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Building inspectors: Bureaucrats, professionals or heroes?

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Building inspectors: Bureaucrats, professionals or heroes?

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Content BUILDING INSPECTORS: BUREAUCRATS, PROFESSIONALS
OR HEROS?
Copyright 2003
by
Karl Wolfgang Doerstling
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUTE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION)
May 2003
Karl Wolfgang Doerstling
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UMI Number: 3103881
Copyright 2003 by
Doerstling, Karl Wolfgang
All rights reserved.
®
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UMI Microform 3103881
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All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
K a & L \A )oLPSiA N J(^^O H gSTU tOfr
under the direction o f h dissertation committee, and
approved by all its members, has been presented to and
accepted by the Director o f Graduate and Professional
Programs, in partial fulfillment o f the requirements fo r the
degree o f
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(5-NX!
L zL
Director
Date May 1 6 , 2003
Dissertation Committee
i s >
Chair
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to my chair, Professor Robert A. Stallings, his ideas,
directions and unwavering support. I greatly appreciate the support of my
committee, Professor Shui-Yan Tang and Professor Burton H. Jones. I would also
like to thank the Los Angeles Department o f Building and Safety, as well as the
inspectors who were interviewed for this study.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii
ABSTRACT iv
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER TWO BUILDING INSPECTORS AS BUREAUCRATS, 16
PROFESSIOALS, OR HEROES?
CHAPTER THREE BUILDING CODES AND THE ROLE OF 47
THE BUILDING INSPECTOR
CHAPTER FOUR THE INSECTORS: IN THEIR WORDS 65
CHAPTER FIVE IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 113
BIBLIOGRAPHY 145
APPENDIX A 149
APPENDIX B 151
APPENDIX C 152
iii
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ABSTRACT
The building of structures for housing, business and industry is at the core of a
societies infrastructure. Throughout history structures have been built and only those that
were vastly overbuilt have withstood the ravages of time. Modem society cannot afford
to build such structures and consequently builds useful buildings for housing, business,
and industry that are safe for the duration of the building’s useful life. To ensure that
buildings are built to the standard of the construction industry, it is the duty of the
building inspector to oversee, monitor, and enforce the building codes which have been
adopted by the local municipality or responsible public agency. These building
inspectors are the agents of the government, which interact directly with the private
builders and contractors engaged in erecting the structures required by the society. The
lack of substantial damage to the City of Los Angeles in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake
is a testament to the building codes and the integrity of the building inspectors
enforcement. Building code enforcement is the government’s tool to ensure safe
buildings. The building inspectors are the enforces of these codes and buildings
inspectors interests in public safety are at odds, at times, with the profit motives of
builders/contractors. Building inspector’s integrity is at the heart of building safety. This
is an inquiry into building inspectors interaction with builders/contractor and the public.
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Chapter One
Introduction
We take for granted the safety of the structures in which we live, work, and play.
Only when an exceptional or extraordinary event occurs, the collapse of a bridge, a
fire in which people die behind locked exits, a hurricane that flattens homes
supposedly built to withstand such forces, does our attention focus on safety and the
mechanisms with which it is pursued only then do we give much thought to this
issue. Even then the issue is of only passing interest to most people, only to the
building specialist is safety a full-time preoccupation.
While it is true that we all want to feel safe in the structures that we inhabit, these
structures are subject at times to forces that may cause them to fail. Consequently, it
may be difficult for us to define “safety.” At the beginning of the twenty-first
century, we take for granted that “government,” “market forces” (e.g., competition),
and the “good will” of builders and building owners will ensure that structures are
safe. But what exactly is this valued quality “safety”? How do we know that a
structure possesses it? This dissertation is concerned with these questions and more
specifically, it is concerned with the following question: What is the connection
between this thing which we value, “safety,” and the attitudes and behavior of the
people that we count on to see that it exists?
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Safety as a Social Construction
The “people” whose activities are the subject of this research reported here are
engaged in a form of governmental activity which is more commonly known as
building regulation. Regulation of building construction, redevelopment, renovation
and repair are components of the pubic policy process intended to realize the goal of
“safety” as a public good. Regulations are designed to bring about safety by
specifying where, how, and with what materials a structure may be built as well as
how existing structures are to be maintained in order to retain their safe existence by
requiring changes to existing structures by retrofitting improvements.
However, proof in an absolute sense that a future structure will be safe when
completed, or that an existing structure is safe in its current configuration is at best
indirect. In essence, what is required is proof of a negative: How does one explain
accidents that did not happen, buildings that did not collapse, and structures that did
not fall down? In relative terms, a structure that has collapsed must possess by
definition less of the quality “safety” than one that has not only failed to collapse, but
has maintained its structural integrity. Post disaster field studies, whose main
objective is to find the causes of building failures, are intended to identify those
aspects of safety—nonstructural as well as structural—that were absent in the failed
or flawed design. Then it can be determined which o f them proximately caused the
building failure, so that their findings and analysis of the failure can be incorporated
in future designs. Thus, in practice safety is always about the future.
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What is the logical status of safety a priori, that is, absent the ex post facto
information from a disastrous collapse? One way of answering this question is to
demonstrate that safety is most fundamentally a social construction, defined as a
combination of the following: a social convention, a social product, and the
negotiated outcome of a social process.
There are two compelling advantages to this approach in answering the question,
“What is safe? First, it does not require that one be either omniscient or clairvoyant.
In other words, it does not presuppose that the analyst has certain knowledge of the
future (i.e., to know in advance which buildings will collapse and which will not).
Second, it directs attention to where the only meaningful answer to the question is to
be found; this is by studying the people designated (as well as those who designate
themselves) as participants in the politically legitimate processes in which the
definition of safety is negotiated.
Those who participate in negotiating safety include: research scientists who
study the effects of physical forces on various types of building designs and
materials; the program managers of governmental agencies that evaluate research
proposals and fund research; the politicians who establish research priorities and
determine the budgets of these funding agencies; the nonprofit organizations that
translate research results into model codes for local governments; the state and local
governments that formulate ordinances and codes that apply within their jurisdiction;
the lobbyists and industry representatives who attempt to influence this process; the
architects and engineers who design new structures, renovations, and the remodeling
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of existing ones; the building contractors and trades people who assemble the
components into a final structure; and the local plan checkers and building inspectors
charged with seeing that the existing local codes are followed.
The process itself is referred to and can be described as “politically legitimate”
which acts to underscore two of its features. One is that the entire process is
sanctioned by the ultimate source o f power extant at the time and place. In the
modem world this means the nation-state. By law, certain people are designated as
being capable and able to decide on behalf of all others what is safe and what is not.
This means that among other things, the state through its agents can establish the
credentials that participants are required to posses in order to take part in these
processes. The other feature is that such state sanctioning differentiates legitimate
from illegitimate forms of transactions among participants as well as between
participants and outsiders.
The diversity of participants and their interests, as well as the complexity of the
process, invites several assumptions about how to approach the issue of safety as a
social construction. The most obvious one is that there is no reason to assume that
there is unanimity or even consensus among all the participants. A better starting
point is the assumption that the entire process is characterized not only by differing
interests but also by fundamentally different conceptions of what is safe. Absent any
absolute or objective way of measuring safety with certainty, other criteria become
objects of negotiation. In other words, the criterion sparks disagreement as to
whether a building is “safe.” Depending upon whose definition is used, the building
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could either be “bombproof’ (i.e. being able to survive all contingencies) or the
building might be compromised and therefore not a “safe” building. Among the
most important of these is cost effectiveness. While none of the participants would
argue in favor of unsafe structures, they do argue over the question of “How safe is
safe enough?” The battle lines are drawn over which types of situations demand
which types of structures and how they should be built to withstand, for example, the
most severe but statistically unlikely earthquake that a given fault could produce, or
a more probable average or “typical” event. More generally, building codes are not
designed to see that structures are designed and built to last in perpetuity but rather
for the “useful life of the building”. “Useful life” reflects the cultural values of
buildings. Which is currently estimated to be between thirty and forty years and
based upon the useful life of the mechanical, plumbing, electrical and other facilities
in the building structure. The building structure can most assuredly last much
longer; it is the mechanical installations that do not last.
According to the Internal Revenue Code Section XX, the tax life is between 31
and 39 years. This has to do with the “depreciable life” of the building for tax, and
therefore be a component of “useful life of the building.” These life expectancies
factor into the decisions, which are made when the various building codes are
considered. Buildings are not built to withstand all contingencies nor are they built
to last forever. However it is more common for buildings today to be removed for
redevelopment purposes rather than demolished as a hazard to the community or
those who dwell in them.
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The process of determining what is safe and what is not, that is, of constructing
the meaning of safety—does not take place in a vacuum. It is shaped by a variety of
constraints. Which include beliefs about what is known about the consequences of
specific practices and materials (i.e., “the limits of knowledge” at a given time and
place), the nature of the participants in the process and their interests, the structures
of power in which the participants are embedded, and the nature of the “arenas” in
which contests over safety take place, including the procedures, precedents, and
histories that are normatively operative in them.
This study focuses on the final negotiated process of building code enforcement
between the building/contractor and the local building inspectors. This could
arguable be the most important step in the process of implementing safe building
codes. In brief, the determination as to what is or is not safe building construction
for housing, industrial, and public structures begins with recommendations from
various engineering organizations to municipalities in the form of minimum
requirements. These recommended minimum requirements are generated through a
process of review by engineers and people in the various building trades. At the
local level, they are considered, debated, and adopted as local ordinances to be
implemented by local building departments. These laws, ordinances, guidelines, and
building codes are then delegated by department managers to their main arbiters, the
building inspectors. Building inspectors are then responsible for imposing these
government regulations on citizens and private enterprises.
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Building Inspectors as Street-Level Bureaucrats
In the social construction of safety, building inspectors are the “front-line
soldiers” fighting on behalf of “the public interest.” They are an important type of a
“street-level bureaucrat” (from Lipsky 1980). Although Lipsky mainly focused on
police, schoolteachers, and social workers in examining the role of street-level
bureaucrats in public policy-making, the term is equally applicable to building
inspectors. Lipsky identifies three defining characteristics of street-level
bureaucrats:
1. They are called upon to interact constantly with citizens in the
regular course of their work.
2. Although they work within a bureaucratic structure, their
independence on the job is fairly extensive. One component of
this independence is discretion in making decisions.
Independence is not limited to discretion. The attitude and
general approach of street-level bureaucrats toward citizens may
affect the individual significantly. These considerations are
broader than the term discretion suggests.1
3. The potential impact on citizens with whom they deal is fairly
extensive.
Building inspectors interact almost exclusively with private citizens and private
business entities during the regular course of building inspection. Inspectors have
independence on the job as well as discretion, although discretion is limited to
interpretation of the building code. Their impact on the citizens is extensive in that
they are primarily responsible for the proper construction of the buildings that all of
the citizens will inhabit, occupy or visit.
1 Footnote in original. [See Janies Q. Wilson, Varieties o f Police Behavior Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press 1968].
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Lipsky sets forth three other criteria characterizing the role of street-level
bureaucrats: (1) they have non-voluntary clients; (2) they have limited control,
although they do have considerable influence over client performance; and (3) their
job performance is difficult to measure in terms of ultimate bureaucratic objectives.
As for building inspectors, they do not deal entirely with non-voluntary clients as
do the police, teachers, and social workers. Rather, building projects are mostly
funded by financial institutions, and the various required inspections are successive
hurdles that must be successfully completed for owners or contractors to be paid
according to work accomplished. Consequently, owners/builders become willing
"non-voluntary" clients because their construction progress payments will be
withheld in the event predetermined inspections are not completed. Building
inspectors thus have relatively extensive influence over client performance, because
they possess the ultimate sanction, refusal to issue a Certificate of Occupancy [CO].
Evaluating the job performance of building inspectors is difficult in the short run,
because direct oversight by mid-level administrators consists only of spot-checking
on the various inspectors. In the long run, however, especially in California, it is the
disastrous collapses and building failures that do not occur are the proverbial test of
time, which validates the performance of building inspectors and the codes that they
enforce.
Lipsky also identifies several conditions in the working environment of street-
level bureaucrats. These include: (1) inadequacy of available resources; (2) work
takes place in circumstances where there exists clear physical or psychological threat
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(or both) exists and where the bureaucrat's authority is regularly challenged; and (3)
expectations about job performance are ambiguous and/or contradictory and include
idealized dimensions that are unattainable.
However, as we will see in later chapters, these are less characteristic of the
working environment of building inspectors than of other “public servants.” For one
thing, building departments usually are run on a balanced budget, and resource
scarcity is not an everyday problem. Although building inspectors are at times
stressed to get work accomplished, building departments do not have the same type
of constraints as the police and teachers. If building inspectors are ever threatened
either physically or psychologically, their departmental procedures manual dictates
that they beat a hasty retreat to the building bureau. The department will take control
of the situation and, if need be, will have the police escort inspectors to construction
sites or homes. Aggressive behavior by owners or builders is therefore
counterproductive and will invariably be their ultimate undoing. Lastly, their job
performance is in principle unambiguous. Building codes, especially the newer
universal codes, are explicitly designed to remove any ambiguities. Nevertheless,
some contradictions will always exist. Ideally these are best resolved on the spot by
inspectors so that there is uniformity of enforcement within building departments. It
is important to remember that this ambiguity, in other words discrepancies of the
code, is often referred to as the “fudge factor.” Inspectors can use this to obtain
compliance on the more important issues such as structural stability and
health/fire/safety issues, as will be shown below.
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Relevance of this Study
This study is an empirical examination of the role of building inspector using an
ethnographic method. The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of
the process of policy implementation by studying that part of the process “where the
rubber hits the road.” Like all public policies, building codes are a form of “law on
the books” (Pound 1993) sentences and paragraphs printed on paper. Actual public
policies—“law in action” (ibid.)—are whatever “lower participants” (Etzioni 1961),
public employees typically on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic organizational
ladder, make of those sentences and paragraphs in the course of their daily work
routines. In the case of building safety (i.e., safety in terms of structural failure in
earthquakes, fire safety under everyday circumstances, and the like) the public
policies involved are building codes, and the street-level bureaucrats that enforce
them are local building inspectors. One might call them “safety bureaucrats,” in
contradistinction from the experts, specialists, and technocrats who participate in
other aspects of the safety policy process (cf. Stallings 1995).
As Lipsky (1980), points out, enforcing regulations—implementing public
policies—is not solely about learning and applying the policies that others have
formulated and adopted. Between the law on the books and law in action stands the
“real world” with a myriad of specific, often idiosyncratic situations not precisely
spelled out in the policies themselves. Therefore judgment and interpretation are
inevitable. It is here that safety bureaucrats are more than mere implementers of
policies; they become policy makers. As with all street-level bureaucrats, public
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policy exists in and through their actions (as well as inactions) and their behavior.
Thus, whatever “safety” means in the abstract—that is, in either formal definitions or
everyday conversations—its “social reality” is realized through interaction in
everyday work settings—the drawing tables of architectural and engineering firms,
the conference tables and computer terminals where plans and drawings are
examined, and the job sites where the assembly of materials is inspected.
The research described here has been designed to provide insight on this
important type of safety bureaucrat, the local building inspector. The focus is on the
specifics of how these men (building inspection remains an overwhelmingly male
occupation) go about their jobs, how they approach their work, how they deal with
contentious situations, and how they see what they do in the context of public safety
and the public interest.
Methodology
The author, a licensed contractor who remains active in the construction trade on
a part-time basis, conducted in-depth interviews and nonparticipant observation with
building inspectors of the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety
[LADBS]. Contact with the department was made initially through the main office
o f the LADBS. A request to interview building inspectors was granted after the
researcher agreed to sign waivers of liability. These waivers exempted the City of
Los Angels from any liability for injuries or other legal actions that might occur
during data collection. This made it possible for the interviewer to accompany
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building inspectors in the offices o f the LADBS, in their vehicles and on
construction job sites performing inspections.
Interviews were arranged through the LADBS head administration office
through Mr. David Lara, who then referred the interviewer to Mr. Bayani Aquino.
Mr. Bayani Aquino asked the heads of the various departments if any of the
inspectors in their department would be interested in being accompanied by a “ride-
along” and submit to being interviewed for a day. Inspectors who were agreeable
became the interviewees for this study. In all, eight inspectors were interviewed and
observed on the job. The sample represents a purposive rather than a probability
sample. It is diverse with respect to the different sections of the building code that
the city enforces (structural, electrical, etc).
Interviews followed a rough format (see Appendix A) so that all interviewees
would be asked the same questions. Questions were purposely designed and stated
to be open-ended to encourage reflective and spontaneous answers. The interviewer
wore appropriate clothing such as work boots, rough shirt and pants, as well as a
hard hat with decal o f the university. This aided his acceptance by the building
inspectors as well as workers at job sites. Interviews with building inspectors
typically began at the beginning of the workday, at about 7:00 a.m. and continued
until the end of the day at approximately 3:30 p.m. All relevant conversations with
interviewees were tape recorded with their permission. The tape recordings were
then transcribed verbatim and edited to reflect accurately the statements of the
interviewees. Anonymity of the building inspectors was preserved by first changing
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the names of the interviewees to numbers and by changing these numbers to
randomized alphabetical initials. To further protect inspectors’ anonymity, all text in
the quotations utilized in this study that might identify the speaker was deleted. (See
Appendix B for a list of inspectors interviewed and their respective trades.)
Since officials in the LADBS administration selected the departments which
provided inspectors and since these departments then requested inspectors to
volunteer for these interviews, there may have been selection bias in the building
inspectors participating in this study. Not surprisingly, as a general rule most of the
inspectors interviewed were initially suspicious of the interviewer’s motive and
intentions. Most openly asked the interviewer whether or not this was an
investigative report for the Los Angeles Times. Once it was established to the
inspectors’ satisfaction that this was to be an academic study about them and their
daily routines, not an expose about the building department or the politics o f the
building department, inspectors quickly became less defensive. As might be
expected, their defensiveness decreased rapidly during the first hour of the day and
continued to decline during the course of the interview.
Although the nature and extent of any selection bias resulting from the manner in
which building inspectors came to be participants in this study can not be known
with certainty, it does not appear to be consequential for the types of information
sought in this research. Having said that, it must also be noted that one interview
obtained during this research was not used in this study because it seemed overly
positive in all aspects and therefore to this researcher ascribed to that particular
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interviewee was lacking in credibility. Interviews with two mid-level mangers also
were not used in the analysis since this was too limited in a comparison with only
two interviewees. Furthermore the topics discussed with these managers during the
interview dealt more with other topics closely but not directly related to the present
study. The products of those interviews and observations are the basis for what
follows.
To remove selection bias as much as possible, it would have been necessary to
draw a stratified random sample of all building inspectors from the rosters of each
division within the LADBS. Practical limitations (of time, lack of financial
resources, the bureaucratic nature of the department, the sensitivity to potentially
adverse publicity, the suspicion of an outsider looking for evidence of corruption,
etc.) precluded such an approach in this study. The findings and conclusions of this
study therefore are based upon in-depth interviews conducted by the author on a
purposive sample of eight building inspectors- street level safety bureaucrats- in the
city of Los Angeles’s Department of Building and Safety and upon his observations
of them in the office, in the field, and in the informal conversations with their peers.
Overview of Remaining Chapters
This dissertation contains six chapters. Chapter two contains a review of the
social science literature regarding professions, heroes, work and occupations. The
distinctive features of professions are discussed, the attribute and process models of
profession occupations are reviewed, and the current debates over professional
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marginality and deprofessionalization are outlined, as is the theory of heroes. The
bureaucratic model of work organizations is described, and issues surrounding the
unique situation of professionals in bureaucracies are presented. Chapter three
provides some historical background to assist in understanding the process of
building code enforcement and the role of building inspectors within it. It contains
discussions o f a brief history o f building codes, a description of the processes
through which building codes are formulated, a brief history of fire prevention as it
relates to the building codes as well as the structural codes. Also a typical day in the
life of a building inspector is described, and the societal implications of the building
inspector role are assessed.
Chapter four presents a description of the characteristics and everyday behavior
of local building inspectors as these relate to the construction of safety in a socially
meaningful sense. Methods of data collection are described. These data are then
examined to discuss the following topics: background, training, and experience
involved in becoming a building inspector; the dynamics of learning the inspector
role, especially with respect to dealing with the public and interacting with other
inspectors, with architects and engineers, and with supervisory officials in building
and safety departments. Also discussed are the broader implications of the building
inspector’s role. Chapter five discusses the general conclusions and implications of
the present study. Chapter six makes recommendations for future research on the
relationship between street-level bureaucrats and safety, and revisits some of the
issues involved in treating safety as a social construction.
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Chapter Two
Building Inspectors as Bureaucrats, Professionals, or Heroes?
Within the division of labor of local government, it falls to building inspectors to
see to it that those elements of public policy targeted on building safety—the
building codes—are implemented. This leads to fundamental questions: Why do
they do it? Why should building inspectors care about public safety? Why should
they care more about an abstract, invisible public than about themselves, their jobs
and careers? Why concern oneself with public safety when there are more
“important” individual concerns, such as their concern to get through the day without
regularly experiencing undue stress, unpleasantness, or worse climbing the
bureaucratic ladder to higher positions?
The way these interrelated questions are stated presupposes that safety, the main
goal of building codes,1 is a known commodity that can be identified with certainty
by everyone (or at least by those with proper experience, training, or education). But
suppose instead, as is assumed here, that true safety is neither certain nor clearly
identifiable in practice, except in hindsight. If true safety can only be described in
the past tense (“This structure has been perfectly safe ever since it was completed”)
but never in the present or future tenses (“This structure is perfectly safe today”;
‘This structure will be perfectly safe for the foreseeable future”), then the questions
1 As well as to insure compliance with the local zoning code, compliance with Title 23, Persons with
Disability Act, sanitation and other specific duties ascribed to the building inspector.
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above must be posed in slightly but significantly modified form: Why should
building inspectors care how closely builders follow the “letter of the law” if it
cannot be conclusively demonstrated that any departures from the code will prove
harmful some time in the future—or, put differently: Will strict adherence to the
code requirements avoid future harm? Is “the public” whose safety is supposedly
being protected by those local ordinances promulgated for the public safety, a reality,
a fiction or a civic myth? If the builder vehemently insists that things had always
been done a certain way in the past with no subsequent harmful consequences, then
why change those things now? What if the builder threatens to get the inspector
fired and to initiate litigation against the building department? Stated in shades of
gray rather than simple black and white, such questions become even more important
to answer empirically.
Conceptually, three differing answers have been offered for questions such as
these. Most influential in the social sciences have been those of the German
sociologist and political economist Max Weber (1864-1920). In Economy and
Society (1978a, pp. 24-38), Weber offers the following pure types of social action,
that is, meaningful behavior between actors (roughly equivalent to the reasons
people do what they do):
“(1) instrumental rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by
expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of
other human beings; these expectations are used as ‘conditions’ or
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‘means’ for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and
calculated ends;
(2) value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious
belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic,
religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of
success;
(3) ajfectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor’s
specific affects and feeling states;
(4) traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation.” (Weber
1978a, pp. 24-25)
These types of action in turn identify four bases for the legitimacy of social
arrangements:
“The actors may ascribe legitimacy to a social order by virtue of:
(a) tradition: valid is that which has always been;
(b) ajfectual, especially emotional, faith: valid is that which is newly
revealed or exemplary;
(c) value-rational faith: valid is that which has been deduced as an
absolute;
(d) positive enactment, which is believed to be legal.
Such legality may be treated as legitimate because:
(a) it derives from a voluntary agreement of the interested parties;
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(P) it is imposed by an authority which is held to be legitimate and
therefore meets with compliance.” (Weber 1978a, p. 36)
Half a century later, Etzioni (1961) borrowed the logic of Weber’s pure types of
social action for his comparative analysis of complex organizations, using the
.. nature of compliance in the organization as the basis of
classification” (p. xv): “Compliance is a relationship consisting
of the power employed by superiors to control subordinates and
the orientation of subordinates to this power” (ibid.). By cross
classifying three types of power employed by organizations to
control the behavior of subordinates (“lower participants,” as
Etzioni famously called them [see pp. 5, 16-19]) with three
pure types of orientation by subordinates to the exercise of
power, Etzioni created a three-by-three typology o f compliance
relations. The three pure types of power (organizational
control) are: coercive power, the threat or application of
physical punishment; remunerative power, the manipulation of
material resources and rewards; and normative power, the
manipulation of symbols (ibid., p. 5).
The three pure types of involvement (Etzioni means by this the cognitive and
affective orientations of subordinates to the form of power to which they are exposed
[see pp. 8-9]) are: alienative involvement, an intensely negative orientation to the
power exercised by higher-ups; calculative involvement, a more neutral orientation
that can be either positive or negative and which is based upon a rational calculation
of means and personal objectives; and moral involvement, a high intensity positive
orientation (pp. 9-11). Three of the resulting nine types of compliance relations are
what Etzioni calls “congruent types”: coercive power-alienative involvement,
remunerative power-calculative involvement, and normative power-moral
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involvement (pp. 12-13). The other six types are described as incongruent (e.g.,
calculative involvement in response to normative power) (pp. 13-14).
Etzioni recognizes that organizations in the real world may simultaneously
utilize all three kinds of power (p. 6), but he argues that each of the three types will
predominate in particular organizations (or in subunits of organizations) because “...
when two kinds of power are emphasized at the same time, over the same subject
group, they tend to neutralize each other” (p. 7). The reason for this, he suggests, is
that the application of one means of power (such as physical coercion) engenders a
corresponding type of compliance by subordinates (for example, alienation), making
them unresponsive to the other two forms of control (e.g., moral suasion) (p. 7).
The work of Weber and Eztioni is suggestive, but not definitive, as a way of
approaching the question; why should we count on building inspectors to see to it
that local building codes are enforced properly, especially in the face of uncertainty
and hostility? Borrowing from each of the typologies, however, a set of three
different reasons may be offered. The empirical materials from the field study may
then be used to assess them. The three are developed as contrasting and idealized
social types (Klapp 1971).2 Social types are not titles or job descriptions. They are
descriptions of the style or manner in which people carry out their formal
organizational roles.
The first is the building inspector as bureaucrat. This casts the building
inspector in the classic role of the “organization man” (see Whyte 1956), a simple
2 Social types are . . consensual concepts of roles that have not been fully codified and rationalized,
. . . [T]hey are a chart to role-structures otherwise largely invisible and submerged” (Klapp 1971, p.
1).
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cog in a large bureaucratic machine. Inspectors see to it that building regulations are
adhered to because that is what their job and their organizations demand. Their
orientation to their work may be either calculative or alienative, to use Etzioni’s
terms. Code enforcement may be driven by inspectors’ perceptions of the negative
sanctions that their supervisors can invoke upon them for failures or lapses in
enforcement (an alienative response to a perceived coercive, discipline-based
management style). In its extreme form, this type of role performance can take the
form of a type of inspector who is “just going through the motions,” “staying out of
trouble,” and “putting in his time” until retirement. Alternatively, code enforcement
maybe driven by a desire to impress one’s supervisor, to “make a name for oneself’
inside the organization (a calculative orientation to a perceived management style
emphasizing performance-based salary and career advancement3 ). In extreme the
form, this type of enforcer is the officious “stickler for detail, no exceptions”
bureaucrat that reinforces the popular stereotypes of government as rife with “red
tape,” “inefficiency,” and “inflexibility,” described by Merton (1968, pp. 249-260) as
goal displacement. Both varieties of the building inspector as bureaucrat are locals
in Gouldner’s (1970, p. 481) sense of the term. Building codes are the “raw
materials” (from Perrow 1967; also Thompson 1967) that their employers process,
and their job is but one piece of the organizational machinery for “processing” that
raw material. The building-inspector-as-bureaucrat type is internally focused; the
3 The classic description o f career advancement o f this bureaucratic type is provided by Weber
(1978b, pp. 958-965).
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internal machinations of his organization are his working environment. His job has
no higher calling or moral purpose. It is part of the machinery of local government.
The second major social type is the building inspector as professional. This
social type is the epitome of Gouldner’s “cosmopolitan” (Gouldner 1970, p. 481).
The professional type of building inspector is outward-oriented; his standards are
those of his professional group. His reference groups or role models are his fellow
professionals wherever they are employed, whether they are within his organization
or other colleagues external to his organization. His is a “higher calling” than that of
the building inspector as bureaucrat. Rather than fear the loss of his pension or loss
of future raises and promotions, he views building code enforcement as the duty of a
professional. The inspector-as-professional type also has a calculative orientation
toward his work, but it is not the same as the calculative orientation of the inspector
as bureaucrat. The professional’s orientation is to the technical aspects of the
building process that his professional group defines as a means to the end of public
safety. Unlike the inspector as bureaucrat, the inspector as professional
simultaneously displays a second orientation toward the work of enforcement, a
calling. This is a variant of Etzioni’s moral involvement, though of more limited
scope than that of the third social type (below). This variant is an orientation shaped
by the ethic or code of the inspector’s professional association. Safety is thus a
higher calling that transcends local organizations (building departments) and
parochial interests and that is embedded in the meaning of professionalism and of the
self-concept of the professional.
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The third type is the building inspector as hero. Code enforcement for this type
is the highest calling of the three. Role involvement is exclusively of the moral
rather than the alienative or calculative form. This type is “heroic” because his
reference group is the citizenry as a whole, the elusive “public.” Enforcing the
building codes of the city is not done out of fear of reprimand for “screw-ups,” the
desire for promotion, or the satisfaction of adhering to the highest professional
standards. Rather, in his eyes, the building codes are moral precepts, adherence to
which is pleasing in the eyes of the citizen-as-god. This type of inspector sees
himself as the heroic servant of his master, the public. Building code enforcement is
a moral calling, and the job of the building inspector simultaneously that of the
devoted disciple and high priest.
In this chapter, the literature on the bureaucratic model and the professional
model will be reviewed more thoroughly than the third model. The heroic model
remains underdeveloped in the social sciences, save for the writings of the late Orrin
Klapp (see esp. 1962,1971) and some of the works of Schwartz (1987,2000) and
Fine (2001).
The Professional Model
The professional model deserves the most attention of the three. For more than a
century, professionalism, especially of subordinate-level, public-sector employees,
has been seen as an antidote for the failings of government, in particular local
government. Early in the last century during the so-called Progressive Era, the
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emergence of the “good government” movement (featuring the city manager as the
local “chief executive officer”), the rise of civil service, the widespread popularity of
and faith in scientific management, and the establishment of professional degree
programs in public administration in U.S. universities were all part of this trend (see
the overview and chronologies in Shafritz and Hyde 1997, esp. pp. 1-13 and 63-75).
By the second half of the twentieth century, this trend had evolved into an interest in
what constitutes a profession and in the movement of certain occupations toward
professional status (see the early collection of papers edited by Vollmer and Mills
1966; see also Freidson 1986). Lipsky (1980) made the issue of whether
professionalizaton offers a realistic “cure” for the perceived maladies of public-
sector performance central to his examination of street-level bureaucracies.
While Lipsky’s conclusion was a negative one (adhering to the norms and values
of a professional group does not automatically make public employees more
responsible and more accountable to local citizens, in his view) and while academic
interest in professions and the process of professionalization had declined
considerably by the end of the century, nevertheless the basic elements of a
perceived solution contained within progressivism and professionalism are alive and
well in the early years of the twenty-first century. These elements are twofold. One
is the valuation of technical competence over the conventional wisdom of first-hand
experience. There are two aspects to the element of technical competence: the
acquisition of technical knowledge through (initial) formal education and (later) in-
service training; and credentialing by technical experts that formally certify the
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possession of technical competence (on the increasing importance of credentialing
throughout the twentieth century, see Collins 1979). The other element is an ethic o f
responsibility stressing the preeminence of collective well-being (e.g., safety) over
the self-interest of the individual public servant. Emphasis on ensuring that building
inspectors adhere to this ethic is cyclical, increasing and decreasing with the ebb and
flow of public interest following dramatic events, especially those hinting of
corruption or scandal (Blair 1999a, 1999b; Rrikorian and Hong 2002; Rashbaum
2002)(See also New York Times4 and Xinhua News Agency5 ). Emphasis on ensuring
that building inspectors are technically competent is more constant, if not increasing.
The influence of professional groups may also be growing as they assume greater
responsibility for training and certification (See ICBO Building Standards and ICBO
Certificate Examinations).
The next section reviews some of the social science literature on occupations and
professions with a specific focus on how it applies to the role of building inspector.
Occupations and Professions
The requisite knowledge for building construction and later building inspection
originally came from the master builder who had practical hands-on building
experience. This knowledge base was adequate for pre-industrial communities.
These tradesmen and other occupational groups were brought into the building trades
through their apprenticeship programs, which were defined and controlled within the
4 New York Times, Nov 26, Dec 11,19 1999, April3, May 17,31,July 14,25 2002
5 Xinhua News Agenci Feb 26, April 5,15, May 24,25 2002
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class structure of the community in which they lived. They were socialized into the
culture of their trades by the master tradesmen or by journeymen, if there were no
master tradesmen for that trade. This meant that they had to start out with the lowest
of the jobs and “pay their dues” in order to learn each step of the trade along the way.
Eventually they would earn the status of journeymen and finally, master of the trade.
Masters served as teachers and supervisors and were directly responsible for the
quality of work, both of their own work and those whom they employed. Since there
was ample time, and communities were rather small, it was in the best interest of
everyone to do the job as best as one could to avoid adverse publicity within the
community, given the knowledge base of the trade at the time. However, as the
population grew and industrialization took hold in towns and municipalities, the
quality of construction was compromised as a result of growing competition, the
increasing size of projects, and the feet that there were too few supervisors for the
jobs that the labor force was to perform. Furthermore, knowledge of building
structures and materials became inadequate for dealing with new materials,
techniques, and arbitrary or changing directives as to how to properly use these new
materials (e.g., steel girders, asphalt, and aluminum), as well as different techniques
used with older materials such as lead, laminated lumber, and the standardization of
lumber specifications (moisture content, structural strength, etc.).
The lead in introducing changes in American building practices was taken by the
Military Academy at West Point at around the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The West Point program was modeled on that of the French Ecole Polytechnique for
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the training of military engineers. The training of military engineers (primarily for
building fortifications, defensive earthworks, field sanitation, etc.) and civil
engineering (the building of canals, bridges, roads, harbors, machinery, millwright,
etc., for civilian and military uses) quickly merged. Their set of courses, which
constituted their area of specialization, melded into present day engineering with
lines of distinction along more theoretical lines, such as structural, mechanical, and
electrical among others (i.e., heat transfer, refrigeration, lighting, geology). Demand
for a better technical education of civilian engineers increased as well. Collins
(1979, p. 165) identifies five different models of engineering education which
contributed to the rapid growth of the training of engineers in the U.S.: (1)
mechanics institutes; (2) the training school movement; (3) the program of the Ecole
Polytechnique-, (4) an informal system of apprenticeships in machine manufacturing
shops; and (5) university-level schools of mechanical engineering. The movement
quickly emphasized classical scientific training in colleges and universities,
specifying requirements for admission, and the number of years of study required. In
the early 1800s, various technical and engineering societies were formed by the
members around their particular discipline and/or specialty (Carr-Saunders and
Wilson 1933). These societies were first incorporated in England and later in
America to elevate the status of the engineer over the millwright mechanic. The
millwright mechanic was considered a true tradesmen, learning through empirical
observation and not from data of multiple scientific observation.
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As the building and construction industry grew, so did the accident rate
(especially in the railroad sector of the economy). Consequently, public pressure
mounted for oversight and supervision of the building process by people with
knowledge of the latest building practices of the day, and hopefully also the safest as
well. Cities and municipalities initially appointed inspectors that had come up from
the ranks of the trades and possessed the requisite knowledge and training of the
trade he or she was to inspect. Inspectors rose from the ranks of mechanics, but they
did not enter the ranks of engineers due to the lack of formal training which was
required by the engineers. Rather, they distanced themselves not only from
mechanics but also from engineers and architects. Consequently, they created their
own social subgroup. Inspectors were no longer associated with the trades. They
became agents of the cities and municipalities and, simultaneously, agents of
engineers and architects to ensure compliance with building plans. Contemporary
building inspectors have either risen through the ranks of the blue-collar tradesmen
with the requisite years as apprentice, journeymen, and master, to become an
inspector or they have undertaken some combination of special on-the-job training,
higher education, and seminars given by various building departments, trade
organizations, and the International Congress of Building Officials PCBO].
Furthermore, the interaction, which the building inspector pursues, is not with
co workers, which is the normal course of occupational interaction, but rather with a
nonvoluntary citizen/client of the municipality or city. This was the state of affairs
until recent times. Modem postindustrial societies require education, training, and a
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background, if not in the trade itself, then the ability of the inspector inspecting the
appropriate trade because of the continual development of new material, testing of
those material and different application of these new material and techniques.
Technical Competence and Occupational Status
With public demand for greater technical competence certified by formal
credentials, the question arises as to whether the perceived status of building
inspectors has also increased. Occupational status is an important resource of type of
social capital (Lin 2001; Lin, Cook and Bunt 2001) in dealing with the clients of
public bureaucracies. Generally speaking, the more prestige that is attached to an
occupation such as building inspector, the more leverage that the public employee
enjoys in his interactions with clients (e.g., builders and contractors). Such prestige
can offset if not overcome the perceived negative image of having a “government
job.” One indication of occupational prestige is provided by classification schemes
such as that developed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Then the question is: Where do building inspectors fall in relation to the
classification of occupations and professions in the social structure? Building
inspectors have characteristics of several types of occupations and professions. It is
readily apparent that those building inspectors who “came up from the ranks of the
trades” have a firm grounding in the occupation’s technical expertise as well as have
the occupational subculture of their trades. The issue becomes, once they leave the
working trades and seek education, credentials, or certification, do the newly
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educated inspectors attain the same professional status as their colleagues who have
not worked in the trades as part of their training? There always seems to be friction
or tension between those formally educated and those informally.
The concept of a profession is rooted in medieval history and needs to be
reviewed in order to understand some of the modem criticisms of it. The definition
of the professional has proven to be rather problematic. There is no clear definition
in the literature, and the folk concepts in everyday usage are ambiguous and in
conflict with the academic definitions. The most traditional professions were doctor,
clergy and lawyer. It now includes chiropractors, dentists, and accountants among
others. “Professional” can refer to someone who makes a living by a profession (i.e.,
the opposite of an “amateur”). However, “profession” can mean, or be attributed to,
someone having special competence, such as mg cleaning. Lack of professional
competence is referred to as being “unprofessional,” a term employed as an insult to
a person’s competency whether or not they are considered to be a professional.
The first attempt to clarify the meaning of profession was an effort to identify the
attributes of professions. This so-called attribute model as described by Pavalko
(1979) contains eight major categories or dimensions: (1) theory, intellectual
technique, and/or knowledge base; (2) relevance to social values; (3) training period;
(4) motivation; (5) autonomy; (6) commitment; (7) sense of community; and (8)
code of ethics.6 The objective of attribute models such as this one was the creation
of a measuring device—a gauge or yardstick—for use in determining where
6 Ronald M. Pavalko, Sociology o f Occupations and Professions, p. [1988??]. See also footnote #3
p.48.
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occupation ranked on a scale of professionalism. The way these models were
constructed was by selecting specific occupations that, by conventional wisdom or
by some consensus among academics, were already presumed to have professional
status. Medicine, law, and engineering were most commonly held up as models of
what it means to be a profession (see, for example, Vollmer and Mills 1966, pp. xv-
xviii). Attributes of a profession were then identified by contrasting the
characteristics of these occupational groups with others that were deemed less
“professional” (the term “semi-professional” was sometimes used; see, for example,
Etzioni 1964, pp. 87-89) such as social work, nursing, and teaching, or with those
thought to be the antithesis of professions such as waitresses and secretaries.
Interest subsequently shifted to the development of so-called process models
such as those proposed by Caplow (1964) and Wilensky (1964). Such models in
general see the process of becoming a profession as involving a series of steps: (1)
the establishment of a professional organization; (2) an attempt to change the name
of the occupation involved; (3) development of a formal code of ethics; and (4)
enactment of legal restrictions to control entry of new members into the profession.
It is the last element of the process model that has been the basis of criticism of
most previous definitions of a profession. This is that they generally fail to
emphasize sufficiently the power that fully professional groups are able to exercise
by controlling (typically with the backing of the state) the market for their services
and the entry of new members into professional practice (see Freidson 1986, esp. pp.
185-208, see also Wilensky 1964).
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Applied to the occupation of building inspector at the beginning of the twenty-
first century, these models of a profession suggest a number of characteristics, which
one would expect to find if this occupation has the properties attributed to a
profession. Turning first to the attribute model, we would expect to find that: (1) the
practice of building inspection is based upon an understanding of theory-based
knowledge; (2) building inspectors share a common set of values that, among other
things, define building safety as a public good and as something that is in the public
interest; (3) building inspection requires extensive formal education, including some
postgraduate work and credentialing, and technical training or experience in one or
more special fields of inspection (structural, mechanical, electrical, etc.); (4)
inspectors are highly motivated to assist in seeing that projects are completed in a
timely and efficient manner and result in a safe, durable structure; (5) inspectors
enjoy a high degree of autonomy in their work, including control over their work
loads and daily schedules; (6) inspectors are highly committed to their work,
describing themselves as “in for the long haul,” and have an employment history
displaying stability rather than frequent job and career changes; (7) building
inspectors display a sense of community, camaraderie, and identification with their
peers; and (8) building inspectors are members of one or more professional
associations that have a written code of ethics which they are at least somewhat
conversant with.
Turning next to the more dynamic process model, we would expect to find that:
(1) over time one or more nonprofit organizations have emerged to establish
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standards for training, education, and experience for entry into and continuance in
the occupation of building inspector, as well as to represent the interests of the
occupational group in policy-making and other arenas; (2) there have been changes
over time in the name title that members of the occupational group refer to
themselves and prefer to be called by others;7 (3) the emergence of a written and
formally adopted code of ethics in one or more of the nonprofit organizations; and
(4) some success in establishing legal requirements (licensing) for participation in
the occupation of building inspector, including influencing the type of credentials,
training or education, and experience necessary for hiring by building departments.
After the materials gathered during the field study of Los Angeles building
inspectors have been presented, we will return to the question of whether or to what
extent building inspection may be called a profession. This is a necessary analytical
step prior to assessing the consequences of professional status for public safety. In
the next section, we turn to the basis of and our expectations about the building-
inspector-as-bureaucrat.
The Bureaucratic Model
Policy-making is organizational work. Almost all of the organizations involved
in the policy process are of the formal, complex type identified with the term
“bureaucracy” in its analytical rather than pejorative sense (see esp. Weber 1978b,
pp. 956-1005). Truly “grass-roots” organizations play a much smaller role in
7 Such changes might be on the order o f other occupations such as “ janitors” who prefer to be called
“custodians” and “garbage collectors” who would rather be known as “sanitary engineers.”
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promoting policy issues than resource rich professional social movement
organizations (see McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977). For example, policy-makers
(i.e., politicians) are less individual decision-makers and orators than well-briefed
heads of large office staffs; lobbyists are in the employment of large law firms and
nonprofit organizations; policy analysts are as likely to be found inside government
as outside it; scientists are employed in government laboratories and research
facilities; etc. In other words, those who implement public policies are not unique in
receiving a paycheck from a formal organizations and pursuing their careers within
them. Yet when one thinks of bureaucrats, one thinks not of people who are typical
of the workforce in general but rather of lazy, secure oafs hiding behind an
unfathomable matrix of complex of rules and procedures. The scholarly literature
contains descriptions of both types, the “everyman” typical perception of all who
work especially in large organizations as well as the reviled incompetent with a
“government job.” Therefore, two sets of expectations will be identified for the
bureaucratic model, one neutral (i.e., analytical) and the other negative in its
connotations.
Both sets of expectations are rooted in Max Weber’s writing and thinking about
bureaucracy and the role of the bureaucratic employee. The “neutral” expectations
come from Weber’s historical analysis; the negative expectations come from
Weber’s personal observations about the bureaucrats of this time, especially Prussian
officialdom Two disclaimers are deemed necessary to properly understand Weber’s
work and, more importantly, to be able to apply it properly. First, Weber’s so-called
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model of bureaucracy was never intended as either a (nomological) theory or a
(normative) set of prescriptions for how to construct and run an organi2ation. It was
intended instead as a methodological tool, a measuring device, for the comparative
historical study of political economy. The method for constructing this research tool
involved the much discussed (and much misunderstood) device known as the ideal
type. Leaving aside the vast secondary literature on this subject (see among
numerous sources, Burger 1987; Huff 1984; and Rogers 1969), the strategy involved
in constructing and applying ideal types is simple: by abstracting and exaggerating
the distinctive qualities of a phenomenon, one arrives at a description of it as it
would appear in “pure form,” stripped of its real-world shadings and variations. The
result is a prototype that does not exist in reality but against which the existing
empirical instances of the phenomenon can be compared. In the case of
organizations, identification of the essential features of the ideal-typical bureaucracy
allows the analyst to gauge how closely and in which ways existing organizations
approximate this prototype.
Second, many critics charge that Weber’s development of the ideal type
bureaucracy amounted to an enthusiastic endorsement of this form of organization.8
8 Passages such as the following, when read out o f context, can give this impression: “The decisive
reason for the advance o f bureaucratic organizations has always been its purely technical superiority
over any other form o f organization” (Weber 1978b, p. 973; italic in the original). However, this is
not an absolute proclamation o f superiority but only a relative one (“over any other form of
organization [that has existed up to the present time]”), and even at that, only on technical grounds.
One sentence following the sentence just quoted is the following: “Precision, speed, unambiguity,
knowledge o f the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction o f friction and of
material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic
administration, and especially in its monocratic form. As compared with all collegiate, honorific, and
avocational forms o f administration, trained bureaucracy is superior on all these points” (ibid., pp.
973-974). This is a highly qualified conclusion, not an unqualified endorsement.
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In feet, as will be shown, Weber was outspoken in his contempt for the excesses of
the bureaucratic form. A related criticism is that Weber insufficiently developed the
negative consequences of bureaucratic organization in his analytical writing (see
Scott 1998, pp. 47-49). It should be noted, however, that Weber did offer insightful
observations on the anti-democratic tendency of bureaucratization (pp. 990-992) and
on the power of bureaucratic “secrecy” (“insider” possession of special
organizational knowledge) vis-£-vis elected officials (pp. 992-993), thereby
anticipating by three-quarters of a century the “discovery” of these issues by
principal-agent theorists (see Moe 1984). It was Robert Merton (1968, pp. 249-260)
who identified and elaborated on some of the “dysfunctional” aspects of
bureaucracy, especially those influencing the personality structures of “lower
participants” working in them.9
Merton’s jumping-off point was the earlier term “trained incapacity,” coined by
Thorstein Veblen (1904). Veblen’s thesis, simply stated, was that what worked well
in the past in a given situation is often inappropriate in the present or similar
situation. For example, workers become quite skillful at performing a specific task
or solving a particular problem through repetition. However, the very skills and
9 Even Weber’s analytical writings were not without rather pointed observations on the impact of
bureaucracy on those who worked throughout their careers in them, a majority o f the labor force in
both the public and private sectors even in this first decades o f the twentieth century in Western
Europe. He writes: “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out o f the [bureaucratic] apparatus into
which he has been harnessed.”' , “... the professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity in his entire
economic and ideological existence. In the great majority o f cases he [sic] is only a small cog in a
ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route o f march, ” (Weber
1978b, pp. 987-988; italics added). (ADD CITATION: Weber’s [1958, p. 181] oft-quoted comments
about the oppressive weight o f “. .. the cloak. . . [that becomes] an iron cage” was directed at the
economic system o f rational capitalism in general, not specifically at its “operational arm,” so to
speak, bureaucratic organization (see also p. 182).
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experience that make them effective in one set of circumstances are the very things
that make them ineffective and their actions inappropriate under even slightly altered
circumstances. Applied to organizations with rationally designed mechanisms for
systematizing routine problems and situations, trained incapacity suggests a type of
inflexibility commonly imputed to bureaucracies in the negative sense.
To this Merton adds the concept “goal displacement” (Merton 1968, pp. 253-
254). Simply put, goal displacement described a process by which what had been
created at one time, as means to achieving organizational ends at a later time instead
become ends in themselves. Over conformity to rules, formalism that becomes
ritualism, and “... punctilious adherence to formalized procedures . . . interferes
with the achievement of the purposes of the organization, in which case we have the
familiar phenomenon of technicalism or red tape of the official” (p. 253). Merton
provides a colorful example: “An extreme product of this process of displacement of
goals is the bureaucratic virtuoso, who never forgets a single rule binding his action
and hence is unable to assist many of his clients” (pp. 253-254).
Merton identifies three other characteristics of this negative model of
bureaucracy. One is that the impersonality of universalism, the norm that similar
clients or customers must be treated similarly, can easily be perceived by the client
or customer as “indifference” on the part of the bureaucrat toward those clients or
customers (Merton 1968, p. 256). Another is the monopolistic nature of public
agencies. The feet that clients have nowhere else to turn for services promotes
remoteness in the relationships between public officials and clients. A third is the
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perceived status similarities and differences between officials and their clients.
Merton (1968, pp. 257-258) identifies “aloofness” as a frequent response of officials,
both when they perceive that they are of higher status than their clients and that
clients are of higher status than they are. Each of these characteristics of a less
neutral, more negative image of bureaucracy and of bureaucrats will be used (below)
to create one of two different sets of expectations of the building inspector as
bureaucrat.
To set the record straight on the two views of bureaucracy, it should be noted
that Weber himself held both neutral and negative views of it. The neutral depiction
is represented by his development of the ideal-typical bureaucracy as a tool for
comparative historical research. The negative view is found in Weber’s personal
feelings about the modem bureaucrat of his time, especially the Prussian variety.
Such contradictory viewpoints were characteristic of the antinomial structure of
Weber’s thought, which always strove for a sharp distinction between the theories
and methods of his research and his personal values. To give a flavor of the latter,
here is an excerpt from an improvised speech that Weber gave in 1909, as recorded
by his wife. Referring to public officials as little cogs in “... the human machine
(bureaucracy). . . ” he lamented: “... the idea that the world would be filled with
nothing but those little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling
to a small position and strive for a bigger one” (Marianne Weber 1988, p. 416).
Weber’s ideal-typical (i.e., analytical) construction of the bureaucratic model
suggests the following expectations of building inspectors as bureaucrats. (1)
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Inspectors work at tasks explicitly described by rules and regulations of the building
department. These tasks are the inspectors’ official duties and are described in
written job descriptions and civil service categories. The power of inspectors is
limited by these devices, as is the power of superiors over them (i.e., the types of
commands that they can legitimately be given, the sanctions that they can receive,
etc.). The hiring and dismissal of building inspectors is also spelled out in these and
related documents, (la) In the “neutral” model, these rights and duties are expected
to be opaque to outsiders, including nonparticipant observers. If they become
visible, they should appear as explanations for why things are done a certain way
(e.g., “Our departmental procedures require us to . . “The municipal code
prohibits us from...”). (lb) In the negative model, building inspectors should be
observed protecting their “turf,” “hiding” behind rules and regulations (e.g., making
decisions or actions appear to be mandatory when in fact some leeway is permitted),
and rigidly adhering to departmental procedures that do not seem important to other
inspectors.
(2a) In the neutral model, building inspectors are aware of and can readily
describe the hierarchy of offices (chain of command) in which their jobs are
embedded. However, such hierarchies exist largely in the background and are all but
invisible in inspectors everyday routines. (2b) In the negative model, hierarchy
should be paramount in inspectors’ behavior. Overly-deferential treatment of
superiors and rank-conscious relationships with peers and subordinates should be
readily apparent.
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(3) Completion and processing of “paperwork” will occupy an important part of
building inspectors activities. Sign-offs on and processing of permits and other
departmental documents are at the heart of the inspection process. Differences in
expectations between the neutral and the negative inspector-as-bureaucrat models
may be so subtle as to be indistinguishable in field data. The differences may reside
in the attitude toward paperwork and the “compulsiveness” with which inspectors
deal with it. (3 a) In the neutral model, paperwork is a “necessary evil” that is
handled properly but unenthusiastically. (3b) In the negative model, inspectors have
a near ‘Tetish” obsession about paperwork and take extreme pride when calling
attention to this part of their work, especially to their superiors.
Weber’s fourth characteristic of modem bureaucracy has more to do with middle
managers and top administrators in building departments than with rank-and-file
building inspectors. Modem management, whether in private enterprise or public
agency, presupposes “... thorough training in a field of specialization” (Weber
1978b, p. 958). Currently in large cities such as Los Angeles, this suggests an
expectation that those in middle- and upper-level positions of management in
building departments will hold some sort of post baccalaureate degree or certificate
in a management field, perhaps in addition to a background in one of the specialized
trades. At the highest level of administration, personal experience in the building
industry may be totally absent; job requirements may call for specialized experts in
public management, with personal experience in other areas of local government.
This translates into two sets of expectations. (4ai) In the neutral model, building
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inspectors’ immediate supervisors have obtained or have undertaken coursework
toward advanced degrees in management or administration. (4aii) Building
inspectors desiring to move up into a middle-management or supervisory position
will expect to need coursework, if not completion of a degree, in management or
administration, and to be successful, in a written and/or oral examination process.
(4bi) In the negative model, supervisors that have “come up through the ranks,” have
attained their supervisory positions on the basis of having more seniority than the
inspectors under them, and have no specialized training in management. (4bii)
Building inspectors hoping to “move up the ladder” into management will count on a
combination of seniority and having “friends in high places.”
The fifth characteristic of modem bureaucracy is that “... official activity
demands the full working capacity of the official” (Weber 1978b, p. 958), italics in
the original). In short, in building departments in large local jurisdictions inspection
is a full-time job. This is not an earthshaking feature at the present time, but it does
suggest two different expectations about the way modem building inspectors may
approach their jobs. (5a) The ideal modem building inspector is someone who “eats,
breathes, and sleeps” his work. This is a person who would be described by his
peers as a “dedicated professional.” While he may have other interests and hobbies,
he is also interested in improving his job-related knowledge and skills. This may
take the form of enrolling in night classes or attending training sessions that are
neither specifically nor directly required for job retention or advancement. (5b) The
other type of inspector is one who “can’t wait to punch out” at the end of the day.
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He always seems to be “moonlighting” or looking for other ways to make money
outside of his official duties. If he is taking classes or attending sessions at night or
on weekends, these will have little if anything to do with his job. He is the type of
inspector that is often close to violating conflict of interest rules by using his job-
related contacts in pursuit of outside business opportunities.
The sixth and final of Weber’s characteristics of modem bureaucracy is the
formal, written, rationally-established general rales that govern the conduct of all
organizational members. “Knowledge of these rules represents a special technical
expertise which the officials possess” (Weber 1978b, p. 958). While these rules
supposedly cover all facets of employee conduct, there is one underlying principle
that Weber singles out. Translated into the world of contemporary building
inspectors, this principle requires that building inspectors treat all contractors and
builders alike, without favoritism. In Weber’s (1978b, p. 958) words: “... the
authority to order certain matters by decree . . . does not entitle the agency to regulate
the matter by individual commands given for each case, but only to regulate the
matter abstractly.” This is the principle of universalism, the opposite of
particularism. The obvious expectations for our contrasting models of building
inspectors as bureaucrats are these. (6a) The neutral model describes an inspector
who treats each of his “clients” identically, regardless of whether he likes or dislikes
them or whether they are “big-time” builders or “mom-and-pop” operations. (6b)
The negative model describes an inspector who “plays favorites.” He has “friends”
and “enemies” among the contractors with whom he deals and whom he treats quite
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differently, giving “breaks” to the former but not to the latter. He is also the type of
inspector who is compliant with the wishes of large and politically powerful builders
but who frequently belittles and bullies small-time operators.
An evaluation of each of these two models of the building inspector as
bureaucrat will be presented in Chapter 5. Before turning to a presentation of the
materials gathered during the field study, one more model building inspector type
will be elaborated, the inspector as hero.
The Heroic Model
The building inspector as hero should be the easiest of the three to identify (if in
fact he exists). It is unlikely that anyone else (builders, contractors, members of the
public-at-large, etc.) would describe him in heroic terms, except perhaps derisively.
It is the building inspector who sees himself as a hero, making the structures of the
city safe.1 0 He would have to describe himself to his audience, including field
researchers, in ways that call attention to his heroism. The only way others will
come to appreciate this quality is if he points it out to them “in so many words.” He
is someone who “takes himself seriously.” And consequently, takes the fight for
public safety as a “higher calling.”
As in any drama, there are three principal characters in the building-inspector-as-
hero model—the hero, of course, but also the villains (the enemies of the hero), and
1 0 This is a different use o f the term “hero” from that by Klapp (1971, pp. 66-72). A hero is anyone “.
. . who evokes the appropriate attitudes and behavior ...” on the part o f others (p. 66). The title o f
one o f Klapp’s earliest articles, “The Creation o f Popular Heroes” (Klapp 1948), describes well his
approach to heroism as a popularly generated heroic symbol.
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the victims. (1) In the eyes of the heroic building inspector, the villains are the
builders and their armies of contractors and subcontractors. He sees them all as
unscrupulous comer-cutters who “can’t be trusted.” Given this view of the “enemy,”
every day that he goes to work is like “going to war” on the “battlefields” of building
sites. Hence in this scenario, the relationships between inspectors and builders and
contractors should be described by both—and especially by the former—as
adversarial ones.
(2) If villains are the “evil twins” of our heroic inspectors, they are also the
genesis of the victims in the drama. Victims in the building-inspector-as-hero model
are mostly unseen because they are usually “off-stage.” They are members of the
public-at-large, the taxpaying citizen, who inhabit, occupy, and otherwise frequent
the residential, commercial, and public buildings of the local municipality. They are
mostly unseen because they are potential victims of some future, yet-to-happen
calamity. Occasionally these potential victims force their way on-stage in order to
call the audience’s attention to their potential victimhood, as when residents of an
apartment building organize a public demonstration to protest unsafe conditions
caused by an unscrupulous, comer-cutting property owner.
(3) The existence of both villains and their (potential) victims creates the
building inspector as hero. The only thing standing between villains and victims is
the building inspector. Armed with his building codes, he represents part of the “thin
blue line” protecting the public from evil-doers, keeping the city safe from collective
calamities and personal tragedies.
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Empirical support for the inspector-as-hero model should surface in the
comments by building inspectors when describing their work. These would be on
the order of the following: “You know, if it weren’t for us [municipal building
inspectors], there would be no such thing as safety in this city”; They’re [builders
and contractors] out to cheat and lie to save money any way they can no matter who
gets hurt, and we’re the cops on the beat who won’t let ‘em get away with it”;
“Nothing is more important than the safety of John Q. Public”; “The satisfaction that
I get out of this job is not the paycheck but going to bed at night knowing that the
city is a safer place for the taxpaying citizen”; etc.
The social psychology of the building inspector as hero is an interesting topic,
but one for a different occasion. Why the building inspector might come to think of
himself in heroic terms could be explained by several different hypotheses: it could
provide meaning and motivation in a bureaucratic job that otherwise is short on both;
it could provide a rationalization for a career that has gone in an unplanned direction;
or it could represent a defense mechanism for occupying what is self-consciously
perceived to be a low-status occupation. Whatever the causes and functions of such
a heroic self-concept, building inspection has become a higher calling. It is not just
another job in which one seeks to please one’s superiors, thereby enhancing one’s
salary and career; it is more than professional pride in a technically sophisticated and
prestigious occupation; it is work “on the side of the angels,” a virtuous and morally
correct undertaking, even if especially if no one else sees it the same way.
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How much support the field data provide for each of these three types of ideal
building inspectors will be evaluated in a later chapter (Chapter 5). The expectations
developed about each type are more general, less precise than hypotheses, but they
serve the same purpose. They allow us to answer a key question of policy
implementation: What kind of orientation do the people who carry out public
policies (enforce the law, implement regulations and building codes, etc.), bring to
their work? Are they at base nothing more that bureaucrats in the worst sense,
worried only about impressing their bosses, getting a raise, and having an easy time
of it until retirement while going through the motions of attending to the public
safety? Are they every bit as professional as we would like to think are our doctors,
financial advisors, and college professors, knowledgeable in technical details and
unwavering in the face of pressures that would compromise public safety? Or are
they devout high priests, single-mindedly practicing the religion of public safety?
We shall find out. First, a detailed empirical picture is painted of the building
inspector, where he comes from, how he came to be an inspector, what he does
during the course of his workday, how he feels about what he does, and so forth—in
the next chapter.
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Chapter Three
Building Codes and the Role of Building Inspector
A Brief History of the Evolution of Building Codes
Like many public policies that are made to correct a troubling situation,
building codes developed as a response to haphazard construction that had no
controls for planning, safety, or fire hazard considerations. Unfortunately, they were
enacted mostly after there was loss of life and/or property. These losses were as a
result of fires, building collapses, or other types of construction failure. All were
very costly in both direct costs to those that must repair and rebuild as well as the
indirect costs to the general welfare.
The earliest building code known is the Code of Hammurabi, King of
Babylonia, from around 2200 BC. Reflecting the “eye-for-an-eye” mentality of the
ancient world, Hammurabi’s code contained the following elements:
A. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction firm
and the house which he has built collapse and cause the death of the
owner of the house—that builder shall be put to death.
B. If it cause the death of the son of the owner of the house—they shall put
to death the son of that builder.
C. If it cause the death of a slave of the owner of the house—he shall give to
the owner of the house a slave of equal value.
D. If it destroy property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because
he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall
rebuild the house which collapsed at his own expense.
E. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction
meet the requirements and a wall fall in, that builder shall strengthen the
wall at his own expense.
Construction Failure, 2d. 1997, p.4
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Later in the ancient worlds of Rome and Greece were built by skilled artisans
that were building edifices for their patrons. Time was not a problem. Projects
developed as needed as the empires built edifices to their power, monuments to their
gods, or villas for their patrons, and builders were rewarded for their efforts.
However, there was a large portion of uncontrolled building which resulted in the
Great Fire of Rome of 64 AD (among other various burnings of Rome). There is
also speculation that the Emperor Nero wanted to eliminate squalor and hold onto a
section of Rome for his own redevelopment, a plan that had been resisted by the
Roman senate (Grant, 1985). The fire not only solved the “problem,” it also resulted
in an organized and redeveloped Rome, with accompanying emphasis on fire
resistant building and attention to public sanitation through the further construction
of public baths and aqueducts.
The traditions of the artisan and the craftsmen that had emerged out of the
ancient world lasted well into the Middle Ages, at which time the regulation of
building became the jurisdiction of the courts and the rule of (secular) law. The
Middle Ages brought us the law court as a mechanism for enforcing and remedying
poorly or negligently constructed buildings. The courts allowed an action to “lie,”
and hold the supervising agent (i.e. architect) and builder liable for negligence
[Citation] (See also Prosser on Torts). This was an ex post facto solution that
attempted to correct a situation after a problem was discovered or caused death
mayhem and/or destruction, rather than a means of avoiding the problem beforehand.
The incentive here could well be construed that of building whatever one could get
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by with, because the law courts were costly and reserved more or less for the upper
class with little recourse for the middle and nil for the lower class. No real effort
was made to ensure good construction and building as long as there was not a great
loss in property and life. Thus it was just a matter of time until the cities grew in
population and disasters became more of a frequent and reoccurring reality.
Building safety addresses several different distinct problems. Primary is
building a safe structure that will not collapse against the forces of nature in a given
geographic area, including wind forces, weather conditions, and geological hazards
and separate the inhabitants from those outside elements along with heating and
sanitation. The other major concern is building a structure that will be resistant to
destruction of property by fire. It is this aspect of building safety that propelled the
second major phase in the historical development of building codes.
Fire Prevention
The nature of building practices during the Middle Ages, such as overcrowding,
haphazard buildings which interconnect, no firewalls, among other practices,
contributed to the many fires through the ages that brought cyclical devastation to the
cities. When the losses were minimal, they were accepted fatalistically. In the New
World, Boston, Massachusetts, experienced a major fire in 1631. As a result, Boston
was the first city in America to enact fire ordinances. These eliminated some of the
fire prone practices from existing structures and banned from new construction use
of thatched roofs and chimneys constructed from wood and earth. Although London
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had had many fires in its history (e.g., in 798, 982 and 1212 among the more
notable), it was the Great London Fire of 1666 that left an indelible mark on history
due to the building controls that were made afterward. Unfortunately, London was
rebuilt before those controls could be enforced. Laws were introduced in Parliament
to avoid another devastating conflagration, but the changes were introduced after
much of the same haphazard building had already been completed.
The Great Fire of London had an impact far beyond that city, however. When
William Penn founded Philadelphia, he had The Great London Fire in mind when he
vowed that nothing like it would happen in his new city. Philadelphia’s newly
enacted town laws required all buildings within the city limits to be built of brick,
and those existing structures of wood construction were to be tom down, despite the
protests and near riots of the Philadelphia’s citizens (Bacon, 1974). New York also
had outlawed wood and mud chimneys by 1648, and by 1766 required buildings to
be built of brick or stone with roofs to be of tile or slate (Boring, et a ll 981).
However, many other cities ignored the lessons of London and paid the price like
New York in the Fire of 1835, which destroyed 700 buildings and 52 acres of prime
business district. The most notably conflagration in America is the Great Chicago
Fire of 1871, killing 250 people, destroying about four square miles of the city and
with some 17,000 buildings, and leaving 100,000 people homeless. Four years later,
Chicago enacted a building and fire-prevent ordinance. Lloyds of London had seen
the threat of a major conflagration in Chicago and had warned its underwriters of this
risk though nothing was done till it was too late. Afterward it was the insurance
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companies which assigned risk and predicated the risk premiums of the landlord and
tenets of building according to the fire prevention techniques which were available at
the time, such as; sprinklers, fire walls, fire doors, adequate party walls, etc.
Structural Safety
The Industrial Revolution brought about changes in building materials and
construction techniques in the United States and other industrialized nation. There
was a great deal of trial and error in building construction to accommodate the mass
migration to the cities and urban centers and the resulting building boom. Dwellings
and factories became multi-story structures in order to maximize the land use costs,
which brought about still more changes in construction technology. The westward
expansion of roads and railways was soon accompanied by losses due to failure of
bridges and roadbeds. These failures were resolved through a plethora of individual
as well as business lawsuits. Historically lawsuits have been a very inefficient
method of solving problems, even those of structural failures resulting in death and
destruction of property. Not until the many deaths cause by railroad accidents at the
turn of the century, (caused by bridge failures, fires caused by the cinders of wood
and coal fired locomotives, and telescoping cars1 ), were the inspectors brought to the
construction sites as the agents of the municipalities, counties and states in an
attempt to protect the public for the asymmetry of information. This can be
compared with the outrage resulting in the regulation of the meat packing industry as
1 This was a phenomena that occurred when a moving train collided with anther train on object, the
passenger cars would crash into one another like a telescope.
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depicted by Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, which resulted in the formation of the
Food and Drug Administration.
Other structural aspects of building safety also had to be addressed,
especially those rare events as earthquakes and the development of the science of
seismology. The Messina-Reggio (Italy) earthquake of 1908 (160,000 killed) led to
the world’s first seismic code, a development to incorporate the known forces of an
earthquake, at that time, into the structural analysis of the building and to build the
structure to withstand those forces. This was further advanced by the Japanese
Home Office following the 1923 Kanto earthquake (140,000 killed). In the United
States, seismic design considerations were first introduced into the Uniform Building
Code in 1927 following the Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925. These early design
requirements would prove inadequate during the Long Beach earthquake of 1933.
Damage from this earthquake was especially evident in the number of school
buildings that were either destroyed or damaged beyond use. (Fortunately, the
earthquake occurred at six minutes before 6:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, a time
when school buildings were vacant.) This earthquake brought about changes in
building codes in California regarding school construction standards (many of which
are popularly associated with the Field Act; see Geschwind 2001, pp. 105-118).
Later earthquakes in the state would lead to changes in codes for hospitals, highway
bridges, and steel-frame high-rise buildings.
A general pattern emerges in the historical development of building codes in
this brief overview. A major catastrophe is associated with the destruction of man-
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made structures, usually accompanied by large-scale loss of life. Civil authorities,
where these are dominant, seek ways to prevent such losses in the future. Laws,
ordinances, or codes are changed to reflect the advancements of technology and sets
forth the new requirements about how and with what material structures may be
constructed within the future. Also, although less often, changes are required to
existing structures which have either historical significance or the economics are
such that retrofitting is less costly then to demolition and rebuild. With increasing
occupational specialization, both those who participate in the making of these
requirements (laws, ordinances and code), as well as the content of the requirements
themselves, have changed over time reflecting the advancements in science.
Code Development in the United States
The Chicago Fire and the resulting city building "code" eventually led the
National Board of Fire Underwriters to publish a recommended National Building
Code in 1905. The purpose of this publication was to assist local governments in
adopting their own building regulations (O’Bannon, 1989). This “model” code
would subsequently undergo several iterations and changes.
In 1922, the International Conference of Building Officials (hereafter ICBO)
set out to develop a code that would be acceptable and enforceable in all local
communities and jurisdictions. Its goal was realized in the development of the
Uniform Building Code of 1927, which immediately spread in America as well as
being translated into several languages. It has since become an international code.
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The International Building Code (IBC) was the next step to the code development.
This is a building code that is truly international and is now in the process of being
ratified by various countries. These and other model codes have been amended
many times with changes proposed by the states to reflect local conditions. When
these codes were adopted and were changed by the local municipalities, the changes
reflected varying local conditions. The changes take into account extraordinary
conditions such as permafrost, hurricanes, and other naturally occurring weather or
geological conditions, as well as water percolation and ground water problems.
In California, for example, the state adopts the model codes, and all
jurisdictions within the State of California have six months to write and adopt their
own amendments to them. The present code is the 1997 Uniform Building Code,
which is published by ICBO. Other codes adopted by local jurisdictions include the
1997 Uniform Plumbing Code as published by the International Association of
Plumbing and Mechanical Officials IAPMO, the 1997 Mechanical Code as published
by ICBO, and the 1996 National Electrical Code NEC A. In the case of the fire
sprinkler code, Los Angeles adopted the code written by the National Fire Prevention
Association, NFPA. The State of California directs local jurisdictions which year of
this code to adopt.
Codes such as these become the definitive rules that all building departments
follow and serve as guidelines both for building inspectors and the various building
construction trades whose work they inspect. Codes are published in codebooks;
numerous other documents explain the basis for and interpretation of the codes.
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Combined, these represent the “law on the books” intended to guide the conduct of
building inspectors in ensuring public safety.
Utilization of Building Codes
Although the knowledge requisite for building and construction is widely
available and relatively inexpensive to obtain, from local building departments,
lumber and material yards, bookstores, schools, the World Wide Web, many builders
and contractors choose not to fully acquaint themselves with the codes. Especially
among small time operators and owner/builders of projects, some feign ignorance of
code requirements in order to avoid a more costly building procedure even though
they have the knowledge. If they do not know all the details of the content of the
code itself, they usually know where to obtain such knowledge and information and
who to ask since it is readily available and relatively inexpensive.
In fairness, knowledge of building techniques and materials is quite different
from everyday knowledge. The knowledge that is reflected in building codes and
materials standards is generated through scientific research and engineering studies;
the knowledge of the contractor and the builder is that of personal experience with
specific techniques and materials. This difference between formal knowledge and
everyday personal experience creates the potential for conflict throughout the code
writing and code enforcement process (on the latter, see below). In the code writing
process, the various professional societies which develop the specialized codes (i.e.,
plumbing, HVAC, structural, etc.) all have a formal review processes in which the
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relevant aspects of formal knowledge are presented and debated. The introduction of
revisions in the codes can be done by local officials, engineers, individual inspectors,
or representatives of private industry. Whether or not a provision of the code is to be
added, changed, or deleted is determined through a review by technical experts along
with the comments of building inspectors and trades people. Participation by
representatives of private industry means that private interests can influence the code
for its self-pecuniary interest to the potential detriment of the public safety. As a
result of such concerns, the code review is structured to keep this opportunistic
behavior in check by the review process. Despite this, there are many examples in
the past of trade people influencing building codes, not out of safety considerations,
but rather due to their desire to control and maintain a monopolistic market position
within their area of interest.2
The Application and Building Permit Process
At the other end of the building code process, the one that is the subject of
this study, is the permit and inspection process. The triggering of these processes is
the desire of a building owner or the owner’s representative to construct a new
building (New Construction) or to renovate, alter, or retrofit an existing building.
Either a simple sketch or a full set of plans (including blueprints) are submitted to the
local building department for approval. In the case of a simple project, this could be
2 For example Haddonfield Township, New Jersey required all plumbing to be lead pipe, which was
difficult to install and had been considered obsolete by all other townships in New Jersey. This was
finally overcome with the legislation of prohibition of lead in the drinking water supply in the mid
1970's.
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taken care of right at the counter and a permit issued. In the case of a more
complicated project (for which reviews by the zoning department, department of
streets, public works department, and the building department are required), the
plans are submitted for separate review by each of these departments. This is also
referred to as plan check, a sequential process wherein each stage or “hurdle” must
be cleared and an approval stamp received before plans are sent on to the next
department. Plan check can take several minutes or years depending upon the size of
the project and whether or not zoning variances need to be overcome. The usual
sequence is predicated by what the local municipality believes is most important to
lesser importance, usually; zoning, department of streets, public works and the
building department. The building department has plan checkers for each of the
department such as electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and building structural, each of the
departments’ plan checker reviews the plans.
Once all the departments have stamped their approval on the plan submitted,
a permit to begin the project will be issued. In large jurisdictions, the permit requires
that inspections be made at various points during the project by the various
specialized inspectors of each trade (i.e., plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and building).
It is important to keep in mind that on the approved plans is a stamped disclaimer in
large letters, which states that approval by plan check is conditional and even though
plan check might have permitted something it still must meet code, thereby giving
the building inspector the last word. This passes the onus of any error or omission
by the city plan checkers onto builders, making them responsible for knowing the
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codes in case plan checkers have overlooked or missed a code requirement. This is
in form a shift of liability to the builder for any code violations, in effect holding the
builder totally liable for the construction of the project.
It is the responsibility of the builder, the property owner, or the contractor to
call to make arrangements to have the various trades inspected by the building
department. These inspections must occur in a specific sequence so that the
elements which the inspectors need to examine are not covered up or hidden from
view before an inspection takes place and that particular inspector is signed off. At
this point it is up to the building inspector to ensure that the building and safety
codes are properly complied with and to verify that the building as built will conform
to the plans as specified. Depending upon the size of the project, there may be
multiple inspections for each phase; this will dictate how many inspectors will be
involved with the project. In general, the larger and more complex the project, the
more inspections are required and inspectors involved. Not all inspectors are trained
in all aspects of all the trades (plumbing, electrical, structural, etc.). On more simple
projects (e.g., small residential renovations), a single inspector may perform more
than one type of inspection.
The Purpose of Building Inspectors
The purpose of the building inspector is to ensure that the building codes are
followed by the builders and contractors who are assembling structures and systems
which are to be inhabited and occupied by the public. This is where "the rubber
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meets the road," so to speak. All codes remain simply “law on the books” unless and
until they are consciously employed in the process of construction or reconstruction.
The intent underlying building codes is the protection of life and the reduction of
property losses. For example, from 1973 to 1989 approximately 150,000 people
were killed due to structure (i.e., home, factories, business) fires in the United States.
It has been estimated that this figure would have been much higher were it not for
the building, fire, and safety codes in effect (O'Bannon, 1989, p. 15). State and local
governments have an overriding interest in reducing the uncertainty associated with
arbitrary building standards and the protection of their citizens from unnecessary
losses due to fire and structural failures. Therefore, governmental entities are
compelled to enforce the various building codes as this is in the interest and
protection of the health and safety of the public from faulty building. Furthermore,
the local government wants to preserve property values, and the accompanying tax
base, by enforcing the land use zoning and other devices so as not to mix
incompatible uses of land (such as for industrial, commercial, residential, and other
purposes).
Local governments and other local public entities (school districts and the like)
need to generate revenue to fund the variety of public goods and services that they
provide. Among these are revenues derived from business taxes and from taxes on
residential property. If local governments enforce too stringent of a building code
which would provide an overabundance of maximum safety (however safety is
defined), they risk driving away local existing businesses, increasing the difficulty of
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attracting new businesses, making new development more expensive than developers
are willing to bear, and generating voter backlash. Add in the uncertainty of
determining precisely “how safe is safe,” and the dilemma faced by the local
government becomes obvious over its building standards, whether to build to all
possible contingence or build to the prevailing quantity of acceptable risk, (whatever
that may be according to whom one poses the question).
In the division of labor that exists in the process of creating, adopting, amending,
and implementing building codes, it is the building inspector who is charged with
seeing that the codes are enforced. This makes enforcement of building codes,
which would seem to be cut-and-dried if not uninteresting, a focal point for the
conflicting values inherent in the regulation of building practices. It also includes
resolving the uncertainties of cause and effect between actions performed in the
present and the fate of structures in the future. Not surprisingly, the enforcement of
building codes can be either an adversarial or a non-adversarial process, depending
upon such factors as the local jurisdiction involved, the local building department,
the attitude of individual building inspectors and their clients (owners, builders, or
contractors), etc.
Importance of Codes and their Enforcement
The implications of how successfully from the standpoint of public policy the
inspection process unfolds may be seen in the aftermath of recent earthquake activity
around the world. Four recent earthquakes in particular illustrate how the quality of
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code enforcement affects the public welfare. Three recent earthquakes—one in
Northridge (California) in 1994, second in Turkey in 1999, third in Greece and the
fourth in Taiwan in 1999, soon thereafter—were geophysical events, which
unleashed the forces of nature. In all three locations, local building codes were
closely equivalent, the Turkish and Taiwanese codes having been based on those in
place in California at the time. What was different about these earthquakes was the
vastly different loss of property and life. The fewest number of lives were lost as a
result of the Northridge earthquake. Of the four, the earthquake, Turkey produced
the greatest life loss, 17,255 killed, 23,781 injured; in Greece, 143 killed and 400
injured; in Taiwan 2,403 killed, 10,718 injured. Earthquake safety experts who have
studies these disasters have concluded that the differences, although Northridge was
a mild earthquake in comparison to the others, in loss of building and life among
them is not explained by the building codes per se but rather by the different ways in
which they were enforced in each country. In spite of the recent earthquake one of
the areas was rebuilding with unreinforced masonry and other unsafe construction
(Seismic Safety Commission Findings, A Report to the governor and the Legislature
on the Lessons Learned from Recent Earthquakes In Turkey, Greece, and Taiwan).
The aftermath of these three disasters point to another aspect of building safety.
There is a significant information asymmetry between the consuming public, (that is,
those who purchase and use or inhabit the structures), and the construction and
building industry companies. The average person (e.g., an apartment dweller in the
Turkish city of Ismet or a condominium owner in Los Angeles) will not have the
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knowledge to assess whether on not a building is safe. Existing defects may be
hidden (i.e., they may be under ground or covered over by a wall or other
construction finishes), or they might be quite visible but not obvious, such as blind
room or hall, which does not have an escape route in the event of a smoke or fire. It
is the building inspector who has the requisite knowledge to ascertain the safety of a
building, becomes the “agent” who represents the consuming public, here the
“principal,” to insure that the “agent,” i.e. contractor builder in the building
construction project did not take undue advantage of the “principal,” i.e. the owner.,
The public has a compelling interest in the life-safety quality of its buildings and
building departments, its building codes, and, ultimately, in the inspectors who
enforce them. Unlike police offers or schoolteachers, we know relatively little about
these “safety bureaucrats” and what they do. Yet who they are and what they do is
as important to the functioning of the community as these other, better-known,
street-level bureaucrats. Before turning to the data from an examination of building
inspectors in Los Angeles, we briefly describe what transpires during a typical
workday.
A Day in the Life of a Building Inspector in Los Angeles
Most of the construction industry is subject to the prevailing conditions of light
and weather and, consequently, so too is the work of building inspectors. Since most
construction work begins early in the morning, building inspectors start their day in
the office early. Here they perform various administrative tasks (“paperwork”) and
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take telephone calls from contractors, builders and others with questions, which of
course need to be answered immediately. The inspector’s phones usually starting
ringing at about 7:00 a.m. Building department offices open early as well, and
inspectors arriving at the office are often greeted by contractors seeking permits,
approvals, and changes, as well as subcontractors of various trades seeking
clarification on codes or authorization for changes in original or subsequent building
plans.
With the typical working day for the inspector starting at full gallop, the first task
of building inspectors is to maintain a level demeanor in their early-morning
encounters with anxious, inpatient contractors who are in a hurry to get to their job
sites and their workers, who are awaiting their instructions for the day. These “office
hours” typically last only about one hour after which inspectors are “out the door” on
their ever-changing routes through the city as they visit and inspect job sites.
After leaving the office, the first stop for most inspectors, however, is usually for
a quick coffee break at an early morning restaurant with other inspectors from their
department. Here the conversations vary, but most are job-related—about events at
the office, codes, contractors, and minor problems of inspection. After this coffee
break, it’s on to the day’s inspection routine. If the day is full, inspectors will
usually not return to their office. On light scheduled days, the inspector might return
to the office to clean up the never-ending stack of paper that accumulates in the "in"
box before quitting for the day.
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This routine paperwork, driving, inspecting, more driving, and more paperwork
is interrupted periodically for training sessions. These sessions depend on available
resources, and the supervisors or departmental requirements of new or probationary
inspectors. Such training is either done for an hour in the morning either weekly or
monthly, depending the extent of the material to be covered, before the day’s round
of inspections begin, or inspectors may be sent to take semester-length courses at a
local colleges. Some of the never-ending training is paid for by the inspectors
themselves, and some by the municipality. Many of the inspectors also seek
certification by the ICBO, which requires additional training by the ICBO. The
certification by ICBO also entitles inspectors to additional pay by the LADBS and
what one could call career enhancing. From the standpoints of public policy and
public safety, it also ensures a consistent and standardized level of inspection
practice for the local community. With this brief look “from the outside,” as it were,
at the daily routine of the typical building inspector, we turn our attention to the field
study of the building inspector role.
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Chapter Four
The Inspectors: In Their Words
Background of building Inspectors
The construction of a building is performed by workers, whose labor can be
divided into skilled and unskilled labor. Unskilled laborers include the pick and
shovel crews, material handlers that handle materials for the skilled workers that
actually assembly the steel, wood, stone, cement and other building materials which
become the completed building. The skilled workers are tradesmen1 such as
carpenters, ironworkers, electricians, masons, plumbers, sheet metal men (heating
ventilating and air conditioning men, HVAC, or “tin knockers”), and roofers. These
trades are learned by the workers either through at a vocational school or, the more
usual route, [after completion of high school] through entry-level jobs of a particular
trade. Those that choose to enter one of the labor unions are placed in a program,
which requires an apprenticeship, evening classes, and exams before moving upward
within the union hierarchy. When the apprenticeship program is completed, the
individual becomes a journeyman and after holding the journeyman position a
requisite time period, as well as taking an examination in the same area, then
becomes master of that trade. Another common path to a trade is through the
introduction into that trade by a parent or relative. The type of worker learns
basically by OJT (On the Job Training). This course requires a highly motivated
1 The construction work force is still predominately male, although women have made some progress
in attaining employment in the construction industry. Therefore, masculine pronouns are used
throughout. There is no intent to deny or denigrate women efforts in this industry.
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individual, willing to learn the finer details of the trade on his own time. Most
skilled workers spend their entire careers as journeymen. Few become masters.
Some will move up to become foremen leading a crew of workers. A few will move
up to become superintendents and project managers.
Historically, building inspectors came from trades in which they had been
trained and had worked either a requisite number of years (as required by of the local
building board) or had retired from that trade. One inspector interviewed, TR, stated
“ ... I was a maintenance carpenter; actually, it was a good job because of the
diversity..., from a stand point of learning different things.” This is good broad-
based training for an inspector because in performing building maintenance one
rarely has the same job twice. There is always something new that needs repair, and
the problems inherent in understanding the particularities of each different task.
Most maintenance could be considered a sampling of many trades. The job requires
the command of manual dexterity of the tools of several different trades.
Other building inspectors received their training “in the cradle,” so to speak
such as HT:
The way I started, my dad was a [tradesmen]. I used to go with my
dad when I was 10-11 years old. We used to go with him on job,...
as a young kid.. .half help and half just play around like a kid on a
job. He was a foreman. I went to work with him.... I just like it.
I knew then that I wanted to be a [tradesmen]... And then when I
was sixteen I went with on a summer permit basically through the
union, my dad’s [trade] union. I ... got out of the army,... notified
the union that I was back and showed them my discharge papers
and they called me about three weeks later. I got into the
apprenticeship program, and started my [trade].
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Inspector HT goes further to succinctly explain the apprenticeship program that he
underwent and his commitment to the trade, as evidenced by the fact that he was
acting job foreman before his apprenticeship was completed, HT:
Apprenticeship program was for five years, two nights a week
schooling was two nights a week and apprenticeship program is
basically a schooling at night and hands on, on the job training.
And it’s a five-year program and you had to work at least 1,240
hours a year to get advanced to next year apprentice. You had to
go to school two different classes during the week at night and you
could not miss more than two nights a semester; if you did you
would have to take that class over again.... Well, after I finished
my apprenticeship..., and while I was a fourth-year apprentice I
started running2 work.
Inspector HT illustrates the strong family association and class connection to the
trades typical of the skilled work force in the building construction industry.
Becoming an Inspector
Most all of the building inspectors in the LADBS came from the trades.
Some, came from a combination of school and trade background, ensuring a
prerequisite knowledge base which the cadre of inspectors need to implement the
building code and interpret it for all of the special circumstances that each project
requires.
Inspectors stated two factors that had motivated these skilled workers to
become inspectors. Inspector TR melds both together: .. the steady paycheck
started to appeal to me.. .1 was newly married and... I just... didn’t want to keep
running from job to job... the repetitive work,... just stopped appealing to me.” The
2 Slang trade expression connotating supervising/managing the work to be preformed.
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first issue which the inspector addresses is the “steady paycheck” provided by the
city. Employment in the construction trades is unsteady at best. There is continuous
uncertainty as to whether or not one will have employment after one’s current project
is completed. There are also delays caused by bad weather, non-delivery of
materials, and interruption of work caused by other contractors not completing their
work. Each of these results in lost wages. Secondly, the rather glib answer belies
the discontent with the “repetitive” work, which is the norm of most trades. The
emphasis on production means there is little time for satisfaction with the finished
product. Continuing education of skilled workers is at their own expense in time and
money, whereas building inspectors working for the city are required to continue
their education but are rewarded for that as well. All of the inspectors interviewed
stated they were motivated to further their knowledge and education. Two other
characteristics that could be said to hold for all of these inspectors is that they all had
a definitive “people” side to their personality and they were all deeply concerned
with life/safety or health/safety3 issues. These will be discussed later. But as one
can see, the making of an inspector is a long and involved task. The process makes it
likely that new inspectors will be older than might be expected, having already spent
a number of years in one of the building trades.
3 “Life/safety or health/safety” issue is a combined generic expression to reflect the thrust of the
building codes without specifying the source or nature of the thrust such as plumbing, fire, electrical,
etc.
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Organizational Selection of Building Inspectors
The requirements of the City of Los Angeles require that prospective
inspectors have a minimum time working in a trade. This means that most inspectors
are older than other new hires when they came to the city. Since they are older at the
time of hiring there is a much higher turnover rate among inspectors than any other
employee, in large cities, such as Los Angeles, the learning curve for inspectors is
such that retirement occurs sooner and means the costs of training are greater than
for other workers. The way that HT came to the city is typical,
“... I had 25 years in the trade. [I] retired from the union. My
plans were to work for the city. .. .1 went back to UCLA and I
took a [trade] engineering course.... [T]he whole key to get in the
job with the municipalities or the city or whoever is that like with
me people with 20-30 years experience in plumbing are a dime a
dozen... [what] you have to do is to separate yourself from them,
[the city] likes to see education, I got picked out of 300 guys.”
HT, was a very motivated individual who really wanted to be an inspector after his
tenure as a very skilled tradesman. He was an exception to the older tradesmen who
have relatively short careers as building inspectors.
This problem of short tenure and high turnover was addressed by the Los
Angeles Department of Building and Safety in the 1980s when administration
realized that the building department was heavily staffed with an older cadre of
inspectors whose average age was over 55. This led to a program called “apprentice
inspector” in which the department recruited younger people to learn the “trade” of
being an inspector rather than waiting to hire those that had been in the trades for a
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long time. However, some background in eth trades remained a prerequisite.
Inspector BD describes his training to become an inspector:
..., my background, is [just] schooling, and working the trades.
Back then, I worked for a general contractor and [a trade]
contractor at two different periods. ...When I came here, ...in
1981, and we had an apprenticeship program, an inspectors’
apprenticeship program at that time. It was a three level, three
year program and I came up through that there, and that included
on-the-job training, on-the-job classroom and outside
class/school work at Los Angeles Trade Tech a college [which]
was codes... based. They took your schooling plus you field
practice, you had to have two years of each, two years of school,
two years of trade or four years of school. Then you came
through there,... it was called the assistant inspector program,
and many of the inspectors .. .have come from that, and a lot of
them came straight from the trades.
There seemed to be some ambivalence regarding these apprentice
“inspectors” among the older building inspectors who had taken the more usual path
of having first been established tradesmen. Some interviewees expressed doubt that
an inspector who had not preformed a job himself would they know how to tell
whether what had been built was correct or not. This seems to reflect a elitist
attitude on the part of the skilled tradesmen who had became inspectors toward those
inspectors that did not have time in the trades or that had not “paid their dues.” An
attitude such as this has some merit. Often the process of inspection is affected by
the respect that an inspector receives from the builder/contractor on the job, and this
usually is determined within the first few minutes after the inspector appears on the
job site. If an inspector is perceived as unknowledgeable, or someone who has
“book learning” but no “real” experience and has only the authority of the
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municipality on which to rely, the relationship between inspector and
builder/contractor could easily deteriorate into an adversarial one. An inspector who
is perceived to be an “old hand” invariably receives the deference from the
builder/contractor. If a builder believes that an inspector lacks first-hand knowledge
or can be manipulated due to ignorance, of the ins and outs of actual building
practices, then the project could well be compromised by shoddy workmanship or
defective construction.
Learning to be an Inspector
The training that tradesmen receive as part of their apprenticeship programs
and the further education they acquire within their area of expertise do not fully
qualify them to become inspectors. The role of inspector is a learned occupation that
requires more than just knowing the particular trade and the code associated with it.
Building inspection also requires a keenly developed negotiating skill since a great
deal of time is spent interacting with the owners/builders, who are being monitored
by the inspector. Learning the trade is one thing; learning the code is something
entirely different. Most tradesmen have trouble with technical details of the code
book because their knowledge base is rooted in practical learning from their
foremen, supervisors, and others who may know the code themselves but do not have
time to educate the tradesmen because of production schedule. A typical response is
that by TR:
[I]...went to school, for construction terminology, codes, and stuff
like that, before I became an inspector. And so that was very
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appealing to me, because in the trade you knew how to do the work
but we did not know all of the laws associated with it. I wasn’t
reading code books while I was [working in the trades]. Part of the
apprenticeship classes they give you overviews and stuff like that...
As TR points out the difference between doing the work and knowing the code is the
difference between knowing how to do something and knowing the health and safety
reasons that contribute the “why” behind doing things according to code. This is one
of the differences between most tradesmen and building inspectors like TR. He went
on to learn about the codes and afterwards faced conflicts with others who have an
input into the building process such as architects, structural engineers, and other
specialist. His view is revealing:
And when I took code classes, I thought, wow, this is really complex,
because I could not understand a lot of it. I didn’t know that there
was that kind of depth involved here. And then, you really don’t
know, well am I talking about myself, an inspector, in my opinion,
doesn’t start to understand until he is 2, 2-3 years into the job. The
reason for that is because there is a lot of conflicting opinions, he’s
hearing things from the contractor, he’s hearing things from the
architect, and his own peers, he’s getting a lot of information from
different directions. He’s reading things in the code book that appear
to be abstract and until that abstract thinking starts to solidify into,
“oh, I understand what this means”... [The] elementary stuff, the
guys will get them going, but then all the depth start to come later.
And, then sorting out fact from fiction is really the hardest part. That
was the hardest, here you are up against an architect, your are a
rookie inspector. Well he can tell you anything he wants to tell you,
and you being the rookie,..., it creates doubt in your mind,..., “ am
I reading the book right?” “am I lacking understanding or what?”
So, I had to go through that process, but a lot of my mentors were the
old-timers, they were the first people that I went to as an inspector.”
This inspector had the self-confidence to look to others to help him. He went to
other inspectors, “old timers” as they are called in the trade, or mentors. This
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certainly shows that the body of knowledge entailed in the codes is not a matter to be
taken lightly. This illustrates the necessary ability of the inspector to understand the
abstract code, which is basically directed to construction, and apply it to the situation
at hand. This could be either an old construction (i.e., rehabilitating older buildings)
or application to new unforeseen construction that is a little different than the writers
of the code ever imaged it could be.
Leaning the code is replete with its mistakes and continues after the inspector
is on the job. There is also a learning curve after becoming an inspector. CH had
eight years in the trade before becoming an inspector, CH:
[A]s a matter of fact I did not know most of the codes, I knew a lot
of the codes but I sure did not know it all. No way, I learned it,
when I got older, I really went for it, studied, made a lot of
mistakes, ...called a lot of things that were marginal and learned
that way, you do not learn unless you make mistakes.
Mistakes are made due to the application of abstract directives, which are to be
applied to an actual existing structure. Rigid doctrinaire application of the code by
inspectors is not inspection, having the broad base of knowledge and interpreting the
code to apply to that particular aspect of construction is, but it is also the hardest part
of the job for the rookie inspector to learn.
Mentoring
Mentors, although not stated directly by most of the inspectors, play a strong
role in educating the rookie inspector, but some rookie inspectors do not seek out
mentors. All of the inspectors who were interviewed were open to the learning
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process, by either learning from others with the same trade, “book learning” or
learning from mentors within the department. Mentoring is not always a path in the
education of inspectors, however, some new inspectors look to the old-timers as
mentors, others do not. TR’s observation reveals some of the attitudes that prevail
within the department. TR looked for guidance from the old-timers but explains why
others do not:
A lot of them don’t, and it's based on attitude from what I’m seeing, I
did, because to me, learning is not an embarrassment. You walk into
somebody and say, “Hey, could you explain that to me.”...
And,...the old-timers, they actually appreciated it. So I figured, well
if a person has got longevity then he’s got a lot of experience, and
right now, I lack experience. Sure, I read books, took classes and
stuff like that, but I really don’t have the practical experience [as an
inspector], so that what I was leaning on them for, help, and we
would meet out on jobs even though it was their job and not mine
just to go over some of the bigger things with them. They would
train me, “Here’s what this means in the code book, here’s what this
means in the code book,” and things like that. On the job training.
But, no, to answer your question, “Do all inspector do that?” very
few do, very few.
This is where the learning process has an organizational twist, which is counter
productive to the training of the incoming and newer inspector. The bureaucratic
structure of building departments with their emphasis on seniority, rank, and age can
be barriers to learning from old hands. It takes self-reliance and assertiveness on the
part of younger inspectors to overcome the bureaucratic structure that could inhibit
the educational process of the inspector in training. TR reflects on his learning
versus that of some of his colleagues:
[Through asking questions] I gained enough experience, [it] didn’t
solve all my problems, but I’ll tell you about 95% of them it did.
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Those poor guys, those Bis, (building inspectors) I have two of
them that work in my district under me. I have more empathy for
them; I know what they are going through. I try to take some
burden, their workload, from them from going totally nuts, and
building a bad attitude. I have to console them quite a bit. ...
Some of them will... [ask questions]... some them can have the
world on their shoulders and they are not going to say anything. ...
Because until they start opening up, and talking about what’s going
on out there, you see, everybody wants to be perfect. They are
afraid that they might miss a promotion, if they show that a
weakness. It’s all perception, it’s not true, it won’t happen, but
they think that it might. If I am perceived as knowledgeable I will
get the reward, but unfortunately, they are not perceived as
knowledgeable, because a lot of the old-timers know that. We
want people to ask questions, that’s how you learn. Our whole job
is a process of learning and forgetting.
Inspectors who are afraid to seek advice or help from the more experienced
colleagues fail to optimize available resources. This unfortunate failure stems rich
resources, which could have been a benefit to the inspectors and the department at
large. TR’s Comment about learning and forgetting is meaningful. Inspectors need
to learn to solve the problem at hand and then forget them. Forgetting is positive and
useful because of frequent changes in the code, new directives, and new products
that come forward continually. Consequently, remembering too much from the time
before a change was introduced can lead to mistakes. It is more productive to keep
up with the current code than to remember exactly what was called for in the past.
The Continuing Education of Building Inspectors
The continual change in technology requires continual learning not only
about new technologies but also about changed or forgotten technologies as well. To
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ensure that inspectors are up to speed in their various areas of expertise, building
departments run training programs, short monthly sessions, or foil time schooling.
However, information transfer is not always confined to the classrooms, BD tells the
story of how information has been exchanged between inspectors:
... [W]e sit and talk about a lot of things, codes and questions and a
lot of information is transferred between individuals there. You
don’t have time in the office in the morning so..., it’s usually a mad
house between 0700 and 0800. And you don’t have time to
[answer general questions form other inspectors] except for a few
questions here and there specifically. When I came to the
department, there was an old-timer, building and structural, senior
structural inspector. Even been to Philippe [The Original
Restaurant] downtown, its a little sandwich joint right across for
Union Train Station? ... Sawdust on the floor. I think that it’s been
there forever..., more code has been learned in Philippes, more
information and learning has transpired, is being passed and
transferred, in Philippes than in, in any, in all the training classes
combined that you could ever think of, so. And that is kind of true.
A lot of people think that training is,... a guy, we have a training
division and a training officer for each discipline. We [LADBS]
are large enough to do that. And, training is not, in my opinion, is
not something that takes place bi-weekly or bi-monthly, it’s
something that takes place daily. This industry changes so rapidly,
there are new products, new methods, new ideas... To keep up with
it, you just can’t or hope to think that you are going to pick it up
[easily].
This was also apparent while I was having lunch or coffee breaks with various
inspectors. When other inspectors joined us, the conversation generally was work-
related: either the usual office political items, problem inspections, or code issues.
Most of the codes have directives that overlap with other codes dealing with
the same or a similar issue. For example the fire code may state a specific clearance
of combustible material, and the mechanical code may specify clearance on heating
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flue vents. There are many such overlaps in the code. Dealing with them takes some
getting used to by the inspectors. Along with different codes for each building
discipline, there also may be inconsistencies based on when the permit was issued, as
a different year may have a different code requirement. It is the very knowledgeable
inspector who knows both sides of these contradictions and seeks the safer and more
specific code and section, such a TR:
...I like the NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] better a lot
of times than the code book. It’s the fire code, because a lot of their
language is pretty basic and specific... [where as the BOCA]... is
kind of ambiguous, where do you apply this, how do you apply it,
and, that’s the process that the inspector is going through, he’s trying
to find the application to what he’s supposed to do.”
These overlaps and contradictions afford the inspector a margin of discretion in
which to make on the spot decisions as to how or even which code applies.
Inspectors know of these differences, for example, the ones who were interviewed in
this study chose the more restrictive interpretation toward health and safety in order
to not compromise the overall protection of the public.
Knowing how to apply the code not only requires knowledge of the present
code but also of previous codes and their changes. At one time code specifications
were at the discretion of the local municipality or county. Differing codes and
changes to the codes caused confusion and arbitrary application of the code, resulting
in enforcement that was either too strict or too lax. Changes make it imperative for
inspectors to know precisely how and when to apply which code. Builders are able
to argue that this or that code application was permitted either last week, or last year,
that city or that county. There are also existing so-called non-conforming rights.
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This means if something was installed to comply with the code at the of installation
and it has not been altered or changed since its installation and is in good operating
repair, then it is permissible und the later code (this is also referred to as
“grandfathered”.)
As a result of problems arising from situations such as these, the State of
California mandated that there be a uniform code throughout the state. Uniform
codes subsequently have been adopted. Local jurisdictions are mandated by the
State of California to adapt the California State model Code. Thus there is the
California Electrical Code, based upon the 1996 National Electrical Code (NEC).
The State of California has also adopted the Uniform Building Codes and Uniform
Plumbing Code, among others.
To further ensure consistent and fair inspections many municipalities in
California rely upon ICBO certification for their building inspectors. Certification
improves the knowledge base of inspectors and their disciplines. Certification is not
required by the LADBS but there is a monetary incentive to attain certification. As
told by BD:
When I first started here, ICBO [certification] was not a criterion,
we had/have our own testing and examination process for entry-
level inspectors of the City of Los Angeles. ...It’s not required, you
are not required to be ICBO certified. ICBO, one of their purposes
is provide a means for testing and certification of people that to
show that they have basic knowledge and competence in the
...codes and standards. ...A lot of smaller cities they don’t have,
they can’t afford to keep and maintain they own type [testing]
bureau,..., so they use, in fact most cities will require that you be
ICBO certified. We were around long before ICBO, so we had our
own method in place and we still maintain that. With ICBO, we
get a bonus; it’s like a professional license, a bonus for keeping
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and maintaining that certification. So, not a conditional
requirement for employment in the City of Los Angeles. There are
some inspectors in the City of Los Angeles [who] are required to
have outside licensees, your elevator inspectors and pressure
vessel inspectors, are required to have state licenses, they are
licensed by state and they get extra money for having that also.
A fairly good and typical example of the attitude of inspectors when
enforcing the building codes is provided by inspector EN:
... there are three things, the spirit of the code, the intent of the
code, and the letter of the code. Most inspectors, like [others] and
myself, we live in the spirit and intent. We only go after the letter
of the code if, is somebody just flat out refuses to do anything. Ok,
there are things in code that, like overgrown vegetation, and stuff
like that, that are in our building code that... you don’t typically
write [cite], unless you get a complaint on it or you, you write it
into an order to try and gain compliance. Now, I term those and a
lot of inspectors will term, overgrown vegetation as a bargaining
chip. Ok, you write them up for everything and then you give them
something. Like, hey, I’m going to overlook this little thing here,
if it’s a non-life-safety issue,... it’s just like maybe the guy needs to
get, paint a wall or something like that. And, you’ve written him
up for that, and you can say, “Hey, look I’m not going to go after
you for paint the wall, I need for you to properly vent the water
heater through the roof or move it to the outside or do something,”
along [with] some major, some real-life safety problem or life-
safety issues. S o ,.. .that’s when you go after the letter of the code,
but you still try and,... a little leeway to try .. .and give them
something even though you are not really giving them something to
get your end, type of thing.
Inspector EN goes on to describe an inspector that is overly aggressive in the pursuit
of the building inspection:
So, most guys will live in the spirit and intent, unfortunately,
inspector NP goes by the letter of code all the time. And [that] can
work against you, to say the least, because he would typically go out
on jobs.. .and do sub-floor inspection, where you would look at the
floor joists, and look how everything is attached underneath. Then
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he would make the contractor call him out again for a plywood floor
nailing inspection. Ok, then he would have [the contractor] call him
for a first floor, first floor framing inspection, then he would have
him call him again for the joist that go[es] between floor inspection.
And then he would have come out for the plywood flooring again on
the second deck, then he would have him come out for a roof framing
inspection, before they would plywood the roof over. And then call
out for a roof nailing. I mean, yes those things are in the code, but
the problem being with stuff like that is that you generate more work
and there are ways and there are inspection techniques that you can
use to tell if the guys has done the job correctly or not, without
having to go out and do all that. Like, for your plywood perimeter
nailing, you can tell if the guy has nailed it off correctly or not by
looking and seeing how many nails have come out the side of the
blocks, out of the blocks, or how, you know, how the wood has split
or how it hooked up, if the block is too far in, or he could have
missed it, or not set up correctly. And you can tell those things and
you know, and [if you are] doing that you dogging, the contractor,
[he] feels like you are dogging him number 1; number 2, you have
just increased that guy’s job by anyway from two to six weeks
because of all the extra inspections. And [number] 3 our building
department doesn’t like it because they don’t want to be paying. The
permit fees that are assessed on a building... Don’t cover all that.
This is the worst case scenario for the both the city and the builder/contractor. This
type of conduct is very disruptive to the building and permit process, and it
undermines the legitimacy of the rest of the building inspectors. It can have further
ramifications if the public becomes convinced that the building department does not
care about public health and safety but is nothing more than a sinecure for the
building inspectors. This in turn can encourage builder/contractor to try to "get
away" with whatever they can. The end is an inferior building and a compromised
public safety. Most of the inspectors agreed that over-inspection can and should be
used against recalcitrant builders/contractors, a punitive tactic by inspectors trying to
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get builders/contractors to comply with the code. This can also create a public-
relations problem.
Where the Rubber Hits the Road, or The Inspector Dealing With The Public
The inspectors deal mainly with three major areas of the public seeking the
services of the building department: (1) large contractors that are mostly union
shops; (2) small contractors and homeowners; and (3) complaints by citizens of their
neighbor or others to correct various building discrepancies. These are generic
issues for most building departments across the country. Budget constraints that all
projects have, personality problems, and information problems are also areas that
inspectors address on a daily basis. In the past, there was an emphasis by the
LADBS on rigid adherence to the code with very little discretion on the part of the
inspector. This led to adversarial behavior and counterproductive building code
enforcement in the estimation of building department officials and public complaints.
Counterproductive behavior on the part of builders/contractors included actions such
as: strategic behavior to "get even" or "get back" at the inspector; time lost caused
scrimping on other items on the project; inspections requested by job not ready for
inspection; etc.
A good comparison between the two ideologies of getting voluntary
compliance, which is viewed as by inspectors, and compulsory compliance, which is
viewed as counter-productive, is well demonstrated by TR:
..., My co-worker AT, sat next to each other. And if you look at
both of us, they say personality A, personality B that’s what we
were. Every correction notice he wrote he fought, and people
[builders/contractors] would call downtown. He was doing his job
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correctly, but his personality was getting in the way. And one day I
guess ...sitting there, he wondered why I wasn’t on the carpet all
the time like him. So, he comes in and he says, “you know, TR, I
heard that you [had] written a $650,000 correction notice the other
day.” I said, “So”? He says, “The boss didn’t even talk to you
about it?” I said, “Oh, is he supposed to talk to ...?” He says, “I
write a correction notice of a ten dollar item, I’m in there!” I said,
“AT, when I wrote that correction notice, I said, they were
assuming that I wouldn’t catch what they did.” But I did, and what
I did was show them in the code book, you start structurally
altering a building, I am going to be concerned with that.... Oh,
they were cutting big holes in the walls, for duct work grills and
stuff like that. Well, I looked at it [and said], “I’m sorry, I want a
structural analysis from the engineer of record to show me what is
going on here....” I told AT, I said, “Listen AT, I don’t personalize
anything out there. I didn’t argue with the guy, or anything like
that, I’d just explain what he needed to do, in order for that job to
progress. And he did it.” I would go when I was inspecting to
some of jobs that he had, the core part of downtown. They gave
him limited jobs, but they were big jobs, and it just, that
personality. [He was not a nit picker.] TR: No, he was a great
guy..., he would antagonize you, he would be the one, [to say],
You should have known that!, [or] What the hell’s a matter with
you? [That] type of attitude. [D]on’t embarrass anybody, we’re
adults, we make mistakes. See that’s my attitude, I’m not out here
to embarrass anybody, if we make an mistake, we make a mistake,
let’s fix it.
The cost of a project, either in the terms of construction or of remedying a
problem, should not be of any concern to the inspector. But apparently this factors
into some inspectors’ decisions, since one of the first defense of a builder contractor
is stating the costs involved in doing things a particular way or in remedying a
problem. Concern about costs can bring about undesirable consequences in the long
run for both inspectors and building department. Inspector TR addressed the issue
this way;
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And, the part that I don’t mire into, and I kind of get upset at some
of my subordinates when they talk about it, [they ask], “What’ll it
cost in this and that?” “Listen,” [I said], “we are not associated
with that, we have nothing to do with that, all we have something
to do with, is following the code, making sure that they live up to
whatever they have drawn up there. That’s what we are concerned
with,” and I said, “What can help you, overcome that fear, is be
proactive, bring up things in the very beginning, that you will be
concerned with, that way it’s out there.”
Following this advice, inspectors will not be lead down the road concerning costs
and cost overruns, that are problems for owners/builders/contractors.
Inspectors dealing with contractors have some fundamental problems
which stem from a perceived adversarial stance, this perception from the
builder/contractor is that inspectors are the obstacle to getting the job get completed
on time, on budget. Consequently, the latter are not often forthcoming with concerns
which should be addressed early on, instead withholding such problems in hopes that
the inspector is unaware of them. Knowing about such problems, inspectors
recognize that this is a rare situation and that these questions or problems need to be
addressed. The relationship becomes adversarial when an inspector believes that that
he has been deceived (which he has) and takes reprisal against that
builder/contractor. Inspector TR said this about builders/contractors:
... [T]hat’s one of the problems that I have seen, with contractors,
and I used to tell them, [that] what they are afraid of when they
talk, afraid to be honest, and stuff, they are afraid of some kind of
reprisal. And I would tell them, “Listen, don’t be afraid of the
person, from me, there well never be any,... If there is a problem,
or you perceive of a problem like that from somebody else, then
you call that person’s supervisor,... you call the whole world,...
because you know, this is not about reprisal this is about doing
your job.” “We don’t want to start trouble,” and you know I hear
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this from them, I said, “Listen, it is not starting trouble.” I don’t
know it’s like sometimes they enable bad behavior.”
Indeed when the relationship is compromised between the builders/contractors and
inspectors, in this way they have “enabled bad behavior.” It is the building inspector
that can rise above this by not taking this personally and just keep going on with the
inspections. If the trust that is developed between the inspector and the
builder/contractor is impaired, neither will ever have the same respect of the other
again. One inspector related how a particular foreman tried to violate or get around
the code, and this inspector still remembered this situation 12 years later!
Dealing with smaller builders/contractors/homebuilders is usually a problem
perceived to be because they may have severe financial constraints or very limited
resources, lack the skills in allocating those resources, and may not have a
knowledge base to either perform the job or supervise it properly. In other words,
they are seen often just not knowing what they are getting into. TR recounts the
experience with this type of client:
... People think these big jobs, I told one guy, one of my peers, I
would rather handle 3,000 50-story buildings than a lot of the stuff
that our building inspectors have to handle. Because, I been there,
when you are dealing with, Joe Citizen, mom & pop, shoestring
budgets, and stuff like that, a lot of emotion comes up. And then,
[they are] doing the work themselves, they don’t call you before
they get in a mess, they call you after....
Of course by this time small-time builders/homeowners are very upset because they
have to redo what has been built already which costs money, then a delay in time
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and more money. Inspectors really do not want to be the one that tells the
homeowners/builders that they have to redo a job or part of it. Inspector TR tells:
I would tell people like that, “Call us first, we will stop out here,
help you build it, that’s what we get paid for.” “Oh [they say]
some inspectors don’t want that.” I said, “Well you let me know
who they are.”
Some of the inspectors aren’t always this helpful, but here we do not know
if the owner/builder is trying to backtrack, i.e., making excuses, or is really
stating the facts. The owner/builder would not have an incentive to give
the name of an inspector who was not helpful for fear of punitive behavior
if that same inspector later returned to their job site.
The frustration of dealing with people who do not know the code or the trade
is one of the biggest problems that inspectors faces. TR:
... [W]hat happens is you have the novices doing it [building],
that’s what wears you down. When I was a BI, that’s what wore
me down. Actually, a motivator to promote. Cause, I got home
at the end of the day, just tapped out. Explaining, drawing,
literally hands on, “Here, put this here.”
The unrelenting, repeated re-explaining of a rather simple procedure and then to
repeat the exact same thing the next day because there is a whole new labor crew on
the job becomes exhausting for the inspectors. The inability of the novice to think
ahead is also exhausting. For example, TR relates:
.. .Or a guy pouring his footings for masonry block, and you
know the steel is not going to line-up. [You] explain, and
explain, well he didn’t get to that point yet, but your explaining
it, your talking an abstract. Then they say, “Why are you worried
about it now for?” [And you answer] “Well, I’ve got to deal with
it later, that’s why I’m worried about it now....”
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This not only happens on small jobs but larger ones as well. On the larger jobs the
builder/contractor is hiring the lowest of the low bidders who may have a contractors
license but not always the knowledge that should accompany such a license.4
Games and tactical behavior by contractors and builders can be a problem
when the inspector is being used or manipulated. Inspectors deal with this problem
as best as they can. TR's method is to paper the trail:
...[They] call the inspector out even if you are not done. Or, if
there are corrections being done, keep calling them out.... To wear
you down! I tell my guys, you get a contact phone number. If that
is the trail that he is taking you on, you call up before you go, “This
is inspector so and so, are you done with this particular
correction?” “Well, I, I, don’t know, I haven’t [gone]... to the job
site.” “When you know, call me.”
Inspectors in these situations sense that the contractor/builder is trying to manipulate
them for the builder/contractor’s benefit. Since the builder/contractor is perceived to
show disrespect of the inspector's time, by unnecessarily calling for an inspection
when the job is ready to be inspected, an adversarial relationship is set up and this
would make it easier for an inspector to be punitive in his inspection.
Self realization leads some inspectors to change their behavior. Being an
inspector and having the power to enforce the code carries with it the inherent
problems that all enforcement personnel face, namely, the unreasonable attitude of
being “right.” Inspector TR reveled how he changed:
4 Procuring a contractors license is relatively easy, study a test which has only three versions and the
answers for those are obtainable from local and state preparatory mills.
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.. .Well, a long time ago, I was part of the problem. And for a lot
of years,... I was pig-headed, stubborn, and I wanted to win. And
now I just want to be on the team. Well, I used to like engaging, I
thought, that was the point that I had to make, enforcement. Ah,
they call it the “heavy bag syndrome,” you don’t want to display
any weakness. But you see that the thing that I had to come to
grips with is, being reasonable is not weak. You see, I wasn’t
reasonable. I wanted to win. These are the psychological things I
had to go through. ...[W]ell at that point...in my life I had started
learning some coping skills and being reasonable and
understanding, [I] don’t personalize things.. .and I look back and it
helped out.
Now TR’s: “... I want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt before I drag them
through the mud. I mean if I have to, I have to, if I don’t I don’t.”
On one particular job site it was very obvious that the general contractor’s
superintendent was in over his head with this job5. It was clearly to big and too
complicated for him to understand. He had a very slovenly appearance and was
inarticulate. In the room that the superintendent called his office (the worst dirt hole
that I have ever seen called an office even for a construction site), he had a large
poster on the wall which read, “Arguing with an inspector is like wrestling with a pig
in the mud, after a while you realize that the pig likes it.” This poster certainly set
the stage for an adversarial encounter with this inspector. Needless to say, the
inspector on this job had his worst case scenario. The particular subcontractor on
this job was selected on the basis that this job required a minority contractor because
it was undertaken with a government facility. This contractor did not know what a
code book was, nor had he ever read it. Everything that this contractor had installed
was wrong. All of the installation had to be redone, removed, or reinstalled. This
5 This interview was not recorded on privacy grounds of the contractors rights.
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was no small issue. Most of the required work dealt with life safety issues in a
public building (a school annex). This inspection site would require the inspector to
be essentially the supervisor for the contractor/builder overseeing the job that was
staffed by workers who do not know the trade. This is a very unproductive activity
for inspectors and results in great loss of time and money for the city. The inspector
took it on with a positive attitude, however, knowing from the outset the
commitment that this would require.
On par with knowing the code, public relations skills are important assets for
the inspectors. Such skills enable inspectors to get compliance with the code in the
most expeditious and least problematic way. Inspector BD attributes this to
temperament, and makes this point with his observation about a new inspector, DF:
“... He’s doing a very good job, he’s a very well rounded educated, knowledgeable
person. He has the right temperament,...” associated with temperament he mentions
delivery.” BD: “.. .It’s very important,.. .a lot of the things that we say and do, the
delivery is very important.” This is appears to be understatement. For many
inspectors, it appears that delivery is everything. Many may be heard repeating old
adage, “You get more with honey than vinegar.”
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Dealing with Architects and Engineers and Other Professionals in the Building
Industry
Tensions exist between building inspectors and engineers. Observing the
boundaries between the professions6 is the preferred working relationship for most
inspectors such as TR: See, I know what their responsibility is. They understand
my responsibility. I don’t ask frivolous questions, is the real root of the problem or
pretend that I’m an engineer like they are. I don’t do that.”
Developing a strong trust relationship between the inspector and the
operators of the project is absolutely at the core of all further interaction. Like many
other types of social interaction in which one does not know the other parties’
qualifications, inspectors require the builders/contractors to prove their ability to
perform the work at hand. This may or may not be a quick and easy hurdle for
builders/contractors to overcome. It seems that once this hurdle is surmounted, a
mutually respectful attitude prevails. Inspector TR explains his approach:
...[W]hen I first come up on a contractor that I don’t know, I have
to qualify the guy. Just like the deputies that come in for their
licenses, I have to see what they know. Once you develop a
certain amount of understanding, you see that they are going in the
direction, the engineer, architect, contractor, if they are going in
the right direction, there is no red flag, or like I say, I don’t look
for the red flag. I just want to see what is going on, do we have the
right players on the field?
This inspector relies on his personal knowledge and experience in the building and
inspector business.
6 This is assuming that engineering is considered a profession. Most workmen consider architects and
engineers to be professional, treat them with deference, and expect to be treated by them the same
way, with each respecting the others’ ability.
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A special case occurs when the inspector also happens to be an engineer.
This can be a real problem. TR again:
...[A]nother personal observation of mine, I would be, I would
have to watch an inspector that comes from an engineering
background, I would have to watch him. Because, if he’s got an
ego, now all of a sudden the design that he’s supposed to follow,
isn’t quite adequate enough, isn’t quite there, isn’t quite that. And
then all of a sudden, another ego gets into the plan, the person that
did the design, and pulled the permit. So, who’s right? The
engineer of record.
A situation of this type can also arise when an inspector who had been a contractor
attempts to enlarge his role in the grand scheme of things. This can cause problems
that are outside the scope of inspection that should in common terms be handled
farther up the chain of command.
Organizational Problems
The LADBS underwent significant changes in 997 when Mayor Richard
Riordan appointed Andrew A. Adelman as its general manager. The custom in
building departments is to promote from within. However, Mr. Adelman, an
outsiders from the City of Santa Cruz, was chosen from a list of candidates. The
changes that followed his appointment have been keenly felt by the entire
department. This is especially the case with building inspectors and how they treat
builders/contractors who are the recipients of inspections. The latter are now
referred to as “customers.” Some inspectors have accepted the change, but others
have not. TR is one of the former: “... I tell you I love it. I’ll probably be the only
apologist for him [Adelman]. Because, I come to find out, people hate change...
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They hate change, even if it’s good change for the better, absolutely hate it...” TR
gives an example of one old timer’s attitude and the changes:
.. He didn’t want to work a little to helping customers, he
thought that was totally against enforcement.... He retired, because
the new regime would not have put up with that. The new regime
is customer-based, pro-active, help. That’s what you get paid for.
Be congenial, you got any information, share it. No, he would not
have lived in this environment.... an example of how crazy some of
our guys got. For handicap, the side clearance measured 32 inches
to the wall to the edge of the toilet. ...Well, some guys wouldn’t
give you an 1/8 of an inch. A high-rise building and I could have
killed the inspector that was handling this, it was in that stage
where the insanity was running rampant, an entire high-rise
building had to relocate all their partitions in about 40 floors,
because they were a l A inch too close. (Would TR have done
that?) not on your life! .. .These guys were scared because of that
person that I am talking about, and if they work for somebody like
that, who do you blame? I don’t blame them, because I had, like I
say, if he was working for me and did that, that correction notice
would have been tom up so fast, and [he] would have been talked
to by me. For not even using any judgment at all, not one iota of
judgment, so much fear, that he got blinded by the fear. I’m telling
you our business is.., judgment is probably 99% of the game.
There were also other attitudes that were fostered by the building
department’s previous approach toward the builders/contractors. In the past, the
attitude had been one of rigid adherence to the code and the belief that the
department was "doing" something for builders/contractors/homeowners. The new
administration has tried to change this. FH observes:
...I think that it was fantastic to take the approach, hey these are the
people that are paying our salary, treat them as a customer! You
treat them as it was yourself. It really helped because a lot of the
older people and even some of the people who had been with us
for a short time had an attitude, you know, “We’re providing a
service for YOU, and you better be, you know, you better be
there,” and they were down right rude, “I mean, you call for an
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inspection by two o’clock today and if your lucky I’ll show up
tomorrow. And you better wait there all day for me because I’m
not going to wait for you.” No, it was not good. So, now we have
a much more friendly approach and it’s been very well received.
The ability of the inspectors to readily communicate to virtually
anyone while on the road was described by all of the inspectors as one of
the most valuable assets of the new building department. It is the single
tool of the inspection trade that has had the greatest impact on their ability
to perform their duties, because they are available to the “customers” and
they aid in the day’s scheduling. As FH puts it: I think, one, the single
most, biggest improvement that we have is the fact that we have cell
phones. The communication is everything, takes care of so many
problem.”
Interorganizational Conflicts
Conflicts exist in situations where two or more agencies have jurisdiction
over a matter, or they overlap in their authority. This is especially true in fire and
life safety concerns. BD describes such conflicts:
.. .It became a turf war between the building department and the
fire department. And it was never a turf war between our building
inspectors and their.. .inspectors because ... we had always done it.
And it was just that way, and if it gets complicated or if we need
help ... [or] an explanation, of course we go to them and we get
their input or support or have them write it up. We work together
as a team. But, it became a departmental turf war ..., it’s been
going on probably for several years, I think.... it’s a turf war of
management and not field inspection. We still work together,...
like any bureaucracy, I guess,... down on our level it’s not a war at
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all. ...So, when we go out and write it up sometimes contractors
will complain,... “Well, what are you doing out there, telling us
what is faulty well it’s the fire department [duty],” but the fire
department does not come out in the rough-in stage and, to tell
them that’s where they go, or not, “Well, they got approved plans.”
Well, yeah sometimes things get missed on the approved plans.
But, that’s what we are out here to verify.
Here the inspectors do let interorganizational conflicts with the end result of public
safety rather, they maintain their jurisdiction to ensure that the particular building
detail is inspected and not eventually overlooked by both agencies. Then there are
situations where the codes overlap between two inspecting agencies, although not
directly organizational conflicts, they do make for some interesting problems. CH
describes one:
... Fire damping framing. The only reason is because it’s our
framing and what they would do is to make a note on the card as a
building inspector, -Framing OK-.... We write fire damper
framing OK. We have to look at the framing. They say, “See,
another inspector looked at it, look see, [signature on the card].”
“No, we do the fire damper framing, [therefore] tear the drywall
off the wall [so that I can inspect it].” He does not know what he
is doing, then they come over to you, and go, “Well I looked at it.”
Then if we allowed everyone else to look at what we supposed to
look at, and that sets precedent we start losing some of our [turf,
area] we are supposed to do that, so what happens is the
mechanical now, well the building code can do that, the electrical
can do that, what do we need you for? ...But we need to be make
sure that we enforce our code.
Although this may appear to be a conflict over turf, it really is a safety
issue regarding fire dampers. In order that fire dampers perform correctly
in the event of a fire, they must be secured to the wall (framing) in such a
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way that the fire partition will maintain its integrity for the course of the
estimated fire for that rated structure.
Doing Inspections
A typical day for building inspectors starts 7:00 a.m. when they arrive at the
office and begin to receive phone calls. CH, the start of his work day:
...[I] leave my house at 5:30, get there by 6:30, quarter to 7
sometimes 7. [Then] an hour and V i we are in the office 8 or 8:30
getting our route, making phones calls, doing yesterday’s work
putting it away.. We’re out of there by 8:30 maybe 8-9 but
usually, but depends how many people come to the counter...We
talk to people in the morning at the counter; they can come up go
over certain jobs and stuff, because we do not go back, so we’ll
talk to them and sometimes that takes between 15 min to 1 hour.
Depending upon how big a job it is.
This starts the frantic hustle to get to the various job sites in around the building
inspector’s area. Since they have been in the city for awhile, inspectors know where
the job is, but also the route and how to negotiate around the traffic.
What is it that inspectors look for during an inspection? Each inspector
carries out an inspection a little differently, and each has developed his own sense of
what is going on around him at the time. A rather typical response is that of BD:
... I was taught and this is how I do [inspections], I start when I
pull out my card, either in front or across the street from the
building, I start looking at the outside. From the outside, across
the street, that’s when my inspection starts. There, OK, what type
of building is it, what type of occupancy use is it, how many
stories is it, what type of construction is it, it’s all different types.
Ok, and that’s from across the street. ... I’m going to start
thinking, this is the requirement for this building, this is what I’ll
start looking for. This is what needs to be in place. [ And
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from]....across the street. And I look through, and I see trash, and
debris, nails sticking up, unsafe job,... that tells me, what does that
tell you, about the contractor/superintendent that’s running that
job, he don’t care too much. Is he watching his subs? ...Yeah, we
do the same thing when we meet people too. When I introduce
myself, or the superintendent, or contractor, or foremen introduce
themselves, surely. You can’t take the human element out of
human contact. So, its certainly, yes first impressions are a big
thing.
The old adage about first impressions being lasting impressions seems to be
true with building inspectors. There is usually not enough time during an inspection
to develop deep, meaningful relationships with contractors/builders. Inspectors
develop a quick impression of the job and react accordingly. It is in the best interest
of the builder/owner to present as competent as presentation of the job as possible.
Although it is a construction site, there is a well-defined standard of the acceptable
degree of mess and disorder.
Some construction techniques such as pouring concrete decks, installing
reinforcing steel into existing concrete and shotcrete applications require constant
inspection. Since it is inefficient for building inspectors to be at the job site
continuously in order to insure that there operations are performed correctly,
inspectors rely on a deputy inspector. These deputy inspectors are hired by the
builders/contractors. They are independent agents who are responsible to the
building inspectors. These deputy building inspectors are certified for the particular
task by the ICBO. The building inspectors oversee the deputies, who in turn oversee
the operation. TR describes their relationship:
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There is my deputy over there, with his leg up, leg up on the
situation. Good guy, GM. See, he's got to kind of manage the
insanity, like if he starts seeing things getting... [getting out of
hand], then he’s call a guy over to fix it right away. They have
guys, that’s all they do for him. When he says do this, that’s what
their function is. It’s not this [excuse] ... “We’ll get to it,” he
stops the ... [operation], [He says] STOP. And then that gets fixed
and then they keep moving on. And every superintendent will
know that if they don’t listen to him, you talk about a job going
south, they got a big problem. I like to be nice, but I like my
deputies to be very mean. They have to be, they are in close
quarters with these guys, these guys think forming a [bond]
relation, and they forget what his function is. And on some jobs,
we can almost develop a lot of trust and a bond with your deputies
because of their expertise or knowledge. But, one of the false
securities with that is, it almost undermines the deputy, if I don’t
make appearances here periodically, even those guys take
advantage of him a little more.
There seems to be a balance of inspection responsibility between deputy inspectors
and city building inspectors. Although deputy inspectors are hired by
builders/contractors, the city maintains a list of approved deputy inspectors.
Furthermore, deputy inspectors are accountable to the city inspectors. The deputies
are insured, either by their employer’s firm or have been bonded, to indemnify the
builder/contractor or owner in the event of an incident something was missed by a
deputy inspector. Deputy inspectors have a great deal of independence, probably
more so because the area for which they are responsible is very specific and
narrowly defined. The city building inspectors are ultimately responsible for the
inspection of the job. Walking around the construction site with TR ,, I observed
how he subtly pushes or pulls on various construction fixtures/details to verify if they
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have been installed properly. By doing so he was checking not only on the
builders’/contractors’ work but also on the work of his deputy inspector.
Inspections often reveal things that have nothing to do with what the permit
calls for. Often inspectors come across an unrelated hazard. Getting cooperation for
dealing with such unrelated issues may be difficult. A hazard involving a locked exit
door was handled by TR this way:
...[W]hat is this [referring to a set of locked fire exit doors], “Oh,
we don’t know,” [was the answer of the building’s owner]. They
give us the brush off. “Nobody knows about it,” I says, “you know
what, I want whoever is responsible for this ....[locked fire exit].
.. .right now.” And they keep trying to brush me off, I says, “you
know what, I’ll call the fire department.” Sometimes we have to
bring a little hammer, .. .boy when I did that, they [became very
accommodating].
When doing inspections, inspectors encounter; the Good Jobs, the Bad Jobs
and the Ugly Jobs. Good jobs are those that are very satisfying for inspectors. All
inspectors look forward to the following type of job described by BD:
...The contractor that is doing that [pointing to a high-rise
apartment] is very good. He’s one of those guys you just walk on
[the job site] and it’s, [done the right way]. ... [H]e’s been doing
that forever, he’s an old, old, older gentlemen and he just has it
down, he has it wired. He don’t mess around, he don’t cut comers.
If he has a question he calls and asks before he does ‘cause he only
likes to do it once.
That is the type of inspection that the inspectors like to deal with. But other
inspections are also very satisfying. At the top of this list are those when the
inspector’s can teach the builder something about how something is supposed to be
done, when teaching becomes important. HT describes this type of inspection:
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[A good day].. .is when I go out and make all my calls, and
everybody is ready, and there is no problems and jobs, and
everything is good. Or, either that could be my good day, real
good day, or Fm on a job and I got a [tradesmen] that is sharp and
I see something or I find something that is wrong, and he totally
didn’t know anything about it, it’s not that I caught you, it’s you
forgot about this or whatever. And it sort of makes my day that I
made this call not only because I’m there to make the call, but
because but now he knows. He’s learned something, right.
Bad days on the inspection involve the problem of dealing with contractors
who are attempting to “work the system.” Trying to resolve a correction, TR
describes bearing the brunt of one contractor’s behavior:
...That’s where, there are problems, you are trying to resolve
them, but nobody wants to address them. So you have to write it
up, they go through the whole city hall channel, they call
everybody, you have to meet with everybody, you have to talk to
your boss, then you have to talk to you boss’s boss, because they
just created this big firestorm And then, it used to bother me, it
doesn’t bother me now,... I would almost take it personally, then I
realized, well they are working their channels. I just have to do
my job. But, that can kind of wear you down.
Another type of bad day is also described by TR: “.. .Or, if you are building the job
for a small owner. You're their superintendent, you're their construction manager,
you're everything for them.” This type of owner/builder shifts the responsibility for
the work onto the inspector to compensate for his own lack of knowledge of the trade
or the code. TR: “... [T]hen the sad part of that scenario, in this hand-holding,
something got overlooked and maybe or they proceeded and then you caught them,
they would get upset. Then they would say, Why would you allow this to happen?
as if the inspector had caused them the problem.”
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The worst type of inspection day for all inspectors is the continually re
inspection of a job site where the builder/contractor is hoping that the building
inspector misses a discrepancy. BD describes one example:
... pjt’s, when it’s continually, you go back and it’s the same thing,
it’s a large job that’s ongoing. Let’s say, an apartment house or
condominium multi-story and you write the corrections floor
number one, and you have to keep having to write the same
corrections on floor 15,16,17, all the way up. And you just dread
going to that job. You just dread it. That’s what they are doing,
you are their pick-up guy. Their superintendent, their project
manager, you, and those are the ones that I dread going on. It’s
not pleasant, trying to be a superintendent of a hundred jobs, not
just one. Or, that’s when contractors use you,.. .to do their pick
up list7. And that’s not right either.
Making the pick-up or punch list is not the responsibility of building inspectors.
Such a list reflects on the builder, who may be hoping that the building inspector
would miss some details that would otherwise cost the contractor time and money to
correct. This is usually remedied by inspectors being proactive and walking off the
job site if the job is not ready for inspection. It helps if the supervisor is informed of
the building inspectors intention to do so and to support the inspector action in
dealing with this type of manipulative behavior on the contractor/builders behalf.
Another inspector, CH stated: “.. .1 write the same correction today that I wrote 14
years ago to the same company or person....” Inspectors find this depressing.
Not being ready at the time of an inspection wastes time for both builders and
building inspectors. Some inspections are called for in the hope that an inspector
will overlook something (see above) or as a result of the demand by the lending
7 A pick-up list or punch list is a contractor’s list o f building discrepancies that need to be corrected
before a project is signed off or payment vouchers are issued.
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institution. The experience becomes an annoyance to all concerned, as described by
HT:
.. .Annoy me, I guess one thing that annoys on a job is when I go
to an inspection if the guy lies to me, lies to me. That’s, I can’t
stand him lying. Be truthful, be up front with me. If you're ready
you're ready, if you’re not ready you are not ready. Let me know,
don’t start taking me walking around and then all of a sudden, I see
that you are not ready. Hey tell me out front, before I even come
in, why waste my time.
CH had this insight into basis for the problem:
... [Ijt’s because are so many different players, there is a
superintendent, first there is the owner, then a builder, then a
superintendent, then a contractor. And the contractor is being told
by the superintendent that he has a major deadline. “We have to
have it done by this date” “You have to work faster, you have to
work all night, you have to get inspection, you have to have it
done”. “Why do I have to do this?” “Just call for inspection see if
they catch it, if they don’t catch it we’ll move on.” And this
happens every day....They say they wanted to see if it would slide
through. It goes on and o n ,.. .you see the same thing over and over
and over, but they are being told or pushed, you see. And that is
the big problem with a lot of buildings, I feel, that there are too
many different people pushing too many different people for
deadlines, banks loan, loan institutions. If the building is due then
there are going to be penalties like 500 to 10,000 dollars a day
depending. And the there are penalties on the contractor for going
over and stuff starts falling by the wayside, gets swept under the
carpet. And that’s where I feel that we are the best there is and we
don’t — I don’t let it happen. If you didn’t catch it, it would
happen, I would guarantee it.
Deliberate obfuscation of poor or shoddy work is a reoccurring problem. The
contractor/builder tries to slip poor workmanship or code noncompliance past the
building inspector. One of the main functions of the inspector is to prevent this, as
BD describes:
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... First inclination is, always human nature, well not human
nature in a sense, it is, is possibly vindictive. But, I don’t, try not
to,.. I honestly think that, that’s wrong. You're playing into
their game, they win, you lose. That’s how I look at it. If they
get you and then they get you to react, then you do something
that; I react in a way that is unprofessional or inappropriate. To
me, I look at that’s exactly what they want, and they were trying
to provoke a reaction and provoke it and got it and they win.
And I look at it as I lose, and I don’t like that. So, certainly I
will let them know. And I will let them know, what I know and
how I know it, and this is why and where and what and usually it
stops there. I have had a few problems, I can probably count
them on one hand.
What BD is saying here is that when a builder/contractor is trying to hide something
and the inspectors find it, the way to deal with the problem is not to become
vindictive but to rather bluntly tell him of the discrepancy and for him to remedy the
situation. This requires as certain personality type that will not react in a manner that
will exacerbate the situation, a calm but firm ability not to internalize the problem.
Stating the problem in such a neutral manner gives the builder/contractors less of a
reason to argue. It was not ascertained whether or not there was counseling available
for the building inspectors in dealing with the job related stress. As far as screening
goes, the process seems to be one of self-screening. Many tradesmen do not want to
become building inspectors because they do not feel they have the proper
temperament.
There are characteristics that are red flags of job sites to building inspectors.
Though they differ with each inspector, their red flags have common attributes. TR
describes how with experience the unusual begins to stand out from the usual:
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You walk on a site...what’s it look like? But I see jobs, where, it’s
obvious they don’t know what they are doing, it obvious, to me.
To a lot of the small contractors, it’s not obvious to them, because
they don’t know any better. I see something, I say, “Oh-oh, I
better look at this.” Then I get the plans out, and we start looking
at things and that’s only from experience, maybe intuition, or
whatever.... In the construction world everything is typical, so if
they do something unusual, that sends off the red flag. ...Shoddy
workmanship too gives it away. So in our job, it just like the
veteran cop, [you develop the “eyes”].
Substantial compliance seems to be the goal of most of the inspectors. BD
describes what this means:
...Let’s put it this way, there is no building out here that’s to the
letter. ...No job would ever pass, come on. So and some people
are less reluctant to let things go than others, that’s seasoning.
What’s the big issue, what are the small issues. And let’s make a
big deal out of the big issues and little things, “fix it, and next
time.”
There are gray areas in most of the trades, HT offers a similar
description:
... I will try to work with the guy as long as we keep the intent of
the code there and there is no hazard. That’s the main thing, the
hazards, I mean, I can bend a lot, you know what I am saying, I
can bend, but always keeping the hazard part in mind not to have
any kind of hazard.”
Another inspector, LV, sees the inspection process as an approval for job
progress payments:
... we just check mark what the violations are,... so they’ll know,
the owner will know,... sometimes the contractor says [to the
owner], “I got the sign off from the inspector, everything is OK,
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give me the money.” That’s why you write the corrections, just,
keep both parties aware of what is going on.
Communications with the builders
With ethnic diversity, educational differences, and differences among the
trades, the building inspector must deal with a different mix at each job site. Good
communications skills are important, in order for to get the compliance from the
builder that is needed to make the project conform to the plans as set forth by the
architects and engineers. This is not always easy. TR describe an encounter
between an inspector and an engineer:
...[The building inspector and] the builder was [sic] totally
frustrated, it was like trying to communicate with an engineer, and
[the building inspector] kept insisting that the engineer come out
there and the engineer kept insisting, “Well, tell me what the
problem is.” So the two were at a stalemate. So, I said, you know
what, let me talk to the engineer. I talked, explained the problem
and he understood, [I] painted a word picture of what the problem
was, this guy couldn’t paint the word picture, he was insisting he
come out there, and look for himself, ... And why, if you can solve
the problem, we just needed a clarification.
Communication, experience and a sense of timing all help to facilitate the process of
inspection by starting off the relationship between building inspector and builder in
the right direction. GM comments:
...[Tjhat’s where experience comes in, ...start at the very beginning
of the job,... catch their mistakes when they first start them and
you get that straightened out from the very beginning of the job
and they respect you, if you can predict where they are going.
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For TR, those first encounters between the building inspector and the
contractor/builder are most important: “That’s what I call the pro-active approach,...
The inspector lays it out in the beginning, these guys love’m. If he doesn’t, that’s
what alienates them for him.”
Good communications helps to get the job done without having to deal with
ego or one-ups-man-ship, according to TR:
...Am I going to remember all the special requirements?.... I don’t
think so... What I’ll do is talk first, go to the book second, because
talking will cut to the quick. Experience will say look for this, this
and this. We’re in a communication business.
Understanding the builder/contractor’s situation and using two-way
communication to facilitate successful completion of the project is one approach to
the inspection process, as described LV:
And you know, they have to pay bills, they have to finish the job
and go to the next one. So, I’m not there to screw’em and they’re
not there to screw me. So, I tell’em, “You know what, do this, and
there is a way.” You write a correction and [when] you don’t talk
to the guy they get offended. But when you explain, ok, why are
you writing this, I’m writing this because something can happen,
somebody can get hurt. Then they understand, they like you to
explain to them what is going on. If I don’t understand something
I ask them, and they explain it to me alright. It’s a learning
process.
Inspectors such as LV get a lot of satisfaction from teaching the contractor/builder
during the inspection process.
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Special Problems of Small Contractor
The problems that building inspectors have with small-time contractors was
discussed above. Many of these problems have to do with their knowledge base. A
recurrent comment by inspectors is that the small-timers do not have the requisite
ability or training, a failing that can be traced back to the state contractor licensing
board. The legislative intent of the state contractor licensing board was to ensure a
better quality of contractor while simultaneously limiting the pool of contractors in
the state. Many building inspectors believe that the results have been questionable.
EN believes that the licensing process has not been effective in improving the quality
of contractors and builders:
... All you have to do is go in with a letter from somebody that has
a contractors license, that they haven’t bothered to verify, that
states you have done four years of work as a journeymen or what
ever. The test that they give you, very, very little of it qualifies,
last that I heard it was like 15-20% of it actually deals in practical
knowledge. The rest of it is in contractors lien laws, licensing
laws, and all the laws that pertain to contracting. ...So theocally I
can give you a letter stating that you, you worked for four years for
me as a journeyman-level carpenter let’s say, you can go down
there go to one of these, these test places where they guarantee that
you will pass the test. Pay your 600 bucks, get a test date, go
down there, because they give you all the answers at the test
places. They only have 4 or 5 different tests, for each discipline
[or trade], and building is the worst, because they only give you 5
or 6 questions on each trade, outside your lien laws. Get your
license, go hang up your shingle and go to work. You may have
never worked in the industry or in the trades before. And see,
that’s what frustrates inspectors, and because these guys are
supposed to have the basic knowledge of their trade, ...especially if
they are subcontracting to a journeymen. ...And that’s what makes
it hard on us, the other thing is, is that in the City of Los Angeles,
we adopt our own codes. We have general guide lines that now
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the new codes, that we have now is the ’98 California Building
Code. They are trying to standardize everything. But the City of
Los Angeles still, because of the area that we have, our little
idiosyncrasy, like we don’t have snow loads, or you know, or roof
if you have tornado or stuff like that, we don’t adopt certain parts
of the code. But other things like earthquakes and stuff like that,
we have our own provisions, that we put in.
Inspectors believe that contractors think they now “know” building and do
not acquaint themselves with the provisions for the different
municipalities. They believe that small contractors know the basics but
not the idiosyncrasies of the code, let alone the local changes to the code.
Fire Life Safety Issues
The primary concern of every building inspector is the health and safety of
the public, that is, whether a building is structurally sound and whether there is a
health risk for the public. More specifically, for the building inspector it is the
structural integrity of the building. For the plumbing inspection it's the health of the
occupant and the public through application of the plumbing code, which covers
water supply, sewage connections and city gas for heating and cooking. For HVAC;
(heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) inspectors, it is whether or not smoke and
fire will be contained by the HVAC duct system or will be exacerbated by them.
There are overlaps of inspection with most of the areas. Electrical inspection
overlaps with other inspections, in the following example. The question are: does
the fire alarm system function properly?; Do the exit lights function?; Are the fire
doors/curtain properly wired so that they will activate? BD describes:
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... Well, there is a premise behind having a life safety system in
buildings and it’s fire detection and fire warning systems, sprinkler
systems, so forth. It’s number one, it’s early detection, early
warning, whether it’s the occupants or and/or, property. ... If it is a
problem, then this fire warning system will trigger a sequence of
events that will prevent the lose of life and property. So, we will
going to sound an alarm...., and get them out or survive it. We
have departmentalization of a building, fire doors to close and
prevent the spread of smoke and fire, we have resources available
on the premises. Do we have water, and a sprinkler system that is
functional, so if there is a fire we can get it out? Do we have the
means to get the people to put it out until the fire department gets
there? Time, time is a big factor, you talk to the fire department,
one of the biggest factors against them is time.... So there are a lot
of factors that weigh into a these things, availability of, user
friendly, fire department gets there, fire department arrives,
number one, they have to locate the problem. So, we have to
provide means for them to try to pinpoint where the problem is.
Fire alarm panel, actually displays, where, what type of device and
where possibly in the building it is at. They will take their
resources and go to that point. Not all fires, you know, you don’t
have flames jumping out the roof and all. So, do they have water
on site? Can they pump the building from standpipes? .... So, it is
kind of strange how things are enforced in which codes apply, to
do life-safety things. There are bits and pieces in every Uniform
Code, that trigger fire-life safety, take care of fire life safety issues.
So, you've got to take all of these things and put them together
under one big umbrella and we have this alarm control panel,
monitors and controls, and supervise and make sure that the
systems are functioning, or working.
These codes are designed by engineers in the various construction divisions to work
together to provide the best marginal safety for the structure as possible. All of the
building inspectors interviewed stated that they would not budge from code
requirements or the pertinent life-safety issue. As AG stated it:
.. .As an inspector, I don’t budge an inch for life hazard stuff, if it’s
not life hazard I try to get what I can. Life hazard we don’t, we
don’t want anyone to die on our properties, on the things that we
inspect. And everything else, we try and get, we try and work with
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the people. But if he’s trying to put something over on us, then we
twist the screws on him.
Plan Check Problems
The Plan Check Division of the LADBS is supposed to go over all building
plans and verify that projects meet building standards. This is how the process is
supposed to work. However, sometimes things are missed by the plan checkers.
When this occurs, building inspectors must then deal with an irritated
builder/contractor. Plans must either be altered to conform with the code, or the
building must be altered to conform to the plans. Often things are missed as the
result of understating and over-work in the plan check department. In earlier times,
plan checkers either had to be or were going to become building inspectors. They
thus had an extra incentive to be especially careful in scrutinizing building plans.
BD offers these comments about things being missed during plan checking:
A couple of things here and there. Number one, is that they do not
have the time, if they sat down and tried to catch every little thing,
it would never get out of plan check. They don’t have the time.
So, it’s kind of a review process, and even though, if you look at
the back of any stamped approved [plans], It’s going to say this is
probably from any state or city, that there is a disclaimer on the
approved. “This is not an approval for the violation of any city,
county, state, ordinance or code.” So, it’s a review process and the
final approval at the end of the line. ...Now certainly within the
spirit and the intent we want, we follow those plans. But, plan
check, a set of plans is a two dimensional world, and you go out
into a three dimensional world and there are a lot of things. ...You
know nothing is ever perfect. The conditions on the site dictate
other things, and no matter how hard you try, and believe me I
have done plan review before, I have been a resident inspector
before. And you know what, you still miss things.
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There was a time when LADBS inspectors worked in plan check as a
requirement to becoming a field inspector. As the department grew, it depended
more and more on in-house engineers than on the engineering firms submitting
plans. BD describes the transition:
They used to years and years ago. They used to do that. I, we, I
have worked with guys that worked in, round the 40s, 50s, 60s, in
our department, when I was early on in my career, and they used to
rotate, a few senior electrical inspectors into plan check. But, it
became an, a whole, the bureaucracy, it became a bureau in its
own. And, it was the engineering bureau they wanted engineers,
and so there you go, they don’t want inspectors in there. Now, do
we work close together, yes, some of the plan checkers are more
receptive to our input, and come and ask us questions [some more]
... than others. Some don’t ask for any, or have much part with us
at all. We are so spread out, we don’t get to see a lot of the plan
checkers ever. If it was one, if we were all housed in one building
on one floor like most building departments in the US, we’d
probably have closer working relationship so, we’re a little bit
unique in that sense, is that, a lot of my plans like the plans for this
job we’re going to go out to see, they were all plan checked
downtown, the plan checkers are downtown. I can’t just walk over
and ask what do you think?
Sometimes plan check problems are resolved by others as when some major
detail had been overlooked in the submitted plans. Here is how CH dealt with a plan
check problem:
.. .1 told them they had to raise [it] ... and I went there with a
supervisor two days ago and we worked out an alternative, but
prior to that they were telling me the only way they were going to
fix that was going to cost them [about $100,000]. And I said no,
no, lets just do it this way, do this way and I gave them all these
alternatives, and they said, “Do I have to plan check this?” And I
said, “Tell you what, you just work with me on it and we won’t
plan check anything, we will just design it ourselves pretty much.”
Plan check missed it and the .. .engineers missed when you get
there and you tell somebody that to do something that will cost
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[about $100,000], they are not real happy with it. [They said],
“How come it’s on the plan that way?” Well its on the plan
wrong. [The reason is that], a lot, all of our good plan checkers
left, they go, they work and get all of the experience and then they
get good and they get a pile of money from private industry. They
do not stay. Now all we got left are, [outside the trade inspectors]
that are learning to try to do the [this trade].
Here the inspector could have sent the builder/contractor back to plan check and
have plan check instruct the builder as to the acceptable changes that would be
required. This is a good example of a proactive inspector who helped resolve the
problem in the field. In essence he bypassed administrative procedures, but the
problem was solved according to the code to ensure a safe product. This probably
occurs more often than most people would think.
Temptation of Money and the Flesh
One problem that inspectors may need to deal is the attempted payoff, bribe,
payola, or present. Bribes and propositions are difficult issues to raise in field
research. Some inspectors were uncomfortable with these questions, especially since
none of them knew exactly who the researcher really was and were cautious and
guarded of what was said, especially with this topic. Some asked to be “off the
record,” but most of the interviewed inspectors describe a scenario similar, as
described by EN when asked whether or not he had ever been propositioned. While
on an inspection the home owner/builder threw a envelope with approximately
$3,000 or $4,000 onto the front seat of his vehicle. EN’s response was that that was
not enough money; he wanted his present pay for the rest of his life, plus benefits,
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because that was what the value of his risk would be if he accepted the money.
There were also two incidents that were related during the course of study that
involved women propositioning the inspector, either directly as an owner/builder
themselves or as directed by an owner/builder.
Having wide latitude from the home office and autonomy in the inspections
can open the way for a lapse in supervision by management. In the extreme, this can
lead to problems such as taking bribes. MP observes: “...That’s why people get in
trouble. ...They’re kind of their own boss in each of their own little area,... So, you
don’t know what they [the inspectors] are doing until something bad happens, or
something like that.” The inspectors are the agents and have information that they
can withhold from the principal, if they so choose. This is one of the reasons why
supervisors follow up on the work of inspectors. This follow-up by the supervisor
also indirectly informs the builders/contractors that inspectors are being watched,
which is also intended to discourage them from considering temping building
inspectors. The consequence of a building inspector accepting a bribe can be very
costly to the department. All of the inspections which the errant inspector had been
responsible for, starting from the time of the inspector’s first employment, would
need to be reinspected to ensure that all of those inspections were properly
preformed. MP cited one example: “... You know that guy got caught right, ...that
was charging bribes or whatever, then they have to go through his whole area and
look at all these old jobs and stuff, goes back how many years?” With departmental
resources being limited, supervisors must walk a fine line between micromanaging
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and allowing too much leeway. MP again: “Because you know, the supervisors they
sometimes .. .let the leash go too far on some people.”
Although there is little to indicate that problems of corruption are frequent,
all of the inspectors interviewed mentioned that they had been, at sometime in their
role as building inspector, approached with some sort of temptation. These are one
among many constraints, stresses, and stimuli that building inspectors face on the
job.
The materials gathered from observations of building inspectors in the field
and from interviews with them provide an in-depth description of who these people
are, how they become inspectors, and what the work of inspection is like. Using
these materials or background, we return in the next chapter to the question of how
best to characterize the building inspector in the big city: as bureaucrat, as
professional, as hero- or something else.
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Chapter Five
Implication and Conclusions
Studying building inspectors yields information that has direct consequences
for public health and safety. The actions of inspectors and their communications
with the public will have effects on public safety many years after inspections have
been completed as well as after buildings have changed ownership and the inspectors
are long gone. Yet as a result of the inspection process, buildings remain in
relatively stable condition so as to give some certainty to their safety. This has far-
reaching implications for the exchange value of structures. If buildings were built at
a questionable level of workmanship, transaction costs between sellers and buyers
would most likely increase to the point of becoming burdensome, with the
consequence that local development might be hindered. No one can predict the
timing or the magnitude of the next major natural disaster such as earthquake or
violent weather condition, but ensuring that buildings have a reasonable chance of
withstanding these the forces of nature provides a relative sense of security in the
safety of the community’s infrastructure. This is a desired goal of the policies of
municipalities, building departments such as the LADBS, and ultimately of the
individual building inspectors themselves. Building inspectors’ motivation and
behavior greatly assist in achieving this policy objective. By examining the building
inspectors’ behavior, this study attempted to identify some of the reasons for the
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present success of the City of Los Angeles in achieving what is recognized world
wide as a relatively high level of building safety.
The performance of building inspectors, as disclosed by deed as well as by
verbal and nonverbal behavior, was evaluated by comparing it to the three ideal-
typical models developed in Chapter Two: the inspector as bureaucrat, the inspector
as professional, and the inspector as hero. Each model will be examined in light of
materials gathered in the course of this field study before drawing some overall
conclusions about the role of building inspectors in LADBS and the relatively high
level of safety of the built environment in the City of Los Angeles.
The Bureaucratic Model
Like most citizens, building inspectors are familiar with the intricacies of
bureaucratic organization, both as employees working within them as well as
“customers” of the goods and services that they provide. They understand well the
hierarchy of authority from their days spent learning a trade where the authority of
the master tradesman over journeymen is understood, the authority of the
journeyman over the apprentice, etc. or the hierarchical structure of a formal
schooling, i.e. the teacher-student relationship. The organization into clear-cut
divisions of rank in which tradesmen work are well defined in each trade, well
understood and accepted by the tradesmen who make their living within them. There
may be some gray areas of potentially overlapping performance responsibilities
among the trades, these basic bureaucratic structures into which all trades are
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organized lead to agreed upon or negotiated solutions as to which trade is responsible
for an issue and which is not. Bureaucratic organization ensures that the division of
labor is effectively allocated in these types of situations. With their experience in
one of these bureaucratically organized trades, it comes as no surprise that building
inspectors have the ability to adjust readily to working in yet another bureaucratic
environment such as a building department. The question is: What effect if any does
a career spent in such bureaucratic settings have on inspectors and on how they
approach their work? More importantly, what effect does this bureaucratic
environment ultimately have on public safety?
Become a building inspector involved following a prescribed technical path
with the familiar bureaucratic hurdles placed in the way of aspirants to any position
of responsibility in large and complex organizations. (Inspector HT recounted his
experience of competing with some 300 other qualified tradesmen in pursuit of a
position within LADBS and how his continuance of higher and more specialized
education helped him secure win out in this competition.) Once inside LADBS, the
new inspector begins in a probationary position and is closely watched for a
probation period that lasts approximately six months. After successfully completing .
his period of probation, the “new” inspector experiences a strong incentive to
“climb” the bureaucratic “ladder” in order to get away from menial types of
inspections which are traditionally given to new inspectors. The inspector is
beginning to navigate in the “other side” of this public bureaucracy, the side that the
public does not see at all. Building inspectors deal with this bureaucratic
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organization quite comfortably and accept it as part and parcel of their jobs, not as an
interfering or entangling entity that contains their actions at every turn.
The successful accommodation to work inside such a bureaucratic setting
contrasts with the self-image of building inspectors as they go about dealing with
people outside the department. Outside the department, inspectors do not see
themselves as “classical” hard-nosed bureaucrats. Rather, they see themselves as
using the power of public bureaucracy as a tool to enforce compliance with the
building code. Inspections are typically performed with either a positive “Let’s see
what you have and get the job done” or a neutral tone, but, as TR states, the
bureaucratic power that the inspector is capable of summoning up can be a powerful
tool in dealing with an errant contractor to gain compliance with the code or to
prevent “gaming” by contractors and builders. A typical gaming strategy is the case
of the contractor who calls for an inspection before all the required work has actually
been performed and is ready to be inspected. Here the contractor’s gaming behavior
is aimed at exhausting or grinding down an inspector in the hope that his inspections
are either performed improperly or are incomplete. The result of either might be to
compromise building safety.
TR described his strategic use of his role as bureaucrat in dealing with a
situation in which he felt the contractor was attempting to “game” him. He simply
demanded that the contractor follow the prescribed procedure, that is, calling the
department for inspectors to come out only after the work had been completed. TR
documented the worthless or unproductive inspections that had been called in order
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to have evidence in the event that the contractor attempted to escalate the situation
by complaining to his supervisor. He did this to prevent another type of strategic
gaming behavior, attempting to intimidate the inspector into a favorable inspection
by going over the inspector’s head to his supervisor and lodging a complaint that the
inspector is harassing him. In these examples, the inspector was using bureaucratic
behavior strategically as a tool rather than as standard operating procedure. It is the
routine and omnipresent use of bureaucratic regulations and procedures that
identifies the negative type of bureaucrat. Strategic use of bureaucracy as a tool of
necessity is one of the methods that building inspectors have at their disposal to
coerce a recalcitrant builder/contractor into compliance with the building codes, and
inspectors seem to engage in it judiciously.
Another available bureaucratic tool for obtaining compliance with code
requirements is the writing of a citation, also referred to as a “pink slip.” A citation
lists all of the ways in which a project is in noncompliance with the building code.
However, issuing a citation can consume a great deal of inspectors’ time and be
counterproductive in the long-run. This can happen by the number of follow-up
reinspections that are required to document subsequent compliance.
If bureaucratic behavior is strategically used, building inspectors can
establish their authority over contractors and obtain compliance with the code,
thereby achieving the ultimate goal of building safety. The real power of inspectors
is their potential to bring many sanctions, official and unofficial, to bear on
uncooperative contractors and builders. The threat of negative bureaucratic
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enforcement is a very strong incentive to comply with the code requirements before
inspectors invoke the negative weapons in their bureaucratic arsenal. This is known
as “playing hardball.” If an inspector feels that he has the backing of his department,
he can and sometimes does play with a very hard ball if he feels that this is the only
way to convince a builder/contractor that he is the final arbiter of a project’s
compliance with the building plans and their adherence with the code.
Playing hard-ball or “nit-picking” is not in the best interest of the LADBS.
Unless it is called for as a remedial measure to correct the behavior of an errant
builder/contractor, it can be harmful to the LADBS and is counterproductive. It is
harmful due to the ill-will that it can engender among the departments clients and
also due to the possibility of generating negative publicity as a result of “one-sided
reporting” by local newspapers. It is counterproductive due to the time-consuming
follow-up inspections, etc., that it produces.
LADBS management would prefer not to have its inspectors act in the
manner of negative bureaucratic types. TR underscored the department’s attitude in
discussing AT and another inspector who both exemplified the classical “nitpicker”
with constant antagonistic attitudes toward builders and contractors. The negative
bureaucratic type is an inspector “who never forgets a single rule binding his action
and hence is unable to assist many of his clients” (Merton 1968, pp. 253-254).
Inspector AT was cited as one example, an inspector who measured each nail to a
fraction of an inch in a specific location. These negative bureaucratic types are more
likely to treat contractors with the attitude of policemen toward presumed
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“criminals” rather than with the attitude currently preferred by department
administrators of treating contractors as “customers.” This behavior is viewed as
harmful to the department in several ways: it is an attitude that is believed to
perpetuate antagonistic relationships between building inspectors and contractors or
building owners; it fosters an “us” against “them” attitude of superiority on the part
of the building inspector; it can encourage the very gamesmanship that inspectors try
to prevent, encouraging the contractors to try to get away with as much as possible; it
increases inspection time; and it can make for bad public relations overall and
contribute to a poor public image of the department.
It is therefore not in the best interest of the department to condone such
negative behavior. When the department identifies one of its inspectors as a negative
bureaucrat type, one way to deal with the situation is to send him to another branch
of the department where he will have less contact with “customers” and thus can
inflict less harm. Often criticism from peers and supervisors can make the situation
so intolerable for the negative bureaucratic inspector that it can prompt him to leave
the department of his own accord. This course of action is more likely for some
inspectors than others depending on seniority, how much time the person has until
retirement, how “thick-skinned” the person is, etc. Several of the building inspectors
interviewed told of some their peers who did quit or retire soon after the change in
LADBS administration because the new department approach to inspection and to
contractors and owners went against their preconceived notions of how to conduct an
inspection and their inherent “police power” to enforce the code, no matter what.
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Time is a scarce resource for all organizations, including the LADBS. The
number of inspectors its employees affects both the number of inspections that it can
conduct and the amount of time that it can invest in each inspection. If the
department were to hire a very large number of inspectors, it runs the risk of being
accused of being “overstaffed” and of allowing its inspectors to “goldbrick” (i.e.,
work to less than their capacity). At the other extreme, if the department were to hire
too few inspectors, it runs the risk of having a high turnover rate due to overworked
and “burned out” inspectors. Exactly what the correct number of building inspectors
that are needed is difficult to say, but the ever-present time constraints in their daily
routines was a topic brought up by all of the inspectors interviewed in this study.
There never seems to be enough time in the day to accomplish all that is at hand.
One consequence is that inspectors are less likely to be the petty officious
bureaucrats of the negative bureaucrat model. The reason is that being a “nitpicker”
absorbs a great deal of time and in general does not help inspectors get through the
workday. It also has a ripple effect, causing delays at other job sites on down the list
of inspections to be performed.
Time constraints also explain why inspectors tend to pay more attention to
the “big issues” and less attention to the “small stuff.” Given limited time in which
to accomplish their inspections, inspector’s focus on those building details that are of
major consequence, such as the integrity of the structure, the integrity of mechanical
services, the proper size of wire and pipes, etc. “Small stuff’ such as having lawns
mowed, walls painted, and the things that have more to do with the appearance and
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aesthetics can wait till later to be looked at, if at all, since they have little to do with
the overall building safety. (The “small stuff’ cannot be ignored completely and will
eventually have to be dealt with, usually due to complaints by neighbors.)
Applying Weber’s (1978, p. 24) zweckrational (means-ends or instrumental
rational) and wertrational1 (value-rational) definitions of social action to the
behavior of the building inspectors who were interviewed, it appears that the actions
of the inspectors in this study were very much more consistent with the wertrational
orientation of social action than merely the zweckrationmal orientation. That is, their
actions seemed driven by pursuit of an ultimate value (safety) than by the narrow
drive to see that i’s were dotted and t’s crossed for the sake of bureaucratic
expediency. In other words, there was a strong tendency for the inspectors to lean
toward the heroic and professional styles rather than the bureaucratic style. They
were concerned with the ends of their actions, the ultimate result of the building
inspection process—a safe building and the protection of the public safety.
This difference is an important finding and worth emphasizing. Had the
building inspectors’ behavior been found to be more exemplary of zweckrational,
that is, of means-ends rationality, the style would have been in line with the
bureaucratic behavior model. This type of orientation apparently was condoned by
the LADBS in the past and may well be the norm in building department in other
1 “(1) instrumentally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of
objects in the environment and o f other human beings; these expectations are used as ‘conditions’ or
‘means for the attainment o f the actor’s own rationally pursed and calculated ends’;
“(2) value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own
sake o f some ethical, aesthic, religious or other form of behavior, independently o f its prospects of
success.”
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jurisdictions, there overriding concern is with the code for its own sake and building
safety is less a value than the code and its enforcement; it is the code that matters
above all.
It must be remembered that these are archetype models. Both orientations,
instrumental rationality and value rationality, were evident. What is significant is the
extent and the clarity with which the ultimate ends of building inspection were
present in the everyday work routines of the LADBS inspectors and the way in
which the instruments of bureaucracy were used strategically to achieve them The
balance favored ends over means-to-ends.
The Heroic Model
The building inspector as hero places himself on the highest of moral ground.
His reference group is the citizenry in general. With an idealistic lance of Don
Quixotic protecting the public from the profiteers and hucksters, he alone, the
building inspector, guards the safety of his wards. None of the inspectors
interviewed would even come close to this overblown description (although they
probably exist somewhere), but there are elements of paternalistic protection of the
public against profiteers and hucksters in their behavior. One inspector (TR) even
used the simile “... so in our job, it is just like the veteran cop.” He was making an
analogy to police officers’ ability to observe their surroundings and be on guard, ever
vigilant, for the greater safety and protection of the public; so too do building
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inspectors observe the details of a building’s construction that ultimately ensures its
safety and protects the public.
As inspector EN recounted, there are three components to a building code: its
spirit, its intent, and the code itself. He sees the code as a guide and his ultimate duty
to use the code to get 100 percent compliance with its life safety provisions. For
him, there is no compromise to life/health/safety issues; it is the letter of the code, or
else!2 Inspector BD took a heroic behavior stance when he determined that he would
not allow another city department to inspect a particular life/safety implement in
construction. He took the position that only someone from his department really
understood a particular building detail and to let others inspect that detail would
jeopardize public safety. His department and only his department were the final
arbiters of people’s safety on that issue. BD took this position because what
appeared to be a minor building detail could have dire consequences if this
responsibility were to be relinquished to another department, especially since the full
ramifications of that particular detail could easily be overlooked.
Inspector TR declared that building inspectors have nothing to do with the
costs of the building. This position could be interpreted as both heroic and
professional. The hero would never yield the high moral ground to such a lowly
subject as cost of the project. The professional would more likely have consideration
for costs and defer to his “equal” the contractor or builder, but only to find a
2 One inspector, who was not in the interview group, once stated that he did not care what the city
says or the code states; no one in his precinct was going to build a cantilevered porch with wood. He
would demand that they use steel, because wood quickly rots and becomes a pitfall type hidden safety
hazard.
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negotiated ground that would resolve the cost issue without safety being
compromised. Both he hero and the professional are not influenced in their
judgment by considerations of costs. The difference between them is the clear
rejection of costs as an issue without room for compromise (the hero) and
willingness to negotiate with one’s “fellow professional” over costs so long as safety
is judged not to be compromised as a result. In other words, the building inspector
as hero is just as rigid and uncompromising as the building inspector as bureaucrat.
Both are single minded, and both risk the sort of negative backlash against
themselves and the department that was discussed in the preceding section.
Clear-cut heroic behavior is illustrated by TR’s accidental discovery during
an inspection of other building elements that a set of fire doors had been chained
shut. His “heroism” stemmed from the feet that technically it was not his “ job” to
even look at fire doors. Instead he took it upon himself to solve the problem out of
concern for the larger public good. When the building’s owner tried to brush off this
serious code violation, TR had to resort to threatening the owner that he would call
the fire department, which could issue fines and ultimately close the building to the
public until the violation was corrected. He got his compliance quickly. TR stated
that he had been mainly worried about public safety in the event of a fire in that
building and the resulting deaths that would occur from locked fire doors, such as the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York in which 146 people died.
AG, speaking in terms that strongly identified him with the hero type, stated
flatly that he would not budge an inch on safety code violations. He described an
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orientation of getting what one can on other issues but never yielding on the life
safety issues. It is not difficult to see how a heroic attitude develops among building
inspectors. They are keenly aware of the seriousness of the consequences should
they fail in their responsibilities. Inspectors reported the fear of having to live with
the realization that a person’s death was caused by their oversight or careless
inspection.
Many of the inspectors used the first person plural in speaking of their work.
Phrases such as “Oh, we did this,” “We did that,” “We built this on,” or “We built
that on” were common during their interviews and conversations. They displayed
very strong identification with the projects they were involved with, of “owning”
them, so to speak. They evidenced pride in these projects. This is not the attitude of
an officious bureaucrat, whether of the neutral or the negative variety, for whom
contactors, builders, and owners are the “enemy.” However, it could be construed as
the recognition by a bureaucrat of being a “small cog” on the “big wheel” of the
building department machinery. This could also represent the orientation of a
professional, one who is a member o f an elite “team” that helps to build and secure
the safety of structures. Alternatively, the pride in collective effort on behalf of the
public could be recognition that the building department is not comprised of a
number o f Lone Rangers but of team of Don Quixotes. The first person plural is not
the Royal “We” but the pride in a collective team effort to contribute to the city’s
built environment, including the safety thereof.
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Professional Model
The professional building inspector has a strong orientation to the technical
aspects of the building process. The bureaucratic inspector also is concerned with
technical aspects; the difference between them being professional’s development of
technical knowledge far and above that o f the bureaucrat. Rather than using his
technical knowledge to demonstrate his superiority over others, the professional is
eager to share his technical learning with others. “Others” here means primarily
those with whom the building inspectors deal with on a continual basis including the
“customers” of the building department (i.e., builders and contractors), other
inspectors, and any other participant in the building inspection process.
The professional building inspector is set apart from his bureaucratic
counterpart not only by his willingness to share his technical knowledge. He also
has a commitment to continual learning. The acquisition of new technical
knowledge is not foreign to the bureaucratic type of inspector, but it is put to
different use. Again, the ideal bureaucrat’s orientation is strictly internal while that
of the ideal professional is external to the organization in which he is employed.
Thus the professional is more apt to seek peer and collegial recognition, while the
bureaucrat is more inclined to seek advancement up the bureaucratic ladder with this
new knowledge. The ideal professional is by nature more inquisitive about more
things and looks for ways to broaden his understanding of the building process. This
means that the professional is more interested in learning many different aspects of
the inspection process, whereas the bureaucrat remains focused on those narrow
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competencies that he thinks will please his superiors (which may or may not be of
direct value to building inspection). Continuing education is therefore one indicator
of the inspector as professional and of the degree of professionalism of a building
department. Both are evident in the LADBS.
The inspectors interviewed, such as CH, were not afraid to admit that they
had made mistakes along the way, and indeed seemed to take pride in learning from
their mistakes. Rather than continuing to use a well-worn script as the bureaucrat
type might, these inspectors saw continual learning as inherent in their “profession.”
They seemed to believe that this is what sets them apart from other “occupations.”
They were not afraid of learning from others within the department, that is, mentors.
TR and others with a professional bent in their orientation were very willing to listen
and accept some of the ideas that were imparted to them from the older veterans who
had a great deal more experience than they with the inspection process. They
described some of their peers as unwilling to accept the advice of “old-timers,”
seemingly believing that they knew all they needed to know about the code to be
able to apply it. Most inspectors recognized things were not as simple as that and
that no matter how well they knew the details of the code itself, applying it in
specific situations required some form of interpretation.
This suggests another difference between the bureaucratic and professional
types of inspectors. The former seem more likely to fear appearing not to possess
the requisite knowledge of an inspector whereas the latter seemed more willing to
admit ignorance of some specific point or other. Perhaps this was because the
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bureaucratic types feared that they might miss a promotion if their superiors found
them deficient. The professional type seemed more comfortable admitting ignorance
and viewed it as merely part of the process of learning and becoming a better
inspector in the long-run. They also seemed more willing to take for granted the fact
that management already knew who did and who did not have more technical
knowledge, as TR explained. The idea that they “knew it all” was not palatable to
most of the inspectors, as BD recounted in describing all the learning that transpired
over coffee at Phillippes Restaurant. All of them described inspection as an ongoing
learning process and described their job as in part also helping the builders-
contractors and building owners whom they came into contact to learn as well.
These professionally oriented inspectors did not accept what they learned from the
“old-timers” carte balance, however. Rather, they listened, then went back to look at
the code and consider the reason for the specific code provision, consider the safety
issue that was involved, and only then more or less amalgamated all of this
information into a thorough and deeper understanding of the code and the purpose
for it.
That the inspectors interviewed overwhelmingly fit the professional model is
strongly supported by evidence that most of them belong to the ICBO, the
organization that credentials inspectors, conducts educational classes, as well as
actively participates in code development. ICBO membership presents them with
performance standards as well as external validation of their expertise once achieved.
This is important both for an internalized feeling of self-worth and for external
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recognition by the builders and contractors that they deal with daily, by their peers in
the building and related departments, and by the general public as well. Whatever
training and education they receive in-house from the City of Los Angeles, the
certification that inspectors receive from the ICBO after demonstrating new
competencies is more important for the professional careers of building inspectors.
It is an international form of recognition that carries a great deal of weight both
inside and, more importantly from a professional standpoint, outside the LADBS.
The inspector will be recognized as knowledgeable, competent, and hence a
professional wherever he travels to a building site, locally, nationally, or
internationally.
Mutual respect for other professions is another element of the professional
model. Inspector TR described some of the problems in the case of an inspector who
was also an engineer. In this case the inspector with an engineering degree saw
building problems differently than the structural engineer of record. TR’s stance was
not to challenge the engineer of record by placing his own engineering knowledge
above that of the other. Instead, he chose to defer to the engineer of record and to
confine his evaluation to only those matters for which inspectors are responsible.
From the bureaucratic perspective, this represents the application of a sort of
extraorganizational good division of labor, allowing the department to minimize time
and unnecessary entanglements; from the professional perspective, this is the
extension of courtesy to a fellow professional. This form of professionalism
prevents that sort of micromanaging that the inspector would otherwise inject into
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the inspection process by attempting to impose an extraneous set of building criteria
in conflict with the engineer of record. Such implicit disrespect of the engineer of
record’s knowledge and expertise by the building inspector would be considered
“unprofessional behavior.”
Another element of the professional model in the demeanor of the building
inspector: as BD discussed this in an interview in which characterized as
“unprofessional” personalizing and reacting in a hostile manner to a contractor who
seems to be purposefully trying to evade compliance with the building code. To
react in a “professional” manner is a deliberately adopted stance that serves to
prevent inspectors from engaging in unproductive and/or counterproductive behavior
with others. By behaving “professionally,” building inspectors in the long-run
reduce time spent dealing with contractors and by reducing conflict and tension
greatly reduces the stress level that would otherwise permeate the inspection process.
TR concludes that if inspectors fall into “their game” by reacting to their ploy as
contractors expect them to react, then “They win, you lose.”
TR in this example also touches on the issue of self-respect and the respect
that is due the inspector by the contractor/builder. In the “professional” approach to
inspection adopted above, the inspector’s approach was to simply “state facts” and
move on, leaving the contractor to fix the problems. The aim of this strategy was to
avoid becoming part of the problem. This was TR’s definition of how a professional
should behave. To act in a professional manner means not getting caught up in an
unproductive argument that leads nowhere other than to more arguing. An example
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of this self-defined professional behavior can be found on page 87 in which the
building inspector finds that an entire job had been done incorrectly and needed to be
done over again. In this rather extreme case, rather than using the prescribed
bureaucratic procedure of having the contractor removed from the job or some other
punitive measure, the inspector simply told the contractor that they would work
together to get the job done the right way, even though the inspector knew that this
was going to require a lot of time on his part. This was the same inspector who had
encountered the poster denigrating building inspectors. (The inspector chose to just
ignore the sign altogether.) He stated that he felt that a professional inspector needed
to have a thick skin at times in order to deal with the behavior of unprofessional
people.
Professionalism is also related to trust. Mutual trust between building
inspectors and contractors/builders does not occur instantaneously. Rather, it
develops over time, either in the short-term or the long-run. When inspectors treat
contractors in a respectful manner, they increase the likelihood of being treated
respectfully in return. Over time such mutual respect based on the professional
demeanor of the inspector can grow into trust, even when each of the parties has
differing interests and different stakes in the process.
The change introduced into the LADBS by its new department head, to treat
the people with whom it deals as “customers” in the business sense of the word,
certainly is consistent with the professional model. “You do your job [as the
contractor] and I will respect that, and I will do my job [as the inspector] and you
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respect that” seems to be operating philosophy emphasized within the LADBS. This
encourages and fosters a mutual orientation of professionalism between
builders/contractors and building inspectors. Building inspectors are encouraged to
see their roles as one of helping the process of construction or remodeling, not to
hinder it. As inspector GM put it, inspectors need to be proactive, to find the
mistakes in the very beginning of the inspection process, and to try to predict where
the process is going. He believes that inspectors will gain the respect of contractors
if they do this while maintaining a professional attitude and assisting the building
process to be a success.
Summary of Bureaucratic, Professional and Heroic Models
In the final analysis it is the professional model that seems to the behavior of
the building inspectors interviewed and observed in this field study. That being said,
one must be mindful that elements of all three modes were evident. Whether their
personal goals are self-appointed goals, bureaucratically defined goals of the
department, or reflective of the greater public good, it is clear professionalism is the
most dominant of the three orientations contrasted here. This is product of the first
hand experience, extensive learning and credentialing that is required of all
inspectors in order to join the building department. The result is an attitude of
leading and assisting builders, contractors and owners in completing their projects
more than one of “policing” untrustworthy, habitual code violators. All o f the
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inspectors participating in this study seem to take great satisfaction from
participating in the education of the people constructing the building.
Problem-solving, and helping to find solutions to problems was greatly
emphasized by all of the building inspectors interviewed, another product of the
professionalism of this occupational group. They would rather assist in an efficient
and safe solution to a problem then to leave builders in a quandary to figure out what
to do on their own. This works to both parties’ advantage: buildings are built to code
(the inspectors’—and the public’s objective), and builders get to continue on (their
objective) rather that waste time in trying different solutions to remedy the problem
with the possibility that a chosen solution needs to be removed and be rebuilt.
The professional model stands out over the heroic model as well as the
bureaucratic model. A building inspector who has an overdeveloped sense of being
a hero would really be like a Don Quixote, an overly idealistic enforcer o f the
building codes. An insistence of perfection in an imperfect world could drive the
inspector to self-destruct and cause the builder/contractor to call for his removal.
Consequently, the heroic type of behavior has to be tempered with the realities of the
working world, and therefore heroism needs to take a back seat to professionalism.
Similarly, bureaucratic orientation also needs to temper its rigid worldview of
administrative directives and codes with the real world of time constraints and
limited resources.
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The LADBS and the Building Inspectors
The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety is a very large
department. In the year 2000 it issued “over 100,000 permits, with a valuation of
over $2.5 billion dollars and conducts 650,000 inspections annually” (Press Release
of the LADBS dated March 9, 2000). This was accomplished with a workforce of
approximately 800 employees in about 20 offices spread over the City of Los
Angeles. This workload is not for the feint of heart. The department has little time
to waste on marginal inspectors. Along with increasing demand for housing in
southern California created by the dwindling supply of developable land, the
increasing cost of housing that places much of the housing stock beyond the reach of
the average worker, and organized demands for low-income housing, the
department—and its building inspectors—are under enormous pressure.
In spite of the pressure on the LADBS, the inspectors involved in this
research all displayed pride in their work and confidence about the future of the city.
They were not intimidated by bullying contractors, nor did they seem arrogant given
their relative position of power position and technical knowledge. “Let’s see what
we can do,” is the apparent guiding principle of the inspectors interviewed. Life,
heath, and safety concerns seemed uppermost in their minds. There was no wavering
on the fundamentals of safety in building inspection. The risk of injury, health, and
loss of life were not to be compromised for any reason, including cost.
The impression that one takes away from studying close-up this purposive
sample of building inspectors is that the citizens of Los Angeles are getting their tax
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dollars worth. The uncertainty that citizens of Los Angeles may feel about the safety
of the structures in which they life, work, and play should be reduced in light of the
professional quality of inspection o f buildings and other structures under the
enforcement umbrella of the LADBS. Ensuring that buildings have a good chance of
withstanding the unpredictable nature of future earthquakes provides a degree of
stability to the community and to the government that will ensure their social and
economic viability in the event of future catastrophes. This is true even though it is
impossible to protect against all eventualities.
Generaiizable Conclusions to Other Jurisdictions
Although this study was conducted within a unique organization, the Los
Angeles Department of Building and Safety, most cities even of modest size have
autonomous building departments that perform nearly identical functions. There are
some technical differences in code enforcement between large cities such as Los
Angeles and smaller cities, townships, and other municipalities (for example, smaller
cities rely more on state codes and ICBO standards as written and have fewer
specially adapted provisions for local circumstances). The orientation and style
attitudes of building inspectors in LADBS may be unique to Los Angeles due to the
history and subculture of the region, the culture of this particular organization, as
well as the changes introduced by the department’s new general manager, Andrew
A. Adelman. These changes include an emphasis on service delivery and respect for
the department’s “customers,” but the commitment to sound building practice
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remains. The quality of building inspection and code enforcement by LADBS seem
optimal, but this conclusion is unverifiable empirically. In reality, only the
consequences of the next earthquake or major fire will show what level of building
safety has been attained.
One way to compare the picture of building inspectors and of the building
inspection process obtained from this study is to consider the transferability of the
characteristics of the LADBS to other jurisdictions. The difficulty in doing so is that
the LADBS, like many elements of local government in the city of Los Angeles,
occupies a unique status within the universe of local building departments. The
unique history with a range of hazards faced by the city and its pioneering efforts to
address them has made it a model for other departments within the state, the nation,
as well as around the world.1 The different histories of local hazards—and local
politics—makes it likely that other jurisdictions even with the same type of
orientations nevertheless may give them different weighting. Despite the uniqueness
of the LADBS, it nevertheless can and does serve as a “role model” for building
departments in other jurisdictions, especially within but also outside California.
One could make the argument that building departments wanting to learn
from the LADBS example would benefit by accepting the diversity of types among
their own building inspectors. That is, rather than emphasizing professionalism and
a customer-orientated approach to contractors, builders, and property owners for all
their inspectors, other departments would strengthen their code enforcement
3 The longstanding working relationships between building officials in Los Angeles and their
counterparts in Japanese cities regarding seismic hazards is one example.
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objectives by recognizing the potential contributions of each of the three types of
inspectors described here in ideal-typical fashion. Traditional, “by the book”
bureaucratic type inspectors assure continuity and consistency in code enforcement.
Professionally oriented inspectors relate best to the most “sophisticated” customers
(typically those involved in the biggest and most highly visible projects). The heroic
Don Quixote type inspector with the zealousness of a “safety prophet” may be good
not only for setting a high standard for code enforcement and building practice but
also for “spreading the word” and proselytizing about safety. Deploying inspectors
of differing types on assignments best suited for each may be a short-run strategy
while awaiting the effects of turn-over and recruitment to staff the department with
the desired type of building official.
The desirability of attempting to recreate an organization along the optimal
lines of the LADBS in cultures different from that of the U.S. is also questionable.
While the professional model may be the preferred one for Western cultures where
the sort o f instrumental rational described by Max Weber is predominate in business
and governmental transactions, the bureaucratic and heroic models may have their
place in cultures where other action orientations prevail (e.g., value rationality and
tradition). It may very well be that a building inspector who has a heroic outlook
may be preferable in a developing region with a theocratic or religion-based polity.
Like a prophet, such a safety zealot can preach the word (of safety) and be a
protagonist who leads a movement to improve deficient and questionable building
standards. In much of the world, traditional construction practices have resulted in a
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built environment with an overabundance of unreinforced masonry buildings,
notorious death traps in earthquakes of even the most moderate magnitude. It may
take a quasi-religious prophet to convince the masses if not the elites that the
potential loss of life is much higher than it needs to be and that the only recourse is
not just to see that state-of-the art building codes are “on the books” but more
importantly that these codes have a reasonable chance of being implemented on a
daily basis.
Institutional Aspects of Regulatory Bureaucracy
Finally, the results of this study of regulation at the street level suggest that
some of the conclusions about the rigidity of regulatory bureaucracy in the United
States reached by those less familiar with the day-to-day goings on in organizations
such as the Los Angeles department of building and safety may be overstated. A
standard view of the stifling nature of regulatory bureaucracy in democratic polities
such as the U.S. in contrast to the supposedly greater flexibility in similar
organizations in European parliamentary polities is presented by Moe and Caldwell
(1994). According to these authors, the institutional difference between regulation in
the American democratic model of government and regulation in parliamentary
governments is that:
1. In a separation of powers system [as in the U.S.], due largely to the way
authority is divided and checked, formalization works exceedingly well
to protect political interests... The result is a government buried in
bureaucracy: its agencies denied the discretion they need for effective
performance, hamstrung by restrictive rules and procedures, and
insulated from meaningful democratic control.
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2. In a parliamentary system, due largely to its concentration o f power,
formalization does not work to protect political interests or solve
commitment problems, and it is not an attractive strategy in the politics
of structure... The result is a government whose agencies are granted
lots of discretion, built to do their jobs well, and coordinate within a
coherent system of democratic control. (Moe and Caldwell 1994, p.
192)
The picture of the regulatory process presented here, at least in the specific
instance of the LADBS and the work of its building inspectors, is somewhat
different. Building codes are developed within a bureaucratic structure, to be sure.
These codes are subject to the influence of various interest groups at various stages
in the process of recommendation, adoption, and final enactment. Those sections of
the building code that pertain primarily to aesthetic concerns (for the preservation of
community design and beauty, for example) are treated differently than those
sections of the code having to do with basic principles of construction. The laws of
gravity and of nature are not subject to manipulation by any interest group.
However, there is no indication here that influence politics is present at every stage
of the process and at every level on the organizations involved in it. Certainly at the
street level, this study found no indication that enforcement personnel (i.e., building
inspectors) in this regulatory bureaucracy were responsive to the wishes o f powerful
interests on matters of basic structural integrity. There was discretion evident on the
part of inspectors, contrary to the assertion of Moe and Caldwell. However, the
flexibility shown was in working with builders and contractors to achieve rather than
subvert the aims of regulation.
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Thus the overall conclusion of Moe and Caldwell that the American
government system .. [t]end[s] to bury its regulatory agencies in excessive
bureaucracy and deny them the discretion they need to do their jobs well” is not
supported. Nor did this study find building code enforcement to be “formal,
legalistic, adversarial—and ineffective.” Although a “formal, legalistic, and
adversarial” approach to building inspection may have been condoned or even
encouraged by LADBS managers in the past, the present departmental administration
encourages inspectors to treat the builders and contractors as “customers” that the
inspectors are to assist in the completion, not the hindrance, of building projects.
This researcher concluded that the LADBS inspections witnessed were conducted in
the opposite manner; namely, they were nonadversarial and seemingly highly
effective.
Of course, a definitive comparison of regulatory processes in nation-states
having different political structures has not been attempted here. This study is
limited to a single municipal agency (albeit an large and important one in this area of
public policy) and a small purposive sample. Other organizations and different
methods are necessary for a more definitive analysis. The findings presented here
are only suggestive—but encouraging nevertheless.
Future Research
Future research could well go in several different directions. One such
worthwhile project on building inspectors and the implementation of building codes
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would be a cost-benefit analysis of code enforcement. This type of research would
complement the present qualitative field study with a quantitative analysis. Cost-
benefit analysis may resolve issues raised by an ethnographic study such as this one.
“Hard numbers” and “dollars and cents” are more persuasive in the policy arena than
are materials gathered in field research. Cost-benefit analysis may be used to verify
the effectiveness and efficiency of the type of inspection process described here, thus
giving building officials more “ammunition” to support this approach to the
inspection process and to public safety.
Another worthwhile line of future research would be ex post facto analyses of
several various natural disasters that have occurred in areas having roughly the same
building codes “on the books” but with different enforcement policies. Earthquakes
in Turkey and Taiwan in recent years are two examples. By comparing the losses in
such disasters with the cost of code enforcement, one could demonstrate the benefits
of money and emphasis devoted to building code enforcement. Such analyses need
not be confined to cross-national comparisons. It also would be worthwhile to
examine comparative enforcement practices among other building departments in the
United State. The frequency of damaging hurricanes along the Atlantic and Gulf
Coasts provide numerous opportunities to repeat the type of field study carried out
here in jurisdictions with differing reputations for their approaches to the same
hazard.
This study involved the interviewing and observation of a purposive sample
of building inspectors from the different divisions within the LADBS. Whatever
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other selection biases that may or may not have resulted from the manner in which
they were chosen, it is likely that the inspectors who volunteered for this study were
more self-confident and more open than those who did not. This could mean that
they were very likely some of the best of the building inspectors in the department.
As a complement to this study, future research on the same topic should employ
different sampling designs. For example, a simple random sample of inspectors
would allow an examination of the precise distribution of the three inspector types
described here, the bureaucratic, the professional, and the heroic.
Other studies might focus on the “worst” of the building inspectors, as
defined by mid- and upper-level department managers. Although such a focus would
require some finesse on the part of the researchers, it could yield rich data on the
background, mindset, and regulatory orientation of employees that the department
would prefer to avoid in the future. Going one step further, a future study might be
devoted to locating and interviewing building inspectors who “went bad” in some
fashion such as having been accused of corruption or some other pernicious conduct.
This would involve tracking down inspectors who were fired from the department,
asked to leave, or convicted of malfeasance in their role as inspector. Examining
what went wrong in the careers of former employees may shed light on management
practices that proved unsuccessful as well as on the failings of individual inspectors
in positions of responsibility and public trust.
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Conclusion
The safety of the built environment is as good as the quality of building
practice in its construction. Building codes represent agreed upon standards for safe
construction and reconstruction. Since individual citizens lack both the time and
expertise to assure that the structure that they inhabit are as safe as existing
knowledge and practice can make them, they rely on government—principally local
government—to undertake this responsibility. Ultimately it is the building
inspector—a street-level safety bureaucrat—who is responsible for seeing that the
“acceptable” level of safety is achieved. Who these people are, how the came to be
building inspectors, and how they go about their jobs have been the subjects of the
present study.
Government has a compelling interest in maintaining the safety of the
infrastructure of buildings, bridges, and other structure that support the social and
economic activities of its citizenry. Assuming responsibility for structural safety
reflects the belief that the market alone is an insufficient guarantor of safety, at least
in the short run. Whereas private enterprise can choose to walk away form a failed
structure, treating it as a failed business, government, charged with maintaining the
public safety and well-being, cannot walk away from a disastrous fire, building
collapse, earthquake, or other similar calamity. Based upon this researcher’s
experience in carrying out the present study, the citizens of Los Angeles should be
encouraged that, even though they might not find every provision of the city’s
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building code embodied in every inch o f the built environment, the underlying goals
of that code are being pursued everyday by its building inspectors.
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Appendix A
Interview Guide
N o Leading Q uestions; Seek narratives;
Explain to Interview ee:
1. Purpose and nature o f interview , [explain w hy, and w ho you are]
2. Interview ee w ill rem ain anonym ous and all responses are in strict
confidence.
3. M ay I tape record this conversation
4. W hat is your training, background and experience?
H ow do you relate to the other trades? Other inspectors? A & E ’s?
C ities?
W hat do you tell people w ho do not have a good understanding about
building inspection? In other w ords w hat is a quick answ er.
W hat is the long answ er o f w hat, “w hat do you do”?
H ow do you keep current w ith the trade? Journals, sch ool, CE etc?
Are you a m em ber o f ICBO ? W hat do you think o f Com bined
Inspectors?
W hat do you see as the major “issu e” for building inspection?
W hat is the first that that you look for at the inspection site? “red flag”?
D o you have a “pet” issue that you look for?
W hat do you do if you think that som ething is either hidden or shielded
from you on purpose? In other w ords w hat do you do if you think that
you are being had by the builder?
149
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
W hat is the m ost gratifying or exciting thing about your job? Least?
W hat is the m ost distasteful or unpleasant aspect o f you job?
H ave the changes in the bureau o f late changed how you do you
inspection?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Appendix B
Inspectors interviewed:
TR
BD
HT
CH
LV
AG
DJ
MP
FH
WD
Trades represented by the building inspectors
Plumbing
Electrical
Heating Ventilating & Air Conditioning
Sign Installation
Building Structural
Enforcement
Supervisor
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Appendix C
Glossary and Definitions
A&E Architect and engineers
BI Building inspector
BMI Building mechanical inspector
BOCA Building Officials and Code Administration
CO Certificate of Occupancy (a document issued to a building owner
after completion of construction and approval after a final
inspection)
HVAC Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning
ICBO International Congress of Building Officials
IBC International Building Code
LADBS Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety
NBC National Building Code
NECA National Electrical Code of America
NFPA National Fire Prevention Association
Re-bar Reinforcing bar of steel place in concrete to strengthen the material
SBCCI Southern Building Code Congress International
UBC Uniform Building Code
UPC Uniform Plumbing Code
152
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Asset Metadata

Creator Doerstling, Karl Wolfgang (author)

Core Title Building inspectors: Bureaucrats, professionals or heroes?

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Public Administration

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,Political Science, public administration

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Stallings, Robert A. (committee chair), Jones, Burton (committee member), Tang, Shui-Yan (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-361296

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Legacy Identifier 3103881.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Doerstling, Karl Wolfgang

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA