Society’s need for self-monitoring aligns suspiciously with workers’ claims to professional autonomy.

Evidence

There is a powerful coincidence in our apparent need to have street-level bureaucrats monitor their own performance and in the aggrandizing claims of street-level bureaucrats that they are indeed sufficiently autonomous and self-policing to be granted at least a degree of professional status. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1452

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the classic professionalization literature’s incentive/self-interest critique of professional claims, useful for a cross-domain comparison with bureaucratic discretion.
• SEED: Article angle: whose interests are served when professional status is granted precisely to the occupations hardest to supervise?