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Richardson Dilworth Mara Sidney

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URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.60,Issue2,P.

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Editor's Note: This issue revisits the influential article by Michael Lipsky, “Street Level Bureaucracy and the Analysis of Urban Reform,” published by Urban Affairs Quarterly in 1971. We encourage readers to examine this article from our archives. The introduction below provides some historical and disciplinary context for Lipsky's article. https://doi.org/10.1177/107808747100600401.To mark the 60th anniversary of Urban Affairs Review, each issue of Volume 60 will feature one UAR article that the editors and editorial board chose as representing a significant contribution to the study of urban politics in a given decade. We started in Issue 1 with the 1960s, where we featured Ralph Conant's “Black Power: Rhetoric and Reality” (1968). In this second issue, we focus on the 1970s by highlighting Michael Lipsky's “Street Level Bureaucracy and the Analysis of Urban Reform” (1971), which was Lipsky's first cohesive statement on the concept of street-level bureaucracy. We also highlight two articles published in this issue that employ the concept of street-level bureaucracy to analyze urban politics and policy, noting how the concept has been used and transformed as it made its way over the decades and across the pages of UAR.The study of urban politics changed dramatically during the 1970s, as summarized in one somewhat cranky but largely accurate 1977 review essay by Jay Goodman from Wheaton College:We all know the urban crisis has faded from view, vanishing from the evening news as surely as the environmental crisis, the youth crisis, and other fads. The cities appear to have changed. Minorities within them are quiescent. Economic and political power has shifted in favor of the suburbs. Government attention is diminished and routinized. Research funding is no longer easy or lush. (Goodman 1977, 243)Goodman's essay reviewed three edited volumes that each covered the “state of the field” in urban politics (Hawley et al. 1976; Masotti and Lineberry 1976; Young 1975) one of which, Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics, included a version of Lipsky's 1971 article. Reflecting on the influence the article had already had in the field, Goodman asked, “how many times will this paper be recycled?” (Goodman 1977, 244). Indeed, after its first appearance in UAR, the essay appeared in edited volumes by Ermer and Strange (1972) and Frederickson (1973). In a 1978 article, Jeffrey Prottas suggested its appeal:The great utility of Lipsky's work lies in his assertion that street-level bureaucrats are an analytically unique category and that their interactions with clients can be understood in terms generic to the role rather than in organizationally specific, ad hoc terms. This step makes the questions of street-level public bureaucracies intellectually more accessible and, at the same time, intellectually more pressing. (Prottas 1978, 288)Lipsky (1971) conceived of street-level bureaucracy as that layer of local government where bureaucrats—he focused specifically on police patrol officers, teachers, and frontline welfare workers—interacted regularly with citizens and city residents, operating in contexts of inadequate resources, regular challenges and threats to their authority, and contradictory or ambiguous job expectations. The result, he argued, was that street-level bureaucrats would create “shorthand” simplifications in order to categorize the public with which they interacted—their “clientele”—and rely on a definition of community standards that placed some portion of that clientele outside of those standards. Those clientele categorized as problematic and outside community standards reciprocated with hostility, resentment, low performance, or violence, thereby reinforcing the bureaucratic behaviors that helped create this dynamic in the first place.Thus arose Lipsky's paradox, “that critics of urban bureaucracy may correctly allege bias and ineffectiveness of service, at the same time that urban bureaucrats may correctly defend themselves as unbiased in motivation and objectively responsible to bureaucratic necessities” (392). Unlike most of the later work on street-level bureaucracy, race was central to Lipsky's formulation. He assumed that the bureaucratic shorthand and definitions of community would fall along and reinforce existing racial and class cleavages: “Perceptual modes which assist bureaucrats in processing work and which, though not developed to achieve discriminatory goals, result in discriminatory bias may be considered a manifestation of institutional as opposed to individual racism” (399). Lipsky's distinction between institutional and individual racism followed what was at the time possibly the most influential formulation, by Hamilton and Carmichael (née Toure) (1967), as did his further contention that the most common means of addressing racism and social marginalization—“human relations councils, citizen review boards, special equal opportunity units, and other ‘community relations’ bureaus” (400)—were inadequate and possibly exacerbated the problem because “they insulate bureaucracies from having to confront behavioral factors affecting what appears to be racist work performance” (400).Lipsky (1971) also weighed in on then-contemporary policy reform ideas that could improve relationships between bureaucrats and clients, improve service delivery, and improve the standing of street-level bureaucrats among the general public. Many of these have been implemented by now, or at least continue to be considered. In general, he supported institutional change. For example, he was hopeful about decentralization as a way to reduce the overwhelming workload of bureaucrats by allowing localities to narrow the job descriptions of each type of worker. He was interested in performance-based reviews and promotions to replace seniority. He called for the recruitment of idealistic recent college graduates, suggesting that a flow of young people into the professions would bring positive change; he supported “minority hiring” but worried about tokenism and backlash from minority communities against “their own” community members taking on jobs with negative connotations. That said, he was skeptical about community relations boards as a way to oversee agencies, which he saw as taking away responsibility from the agencies for actually understanding problems and solving them. He was also skeptical about diversity and equity training, which is now a large professional field of its own. While he recognized the prevalence of unconscious bias as feeding into the simplifications that he observed bureaucrats making, he was skeptical that “classroom” training would reduce it. He suggested (naively, it now seems) that if bureaucrats were instead trained regularly to carry out their jobs more skillfully, the divides between clients and government workers would shrink.The notion of street-level bureaucracy spawned a broad literature, evident on the pages of UAR for the past half-century. During the 1970s especially, there were various attempts at conceptual clarification and expansion. For instance, John Kirlin (1973) sought to expand upon Lipsky's original formulation by looking not just at how individual bureaucrats responded to “lower-status clientele” but rather how bureaucratic government organizations responded as the clientele they served declined in status. Jeffrey Prottas (1978) similarly sought to expand upon Lipsky's formulation by exploring the ways in which the relative autonomy of street-level bureaucrats was determined both by their frontline worker status, but also by the ambiguous policies under which they were guided by their managers, the structural inability of those managers to actually monitor bureaucrats’ behavior, and the broader professional and quasi-professional guidelines and practices bureaucrats followed that came from outside, and could be orthogonal to, the policies and practices of their home organizations.Yet there were more articles that sought to operationalize the notion of street-level bureaucracy and subject it to various empirical tests, in the process leading to further conceptual expansion and evolution. For instance, contrary to Lipsky, John Comer (1978) found generally high levels of satisfaction among Mexican Americans living in Omaha in their interactions with street-level bureaucrats, which may have said just as much about Omaha and Comer's operationalization of street-level bureaucracy as it did about Mexican Americans or Lipsky's argument. In a relatively clear expansion beyond what Lipsky originally meant by street-level bureaucrats, Michael Brintnall (1981) examined how heavy caseloads in district attorneys’ offices affected the behaviors of lower-level prosecutors handling white-collar and consumer protection cases, yet found what Lipsky would have expected, that heavier caseloads increase “the use of readily identifiable cues in the selection of cases for attention” (294). John Clayton Thomas (1986) used a telephone survey of Cincinnati residents to assess their interactions with a variety of municipal service agencies—“parks, highway maintenance, traffic engineering, buildings and inspections, recreation, waste collection, fire, police, and health” (87)—that, similar to Brintnall, certainly seemed to go beyond Lipsky's notion of street-level bureaucrats. He found that Black Cincinnatians reported higher levels of dissatisfaction in their interactions with these bureaucrats—especially police, fire, and buildings and inspections—which could be largely attributed to the fact that Black people came to these bureaucrats with a higher volume of problems than other groups, which in turn could well have been evidence of the kind of institutional racism Lipsky discussed.By the turn of the twenty-first century, the street-level bureaucracy literature thrived and expanded in policy studies and public administration journals, but on the pages of UAR it was largely reduced to briefly-mentioned truisms such as that most people's contacts with municipal government would be through street-level bureaucrats (Alozie and Ramirez 1999, 469) or that municipal policy was often made at the point of implementation by street-level bureaucrats (Pierre 1999, 376). Indeed, in their study of police-immigrant relations in immigrant-destination cities in California, Lewis and Ramakrishnan (2007) referred to Lipsky (1980) (the book-length expansion of his 1971 article) as part of the “now-dated research that viewed the police as a relatively out-of-control street-level bureaucracy” in which “one might anticipate a great deal of selective enforcement by police departments, probably carried out in a conservative or discriminatory way against immigrants” (880). What they found instead was that police did indeed act with high levels of discretion and autonomy but tended to accommodate immigrant concerns more in the fashion of what Michael Jones-Correa (2008) among others has called “bureaucratic incorporation,” rather than act “in a conservative or discriminatory fashion against minorities” as predicted by Lipsky's model.Yet Lewis and Ramakrishnan's (2007) case studies also indicate that Lipsky's model was indeed probably more accurate in describing police behavior in the 1970s and possibly even the 1980s (see, for instance, 890). It was the passage of time rather than the soundness of the theory itself that rendered the theory inadequate, thereby questioning the extent to which it was ever really a theory at all so much as a description of a specific political and social dynamic at a specific place and time.By contrast, the fact that contemporary authors in this very issue of UAR have found utility in the concept of street-level bureaucracy suggests a level of theoretical robustness, even if at this point the theory may well be almost unrecognizable to Lipsky himself. Thus, for instance, van der Meer, Vermeeren, and Steijn (2023) examine the role perceptions of municipal enforcement officers in a Dutch city, where New Public Management and New Public Governance ideas have changed understandings and expectations about public service. Similar in some respects to the police officers in Lewis and Ramakrishnan's (2007) study, Dutch officers who used to be tasked with enforcing minor rules and regulations according to standard operating procedures are also expected to be “community hosts,” working with and responding to community members. The authors find that officers vary significantly in how they understand their new roles (seeing themselves primarily as bureaucrats, networkers, or inbetweeners). Building on Lipsky's initial exploration of role conflicts between public expectations, client expectations, and bureaucrats’ professional expectations, the authors show that how officers handle situations of conflict varies according to how they see their own job within this “community host” concept. In general, their systematic analysis identifies how street-level bureaucrats within the same job category vary in their perceptions of their job, and how these perceptions shape their behaviors as they interact with the public, notwithstanding the “official” definition of their roles.Second, Nevarez Martinez (2023) expands the street-level bureaucrat concept to include what she calls “new street-level bureaucrats,” namely employees of nonprofit organizations in a California city that have municipal contracts for homeless outreach. Her study of these outreach workers, and of the more traditional street-level bureaucrats such as police officers and government agency workers, shows that local elected officials and a vocal antihomeless group that uses tactics of harassment together exert influence on bureaucrats to use their discretion to roll back services to the unhoused, even in violation of state laws. More generally she argues that local political actors and context should be recognized as important determinants of how street-level bureaucrats will use their discretion.It seems, in short, that at least in the study of urban politics as reflected in UAR, where the concept of street-level bureaucracy was first formally enunciated, it has evolved from a theory that sought to explain a dimension of institutional racism in cities to one that serves as a portal through which the variable impacts of street-level bureaucratic discretion and autonomy can be examined in a variety of disparate contexts.