Unmeasurable work plus felt specialization shields frontline judgments from criticism

Evidence

In the absence of adequate performance measures and in the context of making significant judgments affecting clients’ well-being, street-level bureaucrats depend heavily on subjective assessments of the validity of their practices. This tendency is strongly supported by the feeling that the work they do is so specialized that no one else is in a position to criticize or even comment on their practices. Police, teachers, welfare workers, and other street-level bureaucrats consider themselves isolated from ordinary citizens who cannot appreciate the difficulties and abuse that they experience or the Street-level bureaucrats are receptive to information that seems to confirm the legitimacy of their differentiation of the client world and thus supports their patterns of practice. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 837

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Job mechanization repurposes reflection as error and erases interpretive labor — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1139

Broader Connections

• Job mechanization repurposes reflection as error and erases interpretive labor #expands (0.82) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1139