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Street Level Bureaucrats

Front line public servants tasked with providing benefits and sanctions to citizen. Street-Level Bureaucrats deliver public policies

Who are these SLBs?

Why Street Level?

Discretion

Flawed assumption that front line workers share the same objectives as their managers

Patterns of Practice aka Coping

"How is the job to be accomplished with inadequate resources, few controls, indeterminate objectives, and discouraging circumstances?" (Lipsky, p. 82)

"decisions of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures, effectively become the public policies they carry out.”

Street-Level Bureaucracy

Examination

Examples of Issues

Take Aways

Limitations

Examples

Creaming

Ignore human dimension

Distance from legislative bodies that create policy

Worker bias

Choosing those who are likely to succeed

Distance from the the Bureaucracies that dictate them

Authored by Michael Lipsky

Exercise:

  • Divided in into small groups with each group taking one example of how SLBs cope.
  • Identify issues with each.
  • How would you mitigate?
  • How does the concept of SLBs change you view?

Implications

  • Legislative branch-- potential of diversion from the intent of the policy
  • Judicial branch should be concerned with the constitutionality of the SLB’s actions
  • Executive branch and its bureaucratic agencies are responsible for the implementation and as such, are held accountable for the performance of SLBs.

Routinization

Inequality

  • Does not explain role of SLBs and policy change
  • Influence of SLBs understudied
  • Narrow focus with little to no attention to nonprofit workers who have similar qualities
  • Possibly with more distance, discretion, and autonomy and less measures of accountability

Stifles risk-taking

DISTANCE

  • Comparative approach to raising questions systematically
  • Opportunity to learn lessons, particularly in the area of implementation
  • Lipsky recommends increasing accountability by examining the “policy environment in which street-level bureaucrats function,” reducing discretion, restructuring incentives and sanctions, and investing in SLBs .

Rubber stamping

Goal diversion

Queuing

Adopting the recommendation of others

Such as a judge accepting the decisions of social worker or police officer or an ER doctor accepting the the judgement of the ER clerk

Assumed Balance

Lipsky's Definition

Compassion

and Flexibility

Impartiality

and

Rigid Rule Application

Degree of leeway to make professional judgement calls on the “nature, amount, and quality of benefits provided by their agencies” (Lipsky, 2010, p. 13)

Accountablity

Imposes cost on customers

sends messages about how to comply

SLBs Priorities

Other Pressures

  • the minimization of workforce danger and discomfort
  • maximization of income and gratification
  • less than optimal resources
  • huge caseloads
  • increasing demands
  • vague, conflicting or ambiguous goals
  • difficult to measure performance
  • SLBs provide services that unavailable elsewhere

Source: United States Studies Center

Ignores the human dimension

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