book
Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services
Lipsky, Michael. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. 30th anniversary expanded ed. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010.
Why this matters here
Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy analyzes how frontline public workers exercise discretion under heavy constraint, becoming de facto policymakers where rules meet scarce time and ambiguous cases. Coupling uses that dilemma for the learning-loop break: those closest to friction know where procedure no longer matches reality, yet redesign authority sits elsewhere. The source theorizes street-level discretion and constraint; the book asks what institutions fail to hear when consequence lands on the frontline and change authority does not.
