Clients internalize expected bias, foreclosing direct engagement with the actual cause.

Evidence

Citizen groups will continue to spend great energy conceiving ways to bring accusations of bias to the attention of street-level bureaucracies and designing ways to overcome it. The paraprofessional movement, decentralization, work force integration, and other reform waves have largely been motivated by a desire to overcome perceived biases in a context where the issue cannot be engaged directly, in part for the reaSOI)S mentioned here. The problem is made no simpler by the observation that clients come to expect bias and neglect. That differentiation serves bureaucratic purposes is not acceptable to a clientele ready to read indiflerence into routine procedures and favoritism rationalized as service-related. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 848

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the book’s earlier claims that client expectations get shaped by bureaucratic processing, and to reform-wave literature on paraprofessionals and decentralization. — connects to: Isolated clients internalize personal blame for a structural position. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 858; Street-level bureaucracies manufacture client categories that people then internalize — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 455; Internalizing personal blame or fatalism both block clients’ growth and mobility. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1132 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: If clients already expect bias, what would evidence of a successful reform even look like — and does that expectation itself sustain the differentiation it protests?

Broader Connections

• Isolated clients internalize personal blame for a structural position. #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 858
• Street-level bureaucracies manufacture client categories that people then internalize #expands (0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 455
• Prejudice targets cope either by externalizing or internalizing blame #expands (0.80)
• Internalizing personal blame or fatalism both block clients’ growth and mobility. #expands (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1132