Categorization imperatives force workers to treat clients as attribute bundles, not whole persons

Evidence

Street-level bureaucrats do not work on the entire product, but only on segments. This is the case in two respects. In response to the need to categorize clients they tend to treat them only as bondles of bureaucratically relevant attributes rather than as whole persons. They deal with symptoms, qualifications, and capacities, but not with feelings or superficially tangential facts. The imperatives of processing people into the correct categories tend to overwhelm both profeSSional obligations to treat the whole person and the recognition that responding to clients in narrowly defined areas is likely to miss important dimensions of the presenting problem. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 574

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s causal test: categorization pressure is what drives routine stereotyping of clients into administrative types, institutionalizing stereotypes at the point of intake. — connects to: Street-level bureaucracies manufacture client categories that people then internalize — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 455
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: does the categorical-processing imperative explain why frontline stereotype routines update slower than the cultural narrative? This passage suggests the administrative incentive itself resists whole-person revision.