Formal fairness rules cannot dictate concern levels, so workers apply personal deservingness judgments

Evidence

Not only are the standards of fairness insufficient to dictate levels of concern, but also street-level bureaucrats, like everyone else, have personal standards of whether or not someone is deserving. The public housing manager may be more sympathetic to the elderly than to other eligibles. Housing inspectors may be sympathetic to the plight of the landlord although nothing in the formal structure of the agency encourages such a bias. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 212

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 459; Shared fairness intuitions cannot explain distributive variability when beliefs and situations are held constant. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 326; Informal human-relation influence cannot substitute for technicalized formal power.

Broader Connections

• Shared fairness intuitions cannot explain distributive variability when beliefs and situations are held constant. #corroborates (0.85) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 326
• Informal human-relation influence cannot substitute for technicalized formal power. #corroborates (0.75)