When the State Meets the Street

Bernardo Zacka

Published by Harvard University Press 2017

When the State Meets the Street

Public Service and Moral Agency

Bernardo Zacka

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674981423

Overview
Contents

About this book

Bernardo Zacka 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 significant discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives.

Author information

ZackaBernardo:

Bernardo Zacka is a research fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University and a junior research fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.

Reviews

Glenn C. Altschuler:
One emerges from this insightful book with a considerable measure of respect for bureaucrats...Studying their experience as well as their behavior, is indeed, 'an experiment in living,' as well as a test of our own values and vision. It is, or should be, humbling.

Paul Sagar:
An examination of street level bureaucracy rooted in anthropological fieldwork, but with the philosopher’s toolkit dexterously deployed, it announces [Zacka] as a major new voice.

Yuna Blajer de la Garza:
Zacka persuasively argues that street-level bureaucrats are, in fact, moral agents ‘vested with a considerable margin of discretion.’ More importantly, he makes a compelling case for the normative desirability of that discretionary power…The book draws on a broad array of literatures, from other qualitative work on bureaucracies to psychology, sociology, and normative political philosophy, providing Zacka with an astounding and productive array of interlocutors…Zacka’s remarkable book opens up many intriguing questions and will hopefully be one of many future studies that combine the virtues of an ethnographic approach and normative political theory.

Alex Sager:
In his groundbreaking book When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, Bernardo Zacka illustrates a new methodological approach for political theory, opens up avenues of normative research on the neglected topic of bureaucracy and bureaucrats and overturns an intellectually dubious, but nonetheless dominant, model of the state…Zacka’s discussion is subtle and thoughtful and opens many avenues for political and moral theorists to explore.

Peter Hupe:
Since Michael Lipsky coined the term in 1969, street-level bureaucracy has developed into a scholarly theme of its own. Nevertheless, the normative dimensions of the work done in this segment of government bureaucracy have remained almost entirely in the shadow so far. Filling this lacuna the book is an absolute must-read.

Michael Piore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
Beautifully written, tightly argued, and totally original.

Michael Lipsky, author of Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services:
In this refreshing study, Zacka finds in the commonplace decision-making of street level bureaucrats an implicit but coherent moral structure. When citizens experience the state through street-level encounters, the author shows, they are subject to moral reasoning no less than when elected officials expand or contract social welfare policies, or bring a nation to war.

David Owen, University of Southampton:
When the State Meets the Street reads as one might imagine a collaboration between Bernard Williams, Richard Sennett and James Scott could turn out. If there can be such a thing as an instant classic, this book is one.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1: Street-Level Discretion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
Chapter 2: Three Pathologies. The Indifferent, the Enforcer, and the Caregiver Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
Chapter 3: A Gymnastics of the Self. Coping with the Everyday Pressures of Street-Level Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Chapter 4: When the Rules Run Out. Informal Taxonomies and Peer-Level Accountability Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
Chapter 5: Impossible Situations. On the Breakdown of Moral Integrity at the Front Lines of Public Service Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	240
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	325
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Pages
- Main content: 320
Illustrations
- Other: 1 halftone, 3 line illustrations, 2 tables

eBook

Published: November 5, 2018
ISBN: 9780674981423