Abstract

The paper summarises the recent debate on the street-level bureaucracy perspective elaborated by Michael Lipsky (1980) and developed in the last decades and on its implementation, especially in the field of social policies and services. It deepens a recent relevant symposium on this topic, edited by Evelyn Brodkin, one of the main experts about the perspective. It also explains the reasons why this perspective can be interesting in the study of welfare policies and services in the Italian context.