Front-line discretion shapes how policy is actually implemented.
Lipsky's 1980 study of caseworkers, police and teachers. His finding is that discretion under impossible caseloads is where policy is actually made, and the coping routines become the policy.
In practice
- A benefits assessor with an impossible caseload develops rules of thumb, and those rules become the policy as claimants experience it.
- A teacher who cannot mark everything decides what to mark, and that decision determines what the curriculum is in that classroom.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works