Samenvatting

Street-level bureaucracy as a term was coined by Michael Lipsky, an American political scientist, who launched it in a conference paper presented in 1969. The aggregate phenomenon the term refers to concerns a particular but broad segment of the public and semi-public sector where certain occupations, such as teaching, social work and policing, imply direct contact with individual citizens. Lipsky’s book (1980/2010) became a classic in Public Administration. Since its publication, street-level bureaucracy as an object of academic study has evolved into a scholarly theme of its own. In the study of street-level bureaucracy as now practised by an expanding worldwide community of researchers, applying rules and policy implementation have been joined by a range of other conceptualisations. In research on what happens in the interactions between public officials and individual citizens the focus has shifted more and more towards motivational aspects; links with social psychology have been made. In response, a plea for an ‘institutional (turn or return’ is evident, taking the context of the public encounter into account while making the empirical study of street-level bureaucracy more comparative.