A signaling perspective on bureaucratic encounters: How public officials interpret signals and cues

This article provides scholars studying frontline judgements an analytical framework—the signaling perspective—that could be used to examine how street‐level bureaucrats evaluate unobservable citizen‐client properties. It proposes to look not only at the kind of signals and cues officials gather, but also at the interpretive frames used to make sense of them. This offers a valuable contribution to the street‐level bureaucracy literature, which largely focuses on explaining discretionary decision making by looking at the influence of officials' personal preferences or client characteristics, but less on officials' interpretive frameworks to make sense of client characteristics. The analytical framework is illustrated by applying it to existing literature on trustworthiness judgements of social workers and police officers. Different interpretive frames were found from which frontline officials interpret citizen characteristics as signals. The article concludes by offering several avenues for future research.