Fluent Essays

Week 1 - Assignment 1: Write a Memo About Basic Concepts and Theories Related to Public Management Instructions Suppose you are a department head for the city government in which you live (or another city, if you wish) and you sit on a committee with other city government department heads (i.e., police chief, utilities director, etc.). The purpose of the committee is to resolve problems and discuss issues related to management and organization. One week, the committee discussed its need to know more about some of the basic concepts and theories related to public management (basically, concepts related to the readings you’ve just completed this week). When your colleagues expressed a concern about their lack of expertise in this area, you volunteered to do some analysis of scholarly material related to this topic to brief your colleagues on themes and theories relevant to this topic. The committee chair asked you to present your findings in a memo form. In order to develop an effective memo, you decide to: discuss five key principles related to the basic concepts and theories of public management that you learned from the readings this week; and apply them to administration in a local government context. Write this memo in a way that presents your knowledge of this topic. Address it to the committee chair (Mr. Xing) and your other department head colleagues. Be sure to cite the resources that you used at the end of the memo. Length: 3-4 pages References: Include a minimum of four scholarly resources.   Cook, B. J. (2007). Democracy and administration. Woodrow Wilson’s ideas and the challenges of public management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins... Frederickson, H. G., Smith, K. B., Larimer, C. W., & Licari, M. J. (2016). The public administration theory primer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rainey, H. G., & Cook, M. (2014). Understanding and managing public organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Your memo should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts that are presented in the course and provide new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect graduate-level writing and APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University's Academic Integrity Policy. Week 2 - Assignment: Analyze a Case Study on Management and Organizational Behavior Hide Folder Information Turnitin® Turnitin® enabledThis assignment will be submitted to Turnitin®. Instructions On the first page of the Cincinnati Enquirer on March 20, 2018 (see the Horn (2018) resource this week), was an article that explained some significant issues in the city government in Cincinnati, namely between the mayor and city manager. This article discusses this case and explains the way in which the city charter was developed. Read this article and summarize the problem(s). While every problem is complex (and cannot be clearly or completely articulated in just one article), consider the main issues involved and provide three plausible solutions. Discuss the impact of these solutions, and then recommend one solution to help Cincinnati’s political quagmire be resolved. Follow this format: Write an introductory paragraph. Summarize the problem in the case study. Provide three plausible solutions to the problem. Analyze the impact of these three plausible solutions. Recommend which solution you suggest should be implemented and articulate reasons for your recommendation. Write a conclusion paragraph. In your paper, please use clear, bolded headings to separate the paper into sections. Length: 3-5 pages References: Include a minimum of two scholarly resources, including the article. Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course and provide new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University's Academic Integrity Policy. i n t r o d u c t i o n Power and Public Management Sheldon Wolin begins his rich and stimulating account of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought with an assessment of the emergence of modernity and the ties between modern political theory and modern power. The proliferation of the vol- ume and forms of power was one distinctive milestone in the birth of modern society. In classical and medieval worldviews, power was finite. Individuals and various social groups contended for this scarce resource so that they could enforce their particular conceptions of the well-ordered society (Wolin 2001, 13). The ascent of western civilization, including advancements in science and technology, in economic orga- nization, and in world exploration, along with the growth of populations energized by new social, economic, and political ideas, brought a shift in perspective ‘‘from the acquisition of power to its production.’’ Further, whereas classical political theorists had to contend primarily with the problem of how to preserve and ration power to stave off the chaos of an otherwise uncivilized world, modern political theorists faced the problem of ‘‘a growing sense of helplessness amid a world bursting with new forces’’ (15). The challenge was to bring the profusion of powers into harness. ‘‘The modern project was not to renounce the commitment to increasing power but to find a saving formula whereby it could be rendered ever more predictable, ever more obedient’’ (18). That project of modern theorists involved hierarchical organization and extensive administrative arrangements dedicated to the ‘‘pursuit of truth’’ under centralized direction and control (26). This in turn defined the lives of individuals in modern society around their roles ‘‘as workers, employees, administered beings, and occasional citizens’’ (30). In Wolin’s view, the project of modernity—of modern theorists—was to expunge Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 2 d e m o c r a c y a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i o n ‘‘the political’’ from society. Many and diverse individuals politically engaged meant that power would be uncontrolled and fragmented, and conflict rampant. The aim of developing politically thoughtful, politically mature citizens could in the end only undermine good social order. Wolin thus depicts a developmental dynamic for human society in which individuals first lived in subjugation to the singular power held by a family, clan, or absolute monarch. Then, in the modern age, with power multiple and abundant, the lives of individuals became defined by the influence of multitudinous powers consolidated in the hands of a central state and its similarly centralized and bureaucratized appendages of economy and technology—princi- pally the corporation and the university—which were meant to ensure the contin- uous generation of power as nearly an end in itself. This is a tale told best by Karl Marx. Yet even Marx ‘‘envisaged . . . a system for exploiting the power potentialities of modern science and industry, a system that held a promise of the continuous repro- duction of power’’ (18). Wolin’s biography of Tocqueville is built on his well-established concern for the waning prospects that modern society will choose an alternative path to a demonstra- bly more democratic, more participatory, more political future. His emphasis is on Tocqueville’s titanic and ultimately failed struggle against central elements of the modernity project. Tocqueville sought to preserve valuable vestiges of ‘‘the classical notion of culture as shared and publicly accessible, a preparation for participation in the polity, and hence inseparable from civic life’’ (29) and to reconcile them with the reality that modernity, including the rise of the idea of mass democracy, had forever changed the world. Without such a theoretical reconciliation, however, the great mass of the people would find no collective pathway to control of hierarchical power but would instead remain subjugated to it in their multiple, fragmented roles requir- ing only occasional citizenship. Through the lens of Tocqueville’s theoretical jour- ney, Wolin thus sends us a clear warning that our identity as politically self-aware beings, energetically engaged in self-rule and the shaping of our collective future prospects, is rapidly vanishing from common experience. w o o d r ow w i l s o n ’ s m o d e r n i t y p r o j e c t In his second book, The State, based to a considerable extent on his first set of lectures on administration, Woodrow Wilson offered his own rendition of the drama related by Wolin. In Wilson’s version, the first act had much the same plot. Families, clans, and tribes were part of the developmental ascent of human civilization to nation-states, with individuals merely subjects serving the state as embodied by absolutist monarchs. Wilson’s second act introduced a striking twist, however. He Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . p o w e r a n d p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t 3 recounted what he called the ‘‘modern de-socialization’’ of the state (Wilson 1890, 645–46). The relationship between the state and the individual had turned upside down, such that ‘‘ ‘The individual for the State’ had been reversed and made to read, ‘The State for the individual’ ’’ (Wilson 1890, 646; see also Link et al. 1968, 5:688). The result was the emergence of ‘‘new ideas as to what constitutes social conve- nience and advancement.’’ In adopting many such ideas, the modern state’s aim was ‘‘to aid the individual to the fullest and best possible realization of his individuality, instead of merely to the full realization of his sociality. Its plan is to create the best and fairest opportunities for the individual; and it has discovered that the way to do this is by no means itself to undertake the administration of the individual by old- time futile methods of guardianship’’ (Wilson 1890, 646–47, emphasis in original). Wilson saw the modern state as marshalling power to minister to society in accord with new ‘‘standards of convenience or expediency’’ (Link et al. 1968, 5:671, emphasis in original; see Wilson 1890, 638). But what was the nature of this modern power? Wilson was at best evasive on the question. Nearly two decades later, however, writing on ‘‘Education and Democracy’’ (see Link et al. 1974, 17:131–36), Wilson described three primary modern powers: science, or more precisely ‘‘exact science applied’’; economic enterprise and the drive for competition and profit; and admin- istration, the ‘‘coordination of organizations’’ in both the private and public spheres (Thorsen 1988, 176). These modern powers were progressive in the sense that they facilitated adjustments to changing conditions, but the social progress they moti- vated, especially the first two powers, was generally ‘‘the expression of anarchy and selfishness’’ (179). Administration was already bringing them under some discipline, for administration was cooperation and coordination; Wilson contended that coop- eration ‘‘is the law of all action in the modern world’’ (Link et al. 1974, 17:135). But to integrate the three powers fully in order to constitute harmonious and cooperative national, and eventually international, progress required ‘‘the growth of a fourth power, the power of leadership’’ (Thorsen 1988, 179). From the earliest steps in the progression of his political thought, Wilson had accepted the reality of a modern world of new conditions and flux in the fortunes of men, ‘‘a kinetic society, a sociogram of forces of unprecedented weight and extent, actual and latent, thrusting ceaselessly, colliding and absorbing, but always trans- forming and being transformed,’’ as Wolin has described it (2001, 14). In the further development of this thinking, Wilson conceived an evolutionary ascent for demo- cratic states characterized by the accumulation of habits and character over a long period but also the need for adaptation and adjustment to changing conditions. Such adjustments and adaptations brought with them the accumulation of social and political experience that was the basis of law. Modernity brought an unprece- Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 4 d e m o c r a c y a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i o n dented acceleration in this dynamic, with increasing demands and pressures on individuals from such forces as technological advancements, the development of large and dominating economic entities, burgeoning international migration, and rapid urbanization. Simultaneous with the very first vestiges of modernity’s arrival came the embrace of the idea of mass democracy and the eventual expectation of most peoples around the world that they would have some hand in determining how society would respond to modern conditions and thus how their lives would be shaped. In the United States, the Civil War was a clear marker for the beginning of the effects of modernity. The war’s end and subsequent territorial development had also brought with them the distinctive growth of an increasingly strong American nationalism and, with the completion of the settlement of western lands, the turn toward global engagement. For Wilson, the integration and coordination of modern powers was an enterprise of creation and innovation. Such ‘‘governing power’’ (Thorsen 1988, 65)—what Wil- son thought was the proper understanding of the meaning of sovereignty—belonged in the hands of political leaders. In his 1891 lecture on sovereignty, Wilson distin- guished between power and control in the nature of democratic rule. Sovereignty ‘‘is the highest political power of a State lodged in active organs of the State for purposes of governing. Power is a positive thing; control, a negative thing. Power belongs to government, is lodged in governing organs; control belongs to the community, is lodged with the people’’ (Link et al. 1969, 7:339). This control concerned, of course, the selection of political leaders and by dint of that the ability to say no, at least on occasion, and thus the capacity to constrain the innovations of leaders. In Wilson’s view, then, the self-government expected by peoples experiencing modernity, especially the citizens of the United States, could not be the democracy of the local mass meeting, could not direct decisions on policy. This would be impossible at the national level for national purposes, for national greatness. Instead, modern mass democracy at the level of the nation would have to be, indeed already was, virtual. Citizens participated through thought and discussion. Political leaders stood at the center (Thorsen 1988, 62), interpreting the thought and discussion of the people, finding in or drawing out of the diverse and sometimes conflicting views a common opinion and community will. On the basis of this public opinion formed, leaders took initiative and action, to which citizens gave their active support, or at least their assent. Sometimes they expressed their dissent in the selection of others to lead. Wilson’s normative understanding of the nature of modern democracy was com- plex, with subtle shifts and modifications over time. But two dominant threads are evident, one political, the other social. The political one was that democracy in- Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . p o w e r a n d p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t 5 volved the choice of leaders by citizens, which implied scrutiny and discussion of the initiatives and actions of political leaders. The social one was the absence of privilege or division into status groupings or social classes. Echoing Tocqueville, Wilson referred to this as ‘‘equality of conditions’’ (see Link et al. 1974, 17:81). The two threads were intertwined, for Wilson argued that one of the most distinctive features of democracy was that the reservoir of potential leaders was the society as a whole, rather than limited pools based on wealth, class status, or privilege. Those with the requisite talents and abilities would rise above their fellow citizens and be selected to lead and exercise power. This was true even in administration, under a system of merit selection; indeed, for Wilson it was important to argue that it was especially true in administration, which under modern conditions would be increasingly domi- nated by technical specialists. Merit selection thus was consistent with modern tenets of democratic representation. For Wilson the prospect of a democratic future of increasing organization, cen- tralization, and limited, virtual, participatory rule was positive, not negative. It was the only possible road to an appropriately modern form of political democracy at a national, and eventually international, level. It was the only possible link to and means of citizen engagement in the creation and exercise of national power and the only recognizable form of national self-government that could be preserved in the modern world. The exercise of power, or more precisely the creative coordination of modern powers by government, was safely democratic because the state was oriented toward social convenience and advancement with the individual’s development in mind, because leaders came not from a special ruling class but from the people, and because statesmen could not devise and undertake actions beyond what popular thought was prepared to accept. A particularly distinctive component of Wilson’s stance on modern democratic rule was that most of the matters toward which citizen thought, discussion, and scrutiny would be directed were primarily administrative. They concerned the prin- ciples and purposes underlying national policy plans and the organization and ex- ecution of those plans. Questions concerning how the polity would be constituted had largely been settled, although the shift in national politics to an administrative center was itself an important, and necessary, reconstitution of the regime. It was a systemic reorientation that Wilson sought both to raise awareness of and to cham- pion and guide to its proper realization. In Wilson’s view, administrative power was the central focus of modern, integra- tive democratic statesmanship because administration was at the center of modern democratic politics. In the main, modern democratic politics was administration. As a political institution, administration was intimately tied to the dynamic of demo- Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 6 d e m o c r a c y a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i o n cratic progress through both its foundations ‘‘laid deep in stable principle’’ (Link et al. 1968, 5:370) as well as its accumulation of experience from the immediate and everyday adjustment to conditions as the ‘‘daily and most constant force’’ (Link et al. 1970, 9:25) of the state. The creative exercise of sovereignty—governing power— would draw on the adjustments and accumulated experience of administration, transform it into changed habits, and codify it in rules, viz., statutes and, ultimately, constitutions (Thorsen 1988, 65). The organizations of administration would carry out the laws in their executive mode, but they would continue to make adjustments in response to conditions—rapidly changing in the modern age—and thus admin- istration had ‘‘a life not resident in statutes’’ and was ‘‘indirectly a constant source of public law’’ (Link et al. 1969, 7:129, 138, emphasis deleted). As Wilson argued in both his lectures on administration and several key speeches during the 1912 presidential election, administration was especially actively engaged in defining and redefining the terms of the engagement between public and private, arguably the very essence of modern liberal democracy (Elkin 1985). One might conclude that Wilson belongs in the pantheon of minor theorists of the modernity project. He sought to facilitate in theory and in practice the establish- ment of a modern administrative state within the American polity, which in many ways was the last democratic holdout on earth against the intrusions of modern powers and the transformation of social life into an administered existence. Yet one might also conclude that, like Tocqueville, Wilson sought to preserve some vestiges of the truly political in American culture and tradition (see, for example, Seidelman 1985, 40–44). His political thought, at least in its early to middle stages, was well anchored in Tocqueville and especially Burke, who was ‘‘a historical witness to the enduring power of traditionalism in politics’’ (Thorsen 1988, 37). Despite Wilson’s ‘‘enduring bias against localism and sectionalism in almost any conceivable form’’ (180), he worked to preserve party government and the accompanying congressional prerogatives in a system of national leadership oriented principally toward the ex- ercise of administrative power. Such effort much chagrined progressives who defined national, integrative leadership as incompatible with party leadership and as the province of the executive. It was, however, the success of democracy under modern conditions through national integration and political synthesis that was Wilson’s chief concern. As he argued in Constitutional Government in the United States, his last major work of scholarship, ‘‘synthesis, not antagonism, is the whole art of govern- ment, the whole art of power’’ (Wilson 1908, 106; see also Thorsen 1988, 16). Power is thus an appropriate theme for assessing and interpreting Wilson’s ideas about democracy and administration. His modernity project was centered on getting the American polity to recognize, accept, and harness administrative power and to Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . p o w e r a n d p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t 7 define its proper sphere in a democratic regime facing the pressures, fluxes, and transformations of the new age. This was, at least from Wilson’s perspective, a project of progress and transformation of the political, not its exorcism. The centering of political thought and political action on administration and the positioning of the people outside the sphere of immediate and day-to-day initiative and action in governing was in Wilson’s analysis the inexorable outcome of the evolution of the modern democratic state. Although there might be many practices of businesslike efficiency universally applicable across regimes, matters of social convenience and advancement—even the associated organizational arrangements and administrative practices—were fundamentally of a political nature and regime-specific. The enter- prise was not just a matter of insuring the ‘‘democratic accountability’’ of govern- ment bureaucracy in the rather reductionist sense that seems to dominate current political thinking and practice. Political leadership would link administrative exper- tise, political habits and traditions, public thought, and political experience in a grand, creative synthesis that would fortify and enrich democracy—make it more democratic—in the only way possible under the conditions of modernity. In all this one may find a very compelling way of understanding Wilson’s forty- year project of scholarship, public rhetoric, and national and international states- manship. But what of its relevance to modern public management? p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t a n d m o d e r n p ow e r Public management as currently conceived by many scholars and practitioners is the heir to Norton Long’s effort to focus administrative theory and practice on matters of power (see Kettl 2002, 79). Long argued that ‘‘power is only one of the considerations that must be weighed in administration, but of all it is the most overlooked in theory and the most dangerous to overlook in practice’’ (1949, 257). Long principally focused on the deployment of power in practice, and his was a modern power orientation in Wolin’s sense of the term. Long wanted theorists and practitioners to attend to the power production problem—how administrators could generate an adequate amount of power that would allow them to put public policies into effect. Administrators could not rely for their power solely on the authority granted by Congress and the president in statutes and executive orders or on the power inherent in the bureaucratic structure of hierarchy and command. In order to advance the missions of their agencies, administrators had to produce power by devising strategies, creating alliances, and neutralizing opposition. This way of thinking about, and acting toward, public administration and manage- ment has become the principal focus of the executive management orientation in the Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 8 d e m o c r a c y a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i o n study and practice of public management (see, for example, Heymann 1987). Its special focus is high-level political appointees. But Long made no distinction be- tween high-level, politically appointed executives and career middle managers in his advocacy of a power orientation toward practice. Career executives and managers also had to be concerned with the matter of producing enough power to effect policy change and realize public outcomes. In an important sense, Long’s orientation bridged what subsequently became something of a bifurcation in the field of public management. The currently dominant conceptualization of the field of public man- agement in both study and practice thus can be said to combine the executive management focus on strategies and tactics aimed at advancing agency missions with the mantra of performance that places the onus for the measurement and demonstra- tion of results on middle managers (see Rainey 1990; Brudney, O’Toole, and Rainey 2000, 4–6; Behn 2001, 23–27; but also see Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). Public management thus consists of public executives and managers employing ‘‘judgment or discretion’’ (Lynn 2000, 15) in the design and deployment of organiza- tional, fiscal, financial, budgetary, analytical, and human capital resources and tech- niques. Together the actions of executives and managers constitute the harnessing of what Wilson called the power of organization and coordinated effort—the power of administration. Indeed, in modern public management, especially under the aus- pices of the ‘‘New Public Management,’’ public executives and managers attempt to harness Wilson’s other modern powers—exact science applied, economic enterprise —in their efforts. But to what end is all this directed? Presumably the ‘‘public’’ in public management refers to public purposes or the public good. On this basis, even individuals running purely private entities are public managers if they are engaged in pursuing a public purpose (see, for example, Behn 1997, 3–8). One might regard executives and managers of even the most private of entities—profit-making enterprises—as public managers because they pro- duce goods or services people enjoy and value, and the wealth they generate directly improves the lives of those associated with their enterprises and thus indirectly improves the lives of their communities and even society at large. Many of the largest and most influential for-profit enterprises fall into a public classification—joint-stock companies are public corporations, chartered by state governments, and their direc- tors have obligations to both the company owners and the relevant public authori- ties. More important, it was almost standard doctrine of both the populist and progressive eras that publicly chartered corporations had to operate, and have their behavior evaluated, with an eye toward the public interest. Wilson pressed this view quite strenuously, as when he envisioned in his 1910 American Political Science Association presidential address an era combining the statesmanship of thought and Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 0 7 . Jo h n s H o p ki n s U n iv e rs ity P re ss . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . p o w e r a n d p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t 9 of action, in which ‘‘even corporations may seem instrumentalities, not objects in themselves, and the means may presently appear whereby they may be made the servants, not the masters, of the people’’ (Link et al. 1976, 22:271–72). The academic literature on public management includes an extensive debate over what the differences between public and private management are, and whether they are really meaningful (see, for example, the brief treatment in Rainey 1990, 160, 161–62). Getting caught up in that debate would be counterproductive, however. It is more useful to consider the matter of public versus private management from the perspective of the exercise of power. From this we can begin to see the value of a comprehensive reconsideration and reinterpretation of Wilson’s ideas as part of the continued development, especially in the United States, of scholarly and practi- tioner thinking about public management. Both private, corporate managers and public managers (including those in not- for-profit entities) wield administrative power. In many instances, they wield that power for public purposes. For public managers, the public purposes for which they wield administrative power are always in contention. The public purposes for which private managers exercise administrative power also may be … 40 2: Th eories of Political Control of Bureaucracy foundered, by common consent, but for various alleged reasons: It was em- pirically untrue to what happens and is impossible to operationalize; it was presumptuous if not impious, putting profane hands on a sacred scheme; it concealed ethical problems and encouraged illegal action. So, formally or os- tensibly, we put the dichotomy aside. But at the same time, it lingers, both as an idea and as a practice. And I don’t judge the lingering as simple inertia, a cultural lag. Th e twofold schema has too much going for it in logic and useful- ness simply to disappear. We do, commonsensically, decide and execute, set policy and administer. (1986, 153) Th eories of political control of bureaucracy are, in sum, among the most em- pirically robust and theoretically elegant in public administration. Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 41 3 Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics Introduction: What Are Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics? Th eories of bureaucratic politics seek to explain the policymaking role of ad- ministration and bureaucracy. Such frameworks typically reject the politics- administration dichotomy underpinning theories of bureaucratic control, viewing this division as an analytical convenience that imposes too steep a cost on theoretical development. Specifi cally, the price of making theory more tracta- ble by separating administration from politics is held to be a willful ignorance of the central role of bureaucracy within the polity’s power structure. Since bureaucracies and bureaucrats routinely engage in political behavior, the need to account theoretically for the bureaucracy’s political role is justifi ed. Politics is generically defi ned as the authoritative allocation of values, or the pro- cess of deciding “who gets what, when and how” (Easton 1965; Lasswell 1936). Numerous studies confi rm that bureaucracies and bureaucrats routinely allocate values and decide who gets what, that bureaucracies logically engage in “politics of the fi rst order” (Meier 1993, 7). Th eories of bureaucratic politics therefore be- gin by accepting what has long been empirically observed; that is, in practice, ad- ministration is not a technical and value-neutral activity separable from politics. Administration is politics (Waldo 1948). Accordingly, theories of bureaucratic politics seek to breach the orthodox di- vide between administration and politics and attempt to drag the former into a systematic accounting with the latter. Th at traditional theoretical frameworks ac- count poorly for bureaucracy’s obvious and repeatedly observed political role has long been recognized. Even scholars traditionally credited with describing and supporting the politics-administration divide were well aware of the political role the bureaucracy plays, and the rigidity of the division accepted as their legacy has been described as a caricature of their arguments. Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow, who both wrote at a time when public bureaucracies were ripe with patronage, incompetence, and even outright corruption, were well aware that Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 42 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics politics and administration represented a synthesis rather than two neatly separa- ble portions of the public policy enterprise (Lynn 2001). Other prominent public administration scholars argued during the fi rst half of the twentieth century that administrative theory had to account for politics, both in recognition of bureau- cracy’s real-world role and as a necessary element to building better explanatory frameworks within the discipline. Among the most prominent of these was John Gaus (1931). He observed that federal agencies not only carried out clearly understood directives from Congress but also independently shaped those directives and exercised discretionary poli- cymaking authority while translating the vague intentions of statutes into specifi c government actions. Bureaucracy obviously wields political power. Th is being so, those who sought to understand public agencies could not simply carve off administration from politics and leave the complexities of the latter to political theorists. If bureaucracies were helping to determine the will of the state, they were inescapably political institutions, and Gaus argued that administrative the- ory ignored this fact at its peril. Most famously, in the fi nal sentence of an essay in Public Administration Review, he threw down an implied gauntlet to those who would fashion a theory of administration: “A theory of public administra- tion means in our time a theory of politics also” (1950, 168). Gaus thus succinctly summarized the purpose of theories of bureaucratic politics. As the broader intellectual history of political theory makes clear, this is a dif- fi cult objective, and for more than half a century students of public administra- tion have had mixed success in meeting Gaus’s challenge. Th e issues raised here are more complex than those at the heart of the theories of bureaucratic control. Th e goal is not to locate the dividing line between politics and administration because no such line exists, nor is it to ascertain how bureaucracies can be made accountable to their democratic masters, although this is a question of some im- portance to theories of bureaucratic politics. Questions of political power are the central focus: • To what extent do administrative processes, as opposed to democratic pro- cesses, determine public policy? • Who controls or infl uences the exercise of bureaucratic power? • What is the role of bureaucracy in representing and advancing the goals of particular clientele groups or organized interests? • To what extent do elective institutions and elected offi cials seek to shape and control administration as a means to advance their own political interests? • What is the source of bureaucratic power? • How does the important political role of nonelected institutions based in hierarchy and authority square with the fundamental values of democracy? If anything has been learned by the eff orts expended on developing theories of bureaucratic politics, it is that such questions have no easy answers. Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 43Administrative Th eory as Political Th eory Nevertheless, numerous studies have confi rmed the need for systematic frameworks accounting for the political role of the bureaucracy. Several re- sponses to this need have provided important insights into the political role of the bureaucracy, and in doing so, signifi cantly expanded our understanding of public administration. Administrative Th eory as Political Th eory Th e seminal work that justifi ed the need for a theory of bureaucratic politics is Dwight Waldo’s Th e Administrative State (1948). Waldo did not construct a the- ory of bureaucratic politics in this book, but here and in later writings he made two critical contributions that have supported all subsequent eff orts to do so. First, he undertook a devastating critique of the extant research literature. He argued that public administration scholarship revolved around a core set of be- liefs that cumulatively served to constrain theoretical development. Key among these were the beliefs that effi ciency and democracy were compatible and that the work of government could be cleanly divided into separate realms of decision and execution. Th ese beliefs led public administration scholars to champion effi ciency as the central goal of public agencies, to develop a “science” of administration to maximize that effi ciency, and to ignore the political ramifi cations of these beliefs and the prescriptions they implied. Second, and probably more important, Waldo argued that administrative scholarship was itself driven by a particular philosophy of politics. A good por- tion of Th e Administrative State is devoted to examining the scholarly public administration literature through the lens of fi ve key issues in political philos- ophy: (1) the nature of the Good Life, or a vision of what the “good society” should look like; (2) the criteria of action, or the procedures for determining how collective decisions should be made; (3) the question of who should rule; (4) the question of how the powers of the state should be divided and appor- tioned; and (5) the question of centralization versus decentralization, or the relative merits of a unitary state versus a federal system. Waldo concluded that public administration scholarship was anchored by well-developed responses to all of these issues. Like theorists from Machiavelli to Marx, public administration scholars had a vision of what the “good society” looks like: It is industrial, urban, and centrally planned; it has no poverty, no cor- ruption, and no extremes of wealth. Science is its ideal, and waste and ineffi ciency are its enemy. Th ese same scholars also had a clear preference for the criteria of action: A scientifi c analysis of the facts should decide what should be done. Public administration orthodoxy espoused particularly fi rm beliefs about who should rule: “Th e assertion that there is a fi eld of expertise which has, or should have, a place in and claim upon the exercise of modern governmental functions—this is a fundamental postulate of the public administration movement” (1948, 89–90). Technocrats blessed with the requisite competence and expertise were public Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 44 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics administration’s equivalents of the Guardians in Plato’s Republic. On the par- ticularly American issues of the separation of powers and centralization versus decentralization, Waldo argued that the preferences of administration scholar- ship were equally clear: Administration scholars were hostile to the tripartite partition of power in the American system and sought to increase the power of the executive at the expense of the judiciary and the legislature. Th ey were also in favor of a centralized state. Th ey placed their faith in the competence of a professional administrator, who, given the requisite power and authority, could tackle the obstacles standing before the realization of the good life. If administration scholarship advanced such a distinct and defi nable political philosophy (some might say ideology), it raised an immediate and formidable intellectual obstacle to attempts at conceptually dividing politics and adminis- tration: How could students of administration claim that politics was largely ex- ternal to their interests when their intellectual history revealed such a systematic value-based philosophy of government? Waldo pointed out that administration is frequently claimed to be at the core of modern democratic government, and that this claim helps justify the entire discipline of public administration. If this claim has merit, it implies that democratic theory must deal with administration, and that administrative theory must deal with democratic politics. As a practical matter of explaining the operation and role of administration in government, not to mention as a point of intellectual honesty, students of administration cannot deal with the problems of politics by assuming them away. Waldo argued that administrative scholarship’s failure to incorporate poli- tics explicitly into its theoretical development was a product of its early cultural and intellectual environment. While recognizing the impossibility of cleanly dating the beginning of public administration scholarship as a self-conscious body of thought, Waldo took as his starting point such writers as Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, and Frederick W. Taylor, namely, infl uential man- agement, administration, and organization theorists who wrote near the turn of the twentieth century. Th e work of these scholars refl ected not only the dom- inant cultural values of their time but also the contemporary problems in ad- ministration they sought to address. Cultural values led them to accept science as the surest path to knowledge and commerce as the central activity of society. Th e central problems they sought to address consisted of an unappetizing stew of ineffi ciency marinating in political cronyism and seasoned with graft . One of the outcomes of these contextual forces was that, from the beginning, students of administration adopted effi ciency as their guiding principle. Th e term was vaguely defi ned, though “effi cient administration” clearly meant “good ad- ministration.” When administration scholars operationalized the concept, they mainly seemed to be talking about an input-output ratio, the most output for the least input being the implied objective (Waldo 1948, 201–202). A “good” decision or administrative act was thus one that maximized outputs for a given set of inputs. As Waldo pointed out, this is a concept fundamental to businesses Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 45Administrative Th eory as Political Th eory operating in capitalistic markets, but it is not nearly so important to democratic government. Equity, consensus, or the satisfaction of particular interests is fre- quently the criterion for action in democratic processes, and none of these crite- ria is necessarily effi cient; indeed, these criteria are oft en inescapably ineffi cient. Yet, as administration scholars accepted effi ciency as their central principle, they also accepted democracy—a notoriously ineffi cient basis of organization—as the central principle of the American political system. Th is presented a problem in developing administrative theory. Th e formative era of administrative schol- arship, with its focus on the scientifi c method, its guiding principle of effi ciency, and its position in the shadow of business, meant that it developed in a decidedly undemocratic context. Not only was democracy not synonymous with effi ciency and various other business and scientifi c practices incorporated into public ad- ministration orthodoxy, but also it was quite possibly hostile to them (Waldo 1952, 85). How could the principle central to the American political system be squared with the forces driving the theoretical development of public administra- tion as a discipline? Waldo argued that the founders of public administration solved the conun- drum by accepting democracy as the guiding principle of the American po- litical system, but keeping it external to their professional interests through the politics-administration dichotomy. By separating the work of government into two distinct operations and limiting their attention to the “nonpolitical” element, administration scholars were free to push for centralized power in the executive branch, to prescribe hierarchical and authoritarian bureaucracies as the basis for organizing public agencies, and to call for passing greater responsibilities to the technocrat. As long as these reforms increased effi ciency in administration, and administration was kept separate from politics, theoretically the discipline did not have to square the contradictions these arguments presented to the egalitar- ian ideals of democracy. As Waldo was careful to point out, the founders of public administration were not ideologically opposed to democracy. Th ey were progressive reform- ers who embraced the romantic ideal of democracy as the “best” or “proper” form of government. Th e reality they faced at the time, however, was a public administration characterized by disorganization, amateurism, and dishonesty. Nineteenth-century reforms springing from the presidency of Andrew Jackson had dispersed and factionalized the power of government. Elected offi cials multi- plied, the legislature took precedence over the executive, and government agencies were staff ed through the spoils system. If administration were the core of govern- ment, the net result of these reforms created a serious problem for democracy in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century: a public administration shot through with incompetence, ripe for corruption. For public administration to gain competency and effi ciency, it would have to cleanse itself of politics and learn the lessons of science and business. Good administration (and thus good government) could best be promoted by centralizing and concentrating power; Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 46 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics by running agencies according to sound, scientifi c management principles; by making technical competence the criterion for civil service employment; and by shielding these technical experts from whatever winds happened to be stirring the dust in the political arena. Waldo thus viewed the political philosophy inherent in public administration scholarship not as an attempt to usurp democracy, but as a necessary corrective to save it. As Waldo put it, “Democracy if it were to survive, could not aff ord to ignore the lessons of centralization, hierarchy, and discipline. Put bluntly, it was the maxim ‘Autocracy during hours is the price of democracy aft er hours’” (1952, 87). Th eoretically, the undemocratic elements of administrative orthodoxy—its emphasis on effi ciency, hierarchy, and authority—could be seen in the service of democracy as long as the politics-administration orthodoxy held. An effi cient and expertly run administrative apparatus insulated from politics and under the authority of a powerful executive would increase accountability and promote ef- fective, competently run public programs and policies. If things did not work, ev- eryone would know whom to blame and why, and the representative institutions of democracy could act accordingly. Th e problem, as numerous scholars have pointed out, was that the politics- administration dichotomy did not hold. As Waldo meticulously detailed in his literature review, there was ample evidence that bureaucracies pushed some val- ues over others, that bureaucracies acted as power brokers among competing special interests, and that lawmakers were increasingly reliant on and infl uenced by the expertise and opinions of administrators. Administrative theory simply could not ignore these realities and continue to usefully shape the direction of the discipline. At a minimum, Waldo argued, the concept of democracy and all its messy implications had to be brought back into administrative theory. Ad- ministrative scholars had to recognize that their central principle—effi ciency— was not value neutral, and that its uneasy relationship with democratic principles had to be recognized (Waldo 1952, 90). Waldo suggested that continued attempts to create a science of adminis- tration would result in theoretical dead ends because “science” was, in eff ect, a code word for preserving the core principle of effi ciency, a signal for another attempt to inoculate administration against politics. In an essay in the Amer- ican Political Science Review, Waldo singled out Herbert Simon’s argument separating questions of administration into issues dealing with fact and issues dealing with values. Simon’s enormously infl uential Administrative Behavior (1947/1997) had essentially demolished the extant research seeking to defi ne and promulgate the “principles” or “laws” of a science of administration. Yet Simon sought to save the possibility of that science. He argued that it was con- ceivable if it limited its attention to decisions centered on facts (statements that can be tested to assess whether they are true or false) as opposed to values (statements that are validated by human fi at). Decisions of fact were central to the administrative realm, Simon argued, and could be scientifi cally guided Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 47Allison’s Paradigm of Bureaucratic Politics toward the overall goal of effi ciency. Waldo said that Simon was simply recast- ing the problem by substituting a logical division of politics and administration for an institutional division, and was doing so to preserve the central principle of orthodox administrative theory, namely, effi ciency. Effi ciency could not remain the discipline’s talisman against politics, Waldo argued, because administration is political. In Waldo’s perspective, effi ciency it- self is a political claim. For example, how does one assess the effi ciency of, say, a library, or the Department of Defense? If effi ciency is defi ned as an input-output ratio, one has a choice of inputs and outputs to assess effi ciency in both instances, although none is the unassailably objective “factual” option. As choosing among these options unavoidably involves values not just facts, effi ciency can hardly be value neutral (Stone 2002, 65). If public administration insisted that its orthodox principles were politically neutral, Waldo argued, it would never be rid of the theoretical straitjacket it used to restrain itself from the world of politics. Wal- do’s argument bought a tart response from Simon (1952b), but even as Simon went on the off ensive, there were signs that Waldo’s point had sunk deep into the discipline. Published concurrently with Simon’s essay was another by an equally prominent scholar—Peter Drucker (1952)—who wholeheartedly agreed with Waldo’s assessment of the fundamentally political character of large-scale organi- zations, and suggested that, if anything, Waldo had not pushed his arguments far enough (see Simon 1952a for the complete essay on this point). Waldo argued that at the heart of the problem with administrative theory is a version of the problem James Madison struggled with in Federalist No. 10: How do you preserve individual liberty without destroying the freedoms that make it possible? For Madison, it was the dilemma of constructing a government strong enough to protect individual liberty without making it vulnerable to the forces that would crush the liberties of others for their own selfi sh interests. For Waldo, “Th e central problem of democratic administrative theory, as of all democratic theory, is how to reconcile democracy . . . with the demands of authority” (1952, 102). How do we construct a theory that accommodates the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the bureaucracy, the foundation of the modern adminis- trative state and a seemingly necessary component of contemporary government, with the seemingly contradictory egalitarian, ineffi cient ideals of democracy? Waldo bestowed this grand and sweeping question upon the discipline rather than provide its answer, but the question is surely enough to justify the need to meld administrative theory with political theory, to motivate the search for a theory of bureaucratic politics. Allison’s Paradigm of Bureaucratic Politics In the two decades following the publication of Th e Administrative State (Waldo 1948), an embryonic theory of bureaucratic politics began to emerge from a series of studies examining decisionmaking in the executive branch. Th e Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:42:36. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 48 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics signifi cant claim generated by these studies was that government decisions were products of bargaining and negotiation among interested political actors. As these studies focused on the executive branch, the central player in these bar- gaining frameworks was the president. Th e president, however, was argued to have little unilateral decisionmaking power; he had to accommodate the inter- ests of the various institutional factions in the executive branch. Bureaucracies and bureaucrats, in short, played high-level politics, and usually played the game very well. Th ese studies were discursive rather than explicitly theoretical, but the par- allels between them and the contemporary work on game theory—a highly for- malized and mathematical approach to explaining behavior—are unmistakable. Th e loose bargaining framework adopted by this research quickly proved a use- ful way to organize empirical research and produced many of the raw materials for a more comprehensive theory. Th e best-known studies of this early bureau- cratic politics literature include Samuel Huntington’s Th e Common Defense (1961), Warner Schilling’s 1962 essay on the politics of national defense, and, most famously, Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power (1960). Bureaucracies and executive branch offi cials were not portrayed here as neutral agents of imple- mentation, but as active participants in determining the will of the state. Th ese studies steadily built a case for a general theory of bureaucratic politics centered on bargaining games in the executive branch. Th e fi rst serious comprehensive attempt to produce such a framework was undertaken by Graham Allison in his book Essence of Decision (1971), and fur- ther refi ned by Allison and Morton Halperin (1972). Allison’s immediate focus in Essence of Decision was explaining why the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union did what they did during the Cuban missile crisis. With a nuclear exchange at stake, these were policies of particular importance, but Alli- son was aiming well beyond the confi nes of one case study. Essentially, he posed a broad question that cut to the heart of bureaucratic politics: Why do govern- ments do what they do? In other words, how is policy made, and who determines or infl uences it? To provide general answers to these questions, Allison articu- lated three theoretical models. Th e fi rst was the rational actor model (what Allison termed “Model I,” or the classical model). Model I proposes that government decisions can be understood by viewing them as the product of a single actor in strategic pursuit of his own self-interest. Th e second model is the organizational process paradigm, or Model II, which argues that numerous actors are involved in decisionmaking, and de- cisionmaking processes are highly structured through standard operating pro- cedures (SOPs). When a problem occurs, Model I assumes that the government will identify the potential responses to that problem, assesses the consequences of those actions, and choose the action that maximizes benefi ts and minimizes costs. In contrast, Model II assumes that … 94 4: Public Institutional Th eory of garbage can theory and March and Olsen and their defense of it are the issues of theory parsimony and methodology. Both views go even deeper to issues con- cerning the philosophy of science and competing views about how to do social science. It is our view that modern institutional theory is past this debate, and the big tent conception of institutional theory covers both perspectives. Rational choice scholars applying principal-agent logic to information asymmetry and transac- tion costs in matters of public policy are doing institutional theory. So, too, are scholars doing interpretive thick descriptions of the same public policy matters. Both are studying public institutions and developing institutional theory. Summary Th e vastness of institutional theory makes it diffi cult to neatly summarize its de- velopment. One must, however, acknowledge the contributions of Wilson and March and Olsen, who point out the limitations of explaining institutional behav- ior with economics and market logic. Instead, they build theory that incorporates structure and hierarchy, individual and group behavior, professional and cultural norms, institutional longevity, and the interactions of individuals and organiza- tions with their larger political, social, and economic contexts. As a result, the framework of institutionalism can be used to explain every- thing from the behavior of bureaucrats to the diff usion of innovation across agen- cies or political jurisdictions. Earlier in this chapter, we state that today we are all institutionalists. Given the fl exibility of the framework of institutionalism, this is easy to defend. Yet because of this, institutional theory is fairly subject to the criticism that it lacks a center of gravity, a simplifying assumption. Th is is a valid criticism but should not cause us to lose sight of institutional theory’s very real ac- complishments and possibilities. Th e possibilities and limitations of institutional theory are in some ways a microcosm of the development of public management theory itself. Th ere is a growing theoretical structure, a commonly accepted set of defi nitions and agreed-upon premises, an elaborate if somewhat opaque vocabu- lary, and an increasingly iterative and cumulative body of knowledge. Above all, institutional theory highlights the unique properties and characteristics of public institutions and their problems and promises. Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 95 5 Th eories of Public Management Introduction: Developments in Public Management Th eory Although changing tastes have had some infl uence on all fi elds of theory and ap- plication, no approach to public administration has been more subject to the fads of the day than management. Th e birth of the modern fi eld coincided with the popularity of the scientifi c management of Frederick W. Taylor, the application of time-and-motion studies to public activities, and the relentless search for the one best way. Like the “Total Quality Management” of the 1980s and today’s logic of continuous improvement, scientifi c management was borrowed from business administration early in the twentieth century and applied to public administra- tion and government. Th rough time, in government much of what was understood to be scientifi c management separated itself from the more general subject of management, par- ticularly the management of the staff functions, budgeting, and personnel, and became the taproot of the modern fi eld of operations research. Half engineering and half business administration, operations research is a highly successful ap- plication of mathematics and computing power to classic business management issues, such as scheduling, pricing, quality control, effi ciency in production pro- cesses, and the delivery, warehousing, and inventory of products. Operations research is equally important in the public sector, particularly in public organi- zations for which such techniques are useful: the planning and development of weapons systems; highway and transportation systems; water and waste man- agement systems; nuclear-power-generating systems; air traffi c control systems; and large-scale data management tasks, such as the tax returns and records of the Internal Revenue Service and the management of the Social Security, Medi- care, and Medicaid systems. In contemporary theory, the applications of operations research theory is most oft en found in settings described as tightly coupled systems in which machines, equipment, or technology is coupled with human management. Th e theoretical Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 96 5: Th eories of Public Management literature on high-reliability systems, covered in Chapter 4, is also oft en an ap- plication of operations research and concepts of scientifi c management (LaPorte and Consolini 1991). Of the early features of American public administration—a merit-based civil service, the separation of administration from politics, the “principles” of admin- istration, administration as part of executive government, and the application of scientifi c management—it can be plausibly argued that both the theory and the logic of scientifi c management have been the most infl uential and enduring. Sci- entifi c management theory and logic are so persuasive in many important parts of government and the public sector that they are simply assumed, understood, and therefore usually invisible to the ordinary citizen; they are evident only when a system built on such theory and logic breaks down. When an airplane falls out of the sky, a child dies of E. coli bacteria, or a soldier dies from “friendly fi re,” the citizens and their elected leaders “see” complex public systems built and operated on the assumptions of scientifi c management. When the people “see” an airplane fall out of the sky, they oft en fail to see that at 5:00 p.m. on any workday aft er- noon in the United States, more than 300,000 people are hurtling safely through the skies at fi ve hundred miles per hour. By any reckoning, this is a scientifi c management miracle combining technology, private enterprise, and government control and management. Yet all agree that as air travel increases, these systems must be made even safer (Perrow 1999; Frederickson and LaPorte 2002). How- ever one describes it—the one best way, Total Quality Management (TQM), the high-performance organization, or continuous improvement—the legacy of sci- entifi c management is ubiquitous. In the early years of modern self-conscious public administration, scientifi c management theory and application were most oft en found in the fi eld of pub- lic works, then a close cousin of public administration. Indeed, until the 1960s the American Society of Public Administrators, the American Public Works As- sociation, and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) shared the same headquarters building on the campus of the University of Chi- cago. Leonard White’s original text (1929) contains a chapter on public works administration, and many of the early ICMA publications had to do with public works. Gradually, the two fi elds drift ed apart, engineers identifying with public works and comfortable with scientifi c management techniques, public admin- istrators identifying with the staff functions of government, such as budgeting and personnel administration, and seemingly more interested in the arts of man- agement. In the academy and in the literature—textbooks and journals— public works and public administration, with just a few exceptions, are now almost en- tirely separate (Felbinger and Whitehead 1991a, 1991b). In practice, however, every county has a department of public works; every county has extensive data management systems for property assessment; every state has elaborate social service data management systems as well as highway and other transportation systems; and the national government has engineering and systems operations Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 97Introduction: Developments in Public Management Th eory research specialists of many types. In practice, then, scientifi c management is still very much a part of public administration. Scientifi c management theory, in its original Taylorist sense and its mod- ern TQM sense, is generally in the family of decision theory. Th e purposes and characteristics of decision theory are essentially problem defi nition and problem solving—how to control air traffi c, how to operate an effi cient sanitary sewer and treatment system. Sophisticated decision theoretic models deal with goal ambiguity, resource limitations, incomplete information, and satisfi cing. We cover these topics in Chapter 7. Management theory may have elements of problem solving, but it is ordinarily understood to have to do with the study and description of directing ongoing routine activities in purposeful organizations. With the separation of public works from public administration and Herbert Simon’s assault on “the principles” in the 1950s, and the emphasis on policy anal- ysis and policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s, the subject of management lost cachet and fell off the public administration radar screen. A few blips lingered. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was some interest in generic administration, meaning essentially that management is management wherever practiced; several generic schools of business and public administration were established on the strength of this logic (Cornell, California at Irvine, California at Riverside, Ohio State, Mis- souri at Columbia and Kansas City, Brigham Young University, Yale) (Litchfi eld 1956). Most generic schools have now been discontinued or have evolved small separate and essentially autonomous departments of public administration in large business schools. Th e generic schools had virtually no eff ect on actual public administration practices or theories. Th e 1960s and 1970s saw some interest—particularly in the New Public Administration—in theories of democratic administration, including fl at hier- archies, worker self-management, project management, matrix organizations, and the elimination of competition as an incentive for work (Marini 1971; Frederickson 1980). Th ese theories have had some eff ect on practices and are commonly found in contemporary “good public management” models. Th e social equity theory found in the New Public Administration of the 1960s and 1970s has also had a long shelf life. It came along at a time of high concern for fairness in the workplace, equal employment opportunities, affi rmative action, and comparable worth. Many of these concepts became statutory, organizations and procedure to adopt these values appeared, and social equity is now widely practiced. In their assessment of the eff ects of the social equity aspects in New Public Administration, Jay Shafritz and E. W. Russell (1997) write this: From the 1970s to the present day [public administration scholars] have pro- duced an endless stream of conference papers and scholarly articles urging public administrators to show a greater sensitivity to the forces of change, the needs of clients, and the problem of social equity in service delivery. Th is has had a positive eff ect in that now the ethical and equitable treatment of citizens Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 98 5: Th eories of Public Management by administrators is at the forefront of concerns in public agencies. Reinforced by changing public attitudes, the reinventing government movement and civil rights laws, the new public administration has triumphed aft er a quarter century. Now it is unthinkable (as well as illegal), for example, to deny someone welfare benefi ts because of their race or a job opportunity because of their sex. Social equity today does not have to be so much fought for by young radicals as admin- istrated by managers of all ages. (1997, 451) From the 1950s through the 1970s, with the exception of a continuing interest in budgeting and personnel staff functions, the arguments of the New Public Ad- ministration, and a brief interest in “management by objective,” academic public administration had little to say regarding management in the practice of public administration. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the subject of management returned to public administration with a vengeance, in theory and in practice. It being understood that the most rigorous applications of management the- ory in public administration are found in operations research and public works, and that these applications are best described as decision-theoretic, we now turn to modern theories of public management. Unlike decision theory, these theories are not primarily problem solving, but are instead descriptive of management behavior or function as prescriptive guides for management improvement in the ongoing routine work of organizations. It is common in public administration theory to combine the subjects of man- agement and organization and to treat them either as linked or as the same thing. Th is custom has led to some conceptual and theoretical confusion. For example, decentralization is oft en described as a management phenomenon, although it is generally agreed that many, if not most, aspects of centralization and decen- tralization are organizational or structural phenomena. To reduce this confusion and to sharpen the theoretical point, we have unbundled management and orga- nization theory and treat them separately. Public management is taken to mean the formal and informal processes of guiding human interaction toward public organizational objectives. Th e units of analysis are processes of interaction be- tween managers and workers and the eff ects of management behavior on workers and work outcomes. Th e purpose of this chapter is to describe and evaluate the- ory, either empirically or deductively derived, that accounts for or explains public management behavior. Th eories of public organization, by contrast, have to do with the design and evolution of the structural arrangements for the conduct of public administra- tion and with descriptions or theories of the behavior of organizations as the unit of analysis. Although separating management and organization for concep- tual and theoretical refi nement has its advantages, we do not contend here that management and organization are distinct in an empirical sense. Th ey are not. Management almost always occurs in the context of organization, and organiza- tion is seldom eff ective without management. Th erefore, in the closing chapter, Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 99Traditional Management Th eory Th rust Forward management and organization are bundled back together, as they are in the em- pirical world, and theories of their relationship are presented. Th e following discussion describes theories of public management in four categories. First, and most important, is traditional public management theory, thrust forward. Second is the current popularity of leadership as public manage- ment. Th ird is the theory derived from the longer-standing practice of conducting public management by contract. Fourth are theories of governance that explain important features of public management. Traditional Management Th eory Th rust Forward Traditional management theory has its origins with Frederick W. Taylor and his infl uential Th e Principles of Scientifi c Management, which was published orig- inally in 1911 and is still in print (2010). His subject was business, particularly the shop. His purpose was to move from rules of thumb, customs and traditions, and ad hoc approaches to business management toward a body of scientifi c prin- ciples. His principles were based on precise measurements of work processes, as well as outcomes; on the scientifi c selection of workers; on the optimal placement of workers in describable work roles; on the division and sequencing of work pro- cesses to enhance productivity; and on the cooperation of workers in achieving the organizational objective. Th e application of these principles, Taylor believed, would lead managers and workers to the one best way. As business innovations oft en do, these concepts soon colonized govern- ment. Th ey became a central part of the Progressive Era and the movement to reform government, and they were highly infl uential in the development of civil service systems in government at all levels. Th e widespread use of tests for hiring and promotion, position descriptions, and employee evaluations are all refl ec- tions of scientifi c management. Indeed, one could argue that modern-day testing generally—for progress in school, for admission to universities and graduate schools, and for professional standing in law, medicine, accounting, teaching, and so forth—are also contemporary manifestations of the logic of scientifi c management. Th e desire for certitude, to measure precisely and thus order and categorize the world properly and thereby make sense of it, is doubtless as strong today as it was at the nadir of scientifi c management. Luther Gulick (1937), one of the founders of modern public administration, embraced the orthodoxy of scientifi c management, applied it to government, and introduced the most famous mnemonic in the fi eld—POSDCORB, which rep- resents his theory of the seven major functions of management: • Planning • Organizing • Staffi ng • Directing Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 100 5: Th eories of Public Management • Coordinating • Reporting • Budgeting Until the mid- to late 1950s, any treatment of management in public admin- istration was essentially an elaboration of POSDCORB. Oft en combined with an essentially scalar, or hierarchical, theory of organization, these principles of man- agement had a kind of commonsense quality that was appealing to practicing pub- lic administrators as well as to those studying the fi eld or preparing for practice. Early criticisms of the principles said they were top-down, they were essentially prescriptive, and they underemphasized natural forms of cooperation—but they formed the core of the fi eld. From the 1930s to the 1950s, important modifi cations and adaptations were made to the principles of scientifi c management. Chester Barnard (1938) identifi ed and set out the acceptance theory of authority, which argues that authority does not depend as much on persons of authority or on persons having authority as it depends on the willingness of others to accept or comply with directions or commands. In classic theory, it was argued that policy, instructions, guidance, and authority fl owed down the hierarchy, and communication (what we would now call feedback) fl owed up. Barnard demon- strated that considerable power accumulated at the base of the hierarchy, and that theories of eff ective management needed to be modifi ed to account for the culture of work in an organization, the preferences and attitudes of the work- ers, and the extent to which there was agreement between workers’ needs and interests and management policy and direction. He described the “functions of the executive” as having less to do with the formal principles of administration and more to do with securing workers’ cooperation through eff ective communi- cation, through workers’ participation in production decisions, and through a demonstrated concern for workers’ interests. In a sense, then, authority is dele- gated upward rather than directed downward. Another modifi cation to the principles of scientifi c management came as the result of the Hawthorne studies. Th ese describe the Hawthorne eff ect, which ex- plains worker productivity as a function of observers’ attention rather than phys- ical or contextual factors. Subsequent interpretations of the Hawthorne eff ect suggest that mere attention by observers is too simplistic, and that workers saw in the experiments altered forms of supervision that they preferred and that caused productivity to increase (Greenwood and Wrege 1986). Th e Hawthorne experi- ments and the work of Barnard introduced a human relations approach that for- ever changed management theory. Classical principles of scientifi c management and formal hierarchical structure were challenged by the human relations school of management theory, a body of theory particularly infl uenced by Douglas McGregor (1960). McGregor’s Th eory X and Th eory Y represented an especially important change in management theory. Here are the competing assumptions of Th eory X and Th eory Y: Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 101Traditional Management Th eory Th rust Forward Th eory X Assumptions 1. Th e average person dislikes work and will try to avoid it. 2. Most people need to be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment to get them to work toward organizational goals. 3. Th e average person wants to be directed, shuns responsibility, has little ambition, and seeks security above all. Th eory Y Assumptions 1. Most people do not inherently dislike work; the physical eff ort and the mental eff ort involved are as natural as play or rest. 2. People will exercise self-direction and self-control to reach goals to which they are committed; external control and the threat of punish- ment are not the only means for ensuring eff ort toward goals. 3. Commitment to goals is a function of the rewards available, particu- larly rewards that satisfy esteem and self-actualization needs. 4. When conditions are favorable, the average person learns not only to accept but also to seek responsibility. 5. Many people have the capacity to exercise a high degree of creativity and innovation in solving organizational problems. 6. Th e intellectual potential of most individuals is only partially used in most organizations. Following these assumptions, Th eory X managers emphasize elaborate con- trols and oversight, and they motivate by economic incentives. Th eory Y manag- ers seek to integrate individual and organizational goals and to emphasize latitude in performing tasks; they seek to make work interesting and thereby encourage creativity. It is important to point out that the work of Chester Barnard, the Hawthorne experiments, and McGregor was behavioral, which is to say that it was based on fi eld research. Th e earlier work of Taylor and others, though it was called scien- tifi c management, was less a result of nonsystematic observations and more a result of deductive logic. One important and diff erent approach to management theory in the evolution of public administration is the sociology of Max Weber (1952), who founded the formal study of the large-scale complex organizations he labeled “bureaucracy.” Although he did his work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not generally available to Americans until aft er World War II. Weber’s purpose was to describe the salient characteristics of enduring large-scale orga- nizations, which he labeled “ideal types,” ideal meaning “commonly found” or “generally characteristic.” He was particularly interested in rationality, or collec- tive goal-oriented behavior, as in the rational organization. He was opposed to the class distinctions characteristic of Europe in the early twentieth century and Frederickson, H. George, et al. The Public Administration Theory Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2039766. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:44:49. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 5 . T a yl o r & F ra n ci s G ro u p . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 102 5: Th eories of Public Management to the resulting nepotism and spoils. He argued that rational bureaucracy prac- tices a specialization of labor. Jobs are broken down into routine, well-defi ned tasks so that workers can perfect those tasks and so that job applicants can be tested in specialized areas to meet formal qualifi cations. He described the formal rules, procedures, and record-keeping characteristics of bureaucracies as well as their scalar, or hierarchic, characteristics. Th e bureaucracy, he argued, is imper- sonal and rational because individual selection and promotion are strictly on the basis of merit, scientifi cally determined. Weber’s bureaucracy was more popular with academics than with practi- tioners, and it is a theory of management only in the sense that it describes what he identifi ed as characteristics commonly found in large and complex organi- zations that have endured. Th e critique of Weber’s work is well established. Th e ideal type bureaucracy tends to inertia, resists change, is mechanistic rather than humanistic, and is subject to goal displacement and to trained incapacity. Bu- reaucracy, in the present day, has become the object of a political derision that blames the problems of government on the people and organizations that operate public programs. And bureaucracy is an equally popular whipping boy for schol- ars and consultants who seek to make public programs more eff ective. Despite all this criticism, Weber is acknowledged to have developed one of the most empiri- cally accurate and universal descriptions of the large-scale complex organization in its time, a description that is oft en accurate even today. No criticism of the principles of public administration was so devastating as Simon’s critique (1946)—dismissing them as proverbs. He demonstrated that the principles of public administration were contradictory, had little ability to be generalized as theory, and were fuzzy and imprecise. In the place of the principles of management, which he found theoretically wanting, he developed what has become decision theory. Th is theory has had a profound infl uence on public administration, most of it good. But the obliteration of the principles of management as a straw man was not essential to the presentation of deci- sion theory and to its eventual importance. Th e principles of management were obliterated, nevertheless—at least in the theoretical sense. From the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, little serious theoretical work was done on management in public administration. Th e subject gradually disappeared in the texts as well as in the pages of the Public Administration Review. Th e irony is, of course, that management continued to be the core of public administration practice. It is no wonder that during this period there was a growing distance between public administration scholarship and theory and public administration practice. During this period, fortunately, a strong interest in management theory in … PART THREE STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING AND IMPROVING PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 409 If, as Chapter Six asserts, organizational effectiveness is the funda-mental issue in organizational analysis, then the challenge of chang- ing organizations is a strong candidate for second place. A sprawling literature addresses organizational change and innovation, with much of it focused on how to change organizations for the better. As earlier chapters point out, controversy simmers over whether public organiza- tions and their employees resist change. The truth is that researchers and experts often note a paradoxical aspect of change in public orga- nizations. Far from being isolated bastions of resistance to change, they change constantly. This pattern may sometimes impede substantial long- term change, however. In many public organizations, the politically appointed top executives and their own appointees come and go fairly rapidly. In federal agencies, the agency heads stay less than two years on average. Shifts in the political climate cause rapid shifts in program and policy priorities. This can make it hard to sustain implementation of major changes. Conversely, we now have an abundance of examples of successful change in public organizations, and this chapter describes some of them. CHAPTER THIRTEEN MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 410 Understanding and Managing Public Organizations Relatively Natural Change: Organizational Life Cycles Members of organizations plan and carry out some changes purposefully. Other changes occur more spontaneously or naturally as organizations pass through phases of development or respond to major shifts in their environment. The two types of change intermingle, of course, as manag- ers and other members respond to shifting circumstances. In the past two decades, in their writing and research on organizational life cycles, birth, and decline, scholars have turned more attention to externally imposed and naturally evolving change processes (Aldrich, 1999; Baum and McKelvey, 1999; Cameron, Sutton, and Whetten, 1988; Kimberly, Miles, and Associates, 1980). Much of this work concentrates on business fi rms but applies to pub- lic organizations as well (for example, Quinn and Cameron, 1983; Van de Ven, 1980). Years ago, Simon, Smithburg, and Thompson (1950) noted that public organizations become distinct by the nature of their birth. An infl u- ential set of interests must support the establishment of a public organiza- tion as a means of meeting a need that those interests perceive, and they must express that need politically. Public agencies are born of and live by the satisfaction of interests that are suffi ciently infl uential to maintain the agencies’ political legitimacy and the resources that come with it. Later, Downs (1967) suggested a number of more elaborate ways in which public bureaus form. For one of these ways, Max Weber coined the phrase “routinization of charisma,” in which people devoted to a char- ismatic leader press for an organization that pursues the leader ’s goals. Alternatively, as Simon, Smithburg, and Thompson (1950) pointed out, interested groups press for the formation of a bureau to carry out a func- tion for which they see a need. A new bureau can split off from an exist- ing one, as did the Department of Education from what used to be the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Radin and Hawley, 1988). Also, entrepreneurs may gain enough support to form a new bureau. Admiral Hyman Rickover became a virtual legend by building an almost autonomous program for the development of nuclear propulsion in the nuclear power branch of the navy ’s Bureau of Ships and the nuclear reac- tor branch of the Atomic Energy Commission (Lewis, 1987). The Stages of Organizational Life Downs also said that bureaus have a three-stage life cycle. The earliest stage involves a struggle for autonomy. “Zealots” and “advocates” dominate Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . Managing Organizational Change and Development 411 young bureaus and struggle to build political support for their bureau ’s legitimacy and resource requests. Once a bureau has established itself and ensured its survival, it enters a stage of rapid expansion, in which its mem- bers emphasize innovation. Ultimately, it enters a deceleration phase, in which the administrators concentrate on elaborating rules and ensuring coordination and accountability. Downs associated this process with what he called the rigidity cycle for bureaus. He said that as bureaus grow older and larger and enter the deceleration stage, the zealots and advocates either depart for more active, promising programs or settle into the role of “conservers.” Conservers come to dominate the bureau, and it ossifi es. Others have pointed out that over time many bureaus form strong alliances with interest groups and legislators—especially legislators on the commit- tees that oversee them. These allies guard the bureaus’ access and infl u- ence and stave off many change attempts (Seidman and Gilmour, 1986; Warwick, 1975). Yet Downs oversimplifi es the foot-dragging bureaucracy. Large, old organizations change markedly, as has been recognized in recent life-cycle models. Quinn and Cameron (1983) developed a framework based on similarities among models that others have proposed. Their framework conceives of four stages of organizational life cycle—the entrepreneurial, collectivity, formalization and control, and elaboration stages. In the entrepreneurial stage, members of the new organization con- centrate on marshaling resources and establishing the organization as a viable entity. An entrepreneurial head or group usually plays a strong lead- ing role, pressing for innovation and new opportunities and placing less emphasis on planning and coordination. Quinn and Cameron illustrated this stage by describing a newly created developmental center for the men- tally disabled in a state department of mental health (DMH). The ener- getic center director led a push for new treatment methods that involved deinstitutionalizing clients and developing their self-reliance. The center began to receive expanded support from federal grants, the DMH, and the legislature. In this stage, the center emphasized the open-systems model of organization. Out of the fi rst stage develops the second, the collectivity stage. In this stage the members of the center developed high cohesion and commit- ment. They operated in a fl exible, team-based mode, exhibiting high levels of effort and zeal for the center ’s mission. This type of shift represents an expanded emphasis on teamwork, marked by adherence to the human relations model as well as to the open-systems component of the competing values framework described in Chapter Six. Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 412 Understanding and Managing Public Organizations The research on life cycles points out that crises sometimes push orga- nizations into new stages. About six years after the formation of the center, a major newspaper ran articles attacking the DMH for ineffi ciency, poor treatment of clients, and loose administrative practices. The articles cited critical reports from oversight agencies citing inadequacies in such control mechanisms as organizational charts, records, job descriptions, policy man- uals, and master plans. The DMH conducted a special investigation and instructed the center director to move toward a more traditional organiza- tional structure and more traditional controls. The director left, and the new director emphasized clear lines of authority, rules, and accountability. Staff commitment fell, and many staff members left. The center had clearly moved into the formalization and control stage. In competing values terms, the rational control model predominated, and the importance of open systems and human relations criteria declined. The case ended at this point, but the life-cycle framework includes a fourth stage, involving structural elaboration and adaptation. Confronting the problems of extensive control and bureaucracy that develop during the third stage, the organization moves toward a more elaborate struc- ture to allow more decentralization but also corresponding coordination processes. The organization seeks new ways to adapt, to renew itself, and to expand its domain. A large corporation may become more of a con- glomerate, multiplying its profi t centers, or it may adopt a matrix design (Mintzberg, 1979). It appears to be diffi cult for public agencies to decen- tralize in these ways, however (Mintzberg, 1989). They have no sales and profi t indicators to use in establishing profi t centers, and they face stron- ger external accountability pressures. Note that in the DMH case the press and the oversight agencies both pressed for traditional bureaucratic structures—charts, manuals, job descriptions. Some public agencies also reconfi gure in later stages, however, as described shortly. Organizational Decline and Death Many older, supposedly entrenched organizations face intense pressure to renew themselves. During the 1970s and 1980s, such pressures rose to particular intensity in the United States. Businesses faced surging inter- national competition and swings in the price of oil and other resources. Government agencies faced tax revolts and skepticism about government. This climate bolstered the Reagan administration ’s efforts to cut the fed- eral budget, including funding for many agencies and for federal support to state and local governments, many of which also faced state and local Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . Managing Organizational Change and Development 413 initiatives to force tax cuts (Levine, 1980a). In the 1990s, these pressures eased in certain ways because of a strong economy, and research on decline in public agencies slackened. Nevertheless, many factors continued to pres- sure public organizations in many nations to do more with less. In the United States, a drive to reduce taxes and the federal defi cit continued. The Clinton administration ’s National Performance Review eliminated 324,580 jobs from the federal workforce, bringing federal employment to its lowest level since 1950. As the new century got under way the Bush administration issued the President ’s Management Agenda, which criticized the Clinton administration for making these employment reductions in an across-the- board, poorly planned way that did not take into account strategic human resource needs. At the same time, however, the management agenda announced that competitive sourcing would be one of the primary empha- ses of the administration. This involves conducting competitive assessments to determine whether government jobs and tasks should be outsourced, or contracted out to private organizations (U.S. Offi ce of Management and Budget, 2002). The administration further announced the objective of con- sidering more than eight hundred thousand federal jobs for outsourcing, and the Department of the Army announced a plan to contract out more than two hundred thousand jobs. In many other nations, reforms as part of the New Public Management movement often emphasized using more busi- nesslike arrangements in government, including contracting out and priva- tizing governmental activities. So the challenge of reductions, declines, and cutbacks looms very large for people in government. Even before these recent pressures, organizational researchers realized that while such pressures may have intensifi ed during the period, they actu- ally refl ected ongoing processes of decline and demise that had received little attention in organizational research (Cameron, Sutton, and Whetten, 1988; Kimberly, Miles, and Associates, 1980). Bankruptcy rates among busi- ness fi rms have always been high, and all organizations, including pub- lic ones, tend to have low survival rates (Starbuck and Nystrom, 1981). Organizations may decline at various rates and in various patterns, for a number of reasons (Levine, 1980b). They may atrophy, their performance declining due to internal deterioration. They may become rigid, ineffi - cient, and plagued with overstaffi ng and ineffective structures and com- munications. As described later, the Social Security Administration (SSA) once became so backlogged in processing client requests that everyone involved agreed that something had to be done. In the late 1990s, the IRS undertook a major transformation in response to performance problems and public criticisms (Thompson and Rainey, 2003). Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 414 Understanding and Managing Public Organizations Vulnerability and Loss of Legitimacy. Organizations, especially new ones, can be quite vulnerable to the loss of resources or support from their environment. Shifts in consumer preferences can undercut businesses. Government organizations face an analogous problem when voters resist taxes. This issue is related to another reason for decline, the loss of legiti- macy. Private fi rms, such as tobacco companies, can suffer when the public or public offi cials question the legitimacy of their products or activities. Legitimacy fi gures even more crucially for public organizations. Public and oversight authorities often impose stricter criteria on public organi- zations for honest, legitimate behaviors, as in the example of the HUD scandal described in Chapter Seven. Environmental Entropy. An organization ’s environment can simply dete- riorate in its capacity to support the organization. Resources may dry up. Political support may wane. Public organizations often lose support because of the waning of the social need they address (Aldrich, 1999; Levine, 1980a). Responses to Decline. Organizations respond to decline with greater or lesser aggressiveness and with more or less acceptance of the need for change (Daft, 2013; Whetten, 1988). Some organizations take a negative, resistant disposition toward the pressures for change. They may aggres- sively strike a preventive posture or passively react in a defensive mode. They may try to prevent pressures for change by manipulating the envi- ronment. Public agencies may try to develop or maintain legislation that rules out competition from other agencies or private providers of similar services. Public employee unions sometimes attack privatization proposals because public employees may fi nd them threatening. Conversely, orga- nizations may adopt a less proactive defense against cuts, citing statistics showing the need for their programs and working to persuade legislators that their programs meet important social needs. Other organizations take a more receptive approach to the need for change, either by reacting or by generating change and adaptation. Many public agencies react with across-the-board cuts in subunit budgets, layoffs, or other reductions in their workforce. Conversely, organizations can also adapt through fl exible, self-designing structures and processes. They may allow lower-level managers and employees to redesign their units when they feel the need (Whetten, 1988). The pressures for reduced government just described have led to a rich discussion of tactics for responding to funding cutbacks. Table 13.1 Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . Managing Organizational Change and Development 415 Tactics to Resist Decline Tactics to Smooth Decline External political (problem depletion) 1. Diversify programs, clients, and constituents 2. Improve legislative liaison 3. Educate the public about the agency ’s mission 4. Mobilize dependent clients 5. Become “captured” by a powerful interest group or legislator 6. Threaten to cut vital or popular programs 7. Cut a visible and widespread service a little to demonstrate client dependence 1. Make peace with competing agencies 2. Cut low-prestige programs 3. Cut programs to politically weak clients 4. Sell and lend expertise to other agencies 5. Share problems with other agencies External economic/ technical (environmental entropy) 1. Find a wider and richer revenue base (for example, metropolitan reorganization) 2. Develop incentives to prevent disinvestment 3. Seek foundation support 4. Lure new public and private sector investment 5. Adopt user charges for services when possible 1. Improve targeting on problems 2. Plan with preservative objectives 3. Cut losses by distinguishing between capital investments and sunk costs 4. Yield concessions to taxpayers and employers to retain them Internal political (political vulnerability) 1. Issue symbolic responses, such as forming study commissions and task forces 2. “Circle the wagons”— develop a siege mentality to retain esprit de corps 3. Strengthen expertise 1. Change leadership at each stage in the decline process 2. Reorganize at each stage 3. Cut programs run by weak subunits 4. Shift programs to another agency 5. Get temporary exemptions from personnel and budgetary regulations that limit discretion (continued ) TABLE 13.1. ORGANIZATIONAL DECLINE AND CUTBACK MANAGEMENT: TACTICS FOR RESPONDING TO DECLINE AND FUNDING CUTS Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . summarizes Charles Levine ’s description of some of those tactics (1980b). Rubin (1985) analyzed the Reagan administration ’s cutbacks in fi ve federal agencies. She found that the agencies’ responses in some ways matched what one would expect from the public administration literature and in some ways differed markedly. The president was fairly successful in achiev- ing cutbacks in the agencies. His strong popular support blunted inter- est-group opposition to the cuts in the early phases. Still, agencies with interest-group support more effectively resisted the cutbacks. Yet Rubin found no evidence of strong “iron triangles” (tight alliances of agencies, interest groups, and congressional committees, as discussed in Chapter Five) protecting the agencies. The agencies were not nearly so self-directed and uncontrollable as is sometimes claimed. Agency heads tended to comply with the president ’s cutback initiatives and usually did not work aggressively to mobilize interest- group support. Career personnel carried out many of the cuts as part of their responsibility to serve the president. Some of the agencies, particularly central administrative and regulatory agencies, had no strong interest-group TABLE 13.1 (Continued) Tactics to Resist Decline Tactics to Smooth Decline Internal economic/ technical (organizational atrophy) 1. Increase hierarchical control 2. Improve productivity 3. Experiment with less costly service-delivery systems 4. Automate 5. Stockpile and ration resources 1. Renegotiate long-term contracts to regain fl exibility 2. Install rational choice techniques 3. Mortgage the future by deferring maintenance and downscaling personnel quality 4. Ask employees to make voluntary sacrifi ces such as taking early retirements and deferring raises 5. Improve forecasting capacity to anticipate future cuts 6. Reassign surplus facilities to other users 7. Sell surplus property, lease back when needed 8. Exploit the exploitable Source: Adapted from Levine, 1980b. 416 Understanding and Managing Public Organizations Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . Managing Organizational Change and Development 417 support and were more vulnerable to cuts. Golden (2000) analyzed the career civil servants’ reactions to policy changes that Reagan appointees sought in four federal agencies and found that the careerists put up little strong resistance. Their tendency to resist and their manner of doing so depended on many factors, such as professional background. Attorneys in one agency argued more with the Reagan appointees, but felt that it was part of their professional responsibility to carry out their duties conscien- tiously even when they disagreed with the priorities of the Reaganites. These analyses establish some extremely important points. Agency responses to decline are more complex and perhaps less politically resis- tant than depicted in the general literature—agencies do change, and they do not necessarily resist change as forcefully as stereotypes and some theo- ries suggest. Still, politics fi gures very importantly in change and cutback attempts and can severely impede them. Understanding when and how one can effect change becomes the major challenge, to which we return later. The Ultimate Decline: Organizational Death. A conclusion similar to Rubin ’s comes from a debate over whether public agencies can “die.” Kaufman (1976) investigated the question of whether government organizations are immortal, in view of the many assertions about their staunch political sup- port and their intransigence against pressures for change, reduction, or elimination. He noted many threats to an agency ’s survival. They face com- petition from other agencies, loss of political support, and the constant reorganization movements that keep offi cials continuously hunting for ways to reshape government, especially ways that appear more effi cient. Kaufman reviewed statistics on the death rates of federal agencies and concluded that such rates are not negligible. Generally, however, federal agencies have a strong tendency to endure. Of the agencies that existed in 1923, he said, 94 percent had lineal descendants in 1974. Later, Starbuck and Nystrom (1981) mounted a fascinating challenge to this conclusion. They pointed out that Kaufman had classifi ed agencies as lineal descendants even if they had changed organizational locations, names, or personnel or had substantially different functions. When agen- cies merged, he treated the new agency as a descendant of both of the former ones. Starbuck and Nystrom pointed out that studies of death rates of industrial organizations typically treat mergers between corporations as resulting in only one existing organization. When a corporation goes bank- rupt and employees start a similar new one, analysts do not count this as a continuation. Diffi cult issues exist, then, in defi ning organizational death. Starbuck and Nystrom reanalyzed Kaufman ’s data, using criteria more akin Rainey, Hal G.. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1595184. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-21 15:55:03. C o p yr ig h t © 2 0 1 4 . Jo h n W ile y & S o n s, I n co rp o ra te d . A ll ri g h ts r e se rv e d . 418 Understanding and Managing Public Organizations to those used in studies of industry; they found that government agencies and industrial corporations have similar death and survival rates. A large proportion of both government agencies and business fi rms do not survive very long. The analysis turns on whether one uses criteria biased toward organizational change or against it. Peters and Hogwood (1988) also reported fi nding a great deal of orga- nizational change in the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Their analysis showed, however, what other organization theorists have seen when they have stud- ied public organizations (Meyer, 1979): public organizations may be quite change-resistant and intransigent in some ways, and steering them in new and innovative directions can be a major challenge for society. Yet they do, in fact, change a great deal, including undergoing the ultimate change of passing out of existence. As described in later sections, they can also revital- ize themselves after periods of decline. Daniels (1997) analyzed the termination of public programs, point- ing out that programs do get terminated. Termination, he concluded, is hard to achieve, involves a great deal of political confl ict, and presents an American political paradox in that “everyone supports it, and everyone opposes it” (p. 70). Similarly, but with more emphasis on the likelihood of agency termination, Lewis (2002) reported a study of government agency mortality between 1946 and 1997 and concluded that 62 percent of agen- cies created since 1946 have been terminated. He also emphasized the major role of political processes, concluding that agencies face the greatest likelihood of mortality when shifts in the political climate bring their critics and opponents into power. Innovation and Organizations Another response to pressures on organizations, a response that they need in order to survive, is innovation. Innovations in society and in organi- zations fi gure so importantly in social progress that a body of research focused specifi cally on such processes has developed in the last several decades. Some of it addresses the broad topic of diffusion of innovations in societies and across levels and units of government. Numerous studies have explored such topics as the adoption of birth control methods in overpopulated countries, new agricultural methods in less developed coun- tries, and different ways of providing fi … 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 1/11 Section 2: Supervising Public Employees and Organizational Planning PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management… In the first half of this course, an overview was provided on public management and organizational behavior, including some theories and concepts, as well as an overview of governance. Nonprofit organizations were also introduced, as was the critical importance of maintaining high ethical behavior throughout your career and in your agency or organization. The assignments allowed you to apply concepts and theories of public management to administration in a local government context, and relate these theories and ideas to your dissertation topic. You also analyzed case studies, thereby relating your learning to real-life scenarios. In this second section of the course, an introduction to supervising public employees and organizational planning is provided. This is important because understanding and applying the ideas in this section are critical to your career. This section includes an overview of the following course concepts: Challenges of supervising public employees Organizational and strategic planning This section begins by exploring the topic of supervising public employees. As a public administrator, regardless of whether you serve in the human resources department, you will need to have an understanding of the ways in which staff are hired, and the manner in which agencies and organizations manage issues related to personnel. While you may or may not supervise employees, understanding the employee-supervisor dynamic, and being able to negotiate concerns related to this dynamic, will be helpful to you and your colleagues. The readings discuss how human resource management is very much integrated into the life and business of public agencies and nonprofit organizations. The importance of diversity, the challenge of recruiting qualified staff, and motivations of those in public sector employment will be explored. The remainder of this section examines planning in public organizations. Strategic planning helps agencies and organizations stay on track in terms of their mission and work. Thus, the process of strategic planning helps government agencies and nonprofit organizations enhance their value for the public. If you were asked to lead on a project in your office that related to strategic planning, where would you begin? Who would you https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/home/168195 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 2/11 Week 5 recruit to serve on your committee? What would you do to ensure you stay on track? In this section, you will learn steps and strategies for successful strategic planning that can help you in your career in public administration. Figure 1. Strategic planning involves a lot of steps to accomplish a common goal The assignments in this section are meant to engage you as a scholar and public administrator. For example, returning to your role as a department head for a city government, you will develop a PowerPoint presentation and a brochure. These assignments are meant to prepare you for assignments you may very likely be entrusted to complete in your career. You will also engage with case studies, including one that you write for the Signature Assignment (Week 7). Case studies challenge you to consider the facts of a case, evaluate and analyze them, and consider ways to solve them. Thus, they help you in your evaluation and problem-solving skills. 0 % 0 of 27 topics complete javascript:void(0); 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 3/11 Supervising Public Employees: Theory and Practice This week (and next week) examines the supervision of employees, specifically within the public administration context. Human resource management is very much integrated into the life and business of public agencies and nonprofit organizations, just as it is in the corporate environment. As a public administrator, you want to understand the way things ‘work’ in your agency or organization, even if they only indirectly relate to you. Government agencies, especially, can have regulations governing their recruitment and human resource management that many businesses, in general, may not. In addition, bureaucracy and regulations related to unions, can add complexity to hiring someone. Arthur (2004, p.14) identifies nine core areas that relate to human resources in all organizations: legal issues, the employment process, testing, compensation, performance management, benefits administration, employee relations, training and development, and human resources information systems. Tschirhart and Bielefeld (2012, pp. 256-257) distinguish between human resource capacity, which “refers to the abilities, experience, and talent of the people who conduct the work of the organization internally…”, and human resource management, which “refers to the policies and practices in place to mobilize and maximize this capacity.” Though Tschirhart and Bielefeld write specifically within the context of nonprofit organizations, government agencies share similarities with nonprofits when it comes to human resources. For example, they offer employment opportunities outside of the private sector and offer employee values and service opportunities that may be attractive to job candidates. Understanding human resource management will allow you to appreciate administration in its broader context, as well as particular aspects related to building a workforce, for example, issues related to diversity. Among the themes explored this week is the value of ensuring a diverse workforce. Why is diversity important to an organization? As Pynes (2013, p. 110) states, “Diversity can lead to more creative alternatives and higher-quality ideas, primarily from the introduction of different and opposing ideas and viewpoints.” This week’s assignment—a case study—allows you to engage with issues related to diversity and employee relations by confronting issues dealing with a very recent and serious concern that can affect any public organization. The case study is based on concerns that city employees have in San Francisco (related to javascript:void(0); 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 4/11 7 Week 6 Books and Resources for this Week Week 5 - Assignment: Analyze a Case Study on Supervising Employees Assignment Due October 24 at 11:59 PM racism and discrimination). The assignment asks you to consider the problem represented in the article, explore plausible solutions, and then recommend one of them. Be sure to review this week's resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments. References: Arthur, D. (2004). Fundamentals of human resources management (4th ed.). Saranac Lake, NY: American Management Association. Pynes, J. (2013). Human resources management for public and nonprofit organizations: A strategic approach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Tschirhart, M., & Bielefeld, W. (2012). Managing nonprofit organizations. San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass. Supervising Public Employees: Challenges Imagine that you are a manager in a local government agency. Your office is tasked with a new long-term project and you feel that you don’t have the adequate personnel on your team to handle the new responsibilities. You meet with your team and everyone hopes that someone new can be hired to take on javascript:void(0); javascript:void(0) https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/viewContent/1586708/View 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 5/11 this new project. But you know that there have been budget constraints in your agency, and no new funding has become available. In terms of government agencies, Cohen, Eimicke, and Heikkila (2013, p. 47) state, “Hiring the right person for a government job is usually an extremely complex and difficult task.” They describe the bureaucracy involved in getting approvals to hire someone, stating that “most public personnel management takes place in a highly regulated or unionized environment” (Cohen, Eimicke, & Heikkila, 2013, p.48). An important challenge of human resource management is, of course, recruiting qualified staff. Job postings can often be responded to by hundreds of applicants. Many of these will be qualified; many will not be qualified. When considering recruiting staff for a public agency or nonprofit organization, the fit between a candidate, the work, and the organization is of significant importance. But finding the right person is only part of the task of recruitment, and public agencies, as mentioned above, can have important bureaucratic challenges that can feel encumbering when seeking to hire new staff. Thus, the processes that are required before hiring someone (including, sometimes, obtaining new budgetary approval), are important considerations as a public administrator. On another note, job candidates for, and employees serving in, the public sector may have motivations that differ from those outside this sector. While everyone has different reasons for performing the job that they do, the motivation for those in public sector employment may include job security, benefits, or an interest in public service. Related to this, as Perry and Christensen (2015, p.363) explain, job candidates, in their interviews, can be asked about how they ‘fit’ with the organization’s values, or the job’s importance can be emphasized to job candidates. As Rainey and Cook (2014, p.263) state, motivation in work refers to someone’s desire to work well and work hard, and the persistence and excitement they feel in their work. As a public administrator, you will interact with employees, and quite possibly manage one or many. Similar to the need to recruit the right personnel, staying in tune with what motivates your staff is important to help them succeed and enjoy their work. This week’s assignment allows you to engage the readings so that you can prepare a PowerPoint presentation about the topic of supervising public employees and motivation. Be sure to review this week's resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments. 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 6/11 6 Week 7 Books and Resources for this Week Week 6 - Assignment: Create a PowerPoint Presentation Assignment Due October 31 at 11:59 PM References: Cohen, S., Eimicke, W. B., & Heikkila, T. (2013). The effective public manager: Achieving success in government organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Perry, J. L., & Christensen, R. K. (2015). Handbook of public administration. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rainey, H. G., & Cook, M. (2014). Understanding and managing public organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Organizational and Strategic Planning: Part 1 Imagine that, in your role as a manager at a nonprofit organization, you are requested by the executive director to take the lead on a strategic plan for the organization. Your workload is already quite high, and you’re not really sure where to begin. You wonder about the purpose of a strategic plan and are not sure about how to engage others in this process. You read online that the process is supposed to be focused on, among other things, defining what success for your organization looks like, the steps required in order to obtain success, and what this looks like in terms of impact. Furthermore, you learn that it relates to how the organization can actually go about obtaining the results it wants to accomplish, including how to align staff and funding within a suitable time frame to accomplish its goals and mission. javascript:void(0); javascript:void(0) https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/viewContent/1586709/View 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 7/11 Figure 2. Strategic planning begins with a partnership with the staff to identify strengths and weaknesses This week (and next week) explores strategic planning. Strategic planning, within the context of a nonprofit organization, is a “process conducted in partnership with staff in which the board draws on an understanding of organizational strengths and weaknesses and environmental trends to articulate priorities and monitor progress against financial and programmatic goals” (Boardsource, 2010, p.173). You may be asking, where might strategic planning be helpful in my agency? What does it mean to do ‘strategic planning’? Bryson (2018) states that strategic planning requires information gathering, discussion, analysis, and synthesis. This connects with clear organizational goals, and an exploration of possible choices and their implications. He states that strategic planning can help foster communication and wise decision-making, and it promotes implementation and accountability. He introduces the “ABCs of Strategic Planning” (Bryson, 2018, pp. 42-44), where “A” involves a deliberative process to figure where an organization is at now; “B” is determining where you want to be; and “C” is exploring how to get there. Berman and Berman (2006) state that strategic planning ensures that an organization’s mission better serves the needs of society. They state that strategic planning asks questions, such as: 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 8/11 4Books and Resources for this Week Which roles and missions should organizations seek to fulfill? Is the mission, and its rationale, widely shared by client groups and others inside and outside the organization? What are the unique competencies of the organization that make it qualified to fulfill this role? How do these competencies compare with the expertise and capacity of other organizations? How much external and internal commitment exists for goals that are pursued? How might future challenges affect the ability of the organization to fulfill its goals? Is collaboration with other organizations possible and desirable? Which objectives and strategies are being pursued in order to realize the above vision? Are these objectives specific, feasible, and credible? What resources are available to assist organizations in their efforts, and are these resources adequate? By which target date will strategies be implemented and completed? How will success be measured? (Berman & Berman, 2006, p. 74) While the focus of this week’s readings is on strategic planning (a topic discussed again next week), the Signature Assignment due this week asks you to analyze a case study of your own choosing, relating the case to the themes examined in this course as a whole. You will identify an organizational problem in a public administration-related organization, discuss and analyze it, provide plausible solutions, and then recommend one of them. Be sure to review this week's resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments. References: Berman, E. M., & Berman, E. M. (2006). Performance and productivity in public and nonprofit organizations. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Boardsource. (2010). The handbook of nonprofit governance. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Bryson, J. M. (Ed.). (2018). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Chapter 2: The strategy change cycle: An effective strategic planning and management approach for public and nonprofit organizations javascript:void(0) 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 9/11 Week 8 Week 7 - Signature Assignment: Write and Analyze a Case Study Assignment Due November 7 at 11:59 PM Organizational and Strategic Planning: Part 2 As a public administrator, you want your agency or organization to have maximum benefit, using resources wisely in order to meet your mission and have impact on the community you serve. Yet, it is not easy to consider these types of issues so deeply. It requires gathering people and examining your work and goals closely. This final week continues the themes introduced during last week’s readings about strategic planning. Far from a static process, strategic planning, at its heart, helps government agencies and nonprofit organizations to enhance their value for the public. Creating public value, as Bryson (2018, p.44) articulates, “means enhancing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all while also fostering a perfect union. It means ensuring that the beneficial effects of our institutions and efforts carry on into the indefinite future and that we change what we must so that the world is always left better off than we found it. Strategic planning is about listening to ‘the better angels of our nature,’ as Abraham Lincoln called them in his first inaugural address—it is about organizing our best and most noble hopes and dreams, making them reasonable and actionable, and bringing them to life—in short, to create significant and enduring public value.” The readings this week discuss the benefits of strategic planning (including enhanced effectiveness and legitimacy), explain why it is important, and examine the relationship between strategic planning and strategic management. The readings provide examples of strategic planning in public administration settings, as well as a 10-step strategic planning process for government agencies and nonprofits, called the Strategy Change Cycle. This 10-step strategic planning process, developed by Bryson (2018, pp. 67-69), includes: javascript:void(0); https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/viewContent/1586710/View 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 10/11 6Books and Resources for this Week 1. Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process. 2. Identify organizational mandates. 3. Clarify organizational mission and values. 4. Assess the external and internal environments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 5. Identify the strategic issues facing the organization. 6. Formulate strategies to manage the issues. 7. Review and adopt the strategic plan or plans. 8. Establish an effective organizational vision. 9. Develop an effective implementation process. 10. Reassess strategies and the strategic planning process. If you were a department head at a government agency or nonprofit organization, and you were tasked with leading a strategic planning process, would you find the above steps helpful? Who would you engage with in this process? As you read the materials this week, think about how you might go about a strategic planning process, and how such a process could help you and your organization get to where you need to be. This assignment returns to your role as a city department head, asking you to write a brochure to distribute to city employees. The brochure will help city employees understand the steps and concepts related to a new strategic planning process initiated by the city manager. Your brochure will educate employees about strategic planning. The assignment will allow you to engage in the readings and practically apply your knowledge about strategic planning to a public administration setting. Be sure to review this week's resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments. References: Bryson, J. M. (Ed.). (2018). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. javascript:void(0) 9/21/21, 12:14 PM PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Management (9860829994) - PUB-7008 V1: Principles of Organization and Manag… https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 11/11 Week 8 - Assignment: Create a Brochure on Organizational Planning Assignment Due November 14 at 11:59 PM https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/168195/viewContent/1586711/View