Cops, Teachers, Couselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service

Vol. 14 No. 6 (June 2004), pp.416-419

COPS, TEACHERS, COUNSELORS: STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF PUBLIC SERVICE, by Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 216pp. Paperback. $25.00. ISBN: 0-472-06832-6. Cloth. $70.00. ISBN: 0-472-09832-2.

Reviewed by Anne L. Schneider, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University. Email: Anne.Schneider@asu.edu .

Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno have provided a short, powerful, interpretive account of how street level public workers make judgments and deliver services to clients. The book sets a high standard of scholarly work that shows the value of story-based narrative analysis. The authors provide the reader with one story after another of how police, teachers, and counselors bring their own views of fairness into their assessment of clients and exercise their discretion, or at times bend and break the rules to do what they believe is right. In some instances, they go far out of their way to provide extraordinary services, in others, they stick to the minimum allowable by their interpretation of the rules, and in some instances citizens suffer at their hands. Interspersed with fascinating stories, the authors bring out theoretical insights that contribute to theories of bureaucracy and public management, policy impacts on citizens, implementation, and the relationship between law and culture.

The dual existence of law-abiding worker and culturally-specific judgments is evident in many of the stories, although not articulated as such. The prevailing policy narrative is called the “state-agent” narrative that “portrays a democratic state . . . built on law and predictable procedures that insure that like cases will be treated alike” (p.4). Within the discretion permitted by law, this narrative is intended to insure that street level policy treats all citizens appropriately, given the circumstances, and that street level workers will make individual judgments that generally adhere to this dictum. Discretionary decision making is a part of the narrative, but it is to be exercised in a way that cultural differences among clients and individual beliefs of street level workers do not intervene. The second narrative, the citizen-agent narrative, works in close proximity to the first, although it is often in tension with it. Most of the book is about how this second narrative plays out in conjunction with the first.

[S]ome citizens receive unauthorized but extraordinary and life-enhancing help from risk-taking street level workers. Other citizens, based on different judgments, receive what the rules and procedures allow–no more but not less. Still others are excluded from help and social benefits or, worse, are maligned and abused by front-line workers and the system in which they work. . . . [These] cultural judgments are an irreducible element in governing the modern state (p.5).

How do police, teachers, and counselors decide what is fair and right in individual cases? The authors acknowledge this is a complex and difficult question to answer because [*417] judgments, as reflected in the vignettes offered by the workers, are often “ambiguous and multi-layered: they reference both rules and morality to defend decisions, reveal internalized as well as interactive conflicts, and document shifting positions over time. These stories are not philosophical discourses on law or fairness. They are pragmatic expressions about acts and identities and assertions of dominant yet jumbled societal views of good and bad behavior and worthy and unworthy individuals” (p.25).

Identities – of the street level worker and the client – are essential elements to the explanation of how policy plays out in direct contact with citizens. “Street level workers care as much about who a person is as about what the person has done. Identity matters as much as acts (p.51). It should come as no surprise that occupational identity is a prominent factor for the workers. Less expected is the notion that “[a]t least in the urban work sites of our study, the politics of bureaucratic stratification, particularly managers versus workers, is being supplanted by a complex politics of identity in which workers and managers take up belonging in one or more of the many identity enclaves. . . . Workers retain a sense of common belonging related to their occupational identities” (p.53).

Stories sometimes reflect a sense of “heroic worker vs. the system,” but in other instances, front line workers collaborate with their immediate supervisors and others to get things done. Occupational identity is especially strong in these fields, and workers identify closely with their peers and with the mission of helping people with problems. “Nearly all of the workers define themselves as advocates on a mission rather than bureaucrats implementing policy” (p.62). The complex issues of identity are revealed repeatedly in stories of how individual workers move within several different identity clusters—occupational, gender, race, generational, sexual, and position within the bureaucracy.

A central feature of the workers’ assessment of clients is “putting a fix” on them—“assigning to them a social identity or group belonging that carries with it significant meaning and consequence (p.78). The assessment may begin positively, and then turn negative, or vice versa, but once the “fix is in,” it becomes rigid. Street level workers evaluate the worthiness, or lack of it, in the client and then deliver services that fit their assessment.

The basic dilemma – perhaps “the defining characteristic” (p.93) – of street level work is that the needs of individual citizen-clients exist in tension with the demands and limits of rules. The authors acknowledge that ordinarily the rules effectively fit the complexity of workers’ judgments and enable them to do their job—but in these instances, there may be no story worth telling. Hence, one limitation of this form of narrative analysis is that it greatly over represents the unusual and dramatic. The stories, however, are absolutely infused with worker assessments of the deservedness and/or unworthiness of clients.

Who, then, are the worthy? The worthy are those most in need of help, who sincerely want to do better, who do not try to con or scam the worker, who are [*418] not whiney, who are realistic, who may be able to benefit from extra help, and who are “of good character” (pp.102-106). The authors refer to this as a “material dimension of worth:”

This material dimension of worth is a summative judgment: if citizen-clients have genuine needs, are of good character, and are motivated to respond to treatment, then they are likely to repay society for street-level workers’ investments of time, effort, and money....this material dimension of worth is the most tangible expression of how street-level judgments alter the distribution of government services and sanctions (p.106).

The significance of street level judgments is not lost on the authors: “When street level workers extend or withhold services and sanctions, when they go out of their way to help some citizen clients while ignoring or punishing others, then street level workers are making normative judgments about who gets what from government: they are simultaneously fusing the performance of the state with the construction of the social order” (p.106).

Street level workers use different judgments to justify dramatically different treatment – sometimes in ways that (without knowing the “story”) must appear (at best) baffling or (at worst) racist, sexist, or in other ways unjustified. They “know what is best” for their clients, and even while extending special and almost heroic efforts for those deemed worthy, they are also out to “get the bad guys.”

The unworthy are as clearly identified in the stories as are the worthy. Unworthiness is not just based on what someone does – it is a character assessment about who the person is. The unworthy are people who are uncooperative, who attempt to manipulate the system, who are lazy with no individual initiative, who have not earned anything positive, and those who challenge the authority of the case worker. The case workers, whether police, teachers, or counselors, have power over the clients and exercise it. Challenging authority produces conflict with the case workers that may result in punishment or denial of services.

The irony in street level workers becoming rigid rule enforcers is clearly noted:

From the perspective of the state-agent narrative, the use of discretion to get the bad guys is deeply ironic. . . . [S]treet level workers become stringent rule followers, trying to limit services. . . . [R]ather than cutting corners, they follow every procedure. They use the rules to discourage and harass citizen clients. . . . [I]n these cases, workers express more concern for the state’s interests than for those of citizen clients. . . . Front-line workers become the proper agents depicted in principal-agent theory (p.151).

When conflict escalates too far, the street level workers can become rogue agents. Even though their actions may be morally justified in their own minds, they bend or break the rules to punish people, but see this as a service to the community and its values (p.151).

This book has important insights for a number of new and older theoretical perspectives linking policy and democracy, law and culture, the state and its citizens, bureaucratic rules, and [*419] case worker discretionary judgments. Street level workers are absolutely central to the important theoretical questions about who gets what from government and how and why policy has such dramatic impacts on citizen perceptions of government and their assessment of themselves as citizens.

The book also makes important methodological contributions. The authors have more than 150 stories from almost 50 people in two states, representing three different occupational groupings. This permits more analysis with broader applicability than small-sample narratives. Also, the authors make the case that story-telling is an important type of narrative analysis and that it differs in important ways from other modes of qualitative inquiry.

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