Discretion’s mandate collides with workload, forcing stereotype-based routine processing.
Evidence
Street-level bureaucrats are not so favored. Their work involves the bUilt-in contradiction that, while expected to exercise discretion in response to individuals and individual cases, in practice they must process people in terms of routines, stereotypes, and other mechanisms that facilitate work tasks. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1040
Categorization
- DEFINE: Stakes out the book’s core definitional tension: discretion promised to individuals is structurally converted into routinized stereotyping.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s discretion/street-level literature and to Weberian bureaucracy plus organizational-psychology accounts of cognitive load under caseload pressure. — connects to: Work overload itself can shield frontline discretion from administrative oversight. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 203; Workload ceilings would eliminate the discretionary shortcuts that routinize stereotypes — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 243; Work structure creates the need for bias while society supplies its content — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1049 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Frontline work structure, not worker prejudice, creates receptivity to stereotypes
#corroborates(0.95) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 844 - Discretion plus resource scarcity structurally produces routine client differentiation.
#corroborates(0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 816 - Work structure creates the need for bias while society supplies its content
#expands(0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1049