Reducing caseload pressure alone rarely improves frontline bureaucratic practice
Evidence
Relieving case-load pressure may not directly translate into acceptable bureaucratic behavior. In particular, marginal reductions in case load cannot be expected to result in visible improvements in practice. For example, one would not expect teachers to differ substantially in the way they handle disciplinary problems simply because their class sizes are reduced from thirty to twenty-five. Pressures of inadequate resources may still be responsible for questionable practice because: (1) variations in case loads do not cross the threshold below which practice substantially improves; (2) caseload pressures contribute to a milieu that remains even if conditions improve slightly; and (3) the work context of street-level bureaucracies has several components that interact with each other. Case-load pressure may interact with other factors to determine behavior without necessarily varying directly with the behavior in question. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 306
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis: resource conditions are only intermittently causal because they interact with other work-context components and cross thresholds — relevant to how fast stereotype-routinization outpaces cultural change. — connects to: Freeing bureaucrats of routine tasks does not improve client interaction quality — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 259; Adding staff expands caseload coverage without raising per-client service time — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 299; Caseload reductions only change practice past a threshold, so small cuts do nothing