Mass processing demands structurally compromise individualized treatment in public services.
Evidence
Street-level bureaucracies encounter conHict and ambiguity in the tensions between client-centered goals and organizational goals. … The ability of street-level bureaucrats to treat people as individuals is significantly compromised by the needs of the organization to process work quickly using the resources-at its disposal. … The fundamental service dilemma of street-level bureaucracies is how to provide individual responses or treatment on a mass basis. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 356
Categorization
- DEFINE: This is the book’s core framing concept: the ‘mass basis versus individual response’ dilemma that defines the street-level bureaucracy problem.
- XREF: connects to: Mass-processing management displaces the client-orientation goals that justify agencies.; Process-management efficiency displaces the client-oriented purposes of public agencies. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 358; Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 459 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Mass-processing management displaces the client-orientation goals that justify agencies.
#corroborates(0.95) - Process-management efficiency displaces the client-oriented purposes of public agencies.
#corroborates(0.95) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 358 - Organizational necessities force professionals to abandon their trained individualized practice.
#expands(0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 353 - Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing
#expands(0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 459