Indigenous Community Engagement
This site has been set up by Matt Campbell and Michael Christie from Charles Darwin University. It continues our work in Indigenous Community Engagement. Please follow these links for a report from a previous collaborative project examining our university's engagement with Indigenous communities in the NT ICE©CDU and a special Indigenous community Engagement edition of the Learning Communities Journal.
Below we provide some short outlines of theories and methodologies which inform our current thinking.
Please contact us if you have any questions or further contributions. Matthew.Campbell@cdu.edu.au | Michael.Christie@cdu.edu.au
Street Level Bureaucrats and the
Policy Process | Narratives and Discretion in
Organizational Culture | Social Inclusion
as a Public Problem
Street Level Bureaucrats and Policy
'Street level bureaucrats' is a term originally coined by Michael Lipsky and Richard Weatherley in the late 1970s to describe those public employees who interact directly with members of the public. Lipsky went on to expand on this work in his book 'Street Level Bureaucracy' (1980). Common street level bureaucrat occupations include: teachers, police officers, welfare workers, legal aid lawyers and health workers. Street level bureaucrats make decisions that directly affect members of the public, and in making these decisions must exercise varying degrees of discretion.
The street level bureaucracy approach turns the traditional understanding of policy making and development on its head. Traditional understandings of policy as documents and directives developed at high levels of organisations or governments and filtered down to be actioned at the street level, need to be rethought. Lipsky sees street level bureaucrats as the policy makers, because in a real sense the only “policy” that the public experiences is that which is mediated through their contact with street level bureaucrats. In this sense “policy” is the cumulative effect of the individual decisions made by street level bureaucrats.
The concept of street level bureaucracy enables us to examine the ‘gap’ that is seen to exist between policy and practice, and also allows us to see why changes in 'official' policy often do not result in change on the ground. It highlights the difficult position of individuals as they work in situations of uncertainty, brought about by the difficult day to day decisions which have to be made and the complex array of rules, procedures and policies they must work within.
We are interested in using the understandings of policy developed through the street level bureaucracy approach to examine how engagement work occurs in intercultural contexts in the Northern Territory. We are interested to find out how street level bureaucrats’ actions are conditioned by high level policy proclamations (which may be contradictory or unclear), and to what extent they must exercise discretion as they make decisions that affect citizens.
More recently criticisms (Baldwin, 1998; Ellis, Davies, & Rummery, 1999; Howe, 1991) have been made of the continuing relevance of Lipsky’s thesis, arguing that the discretion that Lipsky’s subjects were forced to exercise has been curtailed through an increasing range of administrative and managerial checks and balances. However as Evans and Harris (2004) point out discretion can never be entirely eliminated from the work of street level bureaucrats, partly because they work with people (with their varying and unpredictable needs), and partly because they are subject to a range of vague and often contradictory goals. They acknowledge that the increasing range of regulations to which street level bureaucrats are subject is intended to curtail discretion and control practice, but believe that a significant gap remains between intention and achievement.
Baldwin, M.
(1998). Care management and community care: social work discretion and
the construction of policy. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Ellis, K., Davies, A., & Rummery, K. (1999). Needs assessment, street-level
bureaucracy and the new community care. Social Policy and Administration,
33(3), 262- 280.
Evans, T., & Harris, J. (2004). Street level bureaucracy, social work and the (exaggerated) death of discretion. British Journal of Social Work, 34(6), 871- 895.
Howe, D. (1991). Knowledge, power and the shape of social work practice.
In M. Davies (Ed.), the Sociology of Social Work. London: Routledge.
Lipsky, M. (1980). Street level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the individual
in public services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Narratives and Discretion in Organizational Culture
Maynard-Moody and Musheno, in their work entitled 'Cops, Teachers, Counselors', used a methodology of narrative production and analysis to look at the role of discretion in the work of street level bureaucrats.
If we take for example, the mundane, everyday, and often difficult and thankless work of health professionals, it is clear that it involves a significant factor of discretion in which they move between understanding themselves as agents of the health department or funding body, and understanding themselves as citizens (or community members).
Those health professionals (both Indigenous and nonIndigenous) who engage with Indigenous clients in the various settings of public and primary health care are not merely agents of the policy; the development of standards of practice, protocols, guidelines and mechanisms for monitoring and ensuring accountability can only go some way towards the institutionalization of best practice in communication.
Maynard-Moody and Musheno’s research showed that the narratives which ‘street-level bureaucrats rehearse and produce reveal moral reasoning as they tell the stories of the banal truths by which governmental institutions operate. The stories first establish the citizen-clients’ identities, and then justify the workers identities and practices in terms of the former. They reveal the ways in which street-level decision making is complexly moral and contingent rather than narrowly rule bound. They also reveal that the moral actions of the health professionals and the demands of rules, procedures and policies often coexist in unresolvable tension. The previously recognized barrier between supervisors and front-line staff, between policy-makers and policy implementers goes well beyond hierarchy, rules and routines; it is embedded in the social norms and culture of street-level work.
Furthermore, the workers’ beliefs and values are developed and reinforced within the rough and tumble interactions with peers and clients, more than in their formal interactions with supervisors. The stories they tell not only reflect organization culture, but they structure it actively and into the future. Organizational culture is overwhelmingly more important than hierarchy, supervision and accountability in determining workers’ compliance with best practice and constant quality improvement.
The book highlights that if change is to be made to the ways that street level bureaucrats work, the stories that they tell about their work need to be taken seriously. The authors contend that organisational change will not come about through 'tightening rules, regulations, supervision or through strengthening moral reasoning', it will only come about when street level bureaucrats are encouraged to 'analyse their own and others normative judgements' through normal social processes such as storytelling in supported and visible ways.
Maynard-Moody, S., & Musheno, M. (2003). Cops, teachers, counselors. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Social Inclusion as a Public Problem
This approach uses Kathryn Pyne Addelson’s notion of a Public Problem. We can use as an example the emergence of Social Inclusion as a Public Problem (SI as PP) which introduces remote Aboriginal people as participants in the social sphere in new ways. SI as PP emerges in collective action, but of course different groups (bureaucrats, policy makers, academics, Aboriginal participants) construct issues of inclusion quite differently.
Theoretical work needs to be directed towards ‘success in winning’ particular struggles over inclusion, not to a more general theory. Joining the battle over social inclusion requires using the language and tools available for winning. In research work on social Inclusion we should assume that Aboriginal people and governments should/could both be winners, both ‘end users’ of research.
As we look at the way SI is defined as a public problem (by various participants) we start to see the range of solutions that are appropriate for social inclusion. Aboriginal people have strong ideas and practices of inclusion (which enact metaphysics of sameness and difference, the notion of ‘social’, the individual, the ‘out there’ reality and a cast of participants which might be quite different from those at work in other constructions).
Social Inclusion itself is understood as a participant in an ensemble cast which has human and non-human actors. Received views of agency in the rhetoric around Social Inclusion infect our ability to offer alternatives strategies for winners. The ‘Participants in Collective Action’ approach allows us to be respectful of both government and Aboriginal community memgers and the participants in their worlds – even though they can be quite different. It allows us to avoid the metaphysics of western science, and the individualism of western ethics and political philosophy.
Methodologically we could look at the changing rhetoric and practices of govts concerned with SI and compare them with the history of Aboriginal thinking and practices of social inclusion (with respect to various issues or projects – eg housing, research, education, tourism, arts, health). We need to do this in the piecemeal tactics that work in producing knowledge and policy at the same time. Devising an evidence base is knowledge work that is not separate from policy work.
Those engaged more directly in public problems contribute to social movements in different ways from general theorists. Our work is not to develop a general theory of social inclusion as a political policy, but to act as a particular sort of cognitive authority for particular political problems that will help us understand social inclusion and the other participants and their authority and power in naming participants and problems in collective action.
What really exists is the social/political issue. We are not looking for rational consistency across various understandings and practices of social inclusion. It is from the tensions between the different rationalities that we may be able to devise a more generative approach to Social Inclusion policy.
Social Inclusion as a Public Problem can be understood as a research method that engages and enacts policy; our work is theorising what is happening in the public problem of the moment, provisional theories that we should not expect to easily or automatically extend to cover other situations. This entails finding ways of avoiding the judging observer role in Social Inclusion work.
In the complex work around Public Problems those on all sides legitimatise some answers to the question of How We Should Live, and delegitimize others. How do the public problem of ‘Social Inclusion’ and those who include and are included come to be who they are? Who has authority in the processes?
(This summary is built from notes originally written by Helen Verran)
Addelson, K. P. (2002). ‘The Emergence of the Fetus’. Gender Struggles: Political Approaches to Contemporary Feminism. C. Mui and J. Murphy (eds). Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield: 118-136.
Header photo: John Greatorex (far left) and Yiŋiya Guyula (far right) both from CDU talking to Marpiyawuy, Balarrkpalarrk and Djirarrwuy from Milingimbi about a Financial Literacy project. See www.cdu.edu.au/yaci