Self-selection leaves agencies staffed by those untroubled by service gaps

Evidence

At the extreme, the tension between capabilities and objectives may be resolved by quitting. Or, in anticipation of this tension, people may decline to apply for public employment in the first place. Idealistic young teachers quit because they cannot tolerate the pettiness of their supervisors or their inability to teach as they would like or were trained to teach. Zealous young attorneys leave jobs as public lawyers in despair over making an improvement in the lives of their poor clients. In some ways these idealists are potentially the most dedicated public employees. In other respects they are least suited to do the work. In any event public agencies are left with a work force least bothered by the discrepancies between what they are supposed to do and what they actually do. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1055

Categorization

• QUESTION: The most idealistic recruits self-eliminate, so agencies may be structurally enriched with the workers least disturbed by bias — worth weighing against selection-based accounts of prejudice.
• XREF: connects to: Service agencies sustain an unfalsifiable myth of altruism that legitimizes care under bureaucratic limits — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 534; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”