Street-Level Bureaucrat

Used for the first time in 1980 by Michael Lipsky, the expression street-level bureaucracy indicates the public services whose agents, called street-level bureaucrats, are in direct relation with the public (teachers, police officers, legal aid lawyers, social workers, agents of institutions managing social payments). The interest of such an approach is to analyze public action, not from the point of view of institutions but by bottom-up observation of the interaction between agents and clients. It is generally at this level that the citizens' representations of the institutions and state are built. The way in which administrations individualize the treatment of social problems through face-to-face relations between their workers and the public is not a residual dimension of public action but, on the contrary, a structural characteristic of bureaucratic work.

The relations between street-level bureaucrats and clients are generally seen as ones of domination. This domination is not abstract but very concrete. The agents that categorize individuals using social, racial, and behavioral stereotypes construct them in a bureaucratic identity. But in fact, these relations are more complex than it appears. The good ordering of interactions depends upon the implementation of routines by the agents and on the acceptance by the client of his or her bureaucratic identity. But this order changes when the latter rejects the way in which agents construct them as a problem. The personal characteristics (gender, body, reasoning, and affects) of the agent and client then become important and make the exchange much more subjective. Thus, the client becomes a genuine actor developing strategies (violence, tricks, seduction, claims, or suffering) in order to transform their identity and at the same time those of the agents. This process reveals human [Page 936]resources that are normally invisible during a routine activity.

The crisis of traditional social regulation has increasingly transformed the public services into places for the expression of dissatisfactions and misfortunes. This development explains why many institutions have created ombudsmen to manage a process of institutional adaptation to this new reality. In this context, the role of street-level bureaucrats is to make permanent adjustments between the obligation to observe abstract bureaucratic rules and the necessity of adapting them to singular situations. Their autonomy and their capacity of interpretation confer on them the role of policymakers. Of course the content of public policies depends on broader political and socioeconomic elements; nevertheless, their implementation by street-level bureaucrats can transform their meaning.