To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: It can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held, because the wider community is unable to verify how the information was used. Instead, actions may need to conform to simple and widely verifiable rules. We st...

A dominant assumption in the street-level bureaucracy literature is that bureaucrats’ discretion curtailed by automated systems. Drawing on survey and factual data (n = 549) from Dutch inspectors, we test effect of automation enforcement style whether this can be explained discretion-as-perceived. Our results show (1) increases legal accommodation style; (2) discretion-as-perceived does not med...

Practice-based perspectives in information systems have established how, in every instance of use (i.e., work practices), the user exercises considerable discretion in their appropriation of the technology with local workarounds and situated improvisations. We analyse the relationship between technologically mediated work practices separated in time and space. Specifically, we analyse how simil...

What are the forces that influence strategic managerial decisions in the context of economic transition? In this paper, we analyse how strategic and governance forces influence the degree of discretion perceived by managers operating in the context of the transition economy of Russia. An exploratory case study provides insights about the managerial decision-making process in a transition econom...

The issue of controlling discretion in large public institutions is a crucial one in modern society, and procedural legal reforms are often viewed as one tactic of control. Using due process guarantees in juvenile courts as the substantive issue, this paper tests the utility of procedural reform in reducing discretion. Results indicate that procedural reform in the juvenile court has a quite li...

BACKGROUND Cognitive complaints involving problems with concentration, memory, decision-making and thinking are relatively common in the work force. The sensitivity of both subjective and objective cognitive functioning to common psychiatric conditions, stress levels and to cognitive load makes it plausible that psychosocial working conditions play a role in cognitive complaints. Thus, this stu...

We extend the standard agency framework to allow for complex information, trustworthiness of the principal, and incomplete contracts and show that contractual incompleteness arises endogenously when there is enough complexity and trust. Several predictions of the standard model break down in our more general construction: trust plays a crucial role in the design of optimal contracts; not all th...