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Awarded for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration. Award Committee: Laura S. Jensen, Chair, Virginia Tech University; Terri R. Jett, Butler University; and Herman Schwartz, University of Virginia Recipient: Zachary Oberfield, University of Wisconsin, Madison Dissertation Title: “Becoming the Man: How Street-Level Bureaucrats Develop Their Workplace Identities and Views” Dissertation Chair: Joe Soss, University of Minnesota Citation: Dr. Oberfield’s dissertation uses long term survey and interview data on new police officers and welfare caseworkers in a mid-sized American city to examine the process of socialization into bureaucratic norms. He contrasts the relative degree to which self selection, novices’ own initial beliefs, and the structural constraints of their job create identities, behavior patterns, and views on citizen deservingness. Mr Oberfield carried out a three year long survey of over a hundred officer-cadets and new caseworkers, as well as semi-structured interviews. This alone is a remarkable achievement. While Mr Oberfield’s findings suffer from some weaknesses – in particular an inability to fully account for how self-selection into his two interview pools interacts with the differing degrees of autonomy/discretion involved in each job, the dissertation presents a nuanced exploration and explanation for the development of a bureaucratic consciousness and attitude changes over time. By doing so, he sheds light on how organizations reproduce themselves by reshaping the human raw material that comes their way. |
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