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2. State Agents, Citizen Agents How do street-level workers make sense of their world and account for what they do? These questions guide our inquiry and lie at the heart of scholarship on the state and its workforce. Much of the existing literature converges on a viewpoint of street-level workers that focuses on how they apply the state’s laws, rules, and procedures to the cases they handle. We call this viewpoint the state-agent narrative. We propose an additional viewpoint, a citizen-agent narrative, that is muted in existing scholarship yet prevalent in the stories told to us by street-level workers. The citizen-agent narrative concentrates on the judgments that street-level workers make about the identities and moral character of the people encountered and the workers’ assessment of how these people react during encounters. The two types of narrative are distinct but not discrepant, describing coexisting qualities of street-level work. The state-agent narrative is about law abidance, both of citizens and workers; the citizen-agent narrative is about normative or cultural abidance, identifying those who are worthy citizens and colleagues and those who are not. Both narratives are interwoven into the meaning and purpose of the modern state.1 At times, the dictates of the state-agent and citizen-agent narratives exist in concert: law, public policy, and agency procedures provide a good match with the street-level workers’ views of the people they encounter. At other times, tension intrudes between workers’ inclinations and the dictates of the law. When law, policy, and rules are ill matched to workers’ views of fairness and appropriate action, streetlevel work smolders with con›ict over what is the right decision and what is the right thing to do. The distinct contours of the citizen-agent narrative are most evident in these moments of tension. Many of the stories we collected revealed these tensions and con›icts, and by analyzing these stories, we seek to 9 enhance understanding of the sense making of workers and why they do what they do. Our project focuses on explicating the citizen-agent narrative as the frame or map that workers employ to understand and navigate these moments of tension and con›ict. Before turning to that task in parts 2 and 3, we identify the conceptual contours of both the state-agent and citizen-agent narratives. A considerable amount of public agency and street-level work is routine and follows rules and procedures: researchers estimate that welfare workers adhere to the standard client-intake script 75 percent of the time.2 One fundamental characteristic of street-level work is that frontline state agents are bound by a long tether of hierarchical relationships . There is some variation—teachers are subject to fewer rules than police of‹cers—but from the number of coffee breaks to the types of services provided to the manner an arrest is executed, nearly every aspect of street-level work is de‹ned by rules and procedures. Rules and procedures are an essential aspect of bureaucratic life yet provide only weak constraints on street-level judgments.3 Street-level work is, ironically, rule saturated but not rule bound. Rather than focusing on the routines of workers, the state-agent narrative concentrates on street-level discretion, or workers’ adaptations of laws, rules, and procedures to the circumstances of cases. The issue is not the prevalence of discretionary judgments but the ever-present possibility of discretion.4 The inevitability of discretion makes issues of accountability and control central to mainstream accounts of the administrative state. According to these accounts, rules and procedures can never universally ‹t each case and every circumstance. Decisions must be made. In many circumstances, street-level workers must decide which rules or procedures to apply. The proliferation of rules—often contradictory rules—requires matching the case to the rule or procedure, and this process requires discretion.5 Moreover, despite the video cameras in police cars and the detailed reporting required of other street-level workers, a great deal of street-level work remains hidden from direct supervision.6 On a more abstract level, H. George Frederickson reminds us that discretion is inherent in all acts of administration because “every application of a law involves further elaboration of that law.”7 Thus, like putty, discretion can be squeezed by oversight and rules but never eliminated; it will shift and reemerge in some other form in some other place. This is a fact of life in the...

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