This paper explores how new regulatory technologies and front-line decision-makers reshape one another. Drawing on a recent qualitative study of caseworker decision-making in the Ontario Works program, it demonstrates the dialectical relationship between new case management software and caseworkers. While new technologies may attempt to deskill and decentre front-line decision-makers, transforming them into data entry clerks, caseworkers learn how to expertly translate and input client data to produce decisions that more closely match their interpretation of clients’ needs and welfare laws. The ways in which workers “manipulate the system” to produce a particular decision, though common knowledge among their colleagues, are black boxed to program managers, auditors, and benefits recipients.

The purpose of this paper is to advance an approach to analyzing decision-making by front line public officials. The notion of discretion in front line decision-making has been examined widely in the law and society literature. However, it has often failed to capture the different kinds and levels of decisions that enforcement officials make. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on political, sociological, and legal analysis, we propose a new conceptual framework, one that draws a sharper distinction between discretion and judgment and teases out distinct levels in the scope and depth of decision-making. We then use this framework to create a conceptual map of the decision-making process of front-line officials charged with enforcing the Employment Standards Act (ESA) of Ontario, demonstrating that a deeper, more precise analysis of discretion and judgment can contribute to a richer understanding of front line decision-making and its social, political, and legal implications.

A “just punishment” is increasingly structured by actuarial probability frameworks. Actuarial risk technologies are often characterized as having supplanted much of practitioners' discretionary decision making with structured, quantitatively derived decision-making templates. Some scholars maintain that the transition to risk-based penality has led to “deskilling,” “scientification,” and “erosion of professional discretion,” or even to the elimination of criminal justice practitioners' use of professional discretion. This paper uses data from 71 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with criminal justice professionals to analyse how the introduction of risk tools shapes but does not eliminate discretion. We argue that risk tools are not simply imposed on criminal justice practitioners; instead, practitioners actively resist and embrace risk technologies and temper the impact risk tools have on their discretionary decision making. We maintain that the adoption of risk technologies reflects a negotiated process whereby practitioners welcome the professional advantages that these technologies afford while affirming the centrality of experience and clinical knowledge in decision making. We show how practitioners differentiate between the standardization intended by risk assessments and their own experiences and clinical knowledges, and how they exercise their discretion in an effort to mitigate the perceived discriminatory effects of the risk assessment. Thus, although risk tools are appealing to practitioners because their supposed “objectivity” makes them more defensible to the public, the adoption and use of these tools in the context of professional decision making is more complex and contradictory than much of the theoretical literature has assumed.

Discretion on the part of front-line border officers is fundamental to exploring how nation-states sort out mobile populations at and near international borders. This discretion involves not only decisions about when, on whom, and on what legal grounds to act but also decisions about when and on whom not to act. Examination of non-actions completes the range of information needed to delineate unequal social sorting by the state. Unequal sorting is specified in the analysis of field materials through a novel prism, paying attention to why and how certain borderlanders are trusted in enforcement settings while others are considered potential risks. The allocation of trust and risk proves interestingly complex, revealing several major processes operating simultaneously, both class and race inequality and the enactment of the territorial nation-state.