Researching Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions

Police officers, social workers, teachers, and many other street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion in dealing with clients. In so doing, they make policy as it is experienced at the frontline. Instead of puzzling at repeated public policy implementation failures and wondering why street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) don’t behave the way policy-makers expect, we need to understand the world as seen from the ground. This short and practical text explores the value of interpretive analysis for researching street-level bureaucracy.

Using Michael Lipsky’s (1980) idea of SLB and connecting it to contemporary debates, Mike Rowe argues for an approach to researching SLBs that focuses on dilemmas in practice, ones that change with each policy shift, each new target, with austerity, and with new technology such that no settled state is likely. He places emphasis on the need to understand the ways SLBs respond to pressures in order to work with them and to understand what policy becomes in practice. Street-level bureaucrats and their clients are engaged in a process of sense-making.

Researching Street-level Bureaucracy is not just an essential resource for teachers and students of Master’s and Doctoral programs in Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, it is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the structural pressures that bear on the individual and how any change to the dilemmas confronted might play out at the street-level.

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.