“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.

Reading "Bureaucracy and legitimate authority"

By Max Weber

Three types of Authority:-

Type of authority	Authority Ground	Obedience Character
Legal Authority	Rational Ground	Owed to legally established impersonal order, by virtue of formal legality of their command and within the scope of authority of the office
Traditional Authority	Traditional Ground	Owed to person by traditional sanctioned position of authority, it is a matter of personal loyalty,within the area of accustomed obligations
Charismatic Authority	Charismatic Ground	based on personal trust in his revelation, his heroism or his exemplary quality, within the scope of the individual belief in his charisma

Bureaucracy structure has the following characters:-

• its authority is dominated by the principle of appointment, not elected, appointment is by free contract


• Technical qualification which are formalized and impersonalized by roles and procedures.


• Rational and supreme to other forms of organization, in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline and in its reliability

Social consequence:

• levelling in the interest of broadest possible base of recruitment in technical competence


• Plutocracy


• formalistic impersonality

The greatly levelling of status, creating favourable situation for development of bureaucracy by eliminating the office-holder who rules by status and privilege other than technical ability

Reading "Client contact and emotional labour"

By Kathryn Lively

Key points from this research work:-

Emotional labour, refers to the conscious attempts of workers to bring aspects of their emotional display, or their emotional reactions, in line with corporately mandated emotion or display rules to created feeling states in others (Hochschild, 1983)

The purpose of this study is to examine and determine the difference of the emotional labour performed by paralegals working in small consume-oriented law firm vs. large commercial-oriented law firms.

Conclusion:-

1. The paralegals in consumer-oriented firms have greater levels of involvement and authority, higher emotional labour and the interpersonal relationship than those from commercial-oriented law firms;


2. Though as matter of facts, the paralegals from consumer-oriented firms have less prestigious, lower salaries. But they enjoy the great substantive involvement in controlling clients, have the ability to both undermine and strengthen manager's attempts at regulation of employee's lever or productivity, quality of service, behaviour, emotional display etc.


3. In consume-oriented law firms, paralegals seems to performed less emotional labour in the courser of their interaction with their own attorneys, than their counterparts.


4. The leveling of status difference among workers and management and condition under which lower status workers and management may be released by their obligation to provide bosses with showers of deference, in otherwise hierarchically ordered setting.
   
   

Therefore, the difference in the emotional labour in office, in countermanding request, and commercial-oriented paralegals is not really matter of more or less but a matter of who and why.

Deference- by Edward Shils

Reading summery:

Deference Acts of appreciation of derogation, both positive or high deference and negative or low deference to derogation.

Bases of deference- evoked by the perception in the person or classes of persons perceived, of certain characteristics or properties of their roles or actions. Which is called "deference entitlement", there are not temperamental qualities, thought that may be "deference relevant". Each of deference entitlement has property of charismatic significance. e.g. occupational rule, as one of the most significant entitlement to deference.

Deference Behavior. Deference towards another person is an attitude which is manifested in behavior.

Status, though has other sociological means, is referring to deference position here. Status is not a substantial property of the person arising automatically from the possession of certain entitlements, but an element in a relationship between the person deferred and the deferent person.

Deference action has always been a part of other actions, it seldom appears as deference action alone, but an important part of interaction. It is in attenuated, pervasive and intangible form mingling with all sorts of relationship through tone of speech, demeanour, precedence, frequency and mode of contradiction.

The distribution of deference

Deference is related to objective concept of social stratification.
The attempt study to establish a composite index has proven to be unsatisfactory.
The status index is however amalgamated with objective and subject concept of social and stratification. Status means a total status included both deference entitlement and position constructed by an external observer.

Deference system, territorially dispersed into the local system which are more differentiated to those who participate in them than in the national system.
In local system, deference is more frequently and continuously, while national level differences are less frequently, and less continuously, though it had been more integrated and Incorporated with local systems.

Individuals whose preoccupation are mainly with the local deference system, place themselves on macro-social deference map. This self-location and the perception that others are also locating themselves in the precondition of a sense of affinity, among the similar occupation roles, style of life, or elements of these sense of affinity.

Thus, formation of deference-strata is a process of mutual assimilation of local deference into a national deference system.