Street-level bureaucrats: En studie om möjligheten att skapa policy

Sammanfattning: In the book ”street-level bureaucracy dilemmas of the individual in public services” (2010) the author Michael Lipsky writes about the individual in public services. Lipsky presents a theory about street-level bureaucrats as policy makers. He argues that policy is created by the people at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy, the street-level bureaucrats. This is made possible by two interlinked factors, a relatively large distance from organizational authority witch leads to freedom in the daily routine. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the problem of seeing street-level bureaucrats as a homogeneous group. This essay questions Lipskys tendency to generalize various types of street-level bureaucrats’ possibility to make policy. Therefore the research question is: To what extent does organizational depth affect opportunity for street-level bureaucrats to make policy? By comparing two organizations with different organizational depth, the police and the healthcare, with the degree of freedom at these workplaces this study examine if these two factors correlate. Based on interviews this study finds that even though the organizational depth differs the opportunity to make policy does not vary.