Abstract
When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency would not be possible without Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, a canonical work in policy studies, first published in 1980, that laid the intellectual foundation for the study of implementation. Bernardo Zacka has written a book that respects these roots but also broadens and enlivens a domain of study in need of a fresh treatment.
Zacka conducted eight months of participant observation as a receptionist for an antipoverty organization he calls the Norville Community Development Initiative (NCRI). At two NCRI centers, Zacka observed the work of case workers and was sometimes thrust into casework himself. Using this fieldwork—albeit sparsely—and drawing eclectically from a breathtakingly wide range of sources and disciplinary approaches to the study of politics, policy, and organizations, Zacka develops a robust and analytically rigorous framework for understanding street-level work that builds on, and ultimately surpasses, Lipsky’s original treatment in several respects.
In the first of five main chapters, Zacka establishes that discretion is often a “necessary and desirable feature of our institutions” (p. 35). Zacka shows how street-level workers face a variety of factors (e.g., goal ambiguity, conflicting goals, limited resources, uncertainty) that require a much wider scope of discretion than the “technical discretion” posited by the “compliance model of bureaucratic responsibility”—a perspective that understands organizations as efficient, top-down entities in the Weberian tradition.
With a rich understanding of discretion articulated, Zacka then employs “retellings” of empirical accounts gathered by other scholars. These accounts explore how street-level workers deal with questions of value, a line of inquiry that requires moving beyond the study of decisions and into the study of dispositions. Zacka develops a framework with three ideal types—the Indifferent, the Enforcer, and the Caregiver—that represent three extremes of street-level work. When processing cases, street-level workers must balance the oft-conflicting criteria of efficiency, responsiveness, fairness, and respect. Without a “spirit of moderation,” they often fall prey to a “reductive take” on their role and succumb to one of these “three pathologies.” Street-level workers must therefore engage a “gymnastics of the self, through which they constantly examine, calibrate, and modify their own dispositions” (p. 140) if they are to master their craft—and avoid a lack of compassion (the Indifferent), intrusiveness (the Enforcer), or burnout (the Caregiver).
In Chapter Four, “When the Rules Run Out,” Zacka zooms out to look at social systems within organizations and, specifically, interactions among peers at the street level. In what I found to be the book’s most interesting chapter (and, not coincidentally, the chapter most grounded in his own empirical work), Zacka shows how street-level bureaucrats develop “informal moral taxonomies that allow them to distinguish between clients and cases in a way that is more granular than the official rules provide for” (pp. 156–57). Though it may appear “muddled, haphazard, and arbitrary” (p. 157), street-level bureaucrats employ an “everyday casuistry” as they handle cases. These informal moral taxonomies are, at least in part, arrived at through a social process wherein “peers serve as a constant, panoptic presence” (p. 183) and offer a “level of scrutiny that is far more granular and penetrating” (p. 190) than standard, top-down mechanisms of professional accountability. As such, Zacka makes a case for “‘organized heterogeneity’ in moral dispositions at the front lines of public service” at the group level (p. 154). He contends, convincingly, that “peers with diverging moral commitments place a healthy justificatory burden on each other,” and, therefore, managers that cultivate a workplace with “a diverse array of moral dispositions” (p. 244) will oversee organizations that are more effective and fair.
With this sophisticated analysis of the informal social processes and practices at work in street-level organizations, Zacka is able to offer a persuasive critique of the nearly universally lauded reform efforts that fetishize “transparency” and “accountability” in organizations. These reform efforts, modeled on the private sector in the New Public Management era, jeopardize the informal practices that Zacka describes in a “critical, but sympathetic” way (p. xi) throughout the book (e.g., peer-level accountability mechanisms, “gymnastics of the self”). It is a significant insight to note that reformers ought to be cautiously attentive to the fact that “the proper delivery of public services depends on the existence of a fragile moral ecosystem within bureaucracies, one that involves a delicate equilibrium between a competing array of normative pulls” (p. 246).
In the final main chapter, “Impossible Situations,” Zacka, again using examples unrelated to his fieldwork for most of the chapter, argues against a simplistic, unitary notion of “organizational culture” by writing that there are “a variety of subcultures aligned around various poles or ‘worlds’” and that effective managers need to orchestrate such diversity to encourage bureaucrats to attend to a “plurality of normative considerations” (pp. 220–21). For instance, at the Norville Hispanic Center, Zacka argues, the conflict (sometimes, even, “impossible situations”) between competing normative worlds in the center—professionalism, pastoral care, responsiveness, and efficiency—was “properly orchestrated” (p. 221). The book, therefore, offers not only an elaborate conceptual framework for understanding organizations and implementation, but also policy prescriptions that flow from the analysis.
While When the State Meets the Street offers a robust and analytically rigorous theorizing of the work of street-level bureaucrats, it does not offer a rich ethnography filled with interesting people in a vivid location. Though the book’s introduction includes an extensive and quite insightful fieldnote excerpt wherein the author finds himself telling a client, “I’m just doing my job” (p. 8), it’s not often that Zacka grounds his analysis firmly in his fieldwork. Rather, he more often uses brief anecdotes from his fieldwork or includes “retellings” (Chapter 2) or “stories” (Chapter 5) from other sources.
But there are lots of ideas. In fact, in When the State Meets the Street, the reader is more likely to encounter George Konrád’s novel The Caseworker, Georg Hegel’s interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone, Gregory Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia, or critiques of Hannah Arendt and virtue philosophy than an in-depth engagement with the two NCRI field sites. For me, as an ethnographer, this made the book less insightful and far less absorbing, despite its purported “potential for cross-pollination between political theory and ethnographic modes of inquiry” (p. 28). Others, I assume, will relish Zacka’s enthusiastically designed conceptual framework and his erudite intellectual journey through a maze of big, and often disparate, ideas.
Even those with a penchant for theory, however, may find When the State Meets the Streets to be overtheorized, given the ubiquity of new jargon and made-up terminology. An example: “Notice that the three elements constitutive of a disposition (hermeneutic grid, mode of affective attunement, and normative sensibility) form harmonious psychological ensembles: they involve orientations toward clients that are consonant with one another” (p. 86). Perhaps this is a matter of personal preference, but I would contend that experts and students of policy implementation alike can learn more from empirically rich (and also theoretically sophisticated) accounts of street-level work like Sharon Hays’s Flat Broke with Children, Judith Levine’s Ain’t No Trust, and Forrest Stuart’s Down, Out, and Under Arrest.
That said, When the State Meets the Street offers a compelling critique of simplistic top-down understandings of organizations and organizational actors. Street-level bureaucrats, Zacka shows us, are “not simply the strategic actors presupposed by rational choice theory . . . they also form moral commitments to particular ways of performing the role, and . . . these commitments change at a far slower pace than the political priorities of the day” (p. 206). His focus on informal practices like the “everyday casuistry” practiced in welfare offices and among police officers to handle the complex and ambiguous cases, clients, and situations of everyday street-level work helps us to rethink our understandings of organizations and implementation.
This highly ambitious book is a most welcome addition to the study of implementation. It offers a “bottom-up normative theory of the state” (p. 254) that starts with the street as “not an abstract construct, but a vibrant collection of individuals, each with their own stories, temperaments, aspirations, and anxieties” (p. 249). I only wish that I had encountered more vibrancy in this ethnography—and fewer abstract constructs.