Selective coaching of clients redistributes benefits away from the uncoached

Evidence

Clients tend to experience their needs as individual problems and their demands as individual expressions of expectations and grievances. They often expect treatment appropriate to them as individuals, and are in large measure encouraged in this expectation by public institutions and society in general. On the other hand, street-level bureaucrats experience client problems as calls for categories of action. Individual client demands are perceived as components of aggregates. Expectations of proper treatment are framed in terms of satisfactory solutions for the optimal processing of the totality of the work rather than in terms of the best solution for individual cases. Clients seek services and benefits; street-level bureaucrats seek control over the process of providing them. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 459 (#expands, via linked claim)

Differentiation among clients may take place because of workers’ preferences for some clients over others. They may prefer some clients over others, despite official norms to the centrary, under at least three circumstances. Ultimately they all reflect the fact that workers find greater gratification in interacting with some clients than with others and have opportunities to act on these preferences. … First, some clients simply evoke workers’ sympathy or hostility. Like the Israeli customs officials, workers may be inclined to “give the underdog a break” or may favor clients with similar ethnic backgrounds, as when racial or ethnic favoritism prevails in discriminatory decision making. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 793 (#expands, via linked claim)

The threat of physical harm is the most dramatic aspect of the threat under which street-level bureaucrats sometimes work. But virtually all interactions between street-level bureaucrats and clients in some way focus on the workers’ needs to assert authority and gain client deference. This is most obvious in the case of teachers who are instructed to first establish discipline as a precondition to successful teaching. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 269 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Street-level workers informally teach clients which needs they may legitimately raise — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 472; Workers differentiate clients on affectional preference where they can act on it — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 793; Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 459 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing #expands (0.82) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 459
• Workers differentiate clients on affectional preference where they can act on it #expands (0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 793
• Client deference is a pervasive precondition of frontline service delivery #qualifies (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 269