“Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service”

Reading for 205

By Michael Lipsky

Street-level bureaucracies:

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, typically are teachers, police offices and other law enforcement personnel, social workers, judges, public lawyers and other court officers, health workers, and many other public employees who grant access to government programs and provide services within them.

Dilemmas line where:

Those are potential socially useful roles, yet the very nature of this work prevents them from coming close to the ideal conception of their jobs. Large classes or hug case-loads and inadequate resources combine with the uncertainties of method and the unpredictability of clients to defeat their aspirations as service workers.

Ideally, by training, these street level bureaucracies respond to the individual needs or characteristics of the people they serve or confront.

In practice, they must deal with clients on a mass basis, since work requirement prohibit individualized service.

Street level bureaucrats are often the focus of political controversy, due to:-

1. torn by constantly demand for service recipients to improve effectiveness and responsiveness and by the demands of citizen groups to improve the efficacy and efficiency of government service;


2. the immediacy of their interactions with citizens and their impact on people’s live;


3. play a critical role in regulating the degree of contemporary conflict by virtue of their roles as agents of social control

The role of Street level bureaucrats as policy makers

They make policy by exercise wide discretion in decisions about citizens with whom they interact, then, when taken in concert, their individual actions add up to agency behaviors

Discretion, is considerable in determining the nature, quality and process of service provide, yet not without constrain of rules and regulations.


Results:

Some of them drop out or burn out relatively early in their careers.
Those who stay on often grow in the jobs and perfect techniques, but not without adjusting their working habits and attitudes to reflect lower expectations for themselves, their clients and the potential public policy.

This rationalizing process can be seen as “maturity, or appreciation of practical and political realities, or more realistic assessment of the nature of problem”, but it only summarized the prevailing structure constraints on human service bureaucracies.

The structure of street-level bureaucracy confronts clients with dilemmas bearing on action. In approaching these services, the clients must strike a balance between asserting their rights and accepting the obligations public agencies seek to place upon them as clients. Citizens continuously confront the public policy and inefficiency of social service.

Any Solution?

Basic choices remain:

Further automate, systematize, and regulate the interactions between government employees and citizens seeking help;
More standardization in the name of cost effectiveness and budgetary controls;
Secure or restore the importance of human interactions in service that require discretionary intervention or involvement.