Street Level Bureaucrats

1986 Words8 Pages
Objective This paper aims to study the public’s perception of the accountability of street-level bureaucrats in rendering public policies in the context of their diminishing discretionary capabilities due to the shift in dynamics of information control caused by the wide usage of ICT in public service. Method The purpose described above is attempted within a narrowed scope of interviewing samples of five street level personnel from various government agencies working in the Urban Transformation Centre (UTC), Puduraya- a government service delivery hub in the Kuala Lumpur city centre. Whilst each subject have different job titles and descriptions, and perform different tasks based on their patronage, all subjects spend the majority of their functional time dealing with the public customer, catering to their respective informational and procedural demands. As such, this study mainly focused on a subset of street level bureaucrats- a specific class of street-level bureaucrats which the author will refer to as “counter front-liners” throughout the paper. The interview was done face-to-face in an informal manner to invoke the most honest of responses. Apart from learning the nature of each respondent’s job tasks, questions are posed with the aim to gain further appreciation of the front-liners’ challenges in delivering their services and making sense of their own understanding of their relationship with the customers as well as their parent agencies. Assumptions It will be assumed that the reader has some amount of knowledge about Public Administration in Malaysia and its basic structure and functions in general. The concept of street level bureaucrats and Michael Lipsky’s observation and description of the street level bureaucrats’ nature of exercising power and discretion also will not be outlined. For the benefit of the reader, the paper will make no such

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