Street-level workers actively resist managerial attempts to restrict their discretion

Evidence

Another aspect of street-level bureaucrats’ role interests is their desire to maintain and expand their autonomy. Managers try to restrict workers’ discretion in order to secure certain results, but street-level bureaucrats often regard such efforts as illegitimate and to some degree resist them successfully. Indeed, to the extent that street-level bureaucrats (and this would include police, teachers, social workers, and nurses, as well as doctors and lawyers) expect themselves to make critical discretionary decisions, many of managers’ efforts to dictate service norms are regarded as illegitimate. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 189

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Workers resist algorithmic control by asserting mastery over their trade. — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds: Solidarity…, 104; Street-level bureaucrats are frontline workers exercising substantial job discretion; Street-level workers hold individual and collective control over their working rules — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1378 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Street-level workers hold individual and collective control over their working rules #expands (0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1378
• Workers defend control routines as necessary and resist abandoning them. #expands (0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 902
• Workers establish their own norms that blunt management speed-up tactics #expands (0.90) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1478
• Street-level bureaucrats are frontline workers exercising substantial job discretion #expands (0.85)
• Workers resist reform because it threatens routines that make the job bearable. #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 843
• Work-control needs turn frontline workers into defenders of the status quo. #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1329
• Discretion and concealment constitute meaningful resistance to attention capitalism #expands (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 143
• Workers resist management rationing only when it threatens their own preferred practice #qualifies (0.80) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 729
• Unprotected individual workers are powerless to refuse #contradicts (0.80)
• Managers depend on street-level subordinates because sanctioned discretion precludes intervention #complicates (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 223