Workers under load select clients likely to succeed despite formal equity mandates.

Evidence

Confronted with more clients than can readily be accommodated streetlevel bureaucrats often choose (or skim off the top) those who seem most likely to succeed in terms of bureaucratic success criteria. This will happen despite formal requirements to provide clients with equal chances for service, and even in the face of policies designed to favor clients with relatively poor probabilities of success. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 788

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Creaming’ is defined here as skimming the most likely successes, the canonical form of discretionary client sorting.
• XREF: connects to: Workers bias client selection toward the gratification of likely success, not just agency incentives. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 813; When demand exceeds capacity, workers choose tasks to maximize their assessed scores — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1206

Broader Connections

• When demand exceeds capacity, workers choose tasks to maximize their assessed scores #corroborates (0.90) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1206
• Workers bias client selection toward the gratification of likely success, not just agency incentives. #expands (0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 813