ABSTRACT

Welfare services in Britain up until the early 1980s have been characterised by observers as dominated by professionals and discretion. Discretion is freedom within the work role: 'A public officer has discretion whenever the effective limits on his power leave him free to make a choice among possible courses of action or inaction'. The first, de facto, sense of discretion can be associated with a capacity to act because of the absence of effective control. When Street-Level Bureaucracy was first published in Britain it was greeted as a cogent and credible account of the extensive discretionary practices of employees of public bodies such as Social Services: 'too much rings true for it to be dismissed as a recital of American problems'. It is important particularly for British readers to draw out implicit elements of Lipsky's analysis in Street-Level Bureaucracy, which the title of the book itself might obscure.