IE Week 2 - Weekly Assignment PDF

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Jonathon Dobie Week 2 IE For this week's response, please discuss how Salomon's description of "The New Governance" might further complicate the work of the "street-level bureaucrat." Factors like the implementation of a policy from two or three steps removed from the actual interaction described by Salomon could be a cause for the non-ideal practicing by a street-level bureaucrat. The policy makings do not actually understand what the practices are like within the area that they are creating policy. Similarly, Salomon notes on 1631 that “no single actor, including the state can enforce its will”. I find that closely related to the concept that the street-level bureaucrat establishes their own de facto rules and regulations in practice. The example of a teacher or police officer establishing a general trend to assess a situation based on a couple of key factors is not how the government imagined those positions to be, but there is not much that it can actually do about it because it cannot enforce its will An interesting difference between the two works is that on page 6 of Street Level, there is a note to the changing tide of private agencies towards public agencies, namely in charity. While Salomon provided charts and tables showing how government delivers only 40 percent of all human services in the country. I wonder if this is just a discrepancy in the act of delivering the services or if the claims are actually at odds in the trend of how services are being provided by the government. Page 1629 of Salomon states the trend of a shift towards the privatization of schools, so would that technically be a government human service, but delivered by the private sector. Chapter 5 of Street Level Bureaucracy begins with a statement that all clients at this level are non-voluntary, that seems to be at odds with my earlier paragraph about, “no single actor, including the state can enforce its will”. It is an important distinction that Lipsky briefly mentions, that the services provided are technically voluntary. However, in practice there is no choice but to accept many of the programs, like the welfare example used in the book. So while no actor may be able to enforce their will directly, either a lack of competition of alternatives or, simply, being desperate, does make the will of the actor irresistible. So the authors seem to agree on the subject, but take a different standpoint on the ethical side of the question....