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By (author) Zacka, Bernardo

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Bernardo Zacka probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats—the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed as soulless operators, these workers wield significant discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives.

When the State Meets the Street probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s 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 as a receptionist in an urban antipoverty agency, Bernardo Zacka shows us firsthand the predicament in which these public servants are entangled.

Public policy consists of rules and regulations, but its implementation depends on how street-level bureaucrats interpret them and exercise discretionary judgment. These workers are expected to act as sensible moral agents in a working environment that is notoriously challenging and that conspires against them. Confronted by the pressures of everyday work, they often and unknowingly settle for one of several reductive conceptions of their responsibilities, each by itself pathological in the face of a complex, messy reality. Zacka examines the factors that contribute to this erosion of moral sensibility and what it takes to remain a balanced moral agent in such difficult conditions.

Zacka’s revisionary portrait reveals bureaucratic life as more fluid and ethically fraught than most citizens 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.

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When the State Meets the Street reads as one might imagine a collaboration between Bernard Williams, Richard Sennett, and James Scott could turn out. If there can be such a thing as an instant classic, this book is one.

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In this refreshing study, Zacka finds in the commonplace decision-making of street level bureaucrats an implicit but coherent moral structure. When citizens experience the state through street-level encounters, the author shows, they are subject to moral reasoning no less than when elected officials expand or contract social welfare policies, or bring a nation to war.

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Beautifully written, tightly argued, and totally original.

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In his groundbreaking book When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, Bernardo Zacka illustrates a new methodological approach for political theory, opens up avenues of normative research on the neglected topic of bureaucracy and bureaucrats and overturns an intellectually dubious, but nonetheless dominant, model of the state…Zacka’s discussion is subtle and thoughtful and opens many avenues for political and moral theorists to explore.

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This book…not only offers a valuable contribution to the street-level bureaucracy literature, but is also an essential read for political theorists interested in a bottom-up account of the state.

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Zacka’s application of normative theory to state-level bureaucrats and his efforts at injecting ethnographically informed descriptive evidence into political theory are to be applauded and should represent a vanguard in political theory.

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An exemplary and exquisitely written book from which sociologists have much to learn.<