Allocation decisions on the ground: between dispositional adjustments and institutional framing

Based on an ethnographic survey carried out within six social housing organisations, this article reinvests the issue of social housing allocations from the perspective of the professional practices of those who implement them. It mobilises micro-institutionalist theory, combining the contributions of street-level bureaucracy and neo-institutionalism, to overcome certain pitfalls of ‘bottom-up’ approaches to public action, by articulating different levels of analysis and hierarchising the explanations of bureaucratic work. From this perspective, the study emphasises the weight of organisational logics and qualifies the weight of situational and dispositional factors. Indeed, while the social properties of employees shape their representations of the job and their actions, they are less decisive when it comes to explaining street-level bureaucrats’ behaviors. Similarly, the survey shows that although interactions at the counter can modulate certain allocation decisions, these adjustments remain few and far between and are contained by the institutional environment.