Client-processing paperwork functions to absorb clients’ energies into the bureaucracy’s own workflow
Evidence
Interactions with clients are ordinarily structured so that street-level bureaucrats control their content, timing, and pace. Some of this may be explained by workers’ apparent need to collect information and the press of business that forces them to expedite interactions so as to be able to process still other clients. Clearly the multiple forms that clients must fill out, as irritating as they are ubiquitous, function to direct clients’ energies to the immediate tasks of client processing.
— Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 875
Categorization
DEFINE: Names the three dimensions of interaction control — content, timing, pace — a useful operational definition of bureaucratic discretion at the encounter level.
XREF: connects to: Modern bureaucracy reimagined citizens as regulated particles in a machine; Secondary practices absorb client dissatisfaction so routine processing can continue — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 977