Street-level Bureaucracy; Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services

Lipsky examines what happens at the point where policy is translated into practice, in various human service bureaucracies such as schools, courts and welfare agencies. He argues that policy implementation in the end comes down to the people who actually implement it (teachers, lawyers, social workers). They are the 'street-level bureaucrats', and they exercise a large amount of influence over how public policy is actually carried out. Lipsky suggests that they too should be seen as part of the policy-making community.

He discusses several pressures that determine the way in which street-level bureaucrats implement policies. These include the problem of limited resources, the continuous negotiation that is necessary in order to make it seem like one is meeting targets, and the relations with (nonvoluntary) clients. Some of the patterns of practice that street-level bureaucrats adopt in order to cope with these pressures, are different ways of rationing the services, and ways of 'processing' clients in a manageable manner.

Lipsky concludes that there are potentially means of changing street-level bureaucracies to become more accountable to 'clients' and less stressful for the 'bureaucrats'. One of the ways of doing this, he suggests, is to move research from the ivory tower and onto the street, for example through conducting research while running a social work centre at the same time.