Discretion and the values of fractal man. An anthropologist’s perspective on ‘Street-level bureaucracy’

Abstract

Michael Lipsky’s seminal book entitled ‘Street-level Bureaucracy’ has long been a core citation for a social work scholarship concerned with practice. This article takes issue with a key notion in Lipsky’s book, that of ‘discretion’. It argues that Lipsky’s notion of discretion relies on assumptions often associated with the trope of ‘Economic Man’, and that the notion of discretion remains inadequately theorised in the scholarship that routinely cites the book. To re-orient inquiry about street-level discretion, the article proposes that social work scholarship can usefully look to anthropological discussions of complexities pertaining to the notion of ‘value’.

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