Frontline workers can accept managerial authority while rejecting its policy goals

Evidence

Street-level bureaucrats may consider legitimate the right of managers to provide directives, but they may consider their managers’ policy objectives illegitimate. Teachers asked to participate in compensatory education programs in which they do not believe, or policemen no longer able to arrest derelicts for alcoholism, may resist these policy objectives in various ways. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes legitimacy of managerial authority from legitimacy of policy objectives — a useful analytical separation.
• XREF: connects to: Frontline workers’ coping routines become the actual public policy — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 31; Frontline workers perceive their interests as opposed to managers’ interests. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 191; Workers resist management rationing only when it threatens their own preferred practice — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 729 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Frontline workers perceive their interests as opposed to managers’ interests. #complicates (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 191
• Workers resist management rationing only when it threatens their own preferred practice #exemplifies (0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 729
• Frontline workers’ discretionary acts, not stated policy, constitute government action #expands (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 69