The same discretion that lets workers help clients also drives manager-worker conflict

Evidence

Clearly discretion provides opportunity to intervene on behalf of clients as well as to discriminate among them. Yet at best bureaucracies are highly ambivalent about personalistic service delivery. At the least it is an enduring source of conflict between the objectives of managers and workers. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 215

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Frontline workers’ discretionary acts, not stated policy, constitute government action — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 69; Work discretion and human variety partly counteract alienation and sustain agency fealty — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 567; Frontline workers can preserve discretion through legal loopholes that bureaucrats cannot close (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Workers establish their own norms that blunt management speed-up tactics #complicates (0.82) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1478
• Workers resist management rationing only when it threatens their own preferred practice #complicates (0.75) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 729