| Description |
1 online resource (xi, 337 pages) : illustrations |
| Physical Medium |
polychrome |
| Description |
text file |
| Summary |
This book probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government's human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed as soulless operators, these workers wield a significant margin of discretion and make decisions that considerably affect people's lives. By combining insights from political theory with ethnographic fieldwork as a receptionist in an urban anti-poverty agency, the author shows firsthand the predicament in which these public servants are caught up. Public policy consists of rules and regulations, but its implementation depends on how street-level bureaucrats interpret them and exercise discretionary judgment. These workers are expected to act as sensible moral agents in a working environment that is notoriously challenging and that conspires against them. Pressed to cope with the pressures of everyday work, they often and unknowingly settle for reductive conceptions of their responsibilities. The author examines the factors that contribute to this erosion of moral sensibility and what it takes to remain a balanced moral agent in such adverse conditions.--description provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Street level discretion -- Three pathologies : the indifferent, the enforcer, and the caregiver -- A gymnastics of the self : coping with the everyday pressures of street-level work -- When the rules run out : informal taxonomies and peer-level accountability -- Impossible situations : on the breakdown of moral integrity at the frontlines of public service. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Civil service -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Northeastern States.
|
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Civil service. |
|
Northeastern States. |
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Municipal officials and employees -- Northeastern States.
|
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Municipal officials and employees. |
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Local government -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Northeastern States.
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Local government -- Moral and ethical aspects. |
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Local government. |
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Northeastern States -- Officials and employees.
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| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
|
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Electronic books.
|
| Other Form: |
Print version: Zacka, Bernardo, 1983- When the state meets the street. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017 9780674545540 0674545540 (DLC) 2017005846 (OCoLC)982089280 |
| ISBN |
9780674981423 (electronic book) |
|
0674981421 (electronic book) |
|
9780674545540 |
|
0674545540 |
| Standard No. |
40027565627 |
|
