Professional Identity and Job Burnout of Street-Level Bureaucrats in the Digital Age Under the Background of the Internet of Things

With the rapid advancement of digital technologies, such as the IoT, grassroots governance has entered a new stage of intelligence and digitization. Street-level bureaucrats, as frontline civil servants, play a vital role in public service delivery and community governance. In the digital age, their objective duties and subjective experiences are increasingly influenced by pressures from digital technologies, particularly digital media. Against this backdrop, examining the relationship between the professional identity of street-level bureaucrats and job burnout holds significant practical value for enhancing their work efficiency. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy theory and professional identity theory, this study surveyed 173 auxiliary police officers in Chengdu through questionnaires and in-depth interviews to explore how professional identity relates to job burnout in the digital era. The findings reveal a negative correlation between professional identity and job burnout among street-level bureaucrats in the context of digitalization — namely, a decline in professional identity is associated with higher levels of job burnout. In efforts to strengthen the street-level bureaucrat workforce, tools, such as digital media, can be employed to enhance workers’ sense of self-worth and professional cognition, ignite their passion for the profession, reduce occurrences of job burnout, and ultimately improve work efficiency. The study further proposed that using tools such as the Internet of Things and digital media to strengthen the professional value cognition of street bureaucrats can help improve their sense of professional belonging and enthusiasm, alleviate professional burnout, and thus better achieve public service goals in the intelligent governance system.