Bureaucracy, Street-Level

Throughout the world, legislators and government administrators have increasingly called for greater accountability and improved performance in the delivery of public services, reflecting in part the continuing influence of the theory of new public management that stresses more market-based approaches to service delivery and increased responsiveness to citizens and communities. The worldwide financial crisis has further intensified the pressure on government to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of services.

The performance and accountability movement puts the spotlight on the central role of street-level bureaucrats in the development and implementation of public services. As defined by Michael Lipsky in 1980, street-level bureaucrats comprise workers who interact directly with citizens by providing a valued public service; they include teachers, police officers, case workers, physicians, mental health counselors, and home health workers, and they typically possess a substantial degree of discretion over their work. Importantly though, this discretion is bounded by the restrictions on individual choice placed on street-level bureaucrats by factors common in public and nonprofit agencies, including resource constraints, difficult working conditions, and vague and sometimes conflicting expectations on performance. To cope with these work-related challenges, street-level bureaucrats can sometimes reach decisions that are at variance with the rules and procedures of the agency. Thus, the discretion of street-level bureaucrats can result in policy implementation at odds with the goals and priorities of top administrators, legislators, and the citizenry.

Historically, street-level workers occupied key positions in public agencies. Indeed, the growth of the welfare state in advanced industrial countries [Page 179]in the 20th century typically entailed substantial expansion in the ranks of public sector workers, especially in regions such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the Scandinavian countries. However, in some countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, governments worked in close alliance with large nonprofit organizations who provided social and health services, staffed by countless numbers of street-level workers. The ranks of street-levels workers rose sharply around the world in the 1960s and 1970s with the expansion of the welfare state in policy areas such as health care, social services, criminal justice, and education.

Many of these programs in the United States and abroad encountered serious implementation problems prompting a subsequent reassessment of public services and the role of street-level bureaucrats in service provision. As a result, street-level practice has changed profoundly in the past few decades. First, street-level bureaucrats in social and health care are much more likely to work in a nonprofit or for-profit service agency due to a sharp rise in government contracting for services with these agencies. Indeed, the expansion of services such as home care, community care for the disabled and elderly, substance abuse treatment, and workforce development has been almost entirely through government contracting with private nonprofit and for-profit agencies. While this increase in contracting is particularly pronounced in the United States, it is also evident in many other countries, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.

The growth of contracting has been accompanied by new performance management strategies, including performance contracting, intensified testing, more rigorous practice standards, and outcome evaluation. Overall, these strategies are often an attempt to control the discretion and autonomy of street-level workers. For instance, performance contracts in welfare-to-work programs include specific expectations for street-level workers on the target program goals and sanctions for the agency if these goals are not attained. Similarly, policies promoting “evidence-based practice” seek to enhance the extent to which street-level workers such as mental health counselors or child welfare case workers adhere to professionally recognized standards of best practice. Recurrent fiscal crises of government have also forced public and private agencies to implement new policies to increase the productivity of street-level workers, with corresponding limitations on their ability to depart from established practice standards.

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