Making Life Work: Freedom and Disability in a Community Group Home

5. Endless, Uncertain Work

Driggs House is very much like the kind of workplace Michael Lipsky calls a “street-level bureaucracy.” Counselors face many of the dilemmas that characterize the public service work of “people processing ” in a range of settings—welfare offices, public schools, free medical clinics, and police stations, to name a few—in which there is an inherent conflict between always-limited resources and potentially limitless work. The climate of regulation and accountability that dominates social services, both public and private, is also always at odds with an ideology of care. That is, bureaucratic rationalization and the prevailing emphasis on client autonomy and individuality are always in tension and must be made compatible in the work itself. Lipsky argues, in a phenomenological vein, that in order to cope with these conflicts, individual workers develop informal patterns of practice that are at times unwittingly opposed to official principles of service . These practices nonetheless manage the ongoing clash between professional ideals and organizational demands, because they enable workers to get the job done and in relatively satisfying ways. It is in these informal yet routine practices, rather than in policy meetings and legislative chambers, Lipsky argues, that service outcomes are actually determined. Lipsky argues that street-level bureaucracies are fundamental to contemporary social order in a way that is strikingly similar to other researchers’ historical argument about technologies of government (Dean 1996, 1999; Miller and Rose; Rose 1998b, 1994). Street-level bureaucracies are “organizational embodiments of contradictory tendencies ” in the welfare state (Lipsky, 183–84), because they must always be both normative and coercive. Across multiple areas, street-level 93 5 ENDLESS, UNCERTAIN WORK bureaucracies “delimit people’s lives and opportunities . . . provid[ing] the social (and political) contexts in which people act.” For Lipsky, such settings “hold the keys to a dimension of citizenship,” because, in addition to providing specific services, they also “socialize” individuals “to expectations of government services . . . [and] a place in the political community . . . [by] mediat[ing] aspects of the constitutional relationship of citizens to the state.” I observed these inherent conflicts in the work at Driggs House less as a criticism of the welfare state than as the embodiment of the problem of liberal rule. Lipsky’s phenomenological focus on work practice and service outcomes sets his analysis apart from most research on social service workplaces, but he is also concerned with power and control as questions for policy. His argument about street-level bureaucracies provides a useful point of departure away from the familiar approach to settings like the group home as “forcing houses for changing persons” (Goffman 1961, 12), which focuses on the coerced nature of identity and experience. I approach Driggs House as a workplace precisely because it allows organizational participation and commitment to be seen not simply as a problem of power but also as a dilemma of freedom. Autonomy and Professional Work Like all street-level bureaucrats, group home counselors have a good deal of autonomy. This has a practical basis: much of their work is done individually with residents and out of view of supervisors and often colleagues, and requires the constant exercise of individual judgment . The need to exercise discretion reflects, in part, the very nature of their material—human conduct—work on which cannot be accomplished with standardized procedures. For counselors, having a good deal of discretion is an indication of the importance of the job, and they often emphasize the “human dimensions” that make their work serious professional work (Lipsky, 50). Everett Hughes (44) recognized that “profession” “is not so much a descriptive term as one of value and prestige,” functioning as “a symbol for a desired conception of one’s work and, hence, of one’s self.” Paperwork, by contrast, is regarded largely as a burden, but it is not “dirty work,” in Hughes’s sense (70). Counselors recognize paperwork as necessary, if at times burdensome, especially because it is imposed by those who appear most 94 endless, uncertain work out of touch with the everyday demands of their work: supervisors, the agency, state regulators, auditors, and the like. Clinical work is the “real” work, both meaningful and interesting; counselors often refer to their low pay and unusual hours as proof of the job’s moral value and the personal sacrifices they make for it. Whatever the tensions at Driggs House between bureaucratic accountability and clinical ideals, work on human conduct is complex, ambiguous, and indeterminate. Outcomes...