Agencies formalize practices that workers already adopted informally

Evidence

For example, the official policy of one legal services office may be to accept only emergency cases. Another office in the same city may have an open intake policy but the attorneys may informally decide to recruit and work primarily on the most needy cases. In both offices the policy results are the same, but in one office they stem from agency intake policy, in the other from the structure of workers’ informal assignment of priorities. Often agencies will adopt as official procedure practices that workers previously adopted informally. When police departments distribute fire hydrant spray caps for recreation, the new policy replaces the previous informal practice of overlooking illegal opening of hydrants by neighborhood residents on hot days. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 639

Categorization

• SEED: The hydrant example is an essay-ready vignette about how bottom-up worker practice becomes official policy — inversion of the usual top-down model of policy formation.
• XREF: Supports the reader’s thesis: worker routines crystallize into agency policy, so stereotype-laden informal judgment becomes institutionalized administrative rule faster than cultural change. — connects to: Agencies tacitly tolerate policy violations that are basic to their own survival — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 188; Street-level workers informally teach clients which needs they may legitimately raise — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 472; Workers establish their own norms that blunt management speed-up tactics — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1478

Broader Connections

• Workers establish their own norms that blunt management speed-up tactics #corroborates (0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1478