I will begin my first installment of this book's review by quoting a few paragraphs from the Preface.

"People often enter public employment, particularly street-level bureaucracies, with at least some commitment to service. Teachers, social workers, public interest lawyers, and police officers in part seek out these occupations because of their potential as socially useful roles. Yet the very nature of this work prevents them from coming even close to the ideal conception of their jobs. Large classes or huge caseloads and inadequate resources combine with the uncertainties of method and the unpredictability of clients to defeat their aspirations as service workers."

"Ideally, and by training, street-level bureaucrats respond to the individual needs or characteristics of the people they serve or confront. In practice, they must deal with clients on a mass basis, since work requirements prohibit individualised service. Teachers should respond to the needs of the individual child; in practice they must develop techniques to respond to children as a class ... At best, street-level bureaucrats invent benign modes of mass processing that more or less permit them to deal with the public fairly, appropriately, and successfully. At worst, they give in to favoritism, stereotyping, and routinising - all of which serve private or agency purposes."

"Some street-level bureaucrats drop out or burn out relatively early in their careers. Those who stay on, to be sure, often grow in the jobs and perfect techniques, but not without adjusting their work habits and attitudes to reflect lower expectations for themselves, their clients, and the potential of public policy. Ultimately, these adjustments permit acceptance of the view that clients receive the best than can be provided under prevailing circumstances."

"Compromises in work habits and attitudes are rationalised as reflecting workers' greater maturity, their appreciation of practical and political realities, or their more realistic assessment of the nature of the problem. But these rationalisations only summarise the prevailing structural constraints on human service bureaucracies. They are not "true" in any sense. The teacher who psychologically abandons his or her aspirations to help children to read may succumb to a private assessment of the status quo in education. But this compromise says nothing about the potential of individual children to learn, or the capacity of the teacher to instruct. This potential remains intact. It is the system of schooling, the organisation of the schooling bureaucracy, that teaches that children are dull or unmotivated, and that teachers must abandon their public commitments to educate."

"Street-level bureaucrats often spend their work lives in a corrupted world of service. They believe themselves to be doing the best they can under adverse circumstances, and they develop techniques to salvage service and decision-making values within the limits imposed upon them by the structure of the work. They develop conceptions of their work and of their clients that narrow the gap between their personal and work limitations and the service ideal. These work practices and orientations are maintained even while they contribute to the perversion of the service ideal or put the worker in the position of manipulating citizens on behalf of the agencies from which citizens seek help."

"Should teachers, police officers, or welfare workers look for other work rather than perpetuate unfair, ineffective, or destructive public practices? This would leave clients to others who have even less concern and interest in service ideals. It would mean giving up the narrow areas in which workers have tried to make a difference or in which some progress is foreseen."

"Should they stay on, contributing to discredited and sometimes brutalising public agencies? If current patterns repeat themselves this would mean fighting the losing battle against cynicism and the realities of the work situation, and watching as service ideals are transformed into struggles for personal benefits."

"Should they struggle from within to change the conditions under which citizens are processed by their agencies? This path seems the hardest to maintain and is subject to the danger that illusions of difference will be taken for the reality of significant reform."