Book Review: Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Author | Simon Halliday |
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390601500108 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REFERENCES
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New Left Review 26: 5–36.
De Dianous, S. (2004) ‘Cambodia: The Big Land Grab’, Le Monde Diplomatique
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and Fails Everywhere Else. London: Black Swan.
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of Legal Consciousness’, New England Law Review 26: 73–89.
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AMBREENA MANJI
University of Keele, UK
STEVEN MAYNARD-MOODY AND MICHAEL MUSHENO, Cops, Teachers, Counselors:
Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2003, 221 pp., ISBN 0–472–06832–6, $25.00 (pbk).
Socio-legal studies as a discipline has consistently demonstrated the importance of
street-level discretion to the operations of law in society, particularly when consider-
ing questions of the effective implementation of law and compliance with regulation.
There has been less of a stress, perhaps, on the political significance of front-line
discretion – that it is at street-level where citizens encounter government face to face.
It is in these encounters that politics is played out and where political and legal
consciousness is formed or influenced. Further, as the authors of Cops, Teachers,
Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service demonstrate, it is at the
street-level that government actors produce and maintain society’s normative order(s)
– they (re)produce culture as well as legality. A sustained focus on street-level decision
making, therefore, is very important for socio-legal studies, and Maynard-Moody’s
and Musheno’s contribution is especially welcome. Cops, Teachers, Counselors is an
excellent book. I have a few gripes to make about the thrust of the book’s argument
which are detailed below, but this does not take away from the overall assessment
that this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of government through
front-line decision making which makes a very useful contribution to the field.
The book is based on three years of fieldwork examining the work of police
officers, social workers (in vocational rehabilitation) and teachers. The research
BOOK REVIEWS 147
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