Street-level workers’ coping techniques persist even as they pervert the service ideal.

Evidence

Street-level bureaucrats often spend their work lives in a corrupted world of service. They believe themselves to be doing the best they can under adverse circumstances, and they develop techniques to salvage service and decision-making values within the limits imposed upon them by the structure of the work. They develop conceptions of their work and of their clients that narrow the gap between their personal and work limitations and the service ideal. These work practices and orientations are maintained even while they contribute to the perversion of the service ideal or put the worker in the position of manipulating citizens on behalf of the agencies from which citizens seek help. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 41

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Unsolvable client problems force street-level workers to develop coping mechanisms and alienation — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 586; Workers resist procedural change because it threatens coping routines, not novelty — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 843

Broader Connections

• Unsolvable client problems force street-level workers to develop coping mechanisms and alienation #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 586
• Workers resist procedural change because it threatens coping routines, not novelty #complicates (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 843