations. Of primary interest will be what will be referred to later as the Quality of Life hypothesis, with the measure of Quality of Life for LGBTQ individuals being determined by how frequently LGBTQ equality is affirmed within the official web pages of the county, city, school board, individual schools, and sheriff’s office. The hypothesis is set out as follows:

H8: The mere existence of a PFLAG chapter in a locale is associated with a more frequent affirmation of LGBTQ equality in the official Internet presence of the combined local government in that locale.

The null hypothesis for H8 is:

H0: The mere existence of a PFLAG chapter in a locale shows no association with a more frequent affirmation of LGBTQ equality in the official Internet presence of the combined local government in that locale.

Additional descriptive statistics tests based on the collected data will also be done, but no further hypotheses have been set out for these tests.

Assumptions and Definition of Terms

Specifically related to the conceptualization of this research project, the following assumptions and definitions need to be clearly understood in the context in which they will be used.

Cultural Conflict and the Role of Research in its Resolution

In keeping with what was mentioned in the literature review, testing the effectiveness of an advocacy organization that adheres to what can be argued are “best practices in advocacy” is critical to the validity of this research. PFLAG’s efforts to bring about progressive change include efforts made by individual members that combine “social networking and mobilization, interpersonal communication and negotiation, as well as the use of media for generating public pressure” (Servaes & Malikhao, 2010, p. 42). The strategies followed by PFLAG chapters will therefore be explored in ways that will allow discretion advocates to understand which strategies are more effective than others. Servaes and Malikhao suggest that effective advocacy (especially direct engagement advocacy) will typically rely heavily upon “the power of supportive evidence as generated by professionals and academics [in order to present] a powerful case for sustainable social change” (p. 42).

Before describing the “inside game” (lobbying) and “outside game” (grassroots activities,) Zherka (2012) noted that advocacy was the cumulative effort of coalition-building, effective communication, popular mobilization, and shrewd compromising (p. ix). It involved taking “positive purposes” and linking them with “effective techniques” (p. ix). This subsection is about those effective techniques because, at the end of the day, Zherka describes how the primary purpose of the outside game is to “earn legitimacy” before the inside game can ever be won[2] (p. xvii). Those words, “earn legitimacy,” should resonate with the reader because of how decoupling, as a classification of cultural abidance used in this research, was described in Chapter II.

Zherka (2010, p. xvii) writes how “the most effective way to communicate with people is by talking to them directly.” He goes on to recommend that good advocates utilize “all the modern tools of communication, but concentrate on direct engagement with people” (p. xvii). Maynard-Moody & Musheno (2003, p. 8) also support this idea by affirming that street-level bureaucrats “deal with faces.” They write about how, “the citizen-agent narrative draws attention to workers’ constant focus on who citizens are as much as what they do” (p. 13). To this end, the research conceptualized here recognizes the dynamics that are at play when an advocate’s “face,” in approaching a front-line administrator, replaces the face of an already marginalized person who has traditionally been framed as undeserving or deviant within the culture of the dominant group. Success will require changes that “are deep and equitable and […] their achievement requires both the deconstruction and reconstruction of dominant knowledge frameworks. In other words, we need to change the way [these administrators] think” (Shields, 2013, p. viii).

As it relates to having the backing of peer-reviewed research, PFLAG’s advocacy strategies have evolved over the years to include “the power of supportive evidence,” as recommended by Servaes and Malikhao. Additionally, grassroots members of PFLAG chapters have taken it upon themselves to avail themselves of this knowledge, expanding on it by inviting public speakers to share their work at monthly PFLAG chapter meetings. Individual members who desire to become more informed about this “supportive evidence” are encouraged to visit the PFLAG National web domain and explore the resources that are there.

Once again, the reader is reminded that this research follows the work of Miller (2012), inasmuch as the goals of the individual PFLAG members do not include deconstructing the “old ways” of seeing the world, but rather outline a “third way” in what is traditionally framed as a zero-sum game. Nobody likes to be told they are wrong, which implies that it would be far more productive to outline a win for the marginalized group in a way that there was no cost to the group that historically has opposed change.

Upper-level Street-level Bureaucrat and Front-line Administrator

Examples of upper-level street-level bureaucrats or front-line administrators would be judges, county sheriffs, police commissioners, city managers, HR administrators, school principals, non-elected school district administrators, public hospital administrators, presidents and provosts of public colleges and universities, and just about any other non-elected position in the public sphere where a member of the public would not say, “I want to see your supervisor” in order to secure what Lipsky (2010) referred to when he wrote of “the possibility that a special case is presenting itself, or that extraordinary efforts of one sort or another are called for” (p. xii). The upper-level street-level bureaucrats that comprise the study population are the supervisors who typically have the final say on a decision where administrative discretion will be invoked.

The collection of data for this study will have a particular focus on the decisions made within those administrative positions where the potential exists for a broad use of administrative discretion related to the LGBTQ population, and where those discretionary acts are likely to be reported in a manner where the data will be found in standard data mining practices. An extensive search[3] of Gale’s new, Archives of Human Sexuality – Part I: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940, produced articles that enumerated the following list of non-elected administrators who were primary targets of persuasion during the formative years of PFLAG (1972 to the 1990s):

· Police chiefs

· City managers

· Counselors and therapists:

o To affirm homosexuality as an immutable trait

o To expose ex-gay therapy as harmful

· School principals

· University administrators (to allow gay-affirming student clubs to form)

· Mothers of gay children

· Employers of gays and lesbians

· Gays and lesbians themselves (coming out was a political statement)

· Religious leaders

· Health service providers (especially during the AIDS crisis)

· Community organizations (especially aimed at youth)

· Pundits (general PR aimed at media sources)

· Primary election candidates (before holding elected office)

· Broadly, the general public:

o Street theater awareness campaigns

o Fundraising

o Boycotts

Because this research is exclusively interested in the “outside game,” elected officials will not be included in the listing of targets, since that would fall under the category of lobbying, not advocacy.

The above list, which show extraordinary efforts spent on advocating with city officials, police chiefs, and school principals, suggests that potential areas for current research into secondary data would be within local government, which would include sheriffs and police commissioners, senior-level human resource administrators, and decision-makers in city and county government. In addition to local government administrators, school administrators (specifically high school and middle school principals) and school board superintendents will also be included in this research because of how central these individuals are to the advocacy strategies of PFLAG.

CHAPTER V: METHODS

The purpose of this study is to explore instances where public officials, serving as front-line administrators, have chosen to exercise administrative discretion and to determine if there is a statistically significant correlation of such decision making to the direct engagement efforts and strategies of a local PFLAG chapter, representing a core advocacy organization. The research question is:

This chapter will narrowly focus the research that was conceptualized in Chapter IV into a quantitative study of secondary data that will test the seven hypotheses. First, the search strategies that will yield data on the decisions made by the population of interest will be outlined. This will be followed by describing the scoring mechanism that will be used for each locale, and the recording strategies. Following this, the recommendations for data analysis will be outlined. The chapter will close by setting out any anticipated difficulties if the data proves to be more elusive than originally anticipated.

Data Strategies

The collection of secondary data needs to serve two essential functions: 1) establish the degree to which the PLFAG chapter is fully engaged in direct-engagement advocacy strategies, and 2) establish how, by following that advocacy strategy, it yielded a discretionary act by a front-line administrator that favored the mission, purpose, and goals of PFLAG. Each of the following subsections will set out in detail how the above will be accomplished.

Selecting a Target Population

PFLAG has more than 400 semi-autonomous chapters nationwide, providing sampling opportunities for this research in all 50 states and every major category of population density and type. Some PFLAG chapter names reflect their intent to cover an entire county, while others specify only the name of a city or town, but because a chapter will typically be accessible to any person from the county it was determined that a research design that focused on pulling its sampling from anywhere within a PFLAG locale would be suitable.

As noted in the previous chapter, a PFLAG locale will be grouped by population demographics. Since each PFLAG county will be matched to a non-PFLAG locale, the study population in each group will be doubled, as shown. The estimated size of n for each group is as follows:

i) Micropolitan County n = 116 (58 PFLAG + 58 non-PFLAG)

ii) Rural County n = 32 (16 PFLAG + 16 non-PFLAG)

iii) Small Town ISMC n = 14 (7 PFLAG + 7 non-PFLAG)

iv) Small City ISMC n = 92 (46 PFLAG + 46 non-PFLAG)

v) Medium City ISMC n = 150 (75 PFLAG + 75 non-PFLAG)

vi) Large City ISMC n = 88 (44 PFLAG + 44 non-PFLAG)

As shown above, the total number of locales that will be included in the study will be 492, which excludes those PFLAG chapters in ISMC urban centers larger than 200,000 residents where, culturally speaking, the home city for the chapter is not deemed to be sufficiently independent of the cultural influences of the overall political climate of the metropolitan CBSA. There are 131 PFLAG chapters in the United States that fall into this seventh category of urbanization.

Appendix D shows a comprehensive listing of PFLAG chapters as disclosed on the PFLAG National web site as of July 2016. The listing is sorted by population of the locale and next to that column shows the urbanization classifications just outlined. Additional columns list which of the six regions the chapter is located in and whether that state has been designated empowered or disempowered (Swan, 2015).

Defining the Study Population

As explained in the previous chapter, PFLAG has been chosen to represent an ideal type of progressive advocacy group in this study. By attending regularly scheduled chapter meetings that follow a prescribed format with standardized training material, individual members become familiar with freely-available, peer-reviewed research that supports the progressive mission, purpose, and goals of the organization. It is this “outside game” that this research is interested in exploring because this is where progressive advocates for the LGBTQ community are encouraged to interact directly with street-level bureaucrats, and front-line administrators.

For this study, it will be assumed that a PFLAG chapter that is holding regular monthly meetings will be comprised of members who are actively engaged in progressive advocacy in their community. What cannot be determined by simply finding evidence of monthly meetings, however, is a timeline. For this reason, before data can be used to test the primary hypothesis (H1), it will require that mention of specific advocacy be documented in the minutes of the monthly meeting, in a chapter newsletter, or be mentioned in the PFLAG National newsletter. The earliest date for which a particular topic or target of advocacy is reported will be the baseline used in scoring the discretionary acts of local front-line administrators who will make up the study population.

Scoring Discretionary Acts as Favorable Treatment

With the focus on decision making that takes place in independent suburban communities, as well as rural and micropolitan areas, it is anticipated that carefully designed search engine queries will yield suitable secondary data sources. By reviewing newspaper stories from the area, minutes of local government meetings, scanning for minutes from school board meetings, reviewing individual school web pages, and, as a last resort, by making strategic freedom of information inquiries when necessary, it is expected that a score sheet for each locale could be completed.

The proposed queries that will be scored, based on secondary data findings, have been included as Appendix A. It needs to be made clear that a far simpler determination of what the currently in-force rules and regulations are will not be sufficient to determine what discretionary action might have taken place in any given situation.

In examining the above 14 queries for each locale where there is a PFLAG chapter, and the matched non-PFLAG locale, the following scoring mechanism will be followed:

Score of 2: favored PFLAG goals in the face of possible reprimand.

Score of 1: favored PFLAG goals without fear of possible reprimand.

Score of 0: took neutral position while not recognizing potential for harm.

Score of -1: took neutral position with awareness that harm would continue.

Score of -2: knowingly acted counter to the goals of PFLAG.

Score of “no data:” could not find conclusive data for front-line administrator.

With the five potential front-line administrator positions being studied, and a possible score from +2 to -2 for each of the 14 queries, the range of scores for each county would be from +28 at the top end to -28 at the bottom end. If no data can be found to validate a given query a null entry will be made to ensure it will simply not be counted (as opposed to giving it a score of zero).

If two or more individuals are involved in any discretionary act that is being scored in the above query sheet, the action on the part of the front-line administrator that results in the highest score will be awarded. Furthermore, and specific to H1, in each record it will be important to determine that PFLAG advocacy preceded the discretionary act, which is why, for each query, it will be required that dates be examined so that the number of weeks can be noted between the date the advocacy is mentioned in the PFLAG data and the date that the front-line administrator performed the discretionary act.

Collection of Secondary Data

Appendix B (two pages long) provides an example of the scoring sheet for a PFLAG locale, and Appendix C provides an example of the scoring sheet for a non-PFLAG locale. Numbered arrows have been provided to highlight areas of the score sheet that are described here in the methodology, and Arrow 4 (on both sheets) highlights the only difference between the PFLAG and non-PFLAG score sheets. On the PFLAG sheet, that area describes the historical data of the PFLAG chapter itself, and on the non-PFLAG sheet it shows the demographic similarities that informed the decision to match that locale to the designated PFLAG locale.

The score sheet provided as Appendix B also has numerous other arrows that will be related to upcoming sections, but specifically related to this section is Arrow 1, which points the column showing the 14 queries that will be scored. Arrow 2 is the column where each query is scored (with a value of -2 to +2), and Arrow 3 is the column where the weeks are recorded when dates for both the start of advocacy efforts and the discretionary act could be determined. Related to Appendix D, the region, urbanization, and empowered classifications are recorded on the score sheet in the area designated by Arrow 14.

As required to test H1 and H2, and as shown on the PFLAG locale score sheet by Arrow 4, it will first be necessary to confirm that direct-engagement advocacy for a specific cause is taking place, and a date for the commencement of this advocacy be established. This will require that one of the following be documented in the affirmative:

a. Holding monthly meetings, or…

b. Accessible on-line newsletters for a period of at least six months, or…

c. Accessible minutes of meetings for a period of at least six months.

Additionally, the founding date for the chapter will also be noted, if available. In some instances, securing this information might require sending an email inquiry to contact person listed for the PFLAG chapter on the PFLAG National web domain. It is important to note that many of these PFLAG chapters have been in existence since the 1970s. Finding documentation to support the claim that a chapter has been functional continuously for at least 10 years will be deemed sufficient to establish that direct-engagement advocacy has been ongoing continuously in these chapters from the date that it was established. The 10-year period closely matches the major progress that has been made toward LGBTQ equality in the United States, and prior to this last decade any PFLAG advocacy would have been considered ground-breaking work, anywhere in the United States.

Matching non-PFLAG Locales

As noted earlier, matching PFLAG locales with non-PFLAG locales will be done with a great deal of thought and effort. Urbanization and region will of course establish essential qualifiers as the starting point, but further demographics that will be examined (with a variance percentage recorded for each) include population of the locale itself, race and ethnicity, and the political party affiliation of registered voters. This will be recorded on the non-PFLAG score card in the area designated by Arrow 4.

Google Search Parameters and Scoring

In order to establish that a lack of due diligence in the search practices of the investigator are not contributing to a skewing of the data, identical search practices will be followed for collecting the first round of data. Google searches, with the following terms associated with the county name, the city/town/community name, the school district name, the sheriff’s office name, and the names of each public high school and middle school in the target city/town/community, will be conducted to initiate the data mining for each locale score sheet.

· Initial search terms (e.g. “Boca Raton High School” _____)

a. Gay

b. Lesbian

c. LGBT

d. Transgender

e. Same-sex

f. Domestic partner benefits (predating marriage equality in that state)

g. Marriage equality

Associated with the scoring, several other notable details will be collected on the score sheet for each locale, and each query, as noted below:

· Annotate each find (in the column designated on Appendix B by Arrow 13) as to what source recorded the event. Possible sources that percolated to the top in the Google search will be:

a. Minutes of local government, sheriff, or school board meetings.

b. Minutes of nonprofit organization meetings.

c. News reporting:

i. Local

ii. Regional

iii. State

iv. National

d. Social media – government source

e. Social media – nonprofit source

f. Social media – individual source

i. Celebrity-status profile (more than 1,000 followers)

ii. High profile (100 to 999 followers)

iii. Individual

· With particular attention to dates, score any event where administrative discretion can be shown to have either favored, ignored (no malice), dismissed (with malice) or disfavored the mission, purpose, or goals of PFLAG.

a. If the date of the event precedes the date of known advocacy efforts by PFLAG, the event is disqualified from inclusion in H1.

b. If the date of the event precedes the date when monthly meetings can be documented, the event is disqualified from inclusion in H2.

c. If the date of the event precedes the formation of the PFLAG chapter, the event is disqualified from inclusion in H3.

d. If date cannot be confirmed, qualify inclusion of the event in either H2 or H3, but not H1.

· Identify whether advocacy could be specifically attached to PFLAG or some other progressive advocacy organization.

· In the process of collecting the above data, watch for and record (in the column designated on Appendix B by Arrow 6 on the second page) any data needed for H7, the Quality of Life hypothesis. Find the web domain (home page) for the county, city/town/community, school district, sheriff’s office, and each public high school or middle school. Score each based on whether the following diversity concerns are visible to the public:

a. Sexual orientation diversity is affirmed.

b. Gender identity diversity is affirmed.

c. Implying that workplace harassment (or bullying in school), based on either of the above, will be subject to disciplinary action.

d. Mention of same-sex employee(s).

e. Mention of LGBTQ events such as a Pride festival or parade.

At this point, the score sheets will be subtotaled in preparation for preliminary runs with the data (see Arrows 7 and 8 on the second page of Appendix B). Data collected through any additional data mining efforts that rely upon other protocols, including freedom of information act (FOIA) requests, will be considered separately, with the caveat that the potential exists for skewing the results if the additional effort is being made with a higher weighting on either the PFLAG or non-PFLAG locales.

Other Descriptive Statistics

In addition to the data collection requirements listed above, the score sheet will allow for each discretionary act be evaluated for other factors that are likely to be evident, based on how much disclosure, pre-history, and reporting was done through the secondary data source that exposed the action. The first will be the option to rate the discretionary act based on Kerwin’s (1994) three options for rulemaking (see column designated by Arrow 9 on Appendix B). Recall from Chapter III that Kerwin argues that there is a unique relationship between rules and statutes, as follows:

i) The rule implements the statute.

ii) The rule interprets the statute.

iii) The rule prescribes the action, when all the statute did was establish a societal goal or mandate (Kerwin, 1994, pp. 5-6).

How administrative discretion was applied depends very much on which one of the above three options gave rise to the rule. In two of the examples from the conceptualization chapter (same-sex marriages performed in Ontario, and the completion of a certificate of death in Ohio), the secondary data documented how the governing narratives that were guiding the individual front-line administrators were only doxa and habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), leaving room for new ways of performing the governing narrative. In scoring the data, the third Kerwin classification would be recorded as the governing narrative that (historically) had limited the bounds of discretion for same-sex marriages for that individual (not necessarily for that locale as a whole). The legal challenges of actually registering the outcome of the discretionary actions were secondary to that “phenomenological moment of encounter” (Fox & Cochrane, 1990, p.257) that the street-level bureaucrats had with citizens.

Further to the above, as was explained in the conceptualization chapter with the example of the gay man being detained in a holding cell with a general population of inmates, each discretionary act on the scoring sheet might also allow for a classification according to its legal standing in the jurisdiction (see column designated by Arrow 10 on Appendix B), as derived from one of the following options:

i) Non-enumerated provisions for equity.

ii) Enumerated provisions, but not enforced.

iii) Codified disparate treatment.

In this classification of the score sheet query, the example of the same-sex marriage action from Ontario would fall under the first category, where provisions for equitable treatment had not been enumerated. The street-level bureaucrat (the pastor, acting as an agent for the government) chose to merely treat the same-sex couples under the same guidelines that had been used for every other couple. In the Ohio example, on the other hand, there were regulations in place that expressly forbade equal treatment for same-sex couples, so the third choice would be used to denote the nature of the discretionary act in scoring the action of the registrar of vital statistics.

Additionally, recall from Chapter III that Lipsky (2010) set out methods, through the “structure of alternatives,” whereby discretionary acts by upper-level front-line administrators had a negative impact to the citizens, effectively equivalent to an outright denial of equitable treatment. Where evident in the data that is being scored, these “structures of alternatives” (see column designated by Arrow 11 on Appendix B) that amount to a denial of services might lend themselves for classification as follows:

i) The choice of setting.

ii) The isolation of clients from each other.

iii) The services and procedures of street-level bureaucrat and front-line administrator “are presented as benign.”

iv) Forcing clients to come in for service.

v) Structuring interactions so that “bureaucrats control their content, timing, and pace.”

vi) Development of routines to make client control a precondition of the interaction.

vii) Establishing sanctions to “punish disrespect to routines of order” (Lipsky, 2010, pp. 117-125).

In recording findings, each discretionary act will be evaluated as to whether or not a “structure of alternatives” qualify as an equivalent of a direct action in the denial of equitable treatment, or similarly if one of these denial mechanisms were overcome as part of the favorable treatment afforded by the discretionary act. Both of the examples of the same-sex marriage cases used as examples in the conceptualization chapter were an expansion of equity that overcame point iii), where a refusal of a marriage license had always been set out as benign.

Finally, as it relates to other descriptive statistics, in Chapter II it specifically set out cultural abidance, on the part of front-line administrators and street-level bureaucrats, as a primary target that progressive advocacy had to take on before things will change, particularly as it relates to the LGBTQ population. In summary, the three classifications for cultural abidance that were discussed were:

i) Bias and Zero-sum Thinking (following Foucault’s dividing practices)

ii) Decoupling (granting legitimacy to an extra-governmental organization)

iii) Other Conservative Ideology (as habitus and doxa)

Because the above three classifications of cultural abidance overlap to a certain degree (e.g. habitus and doxa are indeed critical in preserving bias and delegitimizing governmental authority where one has disagreements), the idea of “best fit” will be used to describe the data as each account is scored on the query sheet. As shown by the three columns denoted by Arrows 12 of Appendix B, the “best fit” is awarded a 3, the next best (if appropriate) a 2, and if still relevant the third best fit is awarded a 1. If only one of the options matches the circumstances, that option will be awarded a 3 (best fit) and neither of the other two columns will be scored.

Data Analysis Procedures

The following tests, presented in order of anticipated importance, are a preliminary list of SPSS tools that are expected to be useful in analyzing the data.

Matched-pairs t-test

With dichotomous data on one side (PFLAG vs. non-PFLAG county; urban vs. rural; empowered vs. disempowered, etc.) and continuous data on the other, in a matched-pairs quasi-experimental design a locale with a PFLAG chapter will be contrasted with a similarly situated locale without a PFLAG chapter. As noted previously, the design of the query sheet for each locale will yield interval data on a continuous range from a high of 24 to a low of -24. There will not be a meaningful zero, thereby precluding any tests that require ratio data.

The matched-pairs t-test will be used to test H1, H2, and H3.

Independent Samples t-test

If any of H1, H2, or H3 are supported, when broken down by region (six options), empowered or disempowered (dichotomous), urbanization (six options), or cultural abidance factor (three options), the matched-pairs t-test data will further allow a comparison based on the size of the effect. This will allow for testing of H4, H5, and H6. The Quality of Life hypothesis (H7) will also be tested with an independent samples t-test.

Outliers

If a county score appears to be an outlier (most notably when a non-PFLAG county outscores a PFLAG county), Yin’s (2003) case study approach will be followed and included with the results of this study as a supplement.

Other Tests

The data collected will allow for several other descriptive statistics tests to be conducted that will further aid in examining any kinds of relationships that might be helpful in focusing future research endeavors.

Anticipated Difficulties Finding Data

Where there is no secondary data found that even matches one of the queries (for example, transgender accommodations are neither affirmed nor denied, or there is no record of anybody ever having applied for permit to hold a Pride parade or festival), the first accommodation for not having this data will be to find comparators that also lack the same data. Additionally, a mean score will be determined for each locale where the total score is divided by the number of queries that were answerable. For example, if only 12 queries were scored, with a total of 18, the mean score be 18/12, or 1.5.

Chapter VI – Analysis and Results

[Chapter title copied from PAR Jan/Feb 2016, pp. 121-130.]

Body

Chapter VII – Discussion and Implications

[Chapter title copied from PAR Jan/Feb 2016, pp. 121-130.]

Body

APPENDIX A: PROPOSED QUERIES

The following are the proposed queries that will be scored, based on secondary data findings, for each locale:

A. County Government Findings

1) Accommodations for a transgender employee.

2) Conferring benefits on an employee in a same-sex relationship.

B. County / City / Town Administrator Activities

3) Pride festival or parade permit (to use city park or property).

4) Accessibility to gender-specific public facilities by transgender residents.

C. Sheriff’s Office

5) Support for same-sex couple employees.

6) Support for transgender employee.

7) Affirming decision to support Pride event.

8) Community liaison to LGBTQ community members.

D. High School

9) Same-sex couples accommodated for prom event(s).

10) Anti-bullying and counselling services LGBTQ inclusive.

11) Human sexuality education LGBTQ affirming.

E. Middle School

12) Transgender student accommodation.

13) Anti-bullying and counselling services LGBTQ inclusive.

14) Human sexuality education LGBTQ affirming.

APPENDIX B: SCORE SHEET: PFLAG Locale

The following is the score sheet for a matched, non-PFLAG locale.

(Image continued next page)

APPENDIX C: SCORE SHEET: non-PFLAG Locale

The following is the score sheet for a matched, non-PFLAG locale.

(Image continued next page)

APPENDIX D: COMPREHENSIVE LISTING OF PFLAG LOCALES

The following list is broken into the six urbanization groups, as described in Chapter IV – Conceptualization. Note that each locale is further classified by region, and by whether it is considered empowered or disempowered (Swan, 2015).

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[1] Reverend Dr. Brent Hawkes, CM,, who both secured the marriage licenses and then married the two couples, was recognized by being inducted into the Order of Canada, the highest recognition that can be afforded to a person by the Canadian Prime Minister, acting through the Governor General.

[2] Earning Legitimacy One Ally at a Time: In their 2015 annual “back to school” newsletter, PFLAG National was very intentional with one of the articles, entitled, Engaging Educator Allies to Create Safer Schools. It was an expansion of their Straight Allies campaign, but specifically targets school teachers who are willing to be highly visible in their schools (Owen, 2015). In one newsletter article the national office took the opportunity to educate chapter members on the following PFLAG National web-based resources that they all should be aware of: 1) Guide to Being a Straight Ally; 2) Guide to Being a Trans Ally; 3) Schools in Transition: A Guide for Supporting Transgender Students in K-12 Schools; 4) 2013 National School Climate Survey (from GLSEN); 5) Cultivating Respect: Safe Schools for All; 6) Straight for Equality

[3] Search parameters included frequency searches for the terms “persuade,” “parents of gays” (a precursor name for PFLAG from 1973 to 1980), Parents-FLAG (a precursor name for PFLAG from 1980 to 1990 when the first executive director was hired and the headquarters moved to Washington DC), P-FLAG, and PFLAG. Also entered into the frequency search was “Gay Activists Alliance” and “GAA.” The GAA was an organization that is inseparable from PFLAG because it was co-founded by Morty Manford, Jeanne Manford’s son, six months after the Stonewall Riots in 1969. The GAA had organized what they referred to as a ‘zap’ at the elite Inner Circle media event in 1972, and it was at this event where Morty Manford was injured and subsequently hospitalized. It was when Jeanne Manford tried to raise awareness of how her son was brutally beaten by Mickey Maye, at the time the head of New York City’s firefighter’s union and a former boxing champion, that her advocacy role began, eventually leading to the founding of what is today known as PFLAG in March 1973. The list of who the targets of persuasion were during this founding period is considered by the author to be consistent with who the targets of persuasion are today.

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

Purpose of the Study

Research Question

Summary

CHAPTER II: PROGRESSIVE ADVOCACY

Public Administration as a Progressive Endeavor

The Legitimacy of Progressivism

Progressivism and Privileged Populations

Legitimacy, Discretion and Decoupling

The Primacy of Effectiveness over Efficiency

Moral Values and Cultural Abidance

The Regressive Nature of Cultural Abidance

Advocacy Organizations

Core Advocacy Organizations

Conclusion

CHAPTER III: ADMINISTRATIVE DISCRETION

Administrative Discretion

Background and Perspective

Discretionary Acts and Individual Motives

Legal Constraints that Fail to Require Equitable Treatment

Denying Equity by the Structure of Alternatives

Cultural Violence and Moral Values

Conclusion

CHAPTER IV: CONCEPTUALIZATION

Choosing an Ideal Type Progressive Advocacy Organization

The Power of Testimony and the “Third Way”

Secondary Data as Evidence for Administrative Discretion

Secondary Data as Evidence – Scenario #1

Secondary Data as Evidence – Scenario #2

Secondary Data as Evidence – Scenario #3

Hypotheses

Moderator Variables

Additional Tests

Assumptions and Definition of Terms

Cultural Conflict and the Role of Research in its Resolution

Upper-level Street-level Bureaucrat and Front-line Administrator

CHAPTER V: METHODS

Data Strategies

Selecting a Target Population

Defining the Study Population

Scoring Discretionary Acts as Favorable Treatment

Collection of Secondary Data

Matching non-PFLAG Locales

Google Search Parameters and Scoring

Other Descriptive Statistics

Data Analysis Procedures

Matched-pairs t-test

Independent Samples t-test

Outliers

Other Tests

Anticipated Difficulties Finding Data

Chapter VI – Analysis and Results

Chapter VII – Discussion and Implications

APPENDIX A: PROPOSED QUERIES

APPENDIX B: SCORE SHEET: PFLAG Locale

APPENDIX C: SCORE SHEET: non-PFLAG Locale

APPENDIX D: COMPREHENSIVE LISTING OF PFLAG LOCALES

REFERENCES

Driftless Rivers Coalition, Inc.

Location

Contact