People-processing bureaucracies affect clients through the interaction itself, unlike other bureaucracies
Evidence
These illustrations have special significance for three reasons. First, they are routines of interaction. Thus citizens may be expected to react-with subsequent implications for worker-client relationships. It is one thing to say that bureaucracies routinize the processing of work, but when the work consists of decisions made about people during the interaction itself, the subjects of routinization will be affected by the processing. This clearly distinguishes analysis of people-processing bureaucracies from analyses of other bureaucratic settings. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 627
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the defining feature of street-level/people-processing work: the client is inside the production process and reacts to it, which is what lets stereotypes in routine treatment become self-reinforcing.
- XREF: Relevant to the reader’s mechanism: clients reacting to categorical treatment is a feedback loop that could accelerate stereotype institutionalization beyond what the originating cultural narrative would predict. — connects to: Street-level bureaucracies manufacture client categories that people then internalize — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 455; People-processing agencies affect clients through the very interaction routines themselves.