Mike Rowe

This paper introduces the concept of ‘blue space’ as a theoretical framework for (re)defining the boundaries of police stops. Reflecting on ethnographic research with police officers in Scotland and England, we draw on Ahmed’s concept of ‘white space’ to understand police encounters with the public in ‘blue space’. We argue that police presence in ‘blue space’ acts as a stopping technology, which renders certain bodies as noticeable and out of place, orientating how bodies ‘take up’ space. Being attuned to a subtle economy of bodily movements—looks, glances or even the presence of police officers—can shape how bodies inhabit space. We explore how officers tacitly leverage their presence to ‘stop’ certain bodies in ways not captured by focusing on recorded police stops. In doing so, we consider how blue space challenges a reform landscape that focuses predominately on formal, recorded police stops.

Michael Anteby has written ethnographies that take us into an aeronautic plant and a business school. In this volume, he reveals some of the struggles that lie behind this research. He refers to these tribulations as "resistance" and proceeds to detail different aspects of this phenomenon. At first glance, it appears to be a contribution to discussions of fieldwork practices, of access and building rapport and perhaps even of failures in fieldwork. Indeed, the first two chapters do discuss these themes. We learn of the barriers to accessing the aircraft plant and the subtle understandings that these trials reveal. The obstructions teach Anteby to play up his French associations and to downplay his US ones. Trying to get access, for his students, to the transport security administration reveals the importance that this government agency attaches to concealing its practices. Resistance teaches us something that we might not otherwise learn. If we pause for a moment at the end of these first two chapters, we might note a kind of hidden (how appropriate in the context of the book) message to the ethnographic fieldworker (maybe even hidden to the author himself?). We can imagine organizational ethnographic fieldwork that, like art, solely focuses on "negative spaces" in order to see more clearly the "positive forms" of the organizational and managerial dynamics and processes. In drawing, we are taught that, in recognizing and seeing negative spaces, "you will be seeing and drawing what is not there in order to portray what is there [positive forms]" (Edwards, 2012, p. 112). The illustration of the famous vase (and two faces), one probably we all recognize, may clarify what we mean. By drawing the negative spaces in between the faces, we get the positive form of the vase. By drawing the negative spaces around the vase, you will get the positive form of the faces. All very confusing, but basically by focusing on the negative spaces, which we translate here as

Microbes make life on earth possible, but they can also kill people, certainly if they are of the "MRSA-type" (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a bacteria resistant to many antibiotics. That is why they also go under the name of "multi-drug resistant organisms" (MDROs). On their website, the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA estimates that there are some 70,000 severe infections with MRSA annually and 9,000 deaths. Until Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) designed the first microscopes in the 17th century, nobody could see microbes, as Anderson notes (47-48). In this experimental autobiography of a disease, this historical detail is shared with the reader through the eyes of the erstwhile invisible microbes themselves: "We [the microbes] were everywhere, in everything, populating the living and unliving stuff of the world, beings that had infiltrated all but the coldest and hottest of Earth's materials" (48) [1]. These microbial perspectives are presented as "interludes" in italics, in between the six parts that the book is made up of. This "we" is the "auto" in the biography, while the patient, the author Patrick Anderson, is presented in the third person as "Patrick". It creates an intellectually stimulating ambiance to follow Patrick through his ordeal. And what an ordeal it was, health wise of course, but also financially and in terms of his utter dependency on the medical establishment. And, throughout the ordeal, there was no certainty that he would live. Still, in many parts of the book, the tone is not dramatic, but rather factual. This may be because many, if not most, of the empirical data originate from his mother's, Deirdre's, meticulous record keeping throughout the whole process. She almost never left her son. She was by his side for every medical appointment. There are of course also empirical data from Anderson himself, but as he writes in the afterword: "returning to the home of my own experience meant grappling with the radical disorientation of that home: in and out of consciousness, through countless fever dreams and hallucinations, weed-picking from the official records of my collapse" (221-222). After reading the book, you can appreciate fully why he dedicates it to his mother and, actually, to all mothers for that matter, "in whatever form they take". For the organizational ethnographer, it is fascinating to read how, quite often by implication, the hierarchies within hospitals are portrayed. Although Anderson could not have done without the medical expertise of the various specialist doctors, it is the nurses that gave him crucial emotional support throughout his time in the hospitals. Indeed, the doctors are, in a number of cases, rather cold and dispassionate-valuable traits in the operating theory, but less so at the bedside. It was the same doctors who doubted that Anderson would ever walk again, while other health professionals encouraged him to hope. According to Diana, a home care worker, the "need to keep wanting" (59, italics in original) is key to getting through a deadly illness like this. In terms of emotional support, it was his

Police officers, social workers, teachers, and many other street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion in dealing with clients. In so doing, they make policy as it is experienced at the frontline. Instead of puzzling at repeated public policy implementation failures and wondering why street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) don’t behave the way policy-makers expect, we need to understand the world as seen from the ground. This short and practical text explores the value of interpretive analysis for researching street-level bureaucracy. Using Michael Lipsky’s (1980) idea of SLB and connecting it to contemporary debates, Mike Rowe argues for an approach to researching SLBs that focuses on dilemmas in practice, ones that change with each policy shift, each new target, with austerity, and with new technology such that no settled state is likely. He places emphasis on the need to understand the ways SLBs respond to pressures in order to work with them and to understand what policy becomes in practice. Street-level bureaucrats and their clients are engaged in a process of sense-making. Researching Street-level Bureaucracy is not just an essential resource for teachers and students of Master's and Doctoral programs in Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, it is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the structural pressures that bear on the individual and how any change to the dilemmas confronted might play out at the street-level.

This chapter closes the book by reasserting the value of street-level bureaucracy as a theory. When research is focused on the frontline and draws upon a deep familiarity with the contexts in which encounters with clients take place, it reveals the ways in which institutions shape the use of discretion. Detailed studies that present a thick description of street-level bureaucracy then allow readers to reflect on their own research, understanding or experience as academics, students or practitioners. But these studies also begin to help us understand some of the contemporary challenges facing public services accused of institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and more.

This chapter introduces Michael Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy. It discusses the two key influences identified in the 30th anniversary edition of the book, Street-level Bureaucracy: studies of policy implementation and failure; and the institutional contexts in which street-level bureaucrats work. The theory suggests that discretion is an inevitable aspect of key public services involving interactions with clients. But it also makes clear that discretion is not simply the exercise of individual judgements or prejudices. Street-level bureaucrats make decisions in contexts that direct and limit the options available to them as they respond to the needs of individuals.