Essay On Street-Level Bureaucracy

The resources that street-level bureaucrats have to work are very inadequate. Yet, the demand from the public, or clients, is always increasing. As a result, street-level bureaucrats are constraints to the resources. Street-level bureaucrats also have broad discretion and that’s because of the constraints they are force upon. The resources that they have to work with also make the goals of street-level bureaucrats ambiguous and conflicting. Yet, street-level bureaucrats try to do their best, even though they do not have many resources to work with. They know that they are not doing the “most perfect job,” but they are doing their best with what they have. Street-level bureaucrats do their job so that they can provide services and security to the public, even if they sometime feel that they are taken for granted. In the book, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Public Services, Michael Lipsky (1980) gives an example of some street-level bureaucrats that provides services to the public and what they think of themselves, “the typical teacher, policeman, welfare worker-indeed anyone who regularly meets the public-seems to have an image of himself or herself as working under great strain and with considerable sacrifice to provide clients protection or service no on else would be willing to …show more content…
Routines, especially for street-level bureaucrats, help them simply their work and focus on the priorities. When prioritizing the services, it leaves the street-level bureaucrats to decide who will receive the services and who will not, which mean that some clients are going to suffer from street-level bureaucrats decisions. According to Lipsky (1980), when street-level bureaucrats are doing their routine, the goals are to ration services, control clients and reduce the consequences of uncertain preserving resources, manage the consequences of routine