NCJ Number
124178
Date Published
1989
Length
34 pages
Annotation
Often public institutions are considered as bureaucracies and dealt with as mysterious entities because little is known about what happens inside them.
Abstract
Politicians, the chiefs of police or directors of prisons, are individuals who are professionally within the institution but who are charged with maintaining contacts with the system or world outside. Managers, the police captains or wardens, handle competition within the institution among suborganizations over resources and privileges, and they control the functioning of the suborganizations. Lineworkers, the policemen or correctional officers, mediate between the institution and the transient, the individual for whom the institution exists. There is virtually no lateral mobility in criminal justice operational work except at the top. Workers in social agencies often expect their work to matter, to have a significance beyond the moment of application or encounter. Unfortunately, there are no adequate measures for such expectations. The fear bureaucratic workers have of institutional reform is dysfunctional from a social point of view, but it is not always irrational. Outsiders impose or engineer change in terms of their external perceptions of function, reward, and organization, and these only occasionally coincide with insiders' perceptions.