The Tacit Resistance of Street-Level Bureaucrats

Teachers, social workers, nurses and other professionals play key roles in the advanced Nordic welfare states. As street level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980) they implement state policy “on the ground”, often embodying what Bourdieu (1999) have dubbed “an impossible mission”. Several studies in Norway have shown how street-level bureaucrats find ways to tweak, twist and bend regulations to deliver welfare services that are in the best interests of the citizens, at the same time as they perform their roles in ways that appear accountable towards “the system”. In this presentation I will discuss how this tacit opposition or resistance of the street-level bureaucrats represent both a solution and a challenge for the sustainability of the welfare state.