Ph.D. Project: Trust-based bureaucracy – paradox or potential for increased rhetorical agency in the public sector?
In 2021, a trust reform in public sector was announced in the Norwegian government's political policy document, Hurdalsplattformen. The government refers to the reform as one of their most important projects, with the aim to give "trust, time and power back to the frontline, the backbone of the welfare state, and it will be designed in close interaction with user organizations, union representatives and the management of all large public enterprises".
But how can trust be translated in this context? How to achieve trust-based governance and management in highly bureaucratic organizations, rooted in the administrations text culture that governs the front line and their activity? How to translate trust from abstract value to trust-based practice in a hierarchical system?
I combine a textual and practice-oriented document study with rhetorical criticism and a rhetorical reception study in the Labour and Welfare Administration (Nav) and with political actors in a broad perspective of “politics”. The material is a corpus of texts from both in- and outside of the political and admiration level, in a timeline that goes from 2017 and forward. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how a trust reform as an issue and as a practice is developed in and through documents, from the political level, admiration and “down” to the front line, and to what extent they – the street level bureaucracy – experiences increased empowerment through rhetorical agency when trust is put on the agenda.