KEY TAKEAWAYS from

Cops, Teachers, CounselorsStories from the Front Lines of Public Serviceby Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno (2003)

Presented by Ann WangOriginally presented for PA 715 in Fall 2013

May 13, 2015

Presentation Roadmap

• Objective: Provide an opportunity for public administration students to reflect on the challenges faced by street-level bureaucrats and the potential impact of those challenges on policy implementation

• Agenda:• Warm-Up• Review the policy cycle• Review origins of “street-level bureaucrat”

concept• Introduction to Cops, Teachers, Counselors• Review of coping mechanisms• Implications for PA students: Policy and ethics• Discussion

Warm-Up

• 1 min: Silently read the excerpt • 1 min: Turn to you neighbor and

discuss the following questions:• Is there an ethical issue in this case?• Should a caseworker have this much

discretion? How could this discretion impact policy fidelity?

A review of the Policy Cycle

Problem Identification and Agenda Setting

Policy Formulation

Policy Adoption

Policy Implementation

Policy Evaluation

Policy Termination or

Change

Jones’ (1970) and Laswell’s (1971) Stages-Heuristic Model

A closer look at implementation

Policy Implementation

Macroimplementation by State Agents

Microimplementation by Street Level Workers/ Citizen Agents as they interact with citizens

Street-level workers are important decision makers. They deliver the services; they actualize policy. (p. 11)

Street-level decisions lack the consistency and coherence to be called policy. A street-level worker may handle similar cases in different ways, and workers from the same jurisdiction may handle cases differently. (p. 12)

Street-Level Bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1969, 1980)

• Definition: People employed by government who:• Interact regularly with citizens in their jobs• Have significant discretion in job decision-

making• Have big impact on the life of their clients and

intended policy outcomes, both positive and negative

• Examples: Teachers, social workers, policeman, judges, lawyers, prison guards

• Unique challenges: Huge caseloads, ambiguous agency goals, inadequate resources, and the related conflict between high levels of individualized customer service and the necessity of routinizing to handle volume

Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno (2003)

• Contribution to the field: First major study of street-level bureaucrats to rely on storytelling

• Why stories?• Can be prompted more naturally• Are less “obtrusive” (28)• Allow for more two-way interaction

between the audience and the storyteller• Reveal the norms and judgments of the

storyteller because they are “highly selected and continually emended portraits” of the self and others (32)

Background & Methodology

• Three years of fieldwork• 6-10 months at five research sites in the

southwest and midwest• Police officers (19), Vocational rehab

workers (19), Teachers (10)• Story collection, observations, entry and

exit interviews, collection of agency documents

Why cops, teachers, and counselors?

• Constant face-to-face interaction with citizen-clients relationships and intimate knowledge of clients’ lives, therefore difficult not to get emotionally involved

• Strong occupational identities

• Work lives shaped by complex network of government organizations imposing various rules and procedures, paired with large degree of autonomy in policy execution. Often see themselves as working “against the system” or against “management”, which aren’t always designed to benefit the client

• Three pairs of poles: Deadening routine and moments of panic, chaos, and violence; benevolence and revulsion; and hopelessness and accomplishment

Coping with Discretion: Response Types

1. Provide routine treatment that follows policy requirements and helps the client in a basic way

2. Provide routine treatment that follows policy requirements and punishes the client; “abuse by the book”; tough sentencing

3. Provide extraordinary service beyond policy requirements

4. Engage in conflict with client over goals

5. Not follow the law (e.g. by overlooking an offense) to give the client “a break”

Coping with Discretion: Belonging

“Workers recognize themselves as belonging to racial, class, gender, and sexual groupings and as public employees belonging to professional groupings…Identity enclaves, or recognized social networks of shared identity, are a source of bonding that cuts through the ranks of the agency, producing comfort zones and power bases for group members (p. 20, 72)

Coping with Discretion: “Applying a fix”

“Appearance, skin color, gender, and age are filled with social meanings and provide workers with quick composites…in figuring out who a person is, front line workers also can put a fix on people, assigning them a social identity or group belonging…especially in first encounters where fear and danger are evident, street-level workers tend to use their powers of cultural definition to flatten peoples identities or (en)force their membership in stigmatized social groupings” (p. 53)

Coping with Discretion: Developing Relationships

“Prolonged interaction encourages street-level workers to see common ground, whereas short-term contact highlights differences…stories of sustained interactions between workers and citizens tend to offer thick accounts of who people are imbuing citizens with complex identities and presenting positive outcomes that signify the rewards of street-level work” (p.54)

Coping with Discretion: Ego

“Workers expect civility in conversation, a willingness to listen to their views of the situation, and often deference to their advice…When civil and deferential conduct is revealed, workers show benevolence and sometimes go well beyond the scope of their duties to improve citizen clients’ conditions” (p. 92)

Coping with Discretion: Worthiness

“Street-level workers cannot fight the system for every citizen-client or even every deserving citizen-client. Advocacy is one of street-level workers’ scarcest resources. They lack the time, the tolerance, or the goodwill of their supervisors to push and push for everyone. They reserve this resource for the worthy few.” (p. 119)

Coping with Discretion: WorthinessGuiding questions for the determination of worthiness (and therefore the amount of or direction of expenditure of effort):1. How is the client like me?2. Who is responsible for the client’s problem? Is it

the client?3. Is the client’s goal reasonable?4. Is the client committed to the goal? Does the

client show follow through?5. Does the client respect me and follow my

directions? Is the client irritating?6. Is the client a “good guy” or a “bad guy”?7. Will helping this client ultimately benefit society?

Potential Policy Conflicts

Street-level workers…make their work harder, more dangerous, and, in the bureaucratic sense, less successful in their efforts to help or harm citizens (p. 20)

Street-level workers see themselves as moral actors working in opposition to the system and rarely describe themselves as a part of it (p. 22)

“For the worthy clients, street-level workers are also willing to trade bureaucratic failure for client success. In human services [for example], bureaucratic success is measured in case closures. (p. 119)

Bringing in some PA800:Box (2015) on Administrative Ethics

Three approaches (Svara, 2015):• Virtue• Principle• Consequences

Six Pillars of Character (Ethics by Virtue)Michael Josephson (2006)

1. Trustworthiness2. Respect3. Responsibility4. Fairness with consistency,

equality, openness, due process, impartiality, and equity

5. Caring with causing no more harm than necessary, and benevolence

6. Citizenship

Ethics by Principle

• Reliance on documents:• Laws• The Constitution

• Issues:• Conflicting principles• Dealing with exceptions• Situations where no principles are

available

Ethics by Consequence/Outcome (Utilitarianism)

• Premise: Actions that produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people are the most ethical

• Issues: Defining “good,” uncertainty about the future

Potential Policy Conflicts: Class Discussion

1. How have you experienced or observed the conflicts of street-level bureaucracy in your own work?

2. How can state-agents diminish the amount of discretion that needs to be used by front-line workers?

3. How do we know if front-line workers are truly making the most moral decisions or allocating resources in the most effective way?

4. How can we help train front-line workers to “navigate the moral dilemmas of their work”?

5. How do we solve for the potential discrepancies between program success metrics, as viewed by the front-line workers versus the manager or state agent?