Workers’ private job definitions make discretionary inaction look rational to them.

Evidence

The patterns of practice developed by individual workers often only make sense in the private conception of the job held by the worker, while supervisors and the public still expect allegiance to a more complex set of goals. For example, a police officer who fails to make an arrest upon observing an unlawful incident may strike an observer as negligent. But if the officer privately understands his or her job to be one of maintaining order and community harmony, with law enforcement in the neighborhood a secondary matter, this behavior may be acceptable according to the officer’s private definition. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1074

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s prior highlights on implicit categorization of clients and on bureaucratic ordering of strangers by quick visual cues.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the police officer who doesn’t arrest’ — how privately held job definitions silently author the policy a street agency actually delivers.