Specialized training makes workers see clients through predetermined processing categories
Evidence
Specialization permits street-level bureaucrats to avoid seeing their work as a whole. Once specialized they are expected, and expect themselves, to pursue an agenda that calls for the deployment of a restricted set of (perhaps highly developed) skills toward the achievement of a result defined by those skills. Specialists tend to perceive the client and his or her problems in terms of the methodologies and previously established processing categories that their training dictates . Rare is the specialist who retains a comprehensive conception of the client and the alternatives available for processing. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1083
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The core mechanism for the reader’s stated hypothesis: training installs the categorical lens that precedes and outlives any change in the cultural narrative about clients.
- XREF: Echoes the sociology-of-professions literature on professional deformation and Bourdieu’s habitus; contrasts with claims that discretion is the main stereotype vector. — connects to: Routinized procedures force new clients into pre-existing case categories. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 886; Frontline workers control clients by structuring interactions before behavior emerges — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 465; Information processes in frontline work confirm rather than correct workers’ stereotypes about clients. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1144
Broader Connections
- Frontline workers control clients by structuring interactions before behavior emerges
#expands(0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 465 - Information processes in frontline work confirm rather than correct workers’ stereotypes about clients.
#corroborates(0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1144