Orientation Toward Clients in a Public Welfare Agency

ed from agency records, and the members of the twelve work groups were interviewed. A central focus of the interview, which lasted from one to two hours, was the respondent's orientation toward clients. Only those items which analysis revealed to be salient as well as reliable are used in this paper. Although such interview responses cannot hope to capture all subtle aspects of the case worker's approach to clients, they do indicate some basic differences in approach. "I am indebted to Philip M. Marcus for assistance in the collection and analysis of the data, and to the Ford Foundation as well as to the Social Science Research Committee of the University of Chicago for financial support. I also want to acknowledge William Delany's helpful suggestions for revising the paper. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:40:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 344 ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY BUREAUCRATIC CONSTRAINTS Case workers often complained about the bureaucratic restraints under which they had to operate. Many of them felt that the agency's emphasis on following procedures, and particularly the requirement to investigate closely each recipient's eligibility, made it impossible for them to provide the kind of case-work service which would benefit clients most: They always talk about social work, but actually you can't do anything of the kind here. For instance, I had one case which I wanted to send to... [another agency], but my supervisor said, "You can't. You would have to make a case plan first, and we can't do that." These were the words of a worker who had been with the agency only a few months. Newcomers not only voiced such complaints most often (although they were by no means alone in doing so), but they also frequently criticized old-timers for having grown callous and inflexible in the course of having become adapted to the bureaucratic organization. Implicit in the opinions of case workers were two contradictory explanations of compliance with official procedures. On the one hand, compliance was ascribed to externally imposed restraints that prevented workers from following their own inclinations and furnishing good case-work service. On the other, the old-timers' conformity to procedures was attributed to their rigidity resulting from their overadaptation to the bureaucratic organization. As a matter of fact, neither of these explanations is entirely accurate. Bureaucratic constraints actually became internalized, but adaptation to them did not increase rigidity. The impact of the bureaucratic organization on service to clients cannot be directly determined without comparing different agencies that are more or less bureaucratized. While this is not possible in a study confined to case workers in one organization, an indirect estimate of this impact can be made. Since bureaucratic pressures are, in large part, transmitted to workers through their supervisors, their influence can be inferred from a comparison of the orientations of workers under supervisors who stress strict adherence to official procedures and under supervisors who interpret procedures more liberally. On the basis of their description of a day in the field, workers were classified as being primarily oriented This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:40:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms