Expanding on Lipky’s insights about Street Level Bureaucracies: Welfare Bureaucrats as Street Level Bureaucrats
- Recall in the Lipsky reading and lecture slides, a central problem that he highlights is how Street Level Bureaucrats go about rationing services when they are plagued by work contexts where their time and resources are not adequate to meet the needs being presented to them by the people they are interacting with (clients).
- Turning to the Watkins-Hayes book, cite one or two examples of service rationing highlighted in her welfare office vignettes and reflect on how workers’ are dealing with the dilemmas Lipsky highlights.
- Watkins-Hayes refers to welfare offices as “catch-all bureaucracies.”
- What does this term mean?
- How does this contextual reality – being a catch-all bureaucracy – present a unique dilemma to workers trying to manage large and need-intensive caseloads? Explain this dilemma and why it matters from a social justice perspective.
- Watkins-Hayes notes that the job of the welfare bureaucrat is uniquely challenging not only because as “catch-all bureaucracies” they are dealing with a wide range of clients and client needs, but also because the nature of their job is defined largely by what she calls the “dual-function dilemma.” (see slides 10-12 in the Situated Bureaucrats Lecture)
- Explain what this “dual function dilemma” is (i.e. what are the two functions)?
- How do these functions conflict with one another?
- What problems (what dilemma) does this present—especially given that welfare offices are often plagued by some or all of the four problematic conditions of work that Lipsky highlighted?