Frontline workers can preserve discretion through legal loopholes that bureaucrats cannot close

Evidence

Usually, increased professionalization is associated with deference of the society toward occupations, discretionary judgment, citizen trust, and reciprocal altruism, as well as the characteristics mentioned here. However, in some cases the term simply denotes an occupational group’s increased adherence to accepted occupational norms. Thus increased professionalism among police may mean less discretion and greater conformity to legal standards and norms of police conduct. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1844 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Volcker’s second requirement is a key feature of an effective regulatory system: personal accountability for unlawful corporate practices. It shifts the major responsibility for adherence to the law from regulators to the officials managing the firms. Volcker also wanted vigilant regulators: “And I’d have strong regulators. If the banks didn’t comply with the spirit of the bill, they’d go after them.” The former senator Ted Kaufman, now a professor at Duke University School of Law, describes how adding exemptions to the rule opened a Pandora’s box of rules covering 300 pages: “Here’s the key word in rules: ‘exemption.’ … [A]s soon as you see that, it’s pronounced ‘loophole’” (Stewart, 2011). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1536 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Clearly discretion provides opportunity to intervene on behalf of clients as well as to discriminate among them. Yet at best bureaucracies are highly ambivalent about personalistic service delivery. At the least it is an enduring source of conflict between the objectives of managers and workers. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 215 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Street-level bureaucrats are frontline workers exercising substantial job discretion; Increased professionalism sometimes narrows rather than widens frontline discretion — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1844; The same discretion that lets workers help clients also drives manager-worker conflict — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 215 (+2 more)

Related

• Increased professionalism sometimes narrows rather than widens frontline discretion (similarity 0.83)
• Rule proliferation paradoxically expands rather than constrains frontline discretion (similarity 0.81)
• Street-level bureaucrats are frontline workers exercising substantial job discretion (similarity 0.81)
• Regulatory exemptions function as exploitable loopholes undermining enforcement (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Increased professionalism sometimes narrows rather than widens frontline discretion #qualifies (0.78) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1844
• Regulatory exemptions function as exploitable loopholes undermining enforcement #corroborates (0.78) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1536
• The same discretion that lets workers help clients also drives manager-worker conflict #expands (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 215
• Vocational institutions can evade legal accountability by deflecting blame upward and outward #expands (0.72)