Examining the “in-between” of public encounters: Evidence from two seemingly disparate policy contexts

Face-to-face encounters, where public administrators and citizens interact, are one of the primary ways the public experiences the state. Recognized as crucial to the relationship between citizens and government for decades, scholarship on public encounters has developed around understanding the legal, organizational, and individual factors that affect the decision making of street-level bureaucrats. Research argues that what happens within public encounters are important contributing factors influencing street-level bureaucrats’ decision-making behaviors. This requires an approach examining the conditions under which encounters come to be, how the encounters are designed, the interpersonal and contingent communicative processes used, and the methods by which they are created and maintained by public administrators and citizens alike. We focus on these aspects through the concept of the in-between: the existential, processual space where interactions happen and produce something. Drawing primarily on Hannah Arendt’s writings on the human effort involved in creation of the in-between space, and Mary Parker Follett’s concepts of interweaving, we add to the conceptual framework of the in-between.