Expediency procedures double as hidden rationing of poor clients’ access

Evidence

Assessed time costs may also be experienced as inconvenience, although they are levied as procedure. For example, when an agency refuses to receive complaints over the telephone and requires that they be written, it may cut off complaints lodged frivolously or on impulse, but also discourages complainants who would protest if it were easier. Requirements to complete multiple forms and produce extensive documentation function similarly. It is possible to make an argument that since the real costs of delay and elaborate procedures are the activities foregone while waiting, that is, opportunity costs, it is justifiable that poor people wait longer than the more affluent, since the opportunities foregone are less valued by the society. 6 However, at the very least this elitist view is based on a calculus to the terms of which clients have not consented. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 663

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how procedural requirements function as de facto gatekeeping — mirrors the reader’s theme of routinized administrative discretion institutionalizing barriers faster than cultural change. — connects to: Monetary costs imposed on clients ration access to street-level services — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 656; Apparent fairness of queues makes clients accept fixed-resource rationing assumptions. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 693; Scheduling systems that routinize agency convenience shift service costs onto the least organized clients. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 697
• DEEPTHINKING: The opportunity-cost justification for making the poor wait longer is a dense, disturbing argument worth sitting with: it converts resource scarcity into a moral ranking of whose time matters.

Broader Connections

• Monetary costs imposed on clients ration access to street-level services #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 656
• Apparent fairness of queues makes clients accept fixed-resource rationing assumptions. #complicates (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 693