			Home About us Contact

Street-level Bureaucrats (street-level + bureaucrat)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	50%
Humanities and Social Sciences	33%

Selected Abstracts

In Their Own Words: The Voices and Experiences of Street-Level Bureaucrats

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 2 2005
Norma M. Riccucci
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Urban Service Partnerships, ,Street-Level Bureaucrats' and Environmental Sanitation in Kumasi and Accra, Ghana: Coping with Organisational Change in the Public Bureaucracy

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 1 2006
Richard Crook
This is an empirical case study of ,street-level' officials in a classic ,regulatory' public agency: the Environmental Health Department in Kumasi and Accra, Ghana, where privatisation and contracting-out of sanitary services have imposed new ways of working on Environmental Health Officers. Both internal and external organisational relationships are analysed to explain the extent to which these officers have adapted to more ,client-oriented' ways of working. Their positive organizational culture is credited with much of the positive results achieved, but was not sufficient to cope with the negative impact of politically protected privatisations on the officials' ability to enforce standards. Nor could it entirely overcome the deficiencies in training and incentive structures which should have accompanied the changes in service delivery. [source]

Street-Level Bureaucracy, Interprofessional Relations, and Coping Mechanisms: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Workers in the Sentencing Process

LAW & POLICY, Issue 4 2009
SIMON HALLIDAY
This article builds on the work of Michael Lipsky and develops an argument about the significance of interprofessional working for street-level bureaucracy. It presents an ethnographic analysis of criminal justice social workers writing presentence reports for the Scottish courts. Social workers' report writing for judges brought into relief issues of relative professional status. Social workers were uncertain of their place within the legal domain and concerned about their credibility as criminal justice professionals. Reports were written, in part at least, as a way of seeking esteem and credibility in the eyes of judges,a motivation that undermined the policy objectives of social enquiry in sentencing. Applying the conceptual tools of Bourdieu to our findings, we argue that street-level bureaucrats who have to work across bureaucratic "fields" may find, or fear, that the cultural and symbolic "capital" they retained within their own field is undervalued in the symbolic economy of new fields, putting them in a position of relative inferiority. This issue of relative professional status, and how officials respond to it, is significant for our understanding of street-level bureaucracy. [source]

The Magic of the Populace: An Ethnography of Illegibility in the South African Immigration Bureaucracy

POLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
Colin Hoag
Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegibility in the public's encounter with the state. Much of this work has taken the perspective of the public, however, and less has been said about how functionaries of the state perceive their interactions with the public. This perspectival bias needs to be overcome through ethnographies of the state and of state bureaucracies in everyday practice. This article examines the Immigration Services Branch of the South African Department of Home Affairs, a state bureaucracy widely deemed "illegible" by South Africans and non-South Africans alike. It documents some of the factors that inform the actions of street-level bureaucrats, illustrating how bureaucrats develop systems of meaning to help them mitigate the challenges posed by an unpredictable populace and management hierarchy. These systems serve to stabilize these two unstable entities, but they also enable officials to act in ways that might run counter to official discourse while simultaneously upholding its legitimacy. Their stabilization efforts therefore incite a destabilization of the state, leading it to appear as "magical" or "illegible" to the public. [source]

STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRACY AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2007
PETER HUPE
The concept of ,street-level bureaucracy' was coined by Michael Lipsky (1980) as the common denominator for what would become a scholarly theme. Since then his stress on the relative autonomy of professionals has been complemented by the insight that they are working in a micro-network of relations, in varying contexts. The conception of ,governance' adds a particular aspect to this: the multi-dimensional character of a policy system as a nested sequence of decisions. Combining these views casts a different perspective on the ways street-level bureaucrats are held accountable. In this article some axiomatic assumptions are drawn from the existing literature on the theme of street-level bureaucracy and on the conception of governance. Acknowledging variety, and arguing for contextualized research, this results in a rethinking of the issue of accountability at the street level. [source]

Seeing the full picture?

NEW TECHNOLOGY, WORK AND EMPLOYMENT, Issue 1 2010
Technologically enabled multi-agency working in health, social care
The implementation of local e-government in England touched all public services and affected front-line workers across local authorities and partner agencies. Professional ,cultures' are invoked rhetorically as barriers to the translation of this policy into practice. We propose that the concept of ,street-level bureaucrats' offers a more nuanced and grounded framework to think about local responses to centrally driven change. [source]