Bernardo Zacka, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at Harvard University, 2017). 337 pp. $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 978067454550

• Date: 01 July 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13020
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Author: Robert Agranoff

616 Public Administration Review • July | A ugus t 201 9

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 4, pp. 616–617. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13020.

Bernardo Zacka, When the State Meets the Street: Public

Service and Moral Agency (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at

Harvard University, 2017). 337 pp. $35.00 (hardcover),

ISBN: 978067454550

This notable book identifies the complex moral

challenges of the street-level bureaucrat:

teachers, public officers, driving license

examiners, welfare caseworkers, and housing

inspectors. They represent government before

ordinary citizens. For example, a familiar situation

involves a sheriff’s deputy in the Maryland D.C.

suburban area. A deputy was sent to evict a family of

five, a mother with four children ranging in age from

4 to 17. Over $20,000 was overdue in rent. The father

was a part-time contract employee to a sub-Saharan

African embassy in Washington, who had left the

family for his home country some 6 weeks earlier with

previous rents unpaid. The involved deputy entered

the premises with the intent of serving the papers

and proceeding with removal of personal goods.

On hearing the story and facing the prospect of five

homeless people, the deputy felt concern for the fate

of the children in particular. He did not immediately

serve the eviction papers. He gave the family 10 days

to pay the rent to avoid eviction. The family was, in

fact, not evicted. Friends and neighbors connected

with the deputy and contacted the embassy where

the father worked as a consultant. Embassy officers

apparently pressured the father in Africa, who agreed

to pay the rent with over four monthly payments

oversought by the Sheriff’s office. This situation tested

moral agency—the fate of five people, as it involved

government to ordinary persons. The situation

demonstrates the predicaments with which frontline

government agents are most often engaged.

Bureaucracy at the street level, like in the Maryland

situation, can prove to be more flexible and ethically

challenging than is often understood. When the State

Meets the Street probes the complex moral lives of

street-level bureaucrats who represent governments’

human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed

as soulless operators, these workers wield a significant

margin of discretion and make decisions that

profoundly affect people’s lives. Combining insights

from political theory with his own ethnographic

fieldwork, Zacka shows us firsthand the predicament

to which these public servants are entangled. His

portrait reveals bureaucratic life as more fluid and

ethically fraught than most realize. It invites us to

approach the political theory of the democratic state

from the bottom-up, thinking not just about what

policies the state should adopt but also about how it

ought to interact with citizens when implementing

these policies.

The issue of street-level discretion has received greater

currency (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003),

particularly as the 30th anniversary expanded edition

of Michael Lipsky’s Street Level Bureaucracy (2010)

appeared, and also with Steven Maynard-Moody

and Shannon Portillo’s (2010) dedicated chapter in

The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy. Lipsky

again identified these actions as core bureaucratic

practices that notably shape programs and thus policy

as a function of worker–client coping mechanisms

while dealing with the needs of clients. Maynard-

Moody and Portillo also try to find a way beyond the

use of discretion by direct-contact workers, pointing

to the need “to move beyond the false distinction

prevalent to date between street-level discretion and

rule-based implementation” (233). Their analysis is

based on five foundational street-level worker insights:

their frontline stature, people processing actions,

possession of inherent discretion, decision-making

autonomy, and impacting policy at a basic level

(Zacka, 2016). Also, Evelyn Brodkin’s work on social

administration has brought out the variety of ways

in which practitioners use their discretion to adapt

to performance incentives, as in “These complex

adaptations lead to informal patterns of practice

that can reshape policy delivery, albeit in ways that

are not always readily visible and, certainly are not

made transparent through the performance metrics

themselves” (Brodkin, 2012).

Herein enters the work of Zacka, who combines his

background in political philosophy with fieldwork,

serving as a receptionist in an urban antipoverty

agency. To look at street-level bureaucrats one must

Reviewed by: Robert Agranoff

Indiana University, Bloomington

Robert Agranoff is professor emeritus

at the School of Public and Environmental

Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Since 1990, he has been affiliated with

the government and public administration

program, Instituto Universitario Ortega y

Gasset in Madrid, Spain. He specializes

in intergovernmental relations and

management, and public/nonpublic network

studies. His current work includes two books

Crossing Boundaries for Intergovernmental

Management (Georgetown, 2017)

and Local Governments in Multilevel

Governance: The Administrative Dimension

(Lexington, 2018).

E-mail: agranoff@indiana.edu