Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service

12. Streetwise Workers and the Power of Storytelling

12. Streetwise Workers and the Power of Storytelling Street-level stories are powerfully descriptive: they take us into the storytellers ’ worlds, both real and imagined. Through the storytellers’ words, we experience the physical and emotional context of their work. We meet the students, clients, criminals, victims, bystanders, coworkers , and bosses who populate these story worlds. Street-level stories, like other narratives both grand and mundane, help us understand how sense and meaning are made and how norms are conveyed and enforced. Whether the story is of Odysseus on his mythic voyage or a voc rehab counselor confronting a dif‹cult client, stories reveal moral reasoning as the storyteller navigates through the shoals of ambiguity and con›ict. In describing decisions and actions, street-level stories also reveal acts of governing. “Mundane stories of daily life,” write Sanford Schram and Philip Neisser, “execute a sort of narrative statecraft by reinforcing the banal truths by which political institutions operate.”1 These banal or mundane truths are central to understanding street-level work and the modern state, for they reveal governing at its most elemental, the interaction of the state and citizen. These stories make clear that street-level work is as much a process of forming and enforcing identities—of both citizen-clients and streetlevel workers—as of delivering services and implementing policy. More than bureaucratic politics, identity politics shape the citizenclients ’ outcomes.2 The street-level work world is ambiguous and marked by con›icting signs, leaving the worker to determine how to respond. Two spoiled rich girls caught committing credit card fraud: one recalcitrant, the other repentant. Two small-time drug dealers: one a hardworking Mexican immigrant trying to support his family, the other a lazy miscreant. Two students from a tough neighborhood: one is seen as a threat, the other as deserving extra help. Two vocational 153 rehabilitation clients: one, a tough-looking injured upholsterer, elicits needed but unauthorized service; the other, a demanding and uncooperative quadriplegic, receives as little help as the rules allow. Two more voc rehab clients: for one, the counselor sues her agency to get services; for the other, she conspires with her coworkers to limit services. In these and many more cases described in their stories, street-level workers ‹rst establish citizen-clients’ identities and then respond. Forming and ‹xing identities may involve careful evaluation, as in the case of vocational rehabilitation, or snap judgments, as with police of‹cers patrolling a neighborhood. Once ‹xed, these identities shape the nature of street-level workers’ responses, from bending the rules and providing extraordinary assistance to allowing only begrudging and minimal help and at times to abuse. Some of these identities—“troublemaker,” “personality disorder,” “nice lady”—are indelible and de‹ne, for better or worse, the ongoing relationship between workers and citizen-clients. Other identities are ›uid and change as ongoing interactions challenge preconceived stereotypes: the hapless drunk who is trying to turn his life around, the offender who admits responsibility, the client with a violent history who proves cooperative. Sustained interaction, as in the classroom or when working on a voc rehab case, fosters changes in perceptions of identities, and teacher and rehab worker stories are full of surprises about unpredictable students and clients. Brief interactions, as commonly occur in police work, tend to reinforce stereotyped identities, but police stories also reveal incidents of surprise and change. Whether identities are ‹xed or ›uid, two important observations stand out. First, workers ‹x the identity of citizen-clients. Identity marking and enforcing are fundamental exercises of power by streetlevel workers. Citizen-clients are not entirely passive in this process: how they respond to workers greatly in›uences the labels they receive. Citizens who show deference to police of‹cers, students who demonstrate motivation, and clients who respect their counselors’ expertise are deemed more worthy than individuals who do not. Nonetheless, street-level workers exercise their power over citizen-clients by asserting de‹nitions of citizen-client identities. Second, how workers respond to citizen-clients reveals the workers’ identities, at least at the moment of interaction: Do they de‹ne themselves as enlightened or hard-nosed cops? Do they see themselves as compassionate or by-the-book teachers or counselors? Over time, these identities can become as rigid as the workers’ stereotypes of the citizen-clients. Moreover, street-level workers bring to this process Cops, Teachers, Counselors 154 their occupational identities, which are formed largely in...