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IntroduzioneLa discussione sulla sorte dell'ideologia nei paesi occidentali industrializzati è stata una delle piú estese di quasi tutto il passato ventennio fra politologi, sociologi e storici. Ha prodotto almeno una mezza dozzina di testi, e una quantità tale di saggi che non si possono elencare. Nonostante gli si sia prestato notevole attenzione, il dibattito continua tuttora, irrisolto.

Urban public hospitals have many of the defining characteristics of Lipsky's (1980) street-level bureaucracy, but relatively little is known about what problems these characteristics produce for hospital employees, professionals in particular. This paper develops evidence on the extent of those problems as reported in a survey of employees of an urban public hospital in the Midwest. The data suggest a divided verdict on Lipsky's predictions. Hospital professionals are dissatisfied with how the hospital constrains, and society disdains, their work, but they are largely satisfied that the intrinsic nature of their work is appropriate to their training. Those findings may mean that the plight of the professional in the urban public hospital is not as bleak as Lipsky implies. As such, that plight may also be amenable to improvement by actions these hospitals can afford.

Despite much evidence that municipal services are delivered mostly without significant class bias, suspicions remain that municipal administrators discriminate against the disadvantaged, particularly in one-to-one citizen-administrator interactions. This research develops evidence on that possibility by examining how helpfully and courteously citizens feel they have been treated on a broad range of contacts with the municipal bureaucracy in Cincinnati, Ohio. The findings suggest some areas of possible racial discrimination in bureaucratic treatment of citizens but no discrimination by income. In addition, much of the apparent racial discrimination results from blacks bringing more difficult problems to the bureaucracy, not from bureaucrats giving less consideration to blacks. Municipal administrators appear mostly to be exercising neutral competence in their dealings with citizens, and not always in a manner working to the disadvantage of blacks.