Discretion and the values of fractal man. An anthropologist’s perspective on ‘Street-level bureaucracy’

ABSTRACT

Michael Lipsky’s seminal book entitled ‘Street-level Bureaucracy’ has long been a core citation for a social work scholarship concerned with practice. This article takes issue with a key notion in Lipsky’s book, that of ‘discretion’. It argues that Lipsky’s notion of discretion relies on assumptions often associated with the trope of ‘Economic Man’, and that the notion of discretion remains inadequately theorised in the scholarship that routinely cites the book. To re-orient inquiry about street-level discretion, the article proposes that social work scholarship can usefully look to anthropological discussions of complexities pertaining to the notion of ‘value’.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• discretion
• social work practice
• street-level bureaucracy
• value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jens Kjaerulff is a social anthropologist (PhD). His more recent research has concentrated on questions and conceptions of change and complexity, in contexts of economic practice, especially in terms of work and unemployment. His publications include the edited volume Flexible Capitalism (Berghahn Books), and the monograph Internet and Change (Intervention Press/Routledge).

Notes

1 Acknowledgement: part of the work on which this article is based, was funded by the Velux Foundations (veluxfoundations.dk). My colleague Rasmus Hoffmann Birk, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal, offered shrewd feedback on earlier draft versions of this article, for which I am thankful.

2 Tropes such as ‘Homo Economicus’, ‘Economic Man’ and ‘Social Man’, are puns on the notion of ‘Homo Sapiens’, which in an evolutionist conception is the generic specimen of human being of our times.

3 The notion of a ‘fractal’ was supposedly first coined by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, inspired from the Latin adjective ‘fractus’, in turn deriving from the verb ‘frangere’ which means ‘to break’ (Green, 2005, p. 134). Citing Gleick, Green observes how ‘fractal’ evokes ‘fraction’ and ‘fracture’ in English, and so, for Mandelbrot, ‘came to stand for a way of describing, calculating and thinking about shapes that are irregular and fragmented, jagged and broken-up’ (Gleick, cited in Green 2005, p. 134).

4 In scholarship extending from Lipsky, such assumptions of ‘calculative actors’ have recently been taken to a yet more extreme and explicit level, by a scholar of ‘the street-level’ of some renown (Brodkin, 2011).

5 Yet, readers of the English novelist Jane Austen, for example, will recognise that such multiple dimensions and dilemmas to marriage may also pertain to ‘Western’ minds.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Velux Fonden.