while public agencies rely, for their proper functioning, on the moral agency of street-level bureaucrats, they place these bureaucrats in a working environment that tends to undermine that very agency. This book explores how this predicament comes about and how we might respond to it. It seeks to address two questions: How do the pressures of everyday work gradually truncate the moral dispositions of street-level bureaucrats? And how can we equip such bureaucrats to respond to these pressures while remaining sensitive and balanced moral agents? — 11: 294-298
When making discretionary decisions, street-level bureaucrats ought to remain sensitive to these plural considerations—of efficiency, fairness, and responsiveness, as well as to that of respect, — 22: 501-502
To use a distinction made famous by Pierre Bourdieu, these bureaucrats belong to both the “Left hand” of the state, the one that delivers social services, and to the “Right hand,” the one that enforces order and economic discipline. — 23: 519-521
Three commonalities are particularly noteworthy: street-level bureaucrats are at the bottom of organizational hierarchies; they interact with clients directly; and they are vested with a meaningful margin of discretion. — 23: 534-536
By shedding light on how the bureaucratic encounter takes place in more traditional, face-to-face settings, the following pages will help us think more clearly about the proper role of technology in public service delivery. — 27: 603-605
This book draws on an eclectic array of sources. It engages with political theory in the Anglo-American and Continental traditions, with contemporary moral philosophy, and with social theory. But it also situates normative questions in a richly textured account of bureaucratic life that remains sensitive to institutional context and lived experience. This account builds on empirical research in anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology; on literary representations of bureaucracy; and on eight months of participant observation I conducted in an antipoverty agency. — 27: 609-614
While the NCDI started with a militant community empowerment agenda, it gradually morphed into a human services organization that both administers and helps clients apply for a wide range of governmental programs. — 29: 650-653
The NCDI thus combines service and regulatory functions and, given the volume of clients who pass through it, it is also effectively a “people-processing” organization—one whose primary function is not to change the behavior of clients but to confer “public statuses” on them. — 30: 660-662
As a response to the compliance model, I will seek to establish the following three claims: (1) Spaces of discretion at the street level are not simply “aberrations” that result from poor management (and that could, as such, be easily curtailed); (2) Such spaces of discretion necessarily involve normative judgment—by which I mean judgment that implicates questions of value—and not merely technical or “expert” rationality; (3) While spaces of discretion at the street level must be tightly controlled, we will often (though not always) have good reasons to preserve them. — 36: 780-787