Policy metaphors we live by: beyond the bounds of street-level bureaucracy

Lipsky’s Street-level Bureaucracy is an iconic framework, shaping how scholars understand who makes policy, where it occurs, and how it is enacted. Yet as this framework has traveled across diverse sites, empirical studies increasingly reveal forms of policy work that exceed its bounds. We argue that this tension stems, in part, from the metaphor that structures it – ‘street-level bureaucracy.’ What does the metaphor illuminate and obscure, and how might alternative vocabularies expand possibilities for understanding policy work? To answer those questions, we explain how the metaphor spatializes policy work within a fixed terrain and positions workers as actors whose primary mode of policymaking is through discretion. This, we argue, shapes how policy work is imagined. We then introduce three reorientations – ethical, ecological, and temporal – that unsettle those assumptions, turning our attention from discretion to everyday ethics, discrete policies to contingent policy ecologies, and timelines to temporalities. Together, these reorientations allow us to see policy workers as not merely making policy within predefined environments, but co-producing policy and the very settings in which policy is enacted. We end by inviting experimentation with the metaphorical architecture of street-level bureaucracy to widen the discursive apparatus for understanding policy work, workers, and worlds.