Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services Michael Lipsky Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services This book is in part a search for the place of the mdmdual m those public services iTaH ľtot kvel bureaucracies. These are the schoo Poľce and welfare departments, lower courts leeal éľ ScS' ľh 0ther agendeS «hoSelegwor^ pen atíoľ!f h ľ" "** dÍSCretío" orer *e *s-"". °f benefitS OT tte nation of public [...] «sTe6™,?'"6 "ľ"10118 of -treet^evei bureau-7'inven ľo ^ f^*' a"d the de™es 4Is i ľ°Pf ľ* uncertainfes and work :y c2 „„T í y í" the Public P°'--s y carry out. I argue that public policy is not best understood made in legrslatures or top-floor unes of h.gh-rankmg administrators, because Z important ways it is actually made in the c öwded offices and daffy encounters of street-level worfers I pojnt out that policy conflict is not only expres éd as the contention of interest groups teľ 1 located in the snaggles betwee/indivZworkÍo £^rwho challenge or ^ J^ zenľ at ST ^ *? ^ "^ cBeMs- and * zens-at-large experience street-level bureaucracies * the confltcts that they encounter in wanting ůeí organizational life to be more consistenľwľtif ťheí own preferences and commitments. ForZZ? Sle0"ľbenter PUWlC empl05'ment- P^S street-level bureaucraces, with at least some com- merest lawyers, and police officers in part seek out these occupations because of their p«eľtľai as *™;Sľ=^ Llpst, Copyrigh e 1980 RKseii sage 503 504 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES socially useful roles. Yet the very nature of this work prevents them from coming even close to the ideal conception of their jobs. Large classes or huge caseloads and inadequate resources combine with the uncertainties of method and the unpredictability of clients to defeat their aspirations as service workers. Ideally, and by training, street-level bureaucrats 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 requirements prohibit individualized service. Teachers should respond to the needs of the individual child; in practice, they must develop techniques to respond to children as a class. Police officers should respond to the implications of the presenting case; in reality, they must develop techniques to recognize and respond to types of confrontations, and to process categories of cases accordingly. At best, street-level bureaucrats invent benign modes of mass processing that more or less permit them to deal with the public fairly, appropriately, and successfully. At worst, they give in to favoritism, stereotyping, and routinizing—-all of which serve private or agency purposes. Some street-level bureaucrats drop out or burn out relatively early in their careers. Those who stay on, to be sure, often grow in the jobs and perfect techniques, but not without adjusting their work habits and attitudes to reflect lower expectations for themselves, their clients, and the potential of public policy. Ultimately, these adjustments permit acceptance of the view that clients receive the best that can be provided under prevailing circumstances. Compromises in work habits and attitudes are rationalized as reflecting workers' greater maturity, their appreciation of practical and political realities, or their more realistic assessment of the nature of the problem. But these rationalizations only summarize the prevailing structural constraints on human service bureaucracies. They are not "true" in an absolute sense. The teacher who psychologically abandons his or her aspirations to help children to read may succumb to a private assessment of the status quo in education. But this compromise says nothing about the potential of individual children to learn, or the capacity of the teacher to instruct. This potential remains intact. It is the system of schooling, the organization of the schooling bureaucracy, that teaches that children are dull or unmotivated, and that teachers must abandon their public commitments to educate. In the same way, the judicial system "teaches" that police officers must be impersonal and highly reactive to hints of disobedience among youth, and that judges are unable to make informed determinations or consign defendants to institutions that will help the offender or deter future offenses. Although the potential for thoughtful and useful determinations and interventions is not contradicted in any individual instance, the system teaches the intiaci-ability of the juvenile crime problem. Should teachers, police officers, or welfare workers look for other work rather than perpetuate unfair, ineffective, or destructive public practices? This would leave clients to others who have even less concern and interest in service ideals. It would moan giving up the narrow areas in which workers have tried to make a difference or in which some progress is foreseen. Should they stay on, contributing to discredited and sometimes brutalizing public agencies? If current patterns repeat themselves this would mean fighting the losing battle against cynicism a realities of the work situation, and watch service ideals are transformed into struggl personal benefits. Should they struggle from within to chan conditions under which citizens are process their agencies? This path seems the hardest to tain and is subject to the danger that illusions ference will be taken for the reality of sign reform. The structure of street-level bureaucracy fronts clients with dilemmas bearing on í Consumers of public services, once they decided on or been consigned to a place o dence, with rare exceptions cannot choose the services to which they will be subject. They accept the schools, courts, and police forces o communities. If they are poor they must also i the community's arrangements for health care fare, public housing, and other benefit prograi approaching these institutions they must strike ance between asserting their rights as ci accepting the obligations public agencii place upon them as clients. As citizens tl Street-Level Bureaucracy • 505 seek their full entitlement; as bureaucratic subjects and discretionary roles of street-level bureaucrats in they feel themselves obliged to temper their the face of the enormous and often well-deserved demands in recognition of perceived resource fimi- popular discontent with the effectiveness and quality tations and the agencies' organizational needs, of their work? Although it is apparent that exceptions are often [... ] made and additional resources often found, clients also recognize the potential costs of unsuccessfully i asserting their rights. [. . . ] Should I wait my turn and submit to the The Critical Role of procedures of the agency, despite reservations? I risk STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRATS being unable to gain attention to my particular needs and concerns. Should I speak out forcefully and Public service workers currently occupy a critical demand my rights? I risk the antagonism of the position in American society. Although they are nor-workers by disrupting office procedures. mally regarded as low-level employees, the actions Clients experience similar uncertainties in of most public service workers actually constitute attempting to obtain proper services through collec- the services "delivered" by government. Moreover, tive action. The parent who organizes others to when taken together the individual decisions of protest school actions, or the welfare recipient who these workers become, or add up to, agency policy, challenges welfare policy, even if he or she per- Whether government policy is to deliver "goods"— ceives the possibilities of collective responses, risks such as welfare or public housing—or to confer receiving a reputation as an unreliable troublemaker status—such as "criminal" or "mentally ill"—the toward whom favorable treatment should not be discretionary actions of public employees are the extended. benefits and sanctions of government programs or A final set of dilemmas confronts citizens who determine access to government rights and benefits, arc continuously, if implicitly, asked to evaluate Most citizens encounter government (if they public services. Indeed, recent legislative initiatives encounter it at all) not through letters to congress-u> limit state and local spending have largely been men or by attendance at school board meetings but understood as attacks on governmental performance through their teachers and their children's teachers iind the ineffectiveness of social services. and through the policeman on the corner or in the What are the policy alternatives? When all the patrol car. Each encounter of this kind represents an 'Tal" has been trimmed from agency budget and all instance of policy delivery. ihi: "waste" eliminated, the basic choices remain: Public service workers who interact directly with in Jurther automate, systematize, and regulate the citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have interactions between government employees and substantial discretion in the execution of their work cili/ens seeking help; to drift with the current turmoil are called street-level bureaucrats in this study. rh.u favors reduced services and more standardiza- Public service agencies that employ a significant lion in the name of cost effectiveness and budgetary number of street-level bureaucrats in proportion to controls; or to secure or restore the importance of their work force are called street-level bureaucracies. human interactions in services that require discre- Typical street-level bureaucrats are teachers, police j|"> intervention or involvement. officers and other law enforcement personnel, social iiu how much can human intervention be elimi- workers, judges, public lawyers and other court offi-d from teaching, nursing, policing, and judging? cers, health workers, and many other public employ-liLci is that we must have people making deci- ees who grant access to government programs and s and treating other citizens in the public ser- provide services within them. People who work in v We are not prepared as a society to abandon these jobs tend to have much in common because ■'•inns about people and discretionary interven- they experience analytically similar work conditions, i" machines and programmed formats. Yet how [.. . /As providers of public benefits and keepers °iiť advocate greater attention to the intervening of public order, street-level bureaucrats are the focus 506 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES of political controversy. They are constantly torn by teacher to be richly endowed in learning ability learn the demands of service recipients to improve effec- more than peers of equal intelligence who were not tiveness and responsiveness and by the demands of thought to be superior.1 Welfare recipients find citizen groups to improve the efficacy and efficiency or accept housing inferior to those with equal of government services. Since the salaries of street- disposable incomes who are not recipients.2 level bureaucrats comprise a significant proportion [... ] of nondefense governmental expenditures, any Finally, street-level bureaucrats play a critical doubts about the size of government budgets quickly role in regulating the degree of contemporary con-translate into concerns for the scope and content of flict by virtue of their role as agents of social con-these public services. trol. Citizens who receive public benefits interact [. . . ] with public agents who require certain behaviors of them. They must anticipate the requirements of CONFLICT Over these public agents and claimants must tailor their Interactions With Citizens fions má dfveloP "suitablf ***?* both ,0ľard, ___________^_^_ me servlces they receive and toward the street-level , , , bureaucrats themselves. Teachers convey and A second reason street-level bureaucrats tend f ^ . , t ... , : , r „ .,. ■ , ■ ,. enforce expectations of proper attitudes toward to be the focus or public controversy is the immedi- , ,. lc , ™~ . ., ■ .. _,..r. .... ,,- schooling, sell, and efficacy m other interactions, acy of their interactions with citizens and their „ ,. _ t ... , ^ -,,. , , . -, , t r™ -,. _, ,. ,, Policemen convey expectations about public behav- ímpact on peoples lives. The policy delivered by , ,, .t 0 . , , , , , . / ,. ior and authority. Social workers convey expecta- street-level bureaucrats is most oiten immediate ^ , ^ , ,. , f. , ,, * ,, , _ „ , . . , tions about public benefits and the status of and personal. They usually make decisions on the . . spot (although sometimes they try not to) and r , their determinations are focused entirely on the individual. [ ... ] y##*#i*^s'*C»?«y«?'r##*Ä The decisions of street-level bureaucrats tend to fi>^^M,^^^^^^^^^S' be redismbutive a> well as allocate. By determin- """sTOE^LE^Bl-U^tCRATS A- mg eligibility tor benefits they enhance the claims of some citizens to governmental goods and services at POLICY jMaKERS the expense of general taxpayers and those whose , . 1 , . j ■ j -r, ■ • j ■ Street-level bureaucrats make policy m claims are denied. By increasing or decreasing . . ^ . ..... , ~ ., u.,. t , . . . , related respects, lney exercise wide discretn benefits availability to low-income recipient popu- , . . , . . . t. t, ,. .,, , + t, , c í- decisions about citizens with whom they mti rations they implicitly regulate the degree of redis- _, , . . ,-■_,■■,, ,. ., ... ", ŕ -n u -j r i m , Then, when taken m concert, their individual ac tnbution that will be paid for by more affluent , ' , , . r add up to agency behavior. [ . . . ] sectors. sectors. In another sense, in delivering policy street-level bureaucrats make decisions about people that affect DISCRETION their life chances. To designate or treat someone as-----------------—---------------—-----_ . a welfare recipient, a juvenile delinquent, or a high Unlike lower-level workers in most organi/ ■ ■■ achiever affects the relationships of others to that street-level bureaucrats have considerable d K person and also affects the person's self-evaluation, in determining the nature, amount, and quii Thus begins (or continues) the social process that we benefits and sanctions provided by their age ■ ■•* infer accounts for so many self-fulfilling prophecies. Policemen decide who to arrest and whoso be The child judged to be a juvenile delinquent devel- to overlook. Judges decide who shall receivj ops such a self-image and is grouped with other pended sentence and who shall receive ma: ■'■ "delinquents," increasing the chances that he or she punishment. Teachers decide who will be siľ*[ will adopt the behavior thought to have been incipi- and who will remain in school, and ihey ,! ■ ent in the first place. Children thought by their subtle determinations of who is teachab" the most highly refined example of street-level bureaucratic discretion comes from the field of corrections. Prison guards conventionally file injurious reports on inmates whom they judge to be guilty of "silent insolence." Clearly what does or does not constitute a dirty look is a matter of some subjectivity.4 This is not to say that street-level workers are unrestrained by rules, regulations, and directives from above, or by the norms and practices of their occupational group. On the contrary, the major dimensions of public policy—levels of benefits, categories of eligibility, nature of rules, regulations and services—are shaped by policy elites and political and administrative officials. Administrators and occupational and community norms also structure policy choices of street-level bureaucrats. These influences establish the major dimensions of street-level policy and account for the degree of standardization that exists in public programs from place to place as well as in local programs. To the extent that street-level bureaucrats are professionals, the assertion that they exercise considerable discretion is fairly obvious. Professionals are expected to exercise discretionary judgment in their field. They are regularly deferred to in their specialized areas of work and are relatively free from supervision by superiors or scrutiny by clients. Yet even public employees who do not have claims to professional status exercise considerable discretion. Clerks in welfare and public housing agencies, for example, may exercise discretion in determining client access to benefits, even though their discretion is formally circumscribed by rules and relatively close supervision. Rules may actually be an impediment to supervision. They may be so voluminous and contradictory ih.it iliey can only be enforced or invoked selec-ok. In most public welfare departments, regulars .ire encyclopedic, yet at the same time, they are NM;intiy being changed. With such rules adherer lo anything but the most basic and fundamen-■ nivcepts of eligibility cannot be expected. Police hin ior is so highly specified by statutes and regu-I'oiis that policemen are expected to invoke the * selectively. They could not possibly make ''^K for all the infractions they observe during ^ir working day. (Like doctors and clergymen in Street-Level Bureaucracy • 507 many jurisdictions, they are required to be on-duty and ready to intervene even during their off-duty hours.) Similarly, federal civil-rights compliance officers have so many mandated responsibilities in comparison to their resources that they have been free to determine their own priorities.5 It would seem that the proliferation of rules and responsibilities is only problematically related to the degree of discretion street-level bureaucrats enjoy.6 Since many of the problems discussed here would theoretically disappear if workers' discretion were eliminated, one may wonder why discretion remains characteristic of their jobs. The answer is that certain characteristics of the jobs of street-level bureaucrats make it difficult, if not impossible, to severely reduce discretion. They involve complex tasks for which elaboration of rules, guidelines, or instructions cannot circumscribe the alternatives. This may be the case for one of at least two reasons. First, street-level bureaucrats often work in situations too complicated to reduce to programmatic formats. Policemen cannot carry around instructions on how to intervene with citizens, particularly in potentially hostile encounters. Indeed, they would probably not go out on the street if such instructions were promulgated, or they would refuse to intervene in potentially dangerous situations. Similarly, contemporary views of education mitigate against detailed instructions to teachers on how and what to teach, since the philosophy prevails that to a point every child requires a response appropriate to the specific learning context. Second, street-level bureaucrats work in situations that often require responses to the human dimensions of situations. They have discretion because the accepted definitions of their tasks call for sensitive observation and judgment, which are not reducible to programmed formats. It may be that uniform sentencing would reduce inequities in the criminal justice system. But we also want the law to be responsive to the unique circumstances of individual transgressions. We want teachers to perceive the unique potential of children. In short, to a degree the society seeks not only impartiality from its public agencies but also compassion for special circumstances and flexibility in dealing with them. 508 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES A third reason discretion is not likely to be eliminated bears more on the function of lower-level workers who interact with citizens than with the nature of the tasks. Street-level discretion promotes workers' self-regard and encourages clients to believe that workers hold the key to their well-being. For both workers and clients, maintenance of discretion contributes to the legitimacy of the welfare-service state, although street-level bureaucrats by no means establish the boundaries of state intervention. /"... 7 To the extent that tasks remain complex and human intervention is considered necessary for effective service, discretion will remain characteristic of many public service jobs. [■■■] Differences Between Street-Level Bureaucrats and Managers The maintenance and enhancement of discretion is so important that some detailed illustrations may be useful. Lower-court judges have recently encouraged the development of a great many alternatives to incarceration, in essence turning the courts into social work referral services. In Massachusetts and elsewhere lower-court judges can refer presumptive offenders to many social programs, the successful completion of which will result in obviating their sentences. These include programs to provide first offenders with counseling, job training, and placement assistance, and alcoholics, reckless drivers, and drug offenders with appropriate counseling. In addition, judges have the services of psychiatrists, social workers, probation officers, and others who might be able to provide treatment as an alternative to imprisonment. These developments have been conceived by humanitarian reformers who believe, along with many judges, that prisons create more criminals than they deter by exposing people to experienced crooks, and by pragmatists, who recognize that the courts have become revolving doors of repeat appearances without deterrent effect. It is conspicuous to court observers that these programs take a heavy burden off the judge. The judge is now able to make what appears to be a constructive decision rather than simply to choose between the unattractive alternatives of sending u person to jail or releasing the putative offender without penalty. Indirect evidence that these programs fill critical institutional needs is suggested by the Boston pretrial diversion programs. These programs were utilized beyond their capacity by judges, sometimes without regard for the extremely important initial interview or the relatively stringent eligibility requirements the programs sought to impose in order to maximize effectiveness. Dependent upon judges for referrals and, indeed, for their programs' existence, administrators found it difficult to refuse judges who referred too many clients, or inappropriate clients, to them.7 The Veterans Administration hospital system is a fascinating bureaucracy because it employs doctors, the preeminent professionals, in highly rule-bound organizations. The country's system of socialized medicine for the indigent veteran has developed an extremely complex series of rules because of simultaneous congressional concern to provide veic-mn*. with hospital services, maintain strict cost accounting, and (particularly in the past) not compete w;,i-private medical practice. In large part because VA system was to provide hospital care, leaving private physicians the business of office cohmiI tions, the VA hospitals were prohibited from tivaii patients on an outpatient basis. However, there was an allowable exception lo I rule limiting services to hospitalized velenu Under the "Pre-Bedcare" category (PBC) veiera who required health services prior to their ami-pated admission (for example, blood tests prior surgery) could be treated. Despite various reqnii ments intended to limit PBC treatment to the whose admission was clearly expected, acti admission to the hospitals from PBC lists wa tionally very low. It seems that doctors, c under the restriction that they could not treat p according to their best estimate of need, wert ing patients as outpatients under the fiction th were expected to be admitted. [.. . ] [I]t seei doctors were able to utilize existing burea structures to impose their views of proper tre. on the organization, despite organizational efl circumscribe their discretion. Street-level bureaucrats will also use existii ulations and administrative provision to circu reforms which limit their discretion. In December 1968, in response to pressure from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) adopted new tenant-selection guidelines designed to insure housing project racial integration. The plan utilized what was known as the "1-2-3 rule." To eliminate personnel discretion in assignments the 1-2-3 rule provided that prospective tenants would be offered places only in the housing projects with the three highest vacancy ratios. If these offers were refused, the application would be returned to the bottom of the waiting list. The BHA integration plan did not work. Many housing authority employees objected to assigning people to projects in which they did not want to live. They were particularly concerned for their traditionally favored clientele, the elderly, poor whites who populated the "better" BHA projects. Among the reasons the reform did not work were that housing authority personnel were so inundated with work that proper administrative controls were not feasible, and in the chaos of processing applications, ■se who wished to favor some prospective tenants ;r others were able to do so. Housing officials >k advantage of provisions for exceptions to the !-3 rule, interpreting reasonable provisions for xibility in extremely liberal ways when they nted to. They volunteered information to favored ■ispective tenants concerning how to have their ligations treated as emergencies or other high-oni\ categories, while routinely processing the iJications of others. Applications were frequently 1 m- misplaced so that workers could favor tenants ipl\ by locating their files and acting on them, nie other files remained unavailable for process-:. Meanwhile, public housing managers con-xued to the sustained biases of the agency by ling to report vacancies to the central office when '} occurred, not informing prospective tenants i"ii units were available, or showing tenants they ■•lial to discourage only unattractive or unsafe iu although others in the project were available, ■i^ i he press of work combined with workers' ■Mivs to continue to serve particular clients ^loi cd the discretionary powers the new rules were 'Sidled to eliminate.8 [■■■] Street-Level Bureaucracy • 509 7 Rationing Services: Limitation of Access and Demand Theoretically there is no limit to the demand for free public goods. Agencies that provide public goods must and will devise ways to ration them. [■■■] The rationing of the level of services starts when clients present themselves to the worker or agency or an encounter is commanded. Like factory workers confronted with production quotas, street-level bureaucrats attempt to organize their work to facilitate work tasks or liberate as much time as possible for their own purposes. This is evident even in those services areas in which workers have little control over work flow. For example, police often cannot control work flow because most police assignments are in response to citizen initiated calls. Dispatchers, however, make every effort to permit officers to finish one call before beginning another. Officers often take advantage of this practice by postponing reporting the completion of a call until after they have finished accumulated paperwork. In this way police officers regularize the work flow despite substantial irregularity in requests for assistance. [-■■] [Official efforts to influence the flow of work] range from the mild advisory of the post office providing patrons with information concerning the times when delays are likely to be longest, to the extreme measures taken by a New York City welfare office that closed its doors at noon rather than admit a greater number of Medicaid applicants than could be processed by available personnel in an eight-hour day.9 The Costs of Service [... J Confronted with more clients than can readily be accommodated street-level bureaucrats often choose (or skim off the top) those who seem most likely to succeed in terms of bureaucratic success 510 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES criteria. This will happen despite formal requirements to provide clients with equal chances for service, and even in the face of policies designed to favor clients with relatively poor probabilities of success. Employment counselors, for example, may send to jobs people who have the greatest chance to gain employment anyway, to the neglect of people who are more difficult to place. The Upward Bound program, dedicated to enriching the educational backgrounds of disadvantaged high school students, constantly had to guard against projects taking students whose chances of getting into college were already fairly high. Why does creaming take place, particularly in the face of official opposition to the practice? In every case of creaming the agency's incentives reward successes with clients, but they provide no substantial rewards for the risks taken. ... If all clients are equally worthy but all cannot be served, increasing the rate of personal or agency success becomes primary. Differentiation among clients may take place because of workers' preferences for some clients over others. First, some clients simply evoke workers' sympathy or hostility. Like the Israeli customs officials, workers may be inclined to "give the underdog a break"10 or may favor clients with similar ethnic backgrounds, as when racial or ethnic favoritism prevails in discriminatory decision making. The Boston Housing Authority workers who tended to favor white elderly applicants probably were responding to both ethnic and sympathy appeals when they selectively provided them with critical information. It would be as much of a mistake to infer that ethnic or racial appeals always prevail in affecting discretionary judgments as that they never prevail. Bureaucratic norms operate to restrict the range of determinations made in this way. Thus, black police officers may make particular efforts to act in role-prescribed ways when confronting black citizens. Displaying the complementary tendency, white bureaucrats may be more lenient or tolerant with black clients out of fear of being accused of racial biases. The report from San Francisco that black school children tended to receive good grades and were told that they were doing well in school, but in fact were not learning at an acceptable rate, is a vicious example of what can happen when street-level bureaucrats over-react to the potential for biased behavior. [■■■] A second circumstance of biased behavior is evident when street-level bureaucrats respond to general orientations toward clients' worthiness or unworthiness that permeate the society and to whose proliferation they regularly contribute. This is one of the most well-grounded generalizations that can be made concerning client processing. Juvenile omui judges determine sentencing severity on the basis ol' the apparent worthiness of the defendant. ' Policemen make decisions concerning citizens on the basis of whether or not they display respect. Trauma-team personnel tend to work harder to su\e the lives of the young than the old, the high-sunns citizen rather than the low.12 Other emergency personnel make moral evaluations of client, treat them accordingly.13 [■■■] [TJhere is every reason to think that the gi evaluations of social worth that inform the s( will also inform the decisions of street-level to crats in the absence of strong incentives t contrary. Í--.J Com rolling Culm n am» \w\ Work Situation /"..._/ In the previous chapters I discuss in which patterns of street-level practice fin ■ ration services. A second general function < ' level practice is not so much to limu ser ■ choose among clients, but to obtain client <. ■ tion with client-processing procedures. T1 that clients are expected to cooperate with ■ may not be consistent with agencies' policy . tions. It will, however, be consistent with sm bureaucrats' conceptions of how to prnce-- s with minimal risk of disruption to routine pi Street-Level Bureaucracy »511 [... J Here I consider selected aspects of practice that commonly contribute to routine control of clients. 1. Street-level bureaucrats interact with clients in settings that symbolize, reinforce, and limit their relationship. It is practically a cliche to observe that the severe appointments of a courtroom, dominated by a bench behind which a black-robed judge looks down at other courtroom participants, convey the power of the system of laws over the individual. Separate entrances for judges, commands to stand whenever the judge arrives or departs, and the unin-telligibility of the court clerk further contribute to the mysteries of the courtroom. Each service setting functions somewhat differently, but in their different ways each contributes to client compliance. Many offices in which people seek service are structured to separate clearly the workers from the clients by means of an imposing information desk. Clients, when interviewed, are led to "offices" that, lacking partitions, violate privacy by permitting everyone to view (and listen in on) everyone else's work. Fixed rows of desks in schools, all facing the teacher, physically represent ihc demand for order that teachers and schools require. Like uniforms, settings facilitate the functioning of the bureaucracies by drawing attention u> the location of power and cuing the expectations of clients. These messages are not accidental. They are fos-iiii ed by the agencies and generally consented to by ilic society. [. . . J Are clients important and valued as people? Provide them with comfortable chairs and sofas on which to sit while they wait, ask them if tiioy are comfortable, and reassure them if they must i that they have not been forgotten. Are clients of c account? Neglect these considerations and c a small, cramped waiting room with little atten-i iiuilable. It would be mistaken to think of service iiij^ as accidental. It is often a matter of policy I public services are able, or consider themselves ibie. to plan for client comfort. 2. Clients are isolated from one another. Public vice bureaucracies are organized so that clients ■c ImJe knowledge of others in the same position. )s* client processing is shielded from the scrutiny "ilia- clients. Isolated clients are more likely to nk "l themselves as responsible for their situations. They are unlikely to see their condition as a reflection of social structure and their treatment as unacceptable. When client processing is done in public, the impression is accurately conveyed that clients are competing with one another for the attention or favor of street-level bureaucrats. As suggested earlier, in the brutal realities of triage, clients perceive that they gain special treatment or the attention of workers only at the expense of other clients. The bureaucratic defense against special treatment is also germane here: "If I give it to you I would have to give it to everyone." In street-level settings in which clients do know each other—in schools, mental hospitals, prisons-—client control is fostered by the competitive systems of rewards, fostering among clients individual orientations rather than collective solutions to problem solving. Street-level bureaucracies tend to resist organization by clients when it occurs. They tend to regard client organizations as unnecessary, frivolous, likely to be irresponsible, or not representative of clients' true interests. There are no objective measures of the validity of such assertions. From some perspectives any or all might be true. However, these assertions are most usefully regarded as defenses against client organization, intended to diminish their influence among potential recruits or third parties whose support is sought, or to lay the groundwork for an intransigent official response. In the past decade prison inmates, black high-school students, and welfare recipients all have been regularly subject to such official responses when they have attempted to organize. Public officials often prefer to suppress or disorient client organizations because they can never be sure at what point they will peak or major concessions will be required. [.. . J 3. The services and procedures of street-level bureaucrats are presented as benign. Actions affecting clients are always taken in their best interest. Clients are expected to be grateful for benefits they receive. Where street-level bureaucracies constrain clients who are not regarded as guilty—as in schools, hospitals, and noncriminal arrests by the police (e.g., apprehension of alcoholics)—the ideology of benign intervention is particularly necessary to justify practices of questionable value to both client and worker groups. When combined with 512 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES clients' deference to the more extensive education, scarce organizational and personal resources. For training, and expertise of street-level bureaucrats, various reasons these practices sometimes prove the ideology that street-level bureaucrats' interven- inadequate, or they evoke client reactions that can-tion is in the interest of clients appears to be a not be handled through routine procedures. Cases particularly important instrument of control. that deviate from routine processing are not exempt [. . . ] from routinization, however. Instead street-level Street-level bureaucrats develop sanctions to bureaucracies call on additional practices to manage punish disrespect to routines of order. These sane- the first-round costs of processing people in routine tions are often particularly significant because they ways. These practices function to absorb dissatisfac-are invoked to affect compliance with bureaucratic tion with common procedures, thereby permitting order rather than to affect behavior relevant to ser- agencies to continue to process the majority of cases vice. For example, teachers, like policemen, have routinely, mechanisms that function to provide clues to poten- [ . . . ] tial troublemakers and to exclude from society (in the case of teachers, the society of the school) those Street-level bureaucrats regularly refer difficult whose offenses threaten the working fabric of the or problem cases to other people employed in their institution. Children who are suspended for not hav- organization. Often this is uncomplicated, as when ing a pass, arriving late to class, being absent exces- novices ask supervisors or more experienced work-sively, or smoking in the bathrooms are guilty not of ers to handle clients who present difficulties. The educational sins but may find interviews terminated referral of difficult cases to more experienced work-in the rare cases when they are not willing to con- ers hardly requires comment. From the point of view form to the (reasonable) procedures demanded of of service quality, the problem arises when referrals them by attorneys.14 At another point in the legal are made not because cases defy workers' abilities, process judges tend to sanction defendants on the but because they interfere with routine procedures, basis of the seriousness of rule violations, and also They must be treated as special by a bureaucracy on the basis of their lack of respect for agents of which cannot afford to hear complaints or vigorous the law.lfj dissent from decisions at the same time that other Some insight into the significance for street-level clients with similar claims but less inclination to bureaucrats of procedures fostering control over speak out are also being processed. The problem is clients can be gained by examining the implications kicked upstairs, not to seek expertise but to m ■■ of threatening to deny workers these procedural cop- dissent or noncompliance. Thus street-level It i ■ ing devices. The intensity of the resistance of police cracies introduce the "pressure specialist officers to citizen review boards can be associated hear and decide on clients who pursue their . with the fear that people who do not appreciate the vigorously. pressures and risks of police work will sit in judg- The pressure specialist serves in several ment on officers who do what they have to do in Dissenting clients are siphoned off, permiiun- ■ order to protect themselves. Teachers in traditional tine procedures to be imposed for the vasi ma schools similarly fear the removal of the sanctions Pressure specialists also perform onerous Li4 that, rightly or wrongly, they believe to be effective would otherwise taint the entire staff. For e\t i ■■ deterrents to student misconduct. severe punishments in schools are usually mob [■■■] by an administrator or designated disciplin protecting teachers from having to punish se1 '• „ students whom they are simultaneously ask Managing the Consequences instruct OF ROUTINE PRACTICE The availability of a pressure specialist in * ' ——————————————— respects protects the worker from the clients" *■ Street-level practices ration service, organize clients' negative feelings by providing an alternative to ' - passage through the bureaucracy, and conserve sion making. Rather than listen to clients comi'i ' Street-Level Bureaucracy »513 or worry that a decision may evoke client hostility, the worker can process the case through a pressure referral. Thus the worker's legitimacy is partially protected by the availability of a channel that places responsibility for difficult decisions in the hands of others. Workers can use the availability of pressure specialists to enhance the prospects of favored clients. For example, welfare workers often take pleasure in artfully presenting cases to supervisors in such a way that they are likely to endorse the worker's judgment. Or street-level bureaucrats can scuttle clients' prospects without clients' knowledge by giving the appearance of bureaucratic neutrality but privately providing damaging information to supervisors. The possibility that decisions can be. appealed also enhances the legitimacy of the bureaucracy to the client. For this to work on a sustained basis, however, two conditions raust be met. First, and quite obviously, it must look like channels for appeal are open. Second, and less obviously, these channels must be costly to use, rarely successful, and, if successful, certainly not well publicized. The reason for this is simply that if appeals channels were inexpensive to use or likely to be successful they soon would be used by clients seeking i učí eased benefits or a favorable disposition. The .'iiiinnels of appeal would soon be clogged, and the Manifest unfairness that some clients receive more Ihiti others because they sought more would under-niiie the system. Thus appeals ordinarily require long delays, the services of advocates, complicated administrative inucedures associated with filing, and general hos-filii> from the challenged agency.17 Recent innovations responsive to client pressure often require public agencies to publish the requirements for »|i|jeahng and inform clients of their rights to appeal, provide responses within a specified time poj-iod, and offer counsel to clients seeking appeals. Hiese innovations still require considerable determi->n and energy from individual clients. 1 ublic agencies also seek to insure that appeals ot be sought collectively. The appeals process function so long as a single client cannot gain -ss for a class of clients. So long as individ-clients cannot win benefits for groups, public agencies can ration the claims of large numbers of clients in many ways, and thus gain protection from an inundation of client demands. These observations are generally supported by examining the volume of appeals in public agencies. For example, through the early 1960s there was almost a total lack of appeals from welfare decisions, although federal law required each state to establish an appeals procedure. In New York City, where a relatively liberal welfare environment prevailed compared to the rest of the country, only 15 appeals were taken in 1964, although half a million people were on welfare at the time.18 Appeals can also be discouraged by the high probability that they will not succeed. Allegations of police brutality are rarely made through official channels because of the conviction that they will not receive a sympathetic hearing from the officers who sit on the hearing boards. In Rochester, for example, where 102 complaints alleging "unnecessary force" were registered in the five- to seven-year period after 1965, only two were upheld by the police internal inspection office; of the 368 alleging unnecessary force and other improper behavior, forty-six were sustained.19 A typical response of many public agencies to the claims generated by minority and women's rights movements has been to establish special units to hear citizen complaints and to take responsibility for institutional change in these areas. Police departments have established internal review boards (sometimes with outside citizen participation) and community relations units to present a sympathetic face to the black community. Public school systems have hired community relations specialists and affirmative action officers to take responsibility for the complaints of minorities and women and to articulate agency perspectives consistent with the interests of these groups. These steps have contributed to increased minority and female employment in the bureaucracies, symbolic rewards to these constituencies, perhaps genuine changes in the attitudes of some agency personnel, and possibly greater responsiveness to clients in some circumstances. However, these innovations also function to protect the bureaucracies from pressures for change, 06 514 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES and they insulate street-level bureaucrats from the need to confront certain client populations. Police departments channel what they label minority cases to human relations units when questions about racial attitudes are raised, freeing ordinary officers from having to resolve them. The affirmative action office takes responsibility for recruiting women to the work force, absolving the people who normally do the hiring from having to change their attitudes about female employees. Moreover, the ordinary worker recognizes the essentially symbolic and non-integral nature of the new unit and may display toward it the same antipathy extended toward the group it is supposed to represent. Thus community relations officers are correctly made to feel that they are not respected by patrol officers.20 Equal opportunity officers responsible for integrating work forces have to struggle to obtain respect from within the institutions that hire them. Í-..J 12 Tin IlumiiľK ľi'Mi \i mi Bureaucratic Relations In considering the potential for change in street-level bureaucracies it would be a mistake to restrict analysis to the coping dilemmas and adaptations of service workers, or the patterns of practice that develop among them. The resolution of contradictory tendencies in street-level bureaucracies cannot be understood without examining the role of these public agencies in the society and the ways in which the society impinges on the character of bureaucratic relations. In what ways do street-level bureaucracies reflect and perpetuate the values of the larger society? There are at least two respects in which the structure of relationships between workers and clients appears to be derived from the particular character of American society. First, street-level bureaucracies are affected by the prevailing orientations toward the poor in the United States. These orientations include the deep conviction that poor people at some level are responsible for the conditions in which they find themselves, and that receiving benefits labeled "for the poor" is shameful. These convictions are epitomized in the observation that public programs for poor people are almost always treated in the press as costs to society, not benefits. These attitudes toward social services foi the poor amount to a general stigmatization of poor people. Stigma leads to a general reluctance to join the deviant group in the society on the one hand, and on the other hand provides subtle justification 1'nr patterns of practice that result in inadequate sev\ ice provision. Prevailing attitudes toward the poor permit rationalization of patterns that result in client neglect, which would be more difficult to rationalize if clients were middle class and generally respected. The same may be observed in agencies of training and control. Some lower courts and public schools, for example, develop community reputations lor dealing mostly with low-income clients, and ihey develop patterns of practice that process people les^ respectfully than similar institutions with middle- class clienteles. Intersecting with attitudes toward the stigmatized poor are attitudes prevalent in the larger soi-ieiv regarding clients' racial or ethnic back ■ ■. Racism also affects the extent to whie. • . employees regard clients as worthy, and it a-extent to which patterns of practice ev< distinguish among clients in terms of thi backgrounds. Second, the politics of the larger sock-street-level bureaucracies and their clien1 dynamic relationship between the require . ■ providing services and their perceive Governmental initiatives for programs of si . ■ vice and control expand or contract, gri ■ " quickly or more slowly, in part depending ■■• ■ » relative degree of concern over crisis or cc■ ■ ■ ; periods of social turmoil or widely perceiv ' ■ (the depression of the 1930s, Ů\e ghetto r> ' the 1960s, the "Sputnik" crisis in edueatk ■" ■ 1950s) service benefits and/or funds for trai ■ control functions increase, in periods of rek'■ *. ■ escence pressures are exerted to return the ■ to a ratio of benefits to costs more favorable' *,0* Social analysts may disagree on the precise d • " of the dialectics of expansion and ci governmental social service and con But there should be little doubt Street-Level Bureaucracy • 515 bureaucracies that normally process clients vacillate in their generosity toward client treatment. Street-level bureaucracies are alternately able to treat clients with greater degrees of latitude and forced to restrict options and more narrowly designate benefits.21 In the current period street-level bureaucrats are under pressure to develop more restrictive patterns of practice. They are under pressure to increase case loads and to be more formally accountable, and they are generally asked to expand or maintain coverage in the face of static or declining budgets. [. . . ] It seems apparent that American street-level bureaucracies must be understood as organizational embodiments of contradictory tendencies in American society as a whole. The welfare state calls for and requires social programs to ameliorate the neglect and insecurity of the economic system, to prepare people for roles in the economy, or to manage their deviation from expectations of appropriate behavior.22 In the ideology of the welfare state humanitarian impulses are coincident with the requirements of system maintenance. This, of course, begins to explain how people with humanitarian impulses can work for impersonal, •nalistic, or repressive public service agencies. t people never question that the requirements of täte are congruent with the needs and interests of ; numbers of people. Thus, teachers with corn-ion for children work in brutalizing schools and ire themselves as victimized by the same system victimizes their pupils. Social workers with passion for poor people participate in assigning equate benefit levels to welfare recipients and i they could do more.23 he legitimacy of the political and economic an depends on the appearance of providing for e who cannot provide for themselves and onding openly and fairly to citizens' claims, lie service workers actively translate this require-t into programs. But government policy is not iy in fact to respond fully to the needs of citizens it least two reasons relevant to this discussion, ■irst, there is no agreement as to what those is are. What it means to "respond fully to citizen ds' is a socially determined concept albeit lI*ed by a process that gives more weight to icy elites than clients. As continuing controversies reas as health care, welfare, and legal services ie demands of citizens are open-ended while program costs must be kept within certain bounds. Indeed, the definition of those boundaries is the basic issue in social welfare policy making. Second, there is a powerful imperative to maintain private responsibility for social needs and to make dependency punishable by welfare, public hospitals, and inner-city schools. Granted that street-level bureaucracies exist outside of the welfare context, and that limitations on program expenditures must be encountered at some point. Yet it is not at all clear that the United States inevitably had to develop relatively low social service and benefit levels compared to other advanced industrial countries.24 In an assessment of income and service provision an independent role should be assigned to a perceived need among policymaking elites to limit benefit and service provisions, allegedly to enhance individual and family self-reliance and to stigmatize the status of worklessness and poverty. In short, this is a political system that, whatever its current levels of social welfare expenditures, must also symbolically project images of adequate and reasonably comprehensive social welfare programming to taxpayers and middle-class consumers, while in fact it limits support and assistance. Such a system develops mechanisms to maintain legitimacy and deflect criticism that the society does not provide adequately for its citizens. Street-level bureaucrats mediate between citizens and the state in that clients' inability to obtain benefits or services and inequities of distribution may be understood by clients as personal malfeasance of street-level bureaucrats or administrative agency disarray. Street-level bureaucrats' needs to control their work situations force them to defend themselves and the current arrangements. Agency expectations and occupational norms preclude the excuse that working conditions prevent effective efforts on clients' behalf, despite private recognition that this is the case. This defensiveness separates street-level bureaucrats from their potential allies in improving working conditions for mutual benefit. [■■■] Teachers, social workers, legal aid lawyers, and police officers all enter the work force at least in part. 516 . GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES with a desire to make a contribution to individuals or to the community. In some fields public agencies have a monopoly on jobs available to people in certain professions. Social workers may be able to seek employment in private as well as public agencies, but young adults aspiring to become police officers or teachers largely have to seek public employment if they want to work in these areas. Once attracted to these occupations, however, the dynamics of street-level bureaucracies combine to persuade workers that they are destined to be ineffective in their chosen fields, that clients may not substantially benefit from their efforts, or that conditions of successful intervention are not likely to be available. These conclusions are all the more persuasive because they appear to be substantially true, at least in the short run. It is difficult to aid clients in ways consistent with idealized conceptions of assistance within street-level bureaucracies as they are currently structured, particularly when the least experienced workers are thrown into the most difficult work environments. Thus, generations of thoughtful and potentially self-sacrificing people are disarmed in their social purpose. They come to believe that it is impossible to find conditions conducive to good practice, and that public agencies cannot be otherwise structured. Their choices appear to be to leave public employment for other work or to resign themselves to routine processing of clients while instructing the next generation of idealists that there is little sense in hoping for change or in rendering human services. Similarly, the practice of street-level bureaucrats leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy that relations with clients cannot change. The actions of street-level bureaucrats confirm for clients that they will continue to be treated as they have always been treated. This perpetuates the cycle of the irrelevance of professional help and reinforces tendencies toward despair and inaction. This is the most painful part of the estrangement of workers from their original purpose. These orientations reinforce the tendencies originating in the culture toward enhancement of private interests and the abandonment of social purpose. [■■■] Contradictory Tendencies in Street-Level Bureaucratic Relations Of the attributes that support change in street-level bureaucracies at least five should be noted. First, public programs of entitlement and control provide at least the potential for mobilizing clients and sympathetic publics toward greater accountability in implementation and administration. This consideration is likely to be important in pm portion to the population covered by service. One po*>-sibility is that public agencies will simply differentiaio among high- and low-status clients. But another is thai service will improve for all if high-status clients are included in the population mix. As public-health care delivery becomes more and more generalized and less the concern of low-income populations, it is more likely that clients will be able to have an impact on service quality. Likewise, parents of children in an integrated school can have a greater impact on the quality of service than can parents of a segregated schnnl whose needs can be more easily isolated. [■■■] Second, professional norms of behavior to1 clients provide a measure of resistance to bureai tization. Street-level bureaucrats' claims of pr< sional status imply a commitment that clu interests will guide them in providing service, implicit bargain between the professions and sot is that in exchange for self-regulation they will a clients' interest without regard for personal gain without compromising their advocacy. This is not to say that street-level bureaucrat not also confront organizational demands. On contrary, the essence of their dilemma is that are partly professional and partly bureaucr However, the potential for appealing to the pre sional dimension of these work roles means there is an irreducible minimum considerate importance of respecting clients' individui acting accordingly. Third, street-level bureaucrats by di interact constantly with clients. This prov salutary condition that workers must coi attend to the people they are supposed to si their problems. However elaborate the defense mechanisms developed to shield themselves from the enormity of clients' needs, street-level bureaucrats at some level retain a sense that the people with whom they come in contact are not sufficiently served by the agencies designated to do so. Thus, one might speculate that street-level bureaucrats more than other organizational workers are able to retain a concept of the notion of need in relation to what is actually being provided. This residual awareness may provide a resource that can be tapped. Fourth, lower-level workers maintain a degree of control over their work environment. Individually street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion to control the work situation. Collectively many street-level bureaucrats are able to have a significant say in the rules under which they are employed. Particularly at the individual level this discretion is not likely to be significantly eroded so long as street-level bureaucrats'jobs require them to make discretionary judgments that cannot be entirely programmed. Finally, there is a distinct but neglected precedent for organized public employees championing the needs of clients. Teachers have included limitations ~- classroom size as an objective to be sought 'ough collective bargaining. They have sought this jective not only to improve working conditions t also to create the environment in which they uld function optimally as teachers. Likewise, Jal workers have struck on behalf of improved ne 111 levels for clients.25 The cynic may wish to point out the strategic \aniage to public workers of couching bargaining jecrives in altruistic terms (although managers are ually guilty, insisting that they act on behalf of tpa> ers and the economic well-being of the com-uniry). Still, cynical or not, such alliances, the ill of politics, may be exploited by client groups, iiicularly when, in collective bargaining in the •u:l crisis, wage gains are subordinated to improve-cnis in working conditions. '1 lii- impulse to provide fully, openly, and responsí) for citizens' service needs exists alongside the -dl to restrict, control, and rationalize service 'adequacies or limitations. This is the central "»uradiction of social services. It is more than sim-]J u fension between costs and benefits. It is criti-1 reassure mass publics that their elemental Street-Level Bureaucracy • 517 needs will be taken care of if they are not met privately and to rationalize service inadequacies by deflecting responsibility away from government. Through street-level bureaucracies the society organizes the control, restriction, and maintenance of relatively powerless groups. Antagonism is directed toward the agents of social services and control and away from the political forces that ultimately account for the distribution of social and material values. Thus the American system of service delivery and control is shaped by the aspirations of the population and by the requirements of the larger political and social system. In this sense the United States, no less than other political systems, lends public bureaucracy its particular character. Notes 1. The seminal work here is Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968). 2. Martin Rein, "Welfare and Housing," Joint Center Working Papers Series, no. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Joint Center for Urban Studies, Spring, 1971, rev. Feb. 1972). 3. See Chris Argyris, Integrating the Individual and the Organization (New York: John Wiley, 1964), pp. 35-41. 4. Frank L. Morris, Sr., "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Black Political Group Activity in Two Northern Maximum Security State Prisons" (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1976), p. 40. 5. For example, the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has responsibility to monitor potential violations as follows: racial discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in 16,000 public school districts, 2,800 institutions of higher education, and 30,000 institutions of health and social services; in the same areas, discrimination against handicapped people under Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973; sex discrimination under Section 799A of the Public Health Service Act in 1,500 health education institutions, and under Section 745, sex discrimination in nursing schools; sex discrimination under Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972, in 16,000 public school districts; discrimination by federal contractors under Executive Order 11246, innumerable contractors at 863 higher-education campuses, and more than 3,500 additional locations. Virginia Balderama, "The Office of Civil Rights as a Street-Level Bureaucracy," unpublished seminar paper, University of Washington, March, 1976. 518 • GOVERNMENT AND NONPROFIT AGENCIES 6. David Perry and Paula Sornoff report that welfare workers' behavior with clients in California is ruled by 115 pounds of regulations; that the average police officer is obliged to enforce approximately 30,000 federal, state, and local laws. Perry and Sornoff, "Street Level Administration and the Law. The Problem of Police Community Relations," Criminal Law Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 1 (January-February, 1972), p. 46. 7. This paragraph is based upon personal observations, conversations with court personnel, and sustained discussions with workers in the Boston Court Resources Project. 8. See Jon Pynoos, "Breaking the Rules: The Failure to Select and Assign Public Housing Tenants Equitably," (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1974). 9. The latter case is cited by Barry Schwartz, Queuing and Waiting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 24. This excellent volume provides many insights into issues of priorities in client treatment and the costs of seeking service. 10. Brenda Danet, '"Giving the Underdog a Break': Latent Particularism among Customs Officials," in Elihu Katz and Brenda Danet, eds., Bureaucracy and the Public (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 329-337. 11. Robert Emerson, Judging Delinquents (New York: Aldine, 1969). 12. Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, "The Social Loss of Dying Patients," American Journal of Nursing, vol. 64 (June, 1964), pp. 119-121. 13. Julius Roth, "Some Contingencies of the Moral Evaluation and Control of Clientele: The Case of the Hospital Emergency Room," in Yeheskel Hasenfeld and Richard English, eds., Human Service Organizations, {Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1974), pp. 499-516. 14. Hosticka, "Legal Services Lawyers Encounter Clients: A Study in Street-Level Bureaucracy." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. 15. Maureen Mileski, "Courtroom Encounters," Law and Society Review, vol. 5, no. 5 (May, 1971), p. 503. 16. Rikva Bar-Yosef and E. O. Schild, "Pressures and Defenses in Bureaucratic Roles," in Elihu Katz and Brenda Danet, eds., Bureaucracy and the Public (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 295. 17. On the difficulty of filing complaints against the police see Walter Gellhorn, When Americans Complain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 186ff. 18. Frances F. Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare {New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 173. Piven and Cloward attribute the low number of appeals to the control of the welfare system over clients, resulting in their acquiescence to the system of welfare on its terms, a thesis consistent with earlier arguments in this book. 19. David C. Perry and Paula Sornoff, "Politics at the Street Level; The Select Case of Police Administration and the Community" (rev. version of a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1972), pp. 62-63. 20. See, for example, David C. Perry and Paula Sornoff, "Street Level Administration and the Law: The Problem of Police-Community Relations," Criminal Law Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 1 (January-February, 1972), p. 54. 21. The dynamics of the dialectic of expansion and contraction in public service benefits are treated in Frances F. Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor (New York: Pantheon, 1971). See also Michael Lipsky, Protest in City Politics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970), chap. 2; Murray Edelman, Political Language (New York: Academic Press, 1977), chap. 3. 22. For illuminating discussions of the role of so welfare programs, broadly conceived, in contempoi American society, see James O'Connor, The Fiscal Ci of the State (New York: St. Martin's, 1973); Piven Cloward, Regulating the Poor; Ira Katznelson, "The Ci ■ of the Capitalist City: Urban Politics and Social Contr in Willis Hawley and Michael Lipsky, eds., Theoren Perspectives on Urban Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N I Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 214-229. 23. See Jeffry Galper, The Politics of Social Sen'i {Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975). 24. On national variations in welfare benefit levels; administrative organization see Harold Wilensky, í Welfare State and Equality: Structural and Ideologi Roots of Public Expenditures (Berkeley, Calif.: Univers of California Press, 1975). 25. For one example of public employees seek improved services for citizens see the efforts of Service Employees International Union to obtain bel patient care and treatment facilities at Bostr~ ^ Hospital. 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