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Abstract
This paper develops and tests a parsimonious micro-theory of street-level bureaucrats' individual implementation behavior. By systemizing and synthesizing theoretical insights from Ajzen's theory of planned behavior, from Bandura's theory of perceived self-efficacy, and from implementation literature, we claim that street-level bureaucrats' policy implementation behavior is a function of their individual evaluation of the efficacy of the policy and of their own ability to implement the policy measures in terms of their perceived self-efficacy. We test our theory on a panel data set capturing teachers' implementation of the wide-scale Danish public school reform of 2014. We use administrative data and a five-wave panel survey (2014–18) of 2,055 teachers in approx. 200 schools as well as their school leaders. Our results confirm the importance of teachers' perceived policy efficacy and of their perceived self-efficacy for their implementation behavior. When, as shown in this study, street-level bureaucrats' individual evaluations of a policy and their own perceived abilities shape their implementation behaviors, street-level bureaucrats become even more important individual policymakers than depicted in most research on street-level bureaucrats that mainly focuses on structural determinants of their behaviors rather than individual factors.

Public management studies are increasingly using survey data on managers' perceptions of performance to measure organizational performance. These perceptual measures are tempting to apply because archival performance data or surveys of target group outcomes and satisfaction are often lacking, costly to provide, and are highly policy specific rendering generalization difficult. But are perceptual performance measures valid, and do they generate unbiased findings? We examine these questions in a comparative study of middle managers in schools in Texas and Denmark. The findings are remarkably similar. Managers systematically overestimate the performance of their organization, perceptual performance is only weakly associated with archival performance, and managers do not provide sophisticated assessment of performance by giving their organization credit for the constraints it meets or discounting the resources it has. Even worse, the use of perceptual performance measures seems to provide biased estimates when examining how management affects performance. This is due to both random measurement error and common source bias.

This wide-ranging edited volume provides a state of the art account of theory and research on modern street-level bureaucracy, gathering internationally acclaimed scholars to address the varying roles of public officials who fulfill their tasks while interacting with the public. These roles include the delivery of benefits and services, the regulation of social and economic behavior, and the expression and maintenance of public values. Questions about the extent of discretionary autonomy and the feasibility of hierarchical control are discussed in depth, with suggestions made for the further development of research in this field. Hence the book fills an important gap in the literature on public policy delivery, making it a valuable text for students and researchers of public policy, public administration and public management