Street-Level Bureaucracy from the Clients’ Perspective : how the lower classes experience public institutions

Relationships between public services and citizens are key to street-level bureaucracy analysis. However, research in this domain mostly considers these relationships from the viewpoint of the organization and professionals. SLB analysis teaches us more about how decisions are made than on their impact on people ; on the way bureaucratic power and discretion are exerted than on how clients comply with them or challenge them ; on how criteria are used by bureaucrats and how situations are officially defined than on their acceptance by those subjected to these practices. In this speech I will complement this literature by focusing on the second terms of these alternatives, and to do so, propose to explore SLB from the clients’ perspective. I will explore more precisely the case of the lower classes, which are both the most dependent on institutions and the most alienated from the norms they convey. I will draw on my fieldwork on deprived urban neighborhoods in France, and take some complementary examples from other countries studied by my colleagues of the Lower Classes and Public Institutions network (LoCI).