Unsolvable client problems force street-level workers to develop coping mechanisms and alienation

Evidence

Another reason they do not control the outcome of their work is that clients’ problems are not subject to closure. Although street-level bureaucrats are regarded, and regard themselves, as able to solve problems, the problems do not end or are not resolvable. Many public service agencies are called revolving doors for this reason. Street-level bureaucracies that are oriented toward transforming clients, such as judicial institutions and social welfare agencies, are revolving doors because the solutions they offer people are not adequate. People do not stay “fixed.” To the extent that this presents street-level bureaucrats with severe dissonance between objectives and capabilities, they develop coping mechanisms to shield them from the implications of the gap between expectations and accomplishment. They are alienated to the extent they experience this discrepancy as loss of control over situations they are supposed to control. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 586

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s core question: the gap between expectations and accomplishment is a candidate mechanism for why frontline discretion routinizes — coping mechanisms shield workers and get institutionalized as standard practice. — connects to: Street-level workers’ coping techniques persist even as they pervert the service ideal. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 41; Street-level workers resist outcome metrics that omit controls for client difficulty — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1220; Constant client contact leaves street-level workers aware that needs go unmet — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1376 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Job-stress coping needs produce attitudes that redefine clients and the work itself #expands (0.95) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1047
• Worker alienation cumulatively severed workers from championing client rights #expands (0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 597
• Frontline workers adopt rigid client-blaming views to resolve work contradictions #expands (0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1136
• Street-level workers resist outcome metrics that omit controls for client difficulty #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1220
• Constant client contact leaves street-level workers aware that needs go unmet #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1376
• Burnout-driven low efficacy makes helpers blame and disparage their clients #expands (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 619