Collective worker adaptations become institutionalized as agency service orientations.
Evidence
Private conceptions of the job have their counterparts in official policy. In some cases agencies themselves solve workers’ problems by imposing a particular orientation on the work. At other times, the adaptive defensive attitudes of street-level bureaucrats toward their jobs are incorporated in the service orientation of their agencies although still officially unsanctioned. Thus the staff of some schools develop collective perspectives on their work and some police departments develop a shared view of patrol practices, contrary to the preferences of supervisors. Recruitment of like-minded people to the service contributes to collective adaptation to bureaucratic stresses by excluding staff members who would challenge work-force goal consensus. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1077
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Names the precise bridge between individual adaptive discretion and institutionalized organizational culture — recruitment filtering converts private coping into agency doctrine no official ever ratified.
- XREF: connects to: Workers’ genuine altruism sustains the service myth generation after generation — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 542; Economic institutions perpetuate themselves through reproducing workers’ consciousness — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 1130; Worker-client relations mirror society’s dominant bureaucracy regardless of written policy — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1362 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Economic institutions perpetuate themselves through reproducing workers’ consciousness
#expands(0.85) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 1130 - Worker-client relations mirror society’s dominant bureaucracy regardless of written policy
#exemplifies(0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1362 - Institutionalized organizational forms sediment and become taken for granted across organizations over time.
#expands(0.80) — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 72