Workers resist management rationing only when it threatens their own preferred practice

Evidence

Street-level bureaucrats, however, may devise ways to sabotage management efforts to reduce interactions with clients. The costs of achieving compliance in the face of workers’ resistance may sometimes be more than managers want to pay. … Whether street-level bureaucrats oppose efforts to limit their interaction with clients, or whether they accept and encourage such efforts as a way of salvaging an unattractive or deteriorating work situation, is perhaps the critical question on which the quality of public service ultimately depends. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 729

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the direction of discretion: workers can also sabotage rationing that cuts client interaction. Gives the reader a counter-mechanism to weigh against demand-suppression as the default. — connects to: Worker noncompliance is a permanent lever against management because replacement costs are nontrivial; The same discretion that lets workers help clients also drives manager-worker conflict — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 215; Workers resist procedural change because it threatens coping routines, not novelty — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 843 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Workers resist procedural change because it threatens coping routines, not novelty #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 843
• Workers establish their own norms that blunt management speed-up tactics #corroborates (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1478
• Depoliticized labor markets discipline workers through the threat of unemployment and lower wages #complicates (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 796