Role strain and job crafting in China’s digitalizing street-level bureaucracy

This study draws on 87 in-depth interviews with frontline workers specializing in social assistance services in Shanghai, China to examine how digitalization reconfigures street-level bureaucracy. Integrating role theory and job crafting theory, we find that digital platforms could produce multiple forms of role strain: redundant labour and fragmented systems generate role overload; misalignment between algorithmic rules and clients’ lived circumstances triggers role conflict; and emotional exhaustion coupled with the erosion of occupational identity results in role alienation. To ensure effective grassroots operation, frontline workers proactively engage in task, relational, and cognitive crafting, sustaining professional resilience despite constrained autonomy. This study critiques digital systems design for overlooking frontline implicit knowledge and suggests that digitalization in the street-level bureaucracy is an ongoing process of socio-technical alignment. The findings indicate that the design-reality gap in digital welfare reform may be bridged by systematically incorporating frontline knowledge.