Poor people’s nominal choices mask their effectively nonvoluntary client status
Evidence
Street-level bureaucracies for the most part deal with nonvoluntary clients. This is obvious in the case of the subjects of police arrests; it is less obvious in the case of social services clients who appear to have the option of applying for benefits or refusing them. However, if one takes the view that poor people have no alternatives to seeking essential goods and services through public programs, then analytically the voluntary nature of their involvement in the system becomes suspect. The alternative to volunteering to become a part of the welfare system may be not eating. The alternative to going to a hospital emergency room may be to neglect a serious health problem. If this is the case then to call the client “voluntary” or the mode of client compliance “utilitarian” becomes a bit scholastic. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 348
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on sacrifice and structural constraint — clients choosing between welfare and hunger are being sacrificed into the system’s categories by lack of alternatives. — connects to: Poor clients’ agency involvement is nonvoluntary when no real alternatives exist; Client neglect stems from nonvoluntary dependency, not worker class prejudice alone