Dismantling the Weberian Orthodoxy: Bureaucratic Discretion, Street-Level Sovereignty, and the Reconfiguration of Administrative Legitimacy in Post-NPM Governance Regimes

Abstract

Contemporary public administration scholarship has long operated under the normative primacy of Weberian hierarchical rationality, yet mounting empirical evidence from multi-level governance systems challenges the internal coherence of this framework. This study examines the structural tensions between formalized procedural compliance and discretionary decision-making among frontline public servants across four OECD jurisdictions, employing a comparative institutional analysis grounded in 847 semi-structured interviews and administrative process-tracing data. Drawing on neo-institutionalist theory and Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy paradigm, the findings demonstrate that post-New Public Management governance architectures systematically expand informal administrative sovereignty while simultaneously suppressing its normative recognition. These contradictions erode vertical accountability mechanisms and reconstitute legitimacy through horizontal, networked forms of inter-agency deliberation. The paper proposes a revised analytical framework—Discretionary Legitimacy Governance—that reconciles procedural fidelity with adaptive administrative agency in complex policy environments.