Client prejudice in agencies is shaped more by work setting than by upbringing.

Evidence

This is particularly significant because street-level bureaucrats’ views of their work, and of clients, are matters of great public concern. Street-level bureaucrats are often accused of being biased against particular racial or ethnic groups or they are thought to be particularly cynical or unreliable in fulfilling obligations toward particular social groups. The proposal that workers’ attitudes in large part are formed in response to their work setting contradicts some popular views. Popular wisdom often identifies the source of workers’ attitudes toward clients and their jobs in prejudices acquired in upbringing and social background. Such perspectives lead to recommendations to hire better educated personnel or provide further education and training All too often such perspectives fail to take account of the influence of street-level bureaucrats’ work on their attitudes. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1044

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard causal arrow for discriminatory discretion — the work environment manufactures the bias rather than merely screening for it, which undermines education-and-training remedies.
• SEED: Article angle: if stereotype-institutionalization starts in the job, then diversity hiring/training addresses the wrong bottleneck — compare with implicit-bias-training critiques.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core hypothesis about administrative discretion outpacing cultural narrative change, and to ‘banal racism’ / bureaucratic field literatures. — connects to: Explaining bureaucratic bias requires the work setting, not workers’ social backgrounds — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1046

Broader Connections

• Explaining bureaucratic bias requires the work setting, not workers’ social backgrounds #corroborates (0.95) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1046