190059 SE Counseling and Counseling Research (2024S)

Objectives:
This course introduces students to street-level bureaucracy theory that provides a powerful lens for future social workers or teachers to understand and reflect on the institutional dynamics and contingencies that influence professional practice.
Content:
Social policies are formal solutions to social problems. But because social problems tend to embody highly contested issues, they are rarely resolved in legislative processes that require majority support. As a result, the contests over the goals and content of social policies often resurface during the process of implementation. However, since the implementation of these policies and programs is facilitated through human interactions, discretion tends to be intrinsic at the front-lines of service delivery. Coupled with a chronic mismatch between resources (time, money, programmatic supports, staff capacity, etc.) and demand that characterize the work of social workers, teachers or other public service professionals, these conditions move the actions of so-called street-level bureaucrats (SLB) to the center of attempts to understand what policies look like on the ground. In other words: Abstract and ambiguous legislative text is filled with meaning in the interactions between worker and client.
The course introduces students to a bottom-up perspective on the policy making process. We begin with an introduction of the construction of social problems and the key importance of ‘causal stories’ for assigning responsibilities but also for implying potential solutions. We trace the contest over causation, responsibility and programmatic solutions and how it continues through the legislative process in order to gain a deeper understanding of the patterns why certain issues are more likely than others to advance on the government agenda and ultimately become law. We then shift the focus on the institutional systems charged with policies that tend to lack specificity and often contain contradicting goals (e.g., education as the primary sorting mechanism in society in contrast to claims of education as a leveler of the playing field). Drawing on the growing SLB literature we will examine the conditions of these public/publicly funded institutions and how they shape what professionals do in their interactions with citizens/clients. We will then apply these concepts and ideas to different policy cases in the fields of education and social work.