Accountability controls on discretionary workers can degrade service quality.

Evidence

I argue that bureaucratic accountability is virtually impossible to achieve among lower-level workers who exercise high degrees of discretion, at least where qualitative aspects of the work are involved. Nonetheless, public managers are pressured to secure or improve workers’ accountability through manipulation of incentives and other aspects of job structure immediately available to them. When considered along with other objectives public managers seek, the results may not simply be ineffective but may also lead to an erosion of service quality. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1152

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: States a paradoxical causal mechanism: the very tools managers reach for to discipline street-level discretion may corrode the service rather than fix it — a claim worth sitting with when testing how administrative discretion routinizes stereotypes.
• XREF: connects to: Civil service rules make firing so costly that incompetents are retained, lowering service quality — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 219; Accountability reforms degrade service quality where frontline discretion is unavoidable. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1167; Administrative accountability practices erode workers’ client-responsibility and entrench service ineffectiveness over time — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1288 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Accountability reforms degrade service quality where frontline discretion is unavoidable. #corroborates (0.95) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1167
• Administrative accountability practices erode workers’ client-responsibility and entrench service ineffectiveness over time #expands (0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1288
• Pursuing quantitative performance measures can actively degrade the quality of public service. #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1200
• Face-to-face discretion is irreducible in street-level public service work. #qualifies (0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1451