Article Summary 

Article: “Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Critical Role of Street-Level Bureaucrats” (pp. 401-408)

Source: Businessweek
Author: Michael Lipsky
Date of Article: May 25, 1980

Link to Article: (place link here)

Article Summary

“Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Critical Role of Street-Level Bureaucrats” examines the role of front-line public employees in the bureaucracy. Street-level bureaucrats are those individuals who interact directly with citizens. There are many street-level bureaucrats in public service agencies such as welfare offices. In fact, it seems that the poorer people are, the more street-level bureaucrats affect them. Since street-level bureaucrats have such a great deal of interaction with the public, they are often the focus of public controversy. Their decisions appear to be very personal, as they are directed toward people and their attitudes are obvious. Because of this personalization of bureaucracy, street-level bureaucrats also provide hope for citizens to receive fair and effective treatment, as citizens believe they can reason with these individuals, even if the rest of the bureaucracy is out of reach. In reality, street-level bureaucrats are limited to how responsive they may be. Protocol restricts their abilities to treat things on a case-by-case basis.

Key Points

· Street-level bureaucrats cause a great deal of public controversy due to debates over their scope and function and the impact they have on people’s lives.

· Street-level bureaucrats, such as police officers, teachers, and health workers are familiar to the people they serve, but not necessarily as accountable as people would like them to be.

· Street-level bureaucracies directly affect people and change their lives. This provides people with hope that these bureaucrats will help them on an individual basis.

· Street-level bureaucrats provide a “visible, accessible, and blamable, collective target.”

Your Opinion

Include four to six sentences that reflect your opinion about the information in the article.

Instructions for Article Summary

Your article must be on a topic that is similar to the material covered in the chapter and be no more than 30 days old.

Your summary should be in the format above. Use Times New Roman 12 point font and 1” margins. Include your name and date as a header in the top right corner of your paper.

The summary itself should be 8-10 sentences in length and be a summary of the article. Do not simply repeat sentences that are in the article.

You need 3 to 5 main points from your article. Do not simply repeat what you have in the summary. These main points should be one complete sentence each.

Your opinion is to appear at the end and consists of 4 to 6 sentences about what you think of the information in the article. If you write something simple such as, “I agree with the author.”, that does not count as one of your sentences.

You must include a link to your article.