Whether on a patrol beat, in social service offices, or in public school classrooms, street-level workers continually
confront rules in relation to their own beliefs about the people they encounter. Cops, Teachers, Counselors is
the first major study of street-level bureaucracy to rely on storytelling. Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno
collect the stories told by these workers in order to analyze the ways that they ascribe identities to the people
they encounter and use these identities to account for their own decisions and actions. The authors show us how
the world of street-level work is defined by the competing tensions of law abidance and cultural abidance in a
unique study that finally allows cops, teachers, and counselors to voice their own views of theirwork.