Administrative Justice: Guiding Caseworker Discretion

This thesis demonstrates how flexibility and constraint arise in the context of Ontario Works, a welfare program with a reputation as both rule-bound and discretion-rich. Based on a qualitative socio-legal study of front-line decision-making in five local offices across two southern Ontario municipalities, this dissertation explores how discretion functions at and behind the front-lines of the Ontario Works program. Drawing on legal and socio-legal literature, it demonstrates how in a formal sense discretion becomes explicitly and tacitly incorporated within discrete legislative provisions and, as these rules cross-reference one another, nested throughout an entire legal framework. Further, it shows how front-line workers animate these text-based grants as they perform operational discretion in their routine interactions with benefits recipients, such that it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish discretion from non-discretion at any specific decision-making moment. This thesis then shifts gears to argue that operational discretion is nonetheless guided by two factors: a shared methodology of normative balancing according to which workers reconcile competing legal and managerial norms; and a systematic diffusion of decision-making responsibilities among human and non-human actors such that decisions are produced and influenced by an aggregation of decision-makers. In doing so, it demonstrates how the effects of ideological divergence among caseworkers, on a spectrum ranging from pro-client social workers to black-and-white efficiency engineers, is minimized by the convergence prompted by normative balancing and aggregated decision-making. This thesis then reflects on how new regulatory technologies may subtly shift front-line workersâ perception of their roles as legal decision-makers, from caseworkers who perform discretion in relation to an audience of coworkers with whom they can reason to individuals who must covertly â manipulateâ the legal-technical system with which they are now governed.S.J.D