Michael Musheno
Biographic Data
| ID | 111012 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Musheno |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Musheno |
| SIGNATURE | MUSHENO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 677 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Reinventing “Youth” in Socio-Legal Studies
The social category of “youth” occupies liminal space with blurred boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Dominant modes of socio-legal inquiry into youth typically yield adult-centered, criminological accounts that place adult interests and perspectives at the core of their analyses, focusing ultimately on remedies to quell troubled adolescents and suppress disruptive delinquents. Youth-centered accounts, by contrast, locate young peopl…
Practicing knowledge-agency in highly vulnerable communities
Knowledge-agency represents the skills and cognitive understandings that frontline workers acquire and practice in governing populations. Using an abductive approach, this paper explores how diverse expressions of knowledge shape frontline workers' encounters with diverse people and places in stressful contexts. Analysing interviews with 98 frontline workers from four different policy domains serving the same communities in Brazil, we found three…
Exploring the Prevalence and Meaning of Frontline Work in the Covid-19 Era
Frontline workers have gained heightened attention in the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a comparative analysis of New York Times articles referencing frontline work before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis reveals an expansion and diversification of who is on the frontline of public service, with attention to low-wage Black and Brown workers deemed essential to sustaining community infrastructure amidst institutio…
Navigating Conflict
Exploring frontline work in China
This study of the state frontline workforce breaks new ground by conducting an institutional analysis of rule abidance in the People's Republic of China ( PRC ). We draw upon a survey ( n = 1,721) of Chengguan officers, the main players in regulatory enforcement of civil law in urban China, to explore the influence of autocratic one‐party rule on the meaning of and variation in rule abidance in China. The majority of Chengguan officers are rule f…
Of Fergusons
Coping During Public Service Delivery
Frontline workers, such as teachers and social workers, often experience stress when delivering public services to clients, for instance because of high workloads. They adapt by coping, using such practices as breaking or bending rules for clients, or rationing services. Although coping is recognized as an important response to the problems of frontline work, the public administration field lacks a comprehensive view of coping. The first contribu…
Social Equities and Inequities in Practice
Street‐level workers’ judgments, decisions, and actions touch on questions of social equity, a dominant theme of H. George Frederickson's deep contributions to public administration scholarship. Based on empirical work, the authors question the dominant implementation‐control‐discretion narrative and suggest an alternative framing based on the concepts of agency and pragmatic improvisation. Street‐level workers are often conservers of institution…
Governing through Crime
Cops, Teachers, Counselors
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 th…
Teaching with stories
In a course entitled “Policing and In/Justice” we elicited stories about police-citizen encounters through a narrative-based writing assignment. The assignment required students to identify competing perspectives of the story's events. Building on these perspectives, students engaged in assessment and evaluation of police decision-making. We suggest similar assignments may be relevant to courses with students anticipating or engaged in policing c…
State Agent or Citizen Agent
In street-level work discretion is inevitable. Scholars have articulated a dominant view or narrative that addresses the role of discretion in the administrative state. This state-agent narrative acknowledges inevitability of discretion and emphasizes that self-interest guides street-level choices: street-level workers use their discretion to make their work easier, safer, and more rewarding. In addition the dominant narrative describes street-le…
Telling Tales in School
This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into h…
Policing Identities
We examine police decision making by focusing on police stories and drawing together contemporary thought about identities and police subculture. Our inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational and patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They do engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as others to be feared and themselves as protectors …
Policing Identities
We examine police decision making by focusing on police stories and drawing together contemporary thought about identities and police subculture. Our inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational and patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They do engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as others to be feared and themselves as protectors …
Responding to Troubled Youths
Interrogating Richard Leo's Claims about Police Scholarship
In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in "Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience." He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is "impoverished theoretically" and "often not worth reading" (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the…
Social, Cultural, and Temporal Dynamics of the Aids Case Congregation
Studies of legal decisionmaking have focused traditionally on how social influences, particularly the relative social standing of competing parties, affect case outcomes. More recently, sociolegal scholars have directed their attention to the significance of cultural categories in shaping case-based decisionmaking. We here examine how both social and cultural factors shape judicial decisions and their meanings for a "congregation" of court cases …
Legal consciousness on the margins of society
This study compares how two groups of people, situated at the margins of society, position themselves differently with regard to the law: the HIV‐infected women see themselves as objects of surveillance, while the gay men with HIV imagine themselves as rights‐bearers. At the same time, both groups are influenced by a core liberal presupposition embedded in the American legal order that promotes individualism. Both groups express the conditions of…
Socio‐Legal Dynamics of Aids
Why Have‐Nots Win in the HIV Litigation Arena
This study focuses on “extreme” cases, those in which “have‐nots,” usually people with HIV (PWAs), win HIV‐related disputes in direct contests with “haves.” Using extensive data gathered in the United States, we searched for a socio‐legal explanation of how PWAs have managed to win claims against insurance companies, government agencies, and other institutional plaintiffs. We also looked at judicial preoccupation with PWAs as carriers of contagio…
Court Management of Aids Disputes
Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-relat…
Court Management of Aids Disputes
Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-relat…
Street-Wise Social Policy
Steven Maynard-Moody, Michael Musheno, Dennis Palumbo, Street-Wise Social Policy: Resolving the Dilemma of Street-Level Influence and Successful Implementation, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 833-848
Educational Attainment, Job Satisfaction, and the Professionalization of Correctional Officers
This article analyzes the impact of an administrative effort to increase the educational attainment of correctional officers employed in a medium security facility department of corrections in a western state. Following an era of riots and judicial intervention, higher educational qualifications have been a major component of attempts to professionalize prison security staff. Three competing expectations regarding the relationship between educati…
State Agent or Citizen Agent
In street-level work discretion is inevitable. Scholars have articulated a dominant view or narrative that addresses the role of discretion in the administrative state. This state-agent narrative acknowledges inevitability of discretion and emphasizes that self-interest guides street-level choices: street-level workers use their discretion to make their work easier, safer, and more rewarding. In addition the dominant narrative describes street-le…
Coping During Public Service Delivery
Frontline workers, such as teachers and social workers, often experience stress when delivering public services to clients, for instance because of high workloads. They adapt by coping, using such practices as breaking or bending rules for clients, or rationing services. Although coping is recognized as an important response to the problems of frontline work, the public administration field lacks a comprehensive view of coping. The first contribu…
Telling Tales in School
This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into h…
Street-Wise Social Policy
Steven Maynard-Moody, Michael Musheno, Dennis Palumbo, Street-Wise Social Policy: Resolving the Dilemma of Street-Level Influence and Successful Implementation, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 833-848
Educational Attainment, Job Satisfaction, and the Professionalization of Correctional Officers
This article analyzes the impact of an administrative effort to increase the educational attainment of correctional officers employed in a medium security facility department of corrections in a western state. Following an era of riots and judicial intervention, higher educational qualifications have been a major component of attempts to professionalize prison security staff. Three competing expectations regarding the relationship between educati…
Exploring frontline work in China
This study of the state frontline workforce breaks new ground by conducting an institutional analysis of rule abidance in the People's Republic of China ( PRC ). We draw upon a survey ( n = 1,721) of Chengguan officers, the main players in regulatory enforcement of civil law in urban China, to explore the influence of autocratic one‐party rule on the meaning of and variation in rule abidance in China. The majority of Chengguan officers are rule f…
Policing Identities
We examine police decision making by focusing on police stories and drawing together contemporary thought about identities and police subculture. Our inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational and patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They do engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as others to be feared and themselves as protectors …
Why Have‐Nots Win in the HIV Litigation Arena
This study focuses on “extreme” cases, those in which “have‐nots,” usually people with HIV (PWAs), win HIV‐related disputes in direct contests with “haves.” Using extensive data gathered in the United States, we searched for a socio‐legal explanation of how PWAs have managed to win claims against insurance companies, government agencies, and other institutional plaintiffs. We also looked at judicial preoccupation with PWAs as carriers of contagio…
Changing the Public Drunkenness Laws
Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the "new" public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be followed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the pol…
Exploring the Prevalence and Meaning of Frontline Work in the Covid-19 Era
Frontline workers have gained heightened attention in the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a comparative analysis of New York Times articles referencing frontline work before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis reveals an expansion and diversification of who is on the frontline of public service, with attention to low-wage Black and Brown workers deemed essential to sustaining community infrastructure amidst institutio…
Social, Cultural, and Temporal Dynamics of the Aids Case Congregation
Studies of legal decisionmaking have focused traditionally on how social influences, particularly the relative social standing of competing parties, affect case outcomes. More recently, sociolegal scholars have directed their attention to the significance of cultural categories in shaping case-based decisionmaking. We here examine how both social and cultural factors shape judicial decisions and their meanings for a "congregation" of court cases …
The Justice Motive in the Social Policy Process
Policy analysis in the United States relies heavily on the microeconomic assumption that the primary motive in individual and organizational behavior is self interest. After describing how the over-reliance on self interest emerged, this paper provides evidence that participants in the social policy process relyon other motivations to structure their decision-rules which are equally if not more important than self interest. The paper goes on to d…
On the Hazards of Selecting Intervention Points
Of Fergusons
Legal consciousness on the margins of society
This study compares how two groups of people, situated at the margins of society, position themselves differently with regard to the law: the HIV‐infected women see themselves as objects of surveillance, while the gay men with HIV imagine themselves as rights‐bearers. At the same time, both groups are influenced by a core liberal presupposition embedded in the American legal order that promotes individualism. Both groups express the conditions of…
Socio‐Legal Dynamics of Aids
Practicing knowledge-agency in highly vulnerable communities
Knowledge-agency represents the skills and cognitive understandings that frontline workers acquire and practice in governing populations. Using an abductive approach, this paper explores how diverse expressions of knowledge shape frontline workers' encounters with diverse people and places in stressful contexts. Analysing interviews with 98 frontline workers from four different policy domains serving the same communities in Brazil, we found three…
Interrogating Richard Leo's Claims about Police Scholarship
In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in "Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience." He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is "impoverished theoretically" and "often not worth reading" (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the…
Anthropology and Policy Studies
Like all participating academic disciplines, anthropologists entering the policy studies field face a series of “unsolvable” problems that deal with intellectual values about how to ply one's trade. For example, what are one's obligations to agencies, and to the intended clienteles of public policies, especially when the citizens are “havenots” up against well‐organized economic interests? Such questions raised by anthropologists in this volume a…
Street-Level Law
Changing the Public Drunkenness Laws
Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the "new" public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be followed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the pol…
On the Hazards of Selecting Intervention Points
Anthropology and Policy Studies
Like all participating academic disciplines, anthropologists entering the policy studies field face a series of “unsolvable” problems that deal with intellectual values about how to ply one's trade. For example, what are one's obligations to agencies, and to the intended clienteles of public policies, especially when the citizens are “havenots” up against well‐organized economic interests? Such questions raised by anthropologists in this volume a…
Street-Level Law
The Justice Motive in the Social Policy Process
Policy analysis in the United States relies heavily on the microeconomic assumption that the primary motive in individual and organizational behavior is self interest. After describing how the over-reliance on self interest emerged, this paper provides evidence that participants in the social policy process relyon other motivations to structure their decision-rules which are equally if not more important than self interest. The paper goes on to d…
Educational Attainment, Job Satisfaction, and the Professionalization of Correctional Officers
This article analyzes the impact of an administrative effort to increase the educational attainment of correctional officers employed in a medium security facility department of corrections in a western state. Following an era of riots and judicial intervention, higher educational qualifications have been a major component of attempts to professionalize prison security staff. Three competing expectations regarding the relationship between educati…
Street-Wise Social Policy
Steven Maynard-Moody, Michael Musheno, Dennis Palumbo, Street-Wise Social Policy: Resolving the Dilemma of Street-Level Influence and Successful Implementation, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 833-848
Court Management of Aids Disputes
Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-relat…
Court Management of Aids Disputes
Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-relat…
Socio‐Legal Dynamics of Aids
Why Have‐Nots Win in the HIV Litigation Arena
This study focuses on “extreme” cases, those in which “have‐nots,” usually people with HIV (PWAs), win HIV‐related disputes in direct contests with “haves.” Using extensive data gathered in the United States, we searched for a socio‐legal explanation of how PWAs have managed to win claims against insurance companies, government agencies, and other institutional plaintiffs. We also looked at judicial preoccupation with PWAs as carriers of contagio…
Legal consciousness on the margins of society
This study compares how two groups of people, situated at the margins of society, position themselves differently with regard to the law: the HIV‐infected women see themselves as objects of surveillance, while the gay men with HIV imagine themselves as rights‐bearers. At the same time, both groups are influenced by a core liberal presupposition embedded in the American legal order that promotes individualism. Both groups express the conditions of…
Interrogating Richard Leo's Claims about Police Scholarship
In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in "Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience." He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is "impoverished theoretically" and "often not worth reading" (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the…
Social, Cultural, and Temporal Dynamics of the Aids Case Congregation
Studies of legal decisionmaking have focused traditionally on how social influences, particularly the relative social standing of competing parties, affect case outcomes. More recently, sociolegal scholars have directed their attention to the significance of cultural categories in shaping case-based decisionmaking. We here examine how both social and cultural factors shape judicial decisions and their meanings for a "congregation" of court cases …
Responding to Troubled Youths
Policing Identities
We examine police decision making by focusing on police stories and drawing together contemporary thought about identities and police subculture. Our inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational and patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They do engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as others to be feared and themselves as protectors …
Policing Identities
We examine police decision making by focusing on police stories and drawing together contemporary thought about identities and police subculture. Our inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational and patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They do engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as others to be feared and themselves as protectors …
Teaching with stories
In a course entitled “Policing and In/Justice” we elicited stories about police-citizen encounters through a narrative-based writing assignment. The assignment required students to identify competing perspectives of the story's events. Building on these perspectives, students engaged in assessment and evaluation of police decision-making. We suggest similar assignments may be relevant to courses with students anticipating or engaged in policing c…
State Agent or Citizen Agent
In street-level work discretion is inevitable. Scholars have articulated a dominant view or narrative that addresses the role of discretion in the administrative state. This state-agent narrative acknowledges inevitability of discretion and emphasizes that self-interest guides street-level choices: street-level workers use their discretion to make their work easier, safer, and more rewarding. In addition the dominant narrative describes street-le…
Telling Tales in School
This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into h…
Cops, Teachers, Counselors
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 th…
Governing through Crime
Social Equities and Inequities in Practice
Street‐level workers’ judgments, decisions, and actions touch on questions of social equity, a dominant theme of H. George Frederickson's deep contributions to public administration scholarship. Based on empirical work, the authors question the dominant implementation‐control‐discretion narrative and suggest an alternative framing based on the concepts of agency and pragmatic improvisation. Street‐level workers are often conservers of institution…
Coping During Public Service Delivery
Frontline workers, such as teachers and social workers, often experience stress when delivering public services to clients, for instance because of high workloads. They adapt by coping, using such practices as breaking or bending rules for clients, or rationing services. Although coping is recognized as an important response to the problems of frontline work, the public administration field lacks a comprehensive view of coping. The first contribu…
Of Fergusons
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (14 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Criminology (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Public Administration (7 works) · Public relations (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)