Researching Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions

Using Michael Lipsky’s idea of SLB and connecting it to contemporary debates, Mike Rowe argues for an approach to researching SLBs that focuses on dilemmas in practice. Researching Street-level Bureaucracy is an essential resource for teachers and students of Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, and Criminal Justice.

Mike Rowe is a Lecturer in Public Sector Management at the University of Liverpool. Before returning to higher education, he was a civil servant in what was then the UK’s Department of Social Security. Indeed, he was a street-level bureaucrat at times. His research has concerned discretion in welfare and in mental health, partnership working across public and community organizations and, most recently, discretion in policing. This last project took the form of a six-year ethnography of frontline officers in three different police organizations, bringing a unique longitudinal and comparative dimension. He has organized an annual Ethnography Symposium since 2006 and was founding co-editor of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography. Rowe is the author of Disassembling Police Culture, co-author of Police Street Powers and Criminal Justice and an editor of Governing Police Stops Across Europe, The Politicization of Police Stops in Europe, and Ethnography and the Evocative World of Policing.