Attribution of client responsibility varies across and within public agencies

Evidence

Not all street-level bureaucrats develop these attitudinal patterns. Conspicuously, some public services develop different patterns of attribution of client responsibilities from others, and variations can also be found within individual public services. 25 The task of those interested in promoting the quality of street-level bureaucracy is to help sustain the ambiguity in allocating responsibility. It is undoubtedly an important measure of street-level bureaucratic services that some workers find a way to keep in balance their views of client responsibility and environmental causality and their own potential for intervention. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1137

Categorization

• QUESTION: What institutional conditions keep some agencies from settling on routinized client-blame? Comparing high-variance services could test the speed-differential hypothesis.
• XREF: connects to: Professional norms subordinate agency rules to individual client needs. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1172; Recategorizing a target only along one agency dimension shifts both responsibility and sensitivity judgments — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 43

Broader Connections

• Recategorizing a target only along one agency dimension shifts both responsibility and sensitivity judgments #expands (0.85) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 43
• Professional norms subordinate agency rules to individual client needs. #complicates (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1172