The leading theory in the field from which to draw the ideas, from which much of the work in recent years has evolved, is the concept of ‘the Street-Level Bureaucrat’ (SLB) by American scholar Lipsky (2010; [1980]). Lipsky examined the role of public services employees who work in roles such as teachers, police officers, social workers, health workers and judges, as well as any other employees who provide services within and as part of governments. The street-level framework suggests the paradox between the bureaucracy of set rules and structures and the distance of these employees from the centre of authority and thereby draws attention to the significant contribution of front line workers to policymaking. Lipsky’s core argument is based on three key points: first, the public service employees hold a level
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of discretion that they use to implement policies and must balance the needs to respond individually to cases and to respond collectively to policy demands in the most efficient way. Second, Lipsky argues that the varied roles of the SLBs can be compared on a structural level and between groups. In addition to these first two points, which originated in the original version of his idea, published in 1980, his updated work in 2010 presents the idea that the role of managers in enabling SLBs is also important, as managers can narrow the jobs of SLBs and therefore their level of discretion. In the UK and Australia, for example, there was a trend in the 1990s toward the introduction of new public management (NPM) (Lipsky 2010; Hood and Jackson 1994; Hood 1991), in which managers in the UK were introduced to the school system and teachers followed clearer standards and lost some autonomy.
The concept of SLBs has been widely acknowledged as an important contribution to public policy analysis, and it has been used across many service provisions such as safety, security, education, social services (Durose 2011; Evans 2011; Evans 2007) and homelessness (Alden, 2015). A key point of Lipsky’s idea is
…the decision of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures, effectively become the public policies they carry out (Lipsky 1980, p.xii).
This quotation highlights the importance of policy at the practitioner (micro) level (Scourfield, 2015). According to Lipsky, SLBs interact directly with citizens and can make use of their discretion in performing work tasks (2010). Fundraisers in the case of this study do not engage with members of the public in the same way that teachers or social worker staff might, but they nevertheless interact with donors. Donors are members of the public and fundraisers implement institutional and government policy and work with the donor to achieve donors’ personal goals and combine these goals with the institutional goals.
Lipsky’s definition of SLBs includes key characteristics that could be shared with and applied tofundraisers. First, SLBs work as public service workers. Fundraisers indirectly perform this function, especially in universities, as they raise funds arguably for the wider public good of students and the communities. Second, SLBs interact directly with people as part of their job. Fundraisers equally do so, asking donors for money for public services such as schools, the police and nursing. However, these functions may not be the same or comparable, because fundraisers are not, strictly speaking, delivering public service despite working in public institutions. Third, Lipsky argues that SLBs have options for the way the policy is
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delivered; a similar point could be argued for fundraisers, who talk about different ideas and projects with potential donors and may interpret those, but that remains to be uncovered in this study. A final similarity could be what Lipsky (2010) described as important conditions at work; he describes work in which policy goals are often mismatched with the work
experience (Tummers et al., 2012). These conditions include inadequate resources, demand in excess of supply and in the case of fundraisers, a demand for rapid decision-making to deliver a funding need (Daly, 2013).
However, a distinction must be made between SLBs as defined by Lipsky and fundraisers; there is a difference between a perceived relatively new ‘fundraising’ service that is trying to establish itself within the sector and long-established public services such as police and social work that have been under-resourced for years. The changing higher education landscape has increased the pressure and demands for a more efficient and fast service of HEIs (Barr 2004; 2010), similar to what Lipsky described as the conditions at work (1984), however, this cannot automatically be compared and linked.
Lipsky (2010) also attributes an important influence to the SLBs in the form of ‘substantial discretion’, understood as ‘a choice of judgement within recognised boundaries’ (Durose 2011, p. 908). As part of the discussion of SLBs, the concept of discretion has recently been a popular topic of debate in research (Alden 2015; Scourfield 2015; Hoyle 2014; Evans 2011). The concept was identified by Evans as SLBs using the policies with their knowledge and decision-making to achieve what they can within the constraints of their jobs. Lipsky (2010) also pointed to the ‘conflicting and ambiguous policy agendas under conditions of inadequate resources’ (p.81) that have led to an increasing development of SLBs and therefore gives them more power and tools to carry out their jobs. In the UK, the shifts in funding and the increasing demand for services such as police and social services have left SLBs in what Lipsky describes as conditions that are inadequately resourced. The core argument is that discretion is not only unavoidable but also essential (Hoyle, 2014). This claim has arisen from research into local authority social services (Ellis and Harris; Baldwin 2000), and the concept has been applied more broadly to areas of health and social welfare (Hoyle 2014; Howe 1991). This analysis would develop the ideas that would provide a critical angle on the concept of discretion. The constraints of SLBs job include strained resources and high demands; these conditions can similarly be translated to fundraising, in which not enough resources are provided for successful fundraising. For example, not enough resources are provided for recruiting enough staff to complete fundraising tasks (HEFCE, 2012b), however these resources have to be carefully compared and assessed as these are
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nevertheless different fields of public service with their own rules, structures and hierarchies and involvement of staff and their roles and responsibilities.
Howe (1991) questioned the relevance of Lipsky’s contribution in the area of discretion, pointing out that most of SLBs key tasks are driven by others, such as managers or departmental policies and procedures. However, Baldwin (2000) and Evans and Harris (2004) contest the fact that managerialism has prevented bureaucrats’ discretion to the extent argued by Howe (1991), and Evans (2011) extends this argument by providing
evidence from his qualitative case study of adult social work within a local authority in mental health and older people. Evans (2011) found that discretion was key to these public services and the SLBs, but he also critiqued Lipsky’s account of the role of professionalism. Evans (2011) argues that the effect professionalism has on the relationship between workers and front line managers is underestimated in terms of the role of discretion.
The other criticism that Evans (2011) discussed was the broad generalisation by Lipsky (2010) presuming that ‘managers are a homogeneous group and that they act simply as policy lieutenants’ ( p. 72). Evan’s point is that the discretion does not just take place at the practitioner level, but throughout and across the hierarchy of an organisation. This is a point that needs to be taken into account when using this concept in higher education. Scholars already pointed towards the complex hierarchical structures within higher education and divisions between academic and professional services posts (Waring, 2017). Waring (2017) develops this and points out existing problems in structures of higher education and argues that ‘performance-led management that characterises many institutions is both outmoded and ill-suited to the challenges of an increasingly turbulent higher education sector’ (p.540). Within the academic divisions, structures are usually maintained at the school level; in comparison, fundraisers are usually based within central services of a university in a
development office or fundraising section, part of a wider professional services umbrella that often contains student administration, marketing, communication and research services (Squire 2014; Jongbloed, Enders and Salerno 2008). Fundraising roles and posts have developed as part of professional services posts rather than becoming an academic activity. In central services, there are hierarchical management structures in place that must be taken into account when discussing fundraisers’ role in the policy process and their level of
discretion. Scourfield (2015) agrees that in order to continue using the original concept by Lipsky, it is necessary to acknowledge the role that managers play in providing discretion to cases, which he has proven to be valid in Scourfield’s social care studies. He takes this line of argument a step further and suggests in his example of statutory care home reviews that ‘street-level bureaucracy is more appropriately conceptualised as being the multi-layered
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and dispersed exercise of discretion of multiple state and non-state actors’ (p. 929). Scourfield (2015) thus suggests going beyond Evan’s idea of the reformulation (p. 929). The final criticism is that the idea of discretion could be out of date because services have changed significantly (Evans 2010; Baldwin 2004), but it is also argued that the concept nevertheless exists (Evans 2010; Ellis, Davis and Rummer 2002; Baldwin 2000). Lipsky (2010) himself recognised the limitations of the original theory in going beyond the finding that SLBs’ activities develop into policies (2010). He has since suggested that while SLBs’ behaviour may help toward achieving an overall behaviour, their involvement is only part of an existing broader policy environment, placed within existing structures rather than setting core objectives. As a result, he notes that managers’ roles can help narrow the gap between SLBs’ delivery and conduct and the target policy results which will be an important point to critically consider as part of this study’s examination.