Fiscal crisis shifts organizational focus from service quality to wage relations

Evidence

Who speaks for service quality in the era of performance measurement, productivity campaigns, and fiscal crisis? Public managers, with better control over costs and resource deployment than over the quality of the product, sacrifice service quality in the name of efficiency and productivity. Streetlevel bureaucrats more and more are reduced to production units whose work is speeded up and whose managers appear content to sacrifice quality in order to maintain volume. … Thus, the fiscal crisis raises the salience of the wage relationship and diminishes the salience of service. This is ironic since the wage and benefit demands of organized public employees have been widely regarded as one of the primary causes of the fiscal crisis in the first place. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1284

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘Who speaks for quality?’ — how productivity measurement structurally silences the client-quality voice while amplifying cost control.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the reader’s interest in how administrative priorities get reordered; could feed a piece on managerialism versus street-level judgment.