Handing Off: Frontline Redistribution of Work

In the governance of poverty and marginality, a complex array of frontline workers manages social suffering. Enabled and constrained by vertical and horizontal relations of production, these workers frequently redistribute work across organizational boundaries. Recent scholarship often reduces such redistribution to a single dynamic: “burden shuffling.” This study extends and complicates that framework. Drawing on three case studies—ambulance crews, mandated reporters of child maltreatment, and physicians treating chronic pain—we theorize how frontline workers’ practical and moral judgments structure the form and justification of redistribution. Variation in the extent to which workers feel equipped and see tasks as worthwhile produces three distinct tactics: burden shuffling (when ill-equipped workers offload tasks they do not consider worthwhile), aspirational referrals (when ill-equipped workers seek better-equipped actors for tasks they view as worthwhile), and abandonment (when well-equipped workers disengage from tasks they deem unworthy and leave them to others). By disaggregating redistribution and tracing its relational conditions, this article shows how governance is enacted—and deferred—on the frontlines, and we offer a framework for understanding how workers navigate fragmentation and uneven responsibility in contemporary labor.