Street-Level Organizations, Inequality, and the Future of Human Services

In a time of increasing economic precariousness, social vulnerability, and inequality, human service organizations are being put to the test.At the frontlines of efforts to address social needs, these organizations face government funding cuts, unstable support from philanthropies and donors, and pressure from both public and private funders to do more with less.How are human services organizations to meet these challenges?These are vexing problems with no easy solutions.If we are to think constructively about how human services organizations can face these challenges, we will need a deeper understanding of how these organizations work and adapt to the conditions they face.It is this quest for a deeper understanding that motivates scholars and researchers studying street-level organizations (SLOs), those organizations and agencies that directly bring policies and programs to people.Over the span of some four decades, the field of street-level research and theory has challenged conventional ways of understanding SLOs, probing their dynamics, and critically examining efforts to control, influence, and somehow manage them.Reflecting on developments in this field, this essay considers how street-level research has contributed to understanding human services work and what it suggests about the future of human services organizations in an age of inequality. The emergence of street-level researchStreet-level research was born, in part, out of efforts to understand great social initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s and their aftermath.The War on Poverty and the Great Society offered an idealistic vision of what the U.S. could do to address poverty and build a more inclusive and just society.Promising much, the programs delivered some, in fact, considerably more than they were credited with at the time.But they also left a sense of deep frustration in their wake.It seemed as if the idealism of reformers had collided head on with the practical realities of making things happen on the ground in a complex and fragmented intergovernmental system.This collision of idealism and pragmatism was captured by Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) in their influential book, Implementation.They were sympathetic to government's antipoverty agenda, as explained in the subtitle to their book: This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes.They wanted to understand what went wrong and find ways to correct past mistakes.While "ruined hopes" may be an overstatement, the book reflected the idealism of its authors and directed attention to the practical obstacles that had undermined urban economic development policies as they moved beyond the policy-making corridors of Washington to the streets of Oakland.Along with other important studies conducted during that period, implementation research drew attention to the (now obvious) fact that good policy intentions are not enough; they must be converted into action to have any effect.Pressman and Wildavsky helped to generate interest in research that peered into the so-called black box of implementation.