Agencies tacitly tolerate policy violations that are basic to their own survival

Evidence

This is a neat paradox. Lower-level participants develop coping mechanisms contrary to an agency’s policy but actually basic to its survival. … Street-level bureaucrats have a role interest in securing the requirements of completing the job. Managers, on the other hand, are properly result-oriented. They are concerned with performance, the cost of securing performance, and only those aspects of process that expose them to critical scrutiny. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 188

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the corruption-tolerance literature and to error-message censorship studies where management quietly accepts the violations it formally prohibits. — connects to: Agencies formalize practices that workers already adopted informally — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 639