Clients blame individual workers, not the structural decisions workers must absorb.

Evidence

Parents and children, however, may perceive teachers’ coping responses in their own terms and attribute the quantity and quality of educational services to teachers’ abilities or their own capacities to utilize teachers’ services. They may not look to the systemic decisions that relegate them to large classes, particularly as these decisions are usually screened from the view of the typical parent and student. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1327

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the learned pattern that routinized categories are reproduced without anyone choosing them — the misattribution is structural, not psychological error.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Coping Response Is the Policy’ — how frontline adaptation, not legislation, becomes what citizens actually experience and blame.