Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL

ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY

EMPOWERMENT/ March 2000
Many contemporary reforms of the public sector advocate empowerment as a solution for
many of the problems of governing. The difficulty arises when different groups—clients,
lower-level officials, senior officials, and local communities—are all the subject of empow-
erment. Attempts to enhance the power of all these players in the policy process is argued to
create the probability of political conflict, and this is demonstrated with a set of examples.
Efforts at empowerment further may be the sources of substantial disillusionment and possi-
ble alienation when it becomes apparent that all groups cannot be empowered at once.

CITIZENS VERSUS THE

NEW PUBLIC MANAGER
The Problem of Mutual Empowerment

B. GUY PETERS
University of Pittsburgh/University of Strathclyde
JON PIERRE
University of Gothenburg

One of the powerful ideologies growing up throughout the public sector

during the contemporary period of administrative reform (Aucoin, 1996)
has been that of empowerment. In democratic societies, the term empow-
erment has positive connotations, appearing to promote more directly
democratic forms for governing and opening organizations to the influ-
ences of its members. As with so many terms of this sort, empowerment is
often used to mean exactly what each speaker or writer wants it to mean
and in the process has become debased. Empowerment is used in any
number of ways and is used both as a description of what has been happen-
ing in government and as an ideology for promoting even more change.
We will also be arguing that as appealing as the concept of empower-
ment is, if taken too literally it has the potential to undermine three impor-
tant values in Western societies: representative government, account-
able bureaucracy, and a strong and effective state. Some advocates of

ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY, Vol. 32 No. 1, March 2000 9-28

© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

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10 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

empowerment recognize those potential problems. For example, Dilys

Hills (1994) writes that

the fostering of the civic-republican tradition of citizenship will itself pro-

vide, through the real opportunities provided by improved democratic insti-
tutions and processes, the necessary empowerment and motivation. The
improved scale of and vitality of participation, it is hoped, will allow repre-
sentative democracy to be challenged critically, not undermined. (p. 26)

A naive acceptance of the idea of empowerment without consideration of

the negative side effects may generate more harm than good for society
and especially for the governance of those societies.1 This article is there-
fore something of an unpacking of the concept and also something of a set
of caveats about too easy acceptance of its virtue.

THE TARGETS OF EMPOWERMENT

We can distinguish at least three clear targets for grants of increased

power. These three target groups may have slightly different interpreta-
tions of what the group against which they have been empowered is and
what exactly they are empowered to do. All three are, however, meant to
experience greater latitude for autonomous action and decisions.

Citizens and clients. Empowerment is most commonly discussed in

reference to the clients of the public sector, or perhaps in reference to the
public in general (see Sorenson, 1997). The idea is that government has
become too remote, too bureaucratic, and too hierarchical to be acceptable
in democratic regimes. The argument of the empowerment advocates is
that people should be empowered to make more decisions about their own
lives, whether that power is to be exercised as individuals or as members of
communities.2 Furthermore, it is argued that the state must cease acting in
loco parentis for perfectly competent adult citizens.3 This power relation-
ship between citizens and government is especially evident in social ser-
vice agencies in which the typical role of the service worker is to control as
well as to benefit the client (Handler, 1996).
Programs for citizen involvement stress the need to make government
more accessible to the public and to grant citizens, and clients, greater
4
influence over policy. In particular, this view of government argues that
representative (“aggregative”) institutions are inadequate to involve the

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 11

public and therefore integrative institutions permitting direct participation

and influence are needed. As one definition describing the program of
empowerment for citizens and clients in Denmark (see also Hoff, 1993)
expresses the point,

Empowerment means transforming individuals into citizens; that is

increasing the ability of each individual to internalize a holistic perspective
on societal governance. . . . The keyword in designing democratic institu-
tions which serve the integrative aspects of empowerment is participation.
(Sorenson, 1997, p. 557)

Similarly, Britain, Burns, Hambleton, and Hoggett (1994) describe

empowerment and high quality democracy as “lying in the existence of an
informed, organized and confident citizenry engaged within the public
sphere where no voices are excluded” (pp. 269-270). These ideas have been
spreading beyond their usual locales in the industrialized democracies to
become part of reform efforts in other countries, where “civic empower-
ment” of those with “little previous experience with participation” is
stressed (Abers, 1998, pp. 511-512). The empowerment of citizens also
has become part of the agenda for some international organizations seek-
ing more fundamental change in less developed countries (Timberg,
1995).
One way in which this version of empowerment has been expressed is
“consumerizing” the public sector, although even here there are a multi-
plicity of meanings as became apparent when examining Germany, the
United Kingdom, and the United States (Hood, Peters, & Wollmann,
1996). Governments are said to need to treat the public more as customers
than as clients and to learn how to listen to what people want, as well as to
make decisions about what they will get. For example, at the more extreme
end of the spectrum of involvement, citizens, in their role as parents and
residents as well as citizens, have been given the opportunity to manage
schools and housing estates, rather than leaving that to public managers
(Birchall, Pollitt, & Putman, 1995; Hess, 1994). At a less extreme level of
citizen empowerment, there are a variety of devices that permit citizens to
participate in open hearings, in more dialogical and deliberative settings
for decision, in coproduction, and at a minimum to have their complaints
about government taken more seriously than in the past (Roberts, 1997;
Tritter, 1994). All of these devices are designed to grant the citizen a more
direct and meaningful role in making and implementing public policy; in
other words, they are directed at empowering citizens.

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12 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

Government employees. The second group to be granted increased

power through empowerment are employees of public organizations, es-
pecially workers at lower echelons within these organizations. This is
really an old idea, going back to the human relations approach to manage-
ment and the assumption that employees would work harder and better if
they were provided more opportunities for involvement in their organiza-
tions. Involvement and empowerment therefore has the potential to be ma-
nipulative, but once the genie of empowerment is let out of the bottle it
may be difficult to contain. In more recent times, empowerment often has
been intended less as manipulation and more as a genuine means of im-
proving the working lives of employees and has been found in private as
well as public-sector management (Kernaghan, 1992).
The idea of empowerment has been adopted as one component of the
contemporary reforms of management in and out of the public sector. At
its simplest, empowerment has been manifested in the “quality move-
ment,” with quality circles and similar mechanisms being one way to give
groups of workers greater control over their organizations and their jobs
(Bouckaert & Pollitt, 1993; Swiss, 1992). For example, speaking more
about the private than the public sector, Vogt and Murrell (1990) argue that
“quality teams, whether they are part of the formal organizational struc-
ture or temporary, are at the heart of empowerment” (p. 96).
Empowerment has also been central to reforms in the public sector in
North America. Programs such as PS 2000 in Canada (Tellier, 1990) and
the Gore Report in the United States (Peters & Savoie, 1996) have placed
the idea of empowering employees at the core of the change process. For
example, the PS 2000 program in Canada argued that

empowerment asks employees to assume responsibility for change and to

be accountable for their actions within an environment which accepts a
degree of risk-taking and acknowledges intent as well as results. (Tellier,
1990, p. 52)

This emphasis on involving employees in their organizations continues

with the most recent round of public-sector reform in Canada, La Releve,
and its attempts to renew the vitality of public service (Privy Council
Office, 1997).
Even some aspects of the managerial reforms in New Zealand, Austra-
lia, and the United Kingdom have sought to give managers greater autonomy
to make decisions, even if lower echelon workers may not be empowered in the
process (Ranson & Stewart, 1994, pp. 242-268). Also, the project of

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 13

renouveau in the French state under Michel Rocard stressed the need to
enhance “participation and experimentation” by public managers and to
remove barriers to their exercising power (see Bezes, 1999; de Closets,
1989). Scandinavian public management has traditionally been more par-
ticipatory than that of most other countries, but even there some reforms
have been in the direction of enhanced involvement for public employees
(Gustafsson, 1987). In all these various guises, empowerment simply
means permitting employees to make more decisions on their own, with-
out reference to superiors or to formal rules, with the assumption that
these employees know best their local conditions and the needs of their
clients.
Speaking of Canada, as well as of his own government in Australia,
John Hart (1998) argues that empowerment is perhaps the most basic of
the reforms of government in the past several decades. He argues that

empowerment is much more than delegation. In the words of the Public

Service 2000 task force report, it “encourages managers, supervisors and
employees to try new ways of achieving goals, motivating them to be crea-
tive and innovative in improving the service they deliver. Empowerment
asks employees to assume responsibility for change and to be accountable
for their actions within an environment which accepts a degree of risk-
taking and acknowledges intent as well as results.” . . . Empowerment, more
than any other of the doctrinal components of New Public Management,
reaches deep into the managerial psychology. (p. 289)

In all these cases, empowerment is a means of “breaking through bureauc-

racy” (Barzelay, 1992) and permitting the public employees to have
greater influence over their working lives.

Subnational government. The third target for empowerment is subna-

tional governments. The argument is that central governments have,
through grants and intergovernmental regulations, tended to homogenize
policy and stifle creativity in these lower echelons of government. In this
arena, empowerment may be discussed as “decentralization” or “devolu-
tion” of powers. The 1980s and 1990s have been remarkable in the way in
which previously highly centralized regimes such as France and Spain
have begun to devolve power to lower levels of government (Loughlin &
Mazey, 1995). Although the nation-state remains the principal actor in
Europe, the increasing importance of “Europe of the Regions” points to
this form of empowerment (Le Gales & Lesquesne, 1998).

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14 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

The fundamental idea is, however, the same and decentralization sim-
ply empowers decision makers of local or regional governments to make
decisions that better match their own needs and capabilities, perhaps
within a broad, national framework. For example, speaking primarily in
the context of the United Kingdom, Foster and Plowden (1996) argue that

local services are better delivered if the local communities served are
involved in the provision and production process through empowerment.
Community policemen are more effective in maintaining law and order,
because they are able to involve more members of the community. . . .
Finally, empowerment may revitalize democracy by motivating more peo-
ple to care enough about their local community to vote or even stand for
election. (p. 129)

One illustration of this movement is the contemporary debate over welfare

reform in the United States, with the national plan for policy change
returning much greater power and responsibility to the individual states
(Beaumont, 1996; Hills, 1998). The older welfare system already was
becoming a patchwork of state waivers, but the emerging system more
explicitly grants powers to the states, for good or for ill. There is also an
indwelling assumption that this form of empowerment will, in the long
run, also empower the former recipients of welfare benefits. Indeed, some
of the political rhetoric discusses the requirement for work in the pro-
grams as a form of empowerment.

ASSESSING EMPOWERMENT

Although a powerful idea from a strictly political perspective, the

empowerment of these several groups in society raises a number of related
political and administrative issues. The most obvious and most important
consideration is accountability. Empowering clients and workers in public
organizations may appear democratic, but in some ways it is profoundly
antidemocratic. Empowerment appears to create the problem of ensuring
that policies are made and delivered in accordance with the public interest,
defined rather broadly, and in accordance with the intentions of legitimate
5
decision makers. Allowing clients excessive power over decisions affect-
ing them risks unnecessary spending of public money and the familiar
problem of “capture” of regulators by the regulated interests (Wood &
Waterman, 1995). One of the standard prescriptions for making environ-
mental and economic regulation in the United State more effective is to

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 15

permit regulators more personal discretion, but with that discretion also
may come some erosion of the policy goals selected by their “principals.”6
Similarly, empowering lower echelon workers to make more decisions
on their own authority presents risks of spending public money unwisely
and unfairness to clients based on who their caseworker might be. In addi-
tion to ensuring a sympathetic hearing for their clients, government
organizations also have responsibilities to the public as a whole (in their
role as taxpayers if nothing else), as well as to other clients who deserve
equal treatment. Furthermore, advocates of empowerment assume that
clients will get a better deal if there is greater latitude for lower echelon
workers; they appear to forget some of the extremely negative experiences
of lower status citizens with discretion exercised by public organizations
7
such as the police (Geller & Toch, 1996). Governing always implies bal-
ancing competing values, and that requirement becomes extremely clear
when one considers the potential effects of empowerment on government.
There is often a good deal of naivete, or hypocrisy, in the debate over
empowerment, especially the empowerment of subnational governments.
It is not clear how decisions made by public officials in a state capital, or
even a city hall, are any less bureaucratic and intrusive than are similar
8
regulations made in Washington or Stockholm. The content of the regula-
tions made may be different in the different states and localities, but that
does not imply that they will be superior. This skepticism over devolution
is especially relevant given that the root causes of some of the policy prob-
lems being devolved, for example, poverty, reside more at the national or
international levels than at state and local levels. Devolution of power to
local communities may be good politics, but it is less apparent that it is
necessarily good public policy.
Another problem that empowerment raises is coordination. If organi-
zations, their employees, and subnational governments are all empowered
to make policy decisions relatively autonomously, then it will be increas-
ingly difficult to produce any coherence in public-sector decision making.
It can be argued that coordination in government is often overvalued
(Bendor, 1985; Landau, 1969) but, in an era of scarce financial resources
and citizen grumbling about inefficiency, creating any more incoherence
within the public sector is probably not desirable. Therefore, the creation
of more public organizations through programs such as Next Steps and
then empowering their employees to make more autonomous decisions
raises significant questions about the style of governance that is being sup-
plied (Peters, 1996).

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16 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

THE VIEW FROM THE STREET

The decentralization, deconcentration, and devolution of authority

from the state to local governments described above comes alive primarily
in the exchange between the public bureaucracy and its clients at the local
level of government. However, these reforms per se do not change the
exchange between the state and civil society; they merely authorize or
enable local governments to organize the exchange according to their
preferences rather than those of central government. Put differently,
although these reforms are vertical by nature (Gurr & King, 1987; King &
Pierre, 1990), they, by themselves, do not alter the horizontal dimension of
public-private interaction at the local level.
The greater autonomy accorded local government has probably revital-
ized and politicized the local debate among politicians, managers, and
professional bureaucrats on how to organize the interface between local
bureaucracy and its citizens. The decentralized and less regulated system
of government offers better opportunities for professional norms to guide
the exchange between street-level bureaucrats and their clients than did
the previous system (Ashford, 1990). Increasing bureaucratic discretion is
also an integral component of the new managerialism, displacing decision
making from politicians to the bureaucracy and from higher to lower eche-
lons of the bureaucracy (Zifcak, 1994).
We can find examples of empowerment in most advanced Western
democracies. In Germany, the concept of Bürgernähe (closeness to citi-
zens) has become a catchword for much recent administrative reform
(Derlien, 1995a, 1995b). In the Scandinavian countries, so-called third-
sector initiatives aim at bringing voluntary associations into the process of
public service production and delivery, thus creating a new interface
between the state and civil society. In the United Kingdom, Australia, and
New Zealand (among other places), the new managerialism is manifested
in new public management that aims both at making the public bureauc-
racy more customer-oriented and at strengthening the position of citizens
relative to the public sector (Hood, Peters, & Wollmann, 1996).
These changes at the institutional level have had repercussions on the
intraorganizational level, particularly the face-to-face interaction between
the public bureaucrats and their clients. Bureaucrats have gained greater
discretion and autonomy but at the same time also face greater financial
responsibilities. More important, however, the recent managerial reforms
have highlighted the organizational dilemma between control over some
aspects of the behavior of lower echelon employees on one hand and the

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 17

need for discretion at these same levels on the other. How can supervisors
provide simultaneously for greater discretion and for enhanced financial
controls, greater controls over fraud, waste, and abuse, and higher quality
standards? Furthermore, how can they provide for all those positive out-
comes in an era in which the public service itself is becoming deinstitu-
tionalized and populated by larger numbers of noncareer employees who
lack a public service ethos?
There are several factors underscoring the importance of discretion in
this type of bureaucracy. First, the meeting between a client and a profes-
sional public employee is to a significant extent a matter of balancing the
personal integrity of the client against the bureaucracy’s need for informa-
tion in order to be able to make correct decisions on which services to
offer. Citizens are legally entitled to have their exchange with a public
bureaucracy conducted in strict confidence. For instance, to show that he
is qualified for certain types of public financial support, the client must
present information about his life situation that is highly personal by
nature. It is vital to the client that this information is not made available to
persons other than those directly involved in handling the matter.
Second, discretion is also important for the bureaucracy as an organiza-
tion. Delivering social services in an efficient and effective manner pre-
supposes that the services are adapted to individual needs. Relying strictly
on routinized decision making makes the service ill-attuned to individual
needs and hence less likely to attain its objectives. The real difficulty
arises in determining just how attuned to individual needs the service
should be and therefore just what the boundaries of acceptable discretion
are. There are numerous stories about regulatory creep in which the grad-
ual accretion of decisions creates a common law about what an individual
bureaucrat can or cannot do (see Handler, 1996). Over time, this accumu-
lation of individual decisions may create patterns of implementing policy
that vary markedly from legislative intent for the program.
Finally, in addition to the bureaucratic rules about how public services
should be provided to citizens, there also exist elaborate professional
norms about how the bureaucrat should conduct his or her job. Independ-
ence from detailed rules, and from control from senior levels of the
bureaucracy, is necessary for the bureaucrat to be able to exercise his or
her professional judgment. To be sure, without substantial discretion
already the bureaucracy would not need to hire skilled and professional
staff because handling virtually all matters in the organization would be
guided by standardized rules. That Weberian ideal of the bureaucracy is

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18 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

almost never achieved, however, and administrative jobs retain substantial

discretion.
As the knowledgeable reader has already observed, this dilemma between
organizational control and professional discretion is directly related to the
concept of street level bureaucracy described by Lipsky (1980) and others.
Street-level bureaucracies are public-sector organizations whose services
are delivered through direct communication between the bureaucrat and
the client, something that clearly sets them apart from other groups of pub-
lic employees (Piven & Cloward, 1977). Typical street-level public ser-
vices include the police, teachers, social workers, and health workers, and
also some regulatory employees. The defining characteristic of street-
level bureaucrats is that they daily “grant access to government programs
and provide services within them” (Lipsky, 1980, p. 3). Also, as a result of
their direct and immediate contact with their clients, street-level bureau-
crats are especially inclined to “put the client first” and to side psychologi-
cally with the client against the formal norms of bureaucracy.
Street-level bureaucracies frequently witness coalitions evolving
between clients and bureaucrats. Obviously, it is not a coalition held
9
together by similar interests (at least not in the short term ) but rather by
the professional norms of the bureaucrat that induce him or her to give pri-
mary consideration to the needs of the clients and not to organizational
rules about restrictive use of the bureaucracy’s financial resources, stan-
dardization of the handling of these matters, or even long-term objectives
stated by managers of the bureaucracy. Although the client gets better
service and perhaps more benefits from this bargain, the professional
receives largely the psychic satisfaction of having done the job in a profes-
sional manner. This coalitional behavior, however, depends on bureau-
crats having professional norms, coming from social work, law, or some
other profession; in some senses, the true Weberian might attach primacy
to the interests of the organization.
Some might argue that this conflict between a client orientation and
professional norms on one hand and responsiveness to organizational
management and objectives on the other is a false dichotomy. It is often in
the interests of the bureaucracy to deliver services adapted as much as pos-
sible to each individual’s needs. Also, street-level bureaucrats are con-
trolled by higher echelons of the bureaucracy, by formal rules, and
also—and arguably more important—by the special organizational cul-
ture of a public bureaucracy (Morgan, 1997). However, what does appear
to make street-level bureaucracies special is the joint effect of lower level
discretion and professionalism. Discretion gives the bureaucrat the

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 19

maneuvering space needed to be able to conduct this work according to

professional norms and standards, rather than organizational rules and
procedures. Unlike the latter, professional norms look unilaterally at
which measures and modi operandi are in the best interest of the clients
and pay minimal attention to budgetary consequences of this exchange
with clients.
As public bureaucracies in most Western democracies have had to cut
back significantly on expenditures, and as a market-based approach to
public services has quickly gained ground in the public sector, the result
has been an increasing opposition to the organization from street-level
bureaucrats. This opposition has in many areas of public service been
fueled by the rapidly growing problems facing most bureaucracies in
social welfare services. One source of opposition is supervisors of the
street-level bureaucrats. Middle managers of the public bureaucracy are
the ones most directly responsible for conveying organizational goals to
10
the lower level employees. Thus, in the eyes of the street-level bureau-
crats, the supervisors come to epitomize bureaucratic hierarchy, some-
thing which is in obvious conflict with the self-image of the professional
street-level bureaucrat.
Another target for opposition for the street-level bureaucrats is organ-
izational rules. These rules express organizational objectives and modi
operandi. Also, the delegation of authority from higher to lower levels of
the bureaucracy is often accompanied by a delegation of financial respon-
sibility. For a professional street-level bureaucrat, these are ideas that do
not rhyme well with professional ideals. For instance, a social worker car-
ing about the bottom line is hardly compatible with identifying with the
client. Although the intraorganizational delegation of financial responsi-
bility increases cost awareness at the street level and places economic
decision making at the operative level of the organization, it may also cre-
ate confusion, frustration, and paralysis among street-level bureaucrats.
Interestingly, the long-term outcome of this situation may well be a
deprofessionalization of the street-level bureaucracy. The street-level per-
sonnel will—consistent with their professional training and ideals—
maintain a client-oriented approach to their tasks. In times of budgetary
cutbacks, they may also develop an “us-versus-them” coalition with their
clients and disregard policies and objectives formulated by higher eche-
lons of the bureaucracy. Although this stance will fulfill one of the canons
of professionalism, putting the interest of the client first, it will tend to
undermine the position of these employees within the organization and
lessen the respect in which their profession is held by important social and

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20 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

political actors. Nurses’ strikes in the United Kingdom, for example, have
come to be regarded by many as economically self-serving, rather than as
attempts to defend standards of care for the nurses’ patients.
Looking at these developments at an organizational level, we should
ask what likely consequences they will have for the bureaucracy’s capabil-
ity to deliver services in an efficient and coordinated way. The Lipsky
model of the street-level bureaucracy is a functional model. It accommo-
dates both the needs of clients and formal rules and also acknowledges
professional values as important organizational resources. That said, the
street-level model of a public bureaucracy also is largely unable to operate
according to clear policy goals or to make intelligent and rational deci-
sions (particularly as soon as more than one organizational level is
involved in the decision). The model does not have a clearly defined
mechanism for conflict resolution and, hence, may fail when conflict is
encountered.
Thus, paradoxically, the street-level bureaucracy model is—partly by
design, partly de facto—both functional and anarchic. It is anarchic by
design because of the nature of the task and work situations facing street-
level bureaucrats. On one hand, too much organizational control over their
actions would result in a rigid and inefficient implementation of standard-
ized rules. On the other hand, providing the street-level bureaucrats exten-
sive discretion jeopardizes equal treatment of similar cases and with that
the fundamental value of equity. At an organizational level, such discre-
tion may also drive up expenditures and reduce organizational coordina-
tion and control.
Professional norms play a key role in filling the void of organizational
control at the street level. Because the senior levels of the bureaucracy
cannot produce guidelines—what Simon (1960) calls “programmed deci-
sion making”—for how the street-level bureaucrat should handle the myr-
iad of different situations she or he faces in daily work, those managers
must rely on a developed and skillful professional sense of judgment on
the part of the bureaucrat. Without that professional socialization, the
upper echelon management and their political masters would probably be
unwilling to offer even the somewhat limited latitude to these employees
that traditionally has been given.
The major dilemma, however, is that a significant part of these profes-
sional norms leads the bureaucrat to identify more with the client than the
bureaucracy. The street-level bureaucrat typically argues that each differ-
ent client is in some ways unique, hence decision making cannot be

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 21

programmed or routinized. For the professional street-level bureaucrat,

professional norms are much more apt to guide his or her exchange with
his or her clients than are norms formulated by bureaucratic managers.
Intraorganizational norms are, by definition, characterized by organiza-
tional politics, budgetary restrictions, senior control over lower echelons
of the bureaucracy, and organizational objectives such as efficiency and
political responsiveness. Many of these objectives run counter to the pro-
fessional ideals embraced by professional groups such as social workers,
teachers, and medical doctors.
One interesting counterpoise to the impact of the “old” professions on
service delivery at the street level is the development of the public service
itself as a profession. This development is being slowed somewhat by fis-
cal pressures reducing public employment, as well as by the ideology of
the new public management that argues that public management is not
really different from private management. Even with those contrary pres-
sures, there is a sense that public managers have adopted a more profes-
sional posture, with distinctive training, codes of conduct, and profes-
sional organizations. Although the leaked for best practice for the old
professions is the client, the leaked for public managers is often the public
as a whole, in both their citizen and taxpayer roles.

STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRACY WRIT LARGE:

THE EMERGING POLITICS OF EMPOWERMENT

To this point, we have been describing street-level bureaucracy as it has

evolved over decades of implementing social and economic programs.
Street-level bureaucracy has been a fact of public life, and in some policy
areas such as economic regulation (Bardach & Kagan, 1982) there have
been calls for enhanced discretion for implementers. The contemporary
politics of empowerment, however, tend not only to accept de facto discre-
tion at the bottom of organizations but to laud it and attempt to expand it.
The empowerment movement argues that organizations will work better11
if their lower echelons are given more discretion. The argument is
advanced simultaneously that clients and citizens should also be given
greater control over their own lives and that government bureaucracies
should make fewer decisions for clients, whether the clients are welfare
recipients or middle-class taxpayers. For example, advocates (Vogt &
Murrell, 1990) of empowerment argue that there is no zero-sum game and
that empowerment is

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22 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

an interactive process based on a synergistic, not zero-sum, assumption

about power; that is, the process of empowerment enlarges the power in the
situation as opposed to merely redistributing it. (pp. 8-9)

The ability to advance these arguments and these forms of empower-

ment simultaneously appears to depend on an assumption that the per-
spectives and desires of the two groups are similar. We have already noted
that the street-level model has in it sources of conflict, and those appear
exacerbated by mutual empowerment. Thus, mutual empowerment is
premised on the older professional model in which client interests will
come first in the minds of service providers. That premise may be correct,
but it appears that changes in the nature of the public sector will make it
increasingly less viable. First, empowerment is being pressed at the same
time that fiscal stringency is increasingly a consideration in making and
implementing policy. Thus, even if employee and client agree on what
should be done on behalf of the client they may not have the money to pay
for it. Given limited resources, employees may compete among them-
selves for resources and generate intraorganizational conflicts.
The new public management also places pressures on employees to
meet performance standards—benchmark or quality standards. Although
some of these standards may be qualitative, others are quantitative so that
the employee will encounter pressures not to serve each client as well as
he or she might simply to meet the standards being imposed. Although
employees may be empowered to meet these standards in any manner,
they find most fitting that they are still being held to account, and conflicts
over how services are being delivered may arise as readily as in traditional
modes of service delivery. Indeed, the conflicts may be more destructive
given that the employees cannot appeal to supervisors or rules to justify
their actions to clients.
In addition, professional norms require doing what is in the client’s
best interest, even if the client does not agree or does not recognize that
self-interest. Any disagreements over what constitutes the best interest of
the client can be solved relatively easily so long as the employee remains
in an authoritative position, but with empowerment of clients that position
is somewhat diminished. Furthermore, empowerment of employees tends
to diminish the role of supervisory personnel within the organization so
that the employee has no source of reinforcement for decisions. Again,
mutual empowerment may exacerbate conflicts between clients and
workers, especially when clients may not be in a good position to judge
their own interests, for example, the mentally ill. Most objective analysts

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 23

of social services would argue that government should be about something

more than just giving everyone what he or she wants, but in an age of
empowerment it becomes difficult to make more discerning judgments.

CONCLUSION: THE PARADOXES

OF EMPOWERMENT

We should not expect the mutual empowerment of workers and cus-

tomers in contemporary public organizations to manifest itself in overt
shouting matches or fistfights, at least not usually. What is more likely is a
gradual erosion of the sense of efficacy that the changes may have created
initially. That is, one of the purposes of mutual empowerment is to make
workers feel better about their jobs and to make clients feel better about
the services that they are being provided. Telling these groups that they
have greater control is likely to have that effect. If, however, these indi-
viduals begin to confront others who are also empowered and have to bar-
gain and fight for their rights, just as they had previously, then empower-
ment is likely to be alienating and disillusioning. Indeed, both clients and
workers may perceive themselves being worse off after empowerment
than before, simply because they will believe that they were deceived
about the brave new world of empowerment that they were entering.
The above discussion advanced a number of potentially difficult ques-
tions for advocates of empowerment. The idea of extending meaningful
influence to more segments of society is, a priori, appealing on democratic
and humanistic grounds, but in practice presents problems that should
cause the would-be empowerer to reconsider just how far empowerment
should be extended and to whom. Hierarchical, bureaucratic systems of
government have many well-known problems, but it also appears undeni-
able that their replacements also would. Indeed, extending empowerment
may exacerbate rather than solve the difficulties identified in hierarchical
governance.
In the first place, empowerment of all three candidates—clients,
employees, and subnational governments—may centralize rather than
decentralize governance. By empowering all the groups, government
would, in practice, minimize the mechanisms for solving conflicts
through bureaucratic and regulative action. Given that it would be naive to
assume that no conflicts would arise among mutually empowered groups,
conflicts would be propelled upward in the political structures for

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24 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

resolution (Handler, 1996). Intermediate structures, whether in business

firms, public organizations, or intergovernmental relations, render useful
services in minimizing and resolving conflicts, and if those structures are
removed or devalued through empowerment then decisions must go up to
a level that can make a decision. Again, paradoxically a set of reforms
intending to decentralize may in the end prove to be very centralizing.
In addition, empowering public-sector professionals along with the
simultaneous empowerment of their clients may deprofessionalize those
employees. Granting greater discretionary power to client contact
employees removes their source of support against perceived unreason-
able demands from clients. Likewise, the empowerment of the clients
may generate more of those unreasonable demands. This means that pro-
fessionals will be under greater pressure to do what clients want and not
necessarily what those professionals think should be done in their
trained judgment. In the end, conflict avoidance and the search for sup-
12
port, may mean that the professionals become more the creatures of
their clients.
Finally, clients will not necessarily be winners in the empowerment
game. If clients are “reasonable” and bargain with professional service
providers, they may find their lot improved. If, however, service providers
are not adequately professionalized and attach primary importance to
their own goals rather than to those of their clients, then those clients may
not get what they want. This is especially true when service providers are
required to conform to other parts of the new public management agenda
and document their efficiency. Indeed, devaluing the professional public
service as part of the new public management may mean that clients are
less well off than under the former bureaucratic system. In the traditional
bureaucratic system, rules and procedures protect clients from arbitrary
and capricious action (Gormley, 1989; Thomas, 1998), whereas the
empowered, entrepreneurial public servant may not be expected to recog-
nize such constraints so completely.
Furthermore, if clients subscribe to the concept of empowerment and
say that they are capable of solving their own problems, some people will
be willing to agree with them. In an era of downsizing government, an ide-
ology of self-sufficiency, and communitarianism, clients of public pro-
grams may be expected to “get on their bikes” and support themselves.
Even for groups of clients who might not be considered good candidates
for self-sufficiency, for example, mothers with preschool children, the
direction of public policy is forcing them to provide more for themselves
and depend less on government. In short, empowerment can be a

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 Peters, Pierre / MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT 25

wonderful way to grant clients more control over their lives, but it can also
be a means of removing the supports for those lives.
Much of the above discussion is speculative, but it does point to the
organizational and personal dynamics at the heart of the movement toward
widespread empowerment as an ideology for managing in the public sec-
tor. Empowerment is a positive idea, and permitting individuals and gov-
ernments to control more of the things that matter to them cannot be easily
denigrated as an abstract idea about democracy. On the other hand, the
concept of empowerment has potential consequences that are less desir-
able and less benign. Indeed, it has the capability to generate outcomes
exactly the opposite of those intended. This article then should be seen as
an admonition to the unwary to look carefully before they accept all the
virtues of empowerment.

NOTES

1. For a good critique of such a facile acceptance of empowerment, see Solas (1996).
2. Empowerment was also a theme of the 1960s. What distinguishes contemporary
efforts is that they are more part of the political mainstream rather than the manifestation of a
counterculture.
3. The negative effects of deinstitutionalization on the mentally ill may represent a
misapplication of this ideology.
4. The idea of citizen engagement has been especially important in recent Canadian
reforms. For Germany, see Klein and Schmaltz-Bruns (1997).
5. This argument is similar to the bottom-up version of implementation theory, with its
argument that policy should be made in a way that is easiest to implement rather than in a way
that the “formators” desire (Linder & Peters, 1987).
6. This obviously is phrasing the relationship in the principal agent framework; see
Horn (1995).
7. This brings to the fore some of the schizophrenia associated with discretion in
bureaucracy. We want high levels of discretion when it might help us but argue for tight con-
trols when there is a chance of discretion being used against us.
8. One could argue, in fact, that the regulations will be more oppressive given that firms
or individuals will have to comply with a range of different and even conflicting
requirements.
9. In the long term, however, these coalitions may help mobilize popular support for
bureaucrats fighting cutbacks in their budgets. Professional bureaucrats frequently chal-
lenge local elected officials not directly but indirectly by mobilizing the constituency that
will suffer from the cutbacks (Goldsmith, 1990; Laffin, 1986).
10. In some ways, these middle-level supervisors could be described as intraorganiza-
tional street-level bureaucrats because they relate via personal communication to those who
are affected by decisions made higher up in the organization. At the same time, they are
familiar with the complex work and professional ideals of the street-level bureaucrats and
can easily identify and sympathize with their ideas.

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26 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / March 2000

11. The notion of “work better” is somewhat vague at times. Certainly, empowerment
can lead to lower costs and potentially to a more involved and contented workforce. On the
other hand, it is not clear that these organizations will necessarily produce better objective
decisions for the society as a whole.
12. The logic is not dissimilar to regulatory capture. If other sources of political and
organizational support are minimized, the employees will seek that support from the only
group that still seems to care, their clients.

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B. Guy Peters is a Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University

of Pittsburgh and professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde. He has pub-
lished extensively on comparative public administration and public policy.

Jon Pierre is a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg, Swe-

den. He has written in the areas of comparative administration, industrial policy, and
Swedish local government.

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