Street-level bureaucrats share five structural conditions that shape their work patterns
Evidence
Resources are chronically inadequate relative to the tasks workers are asked to perform. … 2. The demand for services tends to increase to meet the supply. 3. Goal expectations for the agencies in which they work tend to be ambiguous, vague, or conflicting. … 4. Performance oriented toward goal achievement tends to be difficult if not impossible to measure. 5. Clients are typically nonvoluntary; partly as a result, clients for the most part do not serve as primary bureaucratic reference groupS.
— Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 238
Categorization
DEFINE: Defines the constitutive conditions of street-level bureaucracy that the whole analysis depends on.
XREF: These five conditions recur throughout the street-level bureaucracy literature and connect to Lipsky’s later chapters on client processing and alienation. — connects to: Street-level bureaucratic failures are rooted in work structure, not individual failings. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 55; Rigid bureaucratic behavior flows from discretion exercised under shared work conditions — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 234