SCHOOL PRINCIPAL AS A LOCAL POLICY TRANSLATOR:RETHINKING STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRACYIN DIGITAL COMMUNICATION OF EDUCATION REFORMS

Sergiy Yakovliev
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Sergiy Yakovliev: Leonid Yuzkov Khmelnytskyi University of Management and Law, Khmelnytskyi

Economic Synergy, 2026, issue 2, 366-383

Abstract: The article offers a theoretical rethinking of Michael Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy concept in the context of digital communication of education reforms. It is argued that the classical 1980 framework requires two interconnected theoretical extensions. The first extension concerns street-level bureaucrats themselves: in the digital era, teachers are not only executors and interpreters of policy but also simultaneous consumers of central digital communication, members of professional online communities, and witnesses to public audience reactions in social networks. The concept of the digitally-mediated street-level bureaucrat is proposed to capture this qualitatively new work configuration, with four additional dimensions added to the classical Lipsky's framework: a parallel consumer role in central digital communication, horizontal participation in professional online networks, observation of public reactions of policy audiences, and generation of informal feedback. The second extension addresses the level of the school principal. It is argued that the school principal is not a classical street-level bureaucrat but performs a function that conceptually requires distinct theoretical formulation. The concept of the local policy translator is proposed and elaborated as an analytical category describing the managerial figure positioned between the central executive authority and the teaching staff, who filters central digital signals, interprets them in the local institutional context, translates them into the language of in-school action, and simultaneously generates informal feedback. Five systemic features of this role are formulated — filtering, interpretive, translating, legitimating, and feedback-generating — and systematized in a comparative table with the classical street-level bureaucrat. The article connects the proposed concept with recent empirical research on principals as translators of inclusion policies and with the framework of digital discretion in public administration. It offers a conceptual framework for further empirical research on managerial mediation in digital communication of sectoral public policies, with particular relevance for the analysis of educational reform scaling from pilot to mass implementation.

Keywords: street-level bureaucracy; local policy translator; digital communications; public administration; education reform; public policy implementation; school principal; sense-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 D78 H83 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bja:isteus:y:2026:i:2:p:366-383

DOI: 10.53920/ES-2026-2-24

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