Abstract
In the last thirty years or so local authorities, especially the big urban authorities, have been obliged to assume greatly extended responsibilities over many aspects of the collective life of their citizens. Housing, welfare, education, local economic development, physical planning — all these and many other issues are now matters of direct concern to the politicians and officials who make up local administrations. In order to carry out their commitments and meet both the demands of central government and the aspirations of their constituents, local politicians have had to allow or encourage the growth of large bureaucratic departments to deal with housing, highways, social services and the like. These bureaucratic structures with their rational organisation, hierarchy of offices and concern with procedure and universalistic rules have become the means whereby an increasingly large stock of public goods is distributed.
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Notes and References
P. Dunleavy, Urban Political Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1980) p.60.
Ibid, pp. 58 and 59.
Social Trends, 11, 1981, table 5.8, ‘People in employment: by sector’, pp 74–76.
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For an analysis of that quintessential bureaucratic control mechanism, the queue, see J. Lambert, C. Paris and B. Blackaby, Housing Policy and the State: Allocation, Access and Control (London: Macmillan, 1978) ch. 3.
Lipsky, ‘Towards a Theory of Street-level Bureaucracy’.
Prottas, People Processing, p. 7.
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© 1982 Brian Elliott and David McCrone
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Elliott, B., McCrone, D. (1982). Bureaucracy, Politics and the City. In: The City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16925-2_5
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