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Michael Lipsky's seminal book entitled 'Street-level Bureaucracy' has long been a core citation for a social work scholarship concerned with practice. This article takes issue with a key notion in Lipsky's book, that of 'discretion'. It argues that Lipsky's notion of discretion relies on assumptions often associated with the trope of 'Economic Man', and that the notion of discretion remains inadequately theorised in the scholarship that routinely cites the book. To re-orient inquiry about street-level discretion, the article proposes that social work scholarship can usefully look to anthropological discussions of complexities pertaining to the notion of 'value'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scholarship on "time" has emerged that pays attention to the ways contemporary economic life and information technology affect temporal perception and practice. A critique of this scholarship, along with a joint reading and reinterpretation of Alfred Gell's two books The anthropology of time and Art and agency , provides this article's point of departure for "situating time" in the theoretical sense of setting out an explicit temporal ontology—a kind of reflection that I argue is often missing in scholarship on time. This temporal ontology is in turn substantiated and developed through an ethnographic exploration of time's performative dimensions, brought to bear through practices of situating time, here in an ethnographic sense. The empirical material is from fieldwork among people working via the internet from their homes in rural Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]