Michael Lipsky (born April 13, 1940) is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy institution based in New York with offices in Washington, D.C., and Boston. He was a program officer at the Ford Foundation after serving as a professor of political science at MIT. In 1998, Lipsky was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. [1]
He is well known in the field of public administration for his classic book about street-level bureaucracy.
The concept of street-level bureaucracy was popularized by Michael Lipsky in 1980. He argued that "policy implementation in the end comes down to the people who actually implement it". [2] He argued that state employees such as police and social workers should be seen as part of the "policy-making community" and as exercisers of political power.
Lipsky identified several problems with street-level bureaucracy, including "the problem of limited resources, the continuous negotiation that is necessary in order to make it seem like one is meeting targets, and the relations with (nonvoluntary) clients". [2] However, some commentators have challenged Lipsky's model. Tony Evans and John Harris argue that "the proliferation of rules and regulations should not automatically be equated with greater control over professional discretion; paradoxically, more rules may create more discretion." [3] They also argue that the exercise of professional discretion by street-level bureaucrats is not inherently "bad", but can be seen as an important professional attribute. [3]
A profession is a field of work that has been successfully professionalized. It can be defined as a disciplined group of individuals, professionals, who adhere to ethical standards and who hold themselves out as, and are accepted by the public as possessing special knowledge and skills in a widely recognised body of learning derived from research, education and training at a high level, and who are prepared to apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others.
Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. The implementation of public policy is known as public administration. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.
A bureaucrat is a member of a bureaucracy and can compose the administration of any organization of any size, although the term usually connotes someone within an institution of government.
Red tape is an idiom referring to regulations or conformity to formal rules or standards which are claimed to be excessive, rigid or redundant, or to bureaucracy claimed to hinder or prevent action or decision-making. It is usually applied to governments, corporations, and other large organizations. Things often described as "red tape" include filling out paperwork, obtaining licenses, having multiple people or committees approve a decision and various low-level rules that make conducting one's affairs slower, more difficult, or both. Red tape has been found to hamper organizational performance and employee wellbeing across countries and contexts by a meta-analysis and meta-regression in 2021, and especially internal red tape imposed by the organization itself on its employees was identified as particularly harmful. A related concept, administrative burden, refers to the costs citizens may experience in their interaction with government even if bureaucratic regulations or procedures serve legitimate purposes.
Public Administration or Public Policy and Administration is the implementation of public policy, administration of government establishment, management of non-profit establishment, and also a subfield of political science taught in public policy schools that studies this implementation and prepares people, especially civil servants in administrative positions for working in the public sector, voluntary sector, some industries in the private sector dealing with government relations, regulatory affairs, legislative assistance, and business-to-government marketing/sales as well as those working at think tanks, consulting firms, or in other positions that uses similar skills found in public administration.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and political science. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
New Public Management (NPM) is an approach to running public service organizations that is used in government and public service institutions and agencies, at both sub-national and national levels. The term was first introduced by academics in the UK and Australia to describe approaches that were developed during the 1980s as part of an effort to make the public service more "businesslike" and to improve its efficiency by using private sector management models.
Health and Social Care is a term that relates to services that are available from health and social care providers in the UK. This is a generic term used to refer to the whole of the healthcare provision infrastructure, and private sector. The English national provider of information about health and social care is the Health and Social Care Information Centre HSCIC. NHS Scotland has a Health and Social Care Management Board which meets fortnightly.
The Administrative State is Dwight Waldo's classic public administration text based on a dissertation written at Yale University. In the book, Waldo argues that democratic states are underpinned by professional and political bureaucracies and that scientific management and efficiency is not the core idea of government bureaucracy, but rather it is service to the public. The work has contributed to the structure and theory of government bureaucracies the world over and is one of the defining works of public administration and political science written in the last 75 years.
Public administration theory is a mixture of history, organizational theory, social theory, political theory, and other related subject focusing on the meaning, structure, and function of public service under all circumstances. form. It often describes the main historical underpinnings of bureaucracy research as well as epistemological issues related to public service as a profession and an education field.
In sociology, the iron cage is a concept introduced by Max Weber to describe the increased rationalization inherent in social life, particularly in Western capitalist societies. The "iron cage" thus traps individuals in systems based purely on teleological efficiency, rational calculation and control. Weber also described the bureaucratization of social order as "the polar night of icy darkness".
Street-level bureaucracy is the subset of a public agency or government institution where the civil servants work who have direct contact with members of the general public. Street-level civil servants carry out and/or enforce the actions required by a government's laws and public policies, in areas ranging from safety and security to education and social services. A few examples include police officers, border guards, social workers and public school teachers. These civil servants have direct contact with members of the general public, in contrast with civil servants who do policy analysis or economic analysis, who do not meet the public. Street-level bureaucrats act as liaisons between government policy-makers and citizens and these civil servants implement policy decisions made by senior officials in the public service and/or by elected officials.
Dr. John T. Scholz is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor of Political Science and a Courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University. As the first political scientist to formulate the "regulation game," which was later extended in influential work on responsive regulation by John Braithwaite and Ian Ayres. Scholz is widely regarded as one of the leading political scientists addressing regulatory enforcement.
Bureaucracy is a body of non-elected governing officials or an administrative policy-making group. Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials. Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned. The public administration in many jurisdictions and sub-jurisdictions exemplifies bureaucracy, but so does any centralized hierarchical structure of an institution, e.g. hospitals, academic entities, business firms, professional societies, social clubs, etc.
Roderick Arthur William Rhodes, usually cited as R. A. W. Rhodes, is a British professor of political science.
Policy alienation refers to a framework which examines the experiences of governmental employees with new policies they have to implement. It has been used to describe the experiences of front-line public professionals with new policies. It is defined "as a general cognitive state of psychological disconnection from the policy programme being implemented."
Guy Benveniste was an organization theorist who has written about the politics of planning and ways of encouraging bureaucracies to be more adaptive to change.
Demetrios "Jim" Caraley was editor of Political Science Quarterly and President Emeritus of The Academy of Political Science. Before retiring in 2004, he was Janet Robb Professor of the Social Science at Barnard College and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
In public administration, administrative discretion refers to the flexible exercising of judgment and decision making allowed to public administrators. Regulatory agencies have the power to exercise this type of discretion in their day-to-day activities, and there have been cases where regulatory agencies have abused this power. Administrative law can help these agencies get on the path of following regulations, serve the public, and in turn, a reflection of the public's values and beliefs.
As stated by political scientist Samuel Krislov, representative bureaucracy is a notion that "broad social groups should have spokesman and officeholders in administrative as well as political positions". With this notion, representative bureaucracy is a form of representation that captures most or all aspects of a society's population in the governing body of the state.. An experimental study shows that representative bureaucracy can enhance perceived performance and fairness. This study finds that in a “no representation” scenario, respondents reported the lowest perceived performance and fairness, while in scenarios such as “proper representation” or “over representation” of women, they reported higher perceived performance and fairness.