Street-level Bureaucracy. Michael Lipsky

9 important questions on Street-level Bureaucracy. Michael Lipsky

What are street-level bureaucrats?

Public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work.

What are street-level bureaucracies?

Public service agencies that employ a significant number of street-level bureaucrats in proportion to their work force.

The decisions of street-level bureaucrats tend to be ...

Redistributive as well as allocative.
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Why do we see differentiation among clients?

Some clients simply evoke workers' sympathy or hostility.
Street-level bureaucrats respond to general orientations towards clients' worthiness or unworthiness that permeate the society and to whose proliferation they regularly contribute.

Aspects of practice that commonly contribute to routine control of clients:

1. Street-level bureaucrats interact with clients in settings that symbolize, reinforce and limit their relationship.
2. Clients are isolated from one another.
3.The services and procedures of street-level bureaucrats are presented as benign.

The possibility that decisions can be appealed also enhances the legitimacy of the bureaucracy to the client. For this to work two conditions must be met. What are they?

1. It must look like channels for appeal are open.
2. These channels must be costly to use, rarely successful and if successful not well publicized.

Two respects in which the structure of relationships between workers and clients appears to be derived from the particular character of American society:

1. Street-level bureaucracies are affected by the prevailing orientations towards the poor in the US.
2. The politics of the larger society affect street-level bureaucracies and their clients in the dynamic relationship between the requirements of providing services and their perceived costs.

Government policy is not likely to respond fully to the needs of citizens for what 2 reasons?

1. There is no agreement as to what those needs are.
2. There is a powerful imperative to maintain private responsibility for social needs and make dependency punishable by welfare, public hospitals and inner-city schools.

5 attributes that support change in street-level bureaucracies:

1. Public programs of entitlement and control provide at least the potential for mobilizing clients and sympathetic publics toward greater accountability in implementation and administration.
2. Professional norms of behavior toward clients provide a measure of resistance to bureaucratization.
3. Street-level bureaucrats by definition interact constantly with clients.
4. lower-level workers maintain a degree of control over their work environment.
5. There is a distinct but neglected precedent for organized public employees championing the needs of clients.

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