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Public Management: Thinking and Acting in Three Dimensions was born of two convictions: (1) effective public management and competent public managers are essential to achieving the duly authorized goals of public policies at all levels of government, and (2) trustworthy public management is a sustaining factor in the legitimacy of public administration within America’s constitutional scheme of governance. By the term public management, we mean the decisions and actions of public officials in managerial roles to ensure that the allocation and use of resources available to governments are directed toward the achievement of lawful public policy goals.
Imparting a sense of urgency to this project is the steady outpouring of stories of public mismanagement and incompetence in recent years. Policies, organizations, and public officials have too often failed the public, with consequences ranging from unfortunate to tragic. Such failures further diminish Americans’ trust in their government to, as public opinion pollsters put it, “do what is right.i” Excuses that cavalierly explain mismanagement as “stuff happens” hardly mollify citizens who justifiably resent misuses of their tax dollars.
Yet chronic failure is far from the whole story of American public management. In this book, we highlight examples of successful policies, organizations, and individuals. These stories exemplify how the daily business of government at all levels is performed with commendable competence by officials dedicated to effective public service. That the American administrative state ever or even often works well attracts little media, interest group, or citizen attention. “Another good day at the office” is not a compelling story.
Public management in our democracy can be dauntingly challenging. Doing what is right is hard work. Indeed, to manage effectively in a regime of separated powers and checks and balances entails intellectual and practical challenges that are exceptional among modern industrial democracies. Educating people to understand and to meet these challenges is the goal of public affairs education in general, and it is our reason for writing this book. We aim
• to educate readers to be informed citizens concerning how government works, what is involved in implementing complex public policies, and how managerial leadership and skill can contribute to achieving effective public policy outcomes, and
iPew Research Center for People and the Press, “Trust in Government Nears Record Low, but Most Federal Agencies Are Viewed Favorably,” Survey Report, October 18, 2013, Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/10-18-13%20 Trust%20in%20Govt%20Update.pdf.
• to prepare students to participate as professionals by helping them acquire critical analytical and rhetorical skills appropriate to addressing public management’s distinctive challenges, through adherence to a guiding principle of the rule of law and through deliberative processes informed by the multiple dimensions of public management.
THE BOOK’S PREMISES
This textbook’s argument is developed from the following premises:
• The topic of public management is about much more than just what tasks managers do and how they do those tasks. Instead, it is fundamentally about why public managers do what they do.
• A public manager in a particular situation confronts and must sort through many details. Many of these details may seem inconsequential, but they are often of great importance to an accurate understanding of what matters. As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details.” A manager needs to be able to identify the most important among all these details. That requires, in turn, knowing the right questions to ask in order to focus on the key facts.
• Situations that public managers face, and, therefore, the right questions to ask, will differ depending on factors that include
{ the level of government (federal, state, local),
{ politics and political institutions,
{ characteristics of the organizations where public managers work and the type of work the organization does,
{ the organization’s institutionalized values and cultures/subcultures,
{ the personalities and skills of the individual managers themselves, and
{ the context of the organization’s work.
• The real challenges that public managers face typically have no single best response. Instead, relying on analysis—a way of thinking about and approaching problems—is a more robust approach than searching for a textbook answer or resorting to a one-size-fits-all best practice.
• An analytical approach typically involves
{ choosing a framework for viewing public management problems: in this book, that framework comprises three dimensions: structure, culture, and craft, and
{ adopting a systematic process for thinking about the problem or challenge: in this book, that process is the model deliberative process.
• There is more rational, or at least systematic, thinking in public affairs than may be apparent from media accounts. The institutional framework of American governments tends toward reasoned explanations and justifications for policies and budgets. Making persuasive arguments does matter in practice, and, to the extent it does, that is healthy for democratic governance.
WHY THREE DIMENSIONS?
We believe that managing in the public sector requires an understanding of three distinct dimensions of public action:
• Structure: administrative structures and processes,
• Culture: organizations and their cultures, and
• Craft: individual public managers and their skills and values.
These three dimensions interact in complex ways to produce results that approximate what citizens and their representatives expect from their governments.
The three dimensions encapsulate the typical ways in which citizens and lawmakers tend to think about and react to government: as public agencies that serve the public in particular ways (i.e., structure), as the values institutionalized in public bureaucracies that are reflected in the ways employees do their work (i.e., culture), and as the individuals who hold positions of authority and responsibility in government and should be held accountable for how well or poorly government performs (i.e., craft).
The three-dimensional framework is embedded in James Madison’s constitutional scheme of American governance that comprises the rule of law: a separation of powers among legislative, executive, and judicial branches; checks and balances; federalism; and pluralism. Public management is not a thing apart from politics and policy but an integral, inseparable part of making our democratic institutions work for “the people.”
TEACHING PUBLIC MANAGEMENT WITH THIS BOOK
The pedagogical approach underlying this book draws on the authors’ combined half century of experience teaching both public management and policy analysis to students in professional master’s degree programs (experience that, in turn, was grounded on a decade of public service).
The book aims to demonstrate that effective public management in the real world will benefit in significant ways from critical analysis and the manager’s ability to incorporate such analysis into managerial actions and strategies and to bring the need for such intellectual skills to vivid life through the liberal use of cases, examples, and insightful anecdotes of public management in actual practice.
A further aspect of our approach is its emphasis on the rule of law. Many texts, whatever methods they use to prepare professionals for practice, view laws, rules, courts, and legality as specialized topics, thus giving short shrift to how the rule of law permeates professional work. These texts may deal with particular laws, lawsuits, and court decisions in the context of considering specific managerial problems, but they do not sufficiently illuminate the relationship of managerial practice to lawfulness and to upholding the Constitution, which the public manager’s oath of office explicitly requires. In this book, adhering to the rule of law is regarded as the foundation of public management, and we consider in detail what that proposition means for practice.
Public management is not only thoughtful, analytical deliberation and the lawful action that proceeds from it, however. It is also rhetoric, the ability to use language effectively in political and organizational contexts to bring superiors, peers, and subordinates to agreement, action, and cooperation. The “method” of this book, then, is argument based on ideas fully developed in the book’s appendix. We believe that the ability to make persuasive arguments is fundamental to the practice of public management (indeed, it is fundamental
to all forms of public service) in a democracy. The intellectual and verbal skills needed for argument—the ability to reason, explain, and persuade—are not always given appropriate emphasis in the teaching of public management, where behavioral skills—supervision, teamwork, motivation, conflict management, and leadership—are often featured. These behavioral skills are essential, and our hope is that students are given opportunities to develop such skills in their professional training. But reasoned persuasion is a too-littlerecognized sine qua non for managerial effectiveness. It is, moreover, a skill that can be practiced and effectively developed in the classroom.
OUR ARGUMENT FOR THIS BOOK
We make a straightforward claim: Public managers who are able to use all three dimensions of public management to address the issues and problems they confront, whether routine or extraordinary, will perform more effectively than will those who cannot distinguish these dimensions or who use them inappropriately. Three-dimensional public management is better public management.
The reason for making this claim is also straightforward. Because the administrative system is embedded within complex political and legal processes having constitutional origins, public officials in managerial roles have neither the broad discretion nor the clear bottom line that provide a focus for business management. Public managers cannot simply resort to “technical rationality” or rely on “leadership” to ensure “profitability.” Instead, their decisions are constrained by laws, policies, organizational cultures, and legal precedents, and their actions and the consequences they produce are subject to critical scrutiny from legislators, interest groups, courts, the media, and their own employees. A three-dimensional approach helps bring this kaleidoscopic complexity into a clearer focus for action.
Readers of this book will find the evidence for this claim and the reasoning supporting it in the scores of examples, case studies, stories, and references that are included or cited throughout the text. From the analyses of the structural, cultural, and craft elements of real-world managerial activity emerges a strong sense of their specific importance, used singly or in combination, to effective management. Public managers who, in extremis, have the ability to consider all three dimensions of public management are, the evidence suggests, more likely to cope with a crisis, reform an agency, or reach a politically and legally satisfactory resolution to a vexing problem.
The warrant or theory justifying the link between the book’s claim and its evidence is in the logic of governance discussed in Chapter 4 and the theoretical reasoning on which it is based. That body of theory postulates that citizens are linked to the activities and performance of their governments through layers of institutions established according to general principles of delegation and control and accountability. No approach to public management that fails to incorporate the resulting logic of governance into its analysis and prescriptions will adequately recognize the kinds of pressures that constitute the reality of day-to-day public management.
The preceding elements of our argument are subject to qualifications, however. As we discuss in the next section, available texts offer many other approaches to the teaching and practice of public management, and there is value in all of them. Behavioral and experiential and best practices approaches yield important insights in how to manage in the public sector. We believe they are useful supplements to, not substitutes for, a three-dimensional approach.
HOW THIS BOOK DIFFERS FROM OTHER TEXTBOOKS
This book differs in significant ways from other textbooks used in introductory courses on public administration and management in professional master’s degree programs.
One reason for differences among texts is that authors have different disciplinary orientations. Instructors whose backgrounds differ from ours—we consider ourselves to be political economists—might not agree with our emphasis, for example, on the hierarchical nature of governance or on the analytic value of the principal-agent model. Anticipating this reality, we have tried to let the practical challenges of public management, rather than the preoccupations of our own academic field, govern our selection of concepts, heuristics, and examples. Although the assumption of bounded rationality can be insightful in certain applications, we also discuss insightful kinds of psychosocial considerations that affect decision making. We think that applications of principal-agent logic, suitably qualified, can enlighten practice, but we include other models of human interaction as well. We cannot expect instructors to change their academic stripes, but we do hope they will consider the pedagogical value of concepts that they may not use as scholars.
We also acknowledge the differences in how instructors conceive of the nature of professional education, that is, on the answer to the question: How can students at the master’s level best be prepared for the professional practice of public management? Our approach is based on our answer: by helping students acquire critical analytical and rhetorical skills appropriate to addressing public management’s distinctive challenges, through adherence to a guiding principle of the rule of law, and through deliberative processes informed by the multiple dimensions of public management.
Some instructors consider the goal of master’s education in public management to be familiarizing students with research literature related to specific areas and topics associated with public administration and management. Such familiarity may suggest applications of the theories and empirical findings of that literature to public management. Their students are encouraged, in effect, to think like applied social scientists. As practicing social scientists, we have the utmost respect for rigorous research and the findings it produces; this book introduces and draws heavily on them. We believe, however, that master’s-level graduates of a professional program who are not familiar with all that is known about a topic are nevertheless able to think critically and analytically about public management problems. Knowing and applying research literature is a means to an end for practice, not an end in itself. Mastery of an insightful heuristic, together with intellectual curiosity about where helpful answers to managerial challenges may lie, is more likely to assist real-time thinking than mere mastery of the full realm of academic knowledge.
Yet another view of the purpose of master’s education in public management is that it should familiarize students with the administrative state’s architecture and functions, which constitute the context for professional practice and the profession of public administration. As with rigorous social science, we do not stint in our respect for the importance of a working knowledge of the institutions of American governance and the critical importance of public service values. But we believe that being able to describe institutions is of less immediate import to professional practice than knowing how the details of institutions can be a source both of management problems and of solutions to them.
A third view of the purpose of master’s-level education in public management is that it should show how individual personality, skill, aspiration, and character—enlightened by knowledge of practices of successful managers—can contribute to effective governmental performance. Many books take a nuts-and-bolts orientation to
management, emphasizing popular topics such as handling the press, working with politicians, dealing with unpleasant people, managing one’s boss, fostering teamwork, negotiating, and the like. These behavioral skills are important and may enable a particular public manager to handle a situation successfully. But teaching these skills typically involves constructing principles of effective practice from the analysis of cases, examples, and personal experience. Such case-based and experience-based analyses often take institutional and organizational constraints as given. Our analyses of cases and personal experience assume that management is three-dimensional and must not overemphasize individual managers, however charismatic they may be. We are also skeptical of the value of universal principles of effective practice; good managers will violate them as the situation requires. Knowing when and why to violate them is what is important to managerial effectiveness. Our approach emphasizes the acquisition of critical analytical skills that are appropriate for addressing public management’s distinctive challenges in our constitutional scheme of governance.
TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH THIS BOOK
This book is designed for a semester-long course (or a two-quarter course sequence) on public management at the master’s degree level. Supplemented by other readings, the book also might be suitable for a doctoral seminar on the subject and, possibly, for advanced undergraduates studying American politics and government. The book is appropriate for precareer students and those with some or even considerable experience in the public sector (many of whom return to school to develop conceptual foundations for their careers), as most contemporary public management classes include both types of students. Although the emphasis is on management in the public sector, students whose interests lie primarily in the nonprofit sector also will find material of value to them because of its public service orientation and sections specifically about nonprofit organizations and management. We intend for this book to be used as a platform for different types of applications and different types of pedagogical strategies.
In developing the text, we confronted two additional issues. First, where do topics that many instructors regard as important to public management belong? Our choice of emphasis, analytic framework, and text organization inevitably means that familiar topics such as budgeting, human resources administration, outsourcing, and decision making are woven across the three dimensions. Frequent cross-references appear throughout the book, emphasizing the multidimensional nature of particular topics. This treatment reflects our view that the appropriate use of specialized functions is intrinsic to managing in three dimensions rather than an end in itself. Presenting such topics in this way, we have found, makes material that can seem tedious in a traditional descriptive and functional format far more engaging for students because they can see the topics in the broader context of public management’s distinctive challenges.
Second, how should we choose from among the wide array of concepts and heuristics that can be applicable to public management? We attempted to balance a number of criteria: significance, analytical value, and what works well in the classroom. Citations include additional resources that a reader might find useful. Other topics and readings that appeal to individual instructors can be incorporated in a syllabus at appropriate points in the course. Some instructors may choose a different balance and spend an entire class period discussing contracting (for example), while others may devote less time to this structural feature and instead emphasize networks and network management strategies (for example).
To facilitate an interactive, experiential process of teaching and learning, each chapter offers some ideas for class discussion. They include numerous examples of varying lengths to illustrate how concepts are relevant to practice. These examples are based on media accounts, official reports, and, in some cases, academic research publications. Instructors might consider developing preclass assignment questions based on the examples or encouraging students to find others.
An issue that always arises in selecting examples is the balance to strike between successes and failures. This is a subject of lively controversy, with some arguing that failures are more enlightening and others that successes are more inspiring. We like the anecdote about the Dutch national soccer team’s persistent failure to win important matches because of its inability to make penalty kicks. After a coaching strategy of having players study film of successful kicks did not improve matters, team officials decided—with better results—to study film of failed kicks and point out why they failed. While we include both successes and failures throughout the book, we did not hesitate to choose failures—often referred to in the literature as “fiascos”—as a basis for drawing lessons from complex situations.
The examples in the text tend to be weighted somewhat more toward national or federal government issues than toward state or local issues. Although a somewhat more even balance is in principle desirable, the actual balance reflects the fact that public management issues at the federal level and situations occurring in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, tend to be more widely publicized, better documented, and more accessible and even familiar to students in many different settings. We hope that instructors will supplement our examples with ones from state and local settings that reflect local interests and concerns.
Following the main text of each chapter is a fully developed case of public management at the federal, state, or local level of government. Each case is accompanied by a series of questions that may be assigned as preparation for class discussion or as the basis of a written assignment. In general, readers are asked to analyze the case using the concepts presented in the chapter or elsewhere in the book.
For class discussions and assignments, students can be encouraged to exercise the method of the course—that is, use the model deliberative process described in Chapter 1 along with the method of argument described in the appendix or to develop their own arguments as they analyze examples and cases.
We have found it helpful to maintain an explicit relationship between the flow of course material and the real world of public management. Students tend to react well to regular discussions of public management in the news, based on current events that illustrate course themes and ideas. Students might be asked to submit news items for inclusion in this segment of class discussion. Involvement and interaction among students outside of class may be enhanced by using a course-based online learning platform to post and discuss such items.
Although we emphasize the skill of making rational arguments, we know that emotions, deeply held convictions and ideologies, and prior experience and beliefs matter, too. They affect choice and action in all branches and at all levels of government. Incorporating this reality into managerial analysis and argument does not mean that managers should appeal to emotions instead of to common sense and considerations of efficiency and effectiveness. It means that managers should understand how particular arguments are likely to be filtered through the values and emotions of citizens, legislators, and public officials. As the account in Chapter 11 shows, Paul Vallas was effective because his arguments reflected a causal understanding of school improvement that was persuasive.
When all is said and done, public management is about making good on those values and commitments that have been given expression in public policies and laws, about satisfying citizens’ expectations that their governments will perform honestly and effectively. Doing so is a matter of personal character and democratic values, about caring and serving, but it is more than that. Public managers are at the vortex of America’s uniquely complex constitutional scheme, with the intense cross pressures created by its separation of powers and checks and balances. To be effective requires intellectual, behavioral, and emotional strengths of a high—in many cases an extraordinary—order. But that is the kind of challenge the Founders of the Republic created. And there are few deeper satisfactions than meeting such challenges successfully.
Acknowledgments
In addition to those acknowledged in the first edition, we are grateful to Meredith Freed for research and documentation assistance as we prepared the second edition.
From CQ Press, we thank Charisse Kiino for her faith in this project and for guidance and good advice from start to finish; Matthew Byrnie, Sarah Calabi, and Suzanne Flinchbaugh for editorial guidance on the second edition; Katie Lowry and Bennie Clark Allen for their help and patience in preparing this book for publication and seeing it through production; Allison Hughes for her guidance on ancillaries; and Amy Whitaker for her efforts and advice concerning marketing. Thanks also to Michelle Ponce for her copyediting and Mary Mortensen for her superb craft in preparing the indexes.
Finally, the forbearance and sustained support of our spouses, Patricia R. Lynn and Andreas W. Lehnert, enabled us to concentrate on preparing both editions of this book. We thank and love them.
About the Authors
Carolyn J. Hill is associate professor of public policy at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at MDRC. Her research focuses on whether and why public programs are effective and how they can be improved. Her work has been published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and other journals. With Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. and Carolyn J. Heinrich, Hill is the author of Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research.
Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on governance, public administration, and public management. His books include Public Management as Art, Science and Profession, Madison’s Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution (with Anthony M. Bertelli), and Public Management: Old and New, and he is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Public Management. He has received the John Gaus lectureship award from the American Political Science Association, the Dwight Waldo and Paul Van Riper awards from the American Society for Public Administration, and the H. George Frederickson Award from the Public Management Research Association.
PART I ANALYZING PUBLIC MANAGEMENT’S CHALLENGES
The Fundamentals
Public management is a world of settled institutions designed to allow imperfect people to use flawed procedures to cope with insoluble problems.i
—James Q. Wilson Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It
Virtually all of us are aware of government: the federal, state, and local legislatures, agencies, commissions, and courts which make, administer, and enforce the laws that govern and serve us. We have probably studied American history and civics in school. Most of us know about our government through necessary interactions with governments and public employees face-to-face, online, and through the mail. Most of us vote. The news media inform us about elections, policy issues and debates, and the decisions of lawmakers, public officials, and judges. For tens of millions of us, our livelihoods depend on government, and we may understand much more about how government works because we are, or know, public employees, government contractors, participants in nonprofit or civil society organizations, or engaged, activist citizens.
Despite these types of familiarity, most of us may nonetheless view the government as distant and amorphous: it is “them”, not “us.” It is “city hall,” “Washington,” “the bureaucracy.” And most of us don’t trust it.
The government is made up of both elected and unelected officials (the infamous unelected bureaucrats). Do their decisions and actions reflect our society’s values and meet our needs and expectations? Can we trust government to perform effectively? Our opinions about these questions may vary widely, depending on how much we are affected by or involved in government. Yet a sobering fact is that most
iJames Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1989), 375.
At the heart of government are public officials whose job is public management. They work for the departments, bureaus, agencies, and offices of federal, state, and local governments, and they are responsible for transforming the goals and objectives of policymakers into tangible operating results.
Americans do not trust government “to do what is right.”ii Distrust of “big government,” reflected early on in the Boston Tea Party, has grown in recent years as the United States has experienced the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent “Great Recession,” and National Security Agency surveillance revelations. We have duties as citizens to understand our governments at a level beyond a Twitter feed, headline, or sound bite. We all have an interest in building governments that reflect our values, meet our expectations, and earn our trust. A large part of this responsibility is developing a greater understanding of public management. This book aims to develop that understanding and to improve the chances that public managers’ decisions and actions reflect our society’s values, perform effectively, and earn the people’s trust.
At the heart of government are public officials whose job is public management. They work for the departments, bureaus, agencies, and offices of federal, state, and local governments, and they are responsible for transforming the goals and objectives of policymakers into tangible operating results. “We the people” base our opinions about government on these results. Yet most public managers are largely invisible to us unless they make mistakes. They are the unelected bureaucrats we both depend on and distrust.
Public management is hard work. Unlike managers in the corporate sector, public managers often operate in highly charged, uncertain, and hostile political environments. Elected representatives make the laws that create public agencies and provide their budgets. Bargaining and compromise over the conflicting interests of politicians and their constituencies influence the responsibilities of public managers and the structures and resources of the organizations for which they work, seldom resulting in technically rational organizations that can be managed efficiently and effectively. Yet at the same time, politicians demand efficient and effective performance of the technically irrational organizations they created. Often public managers have been given wrenches to pound nails, gloves that don’t fit, maps leading to different destinations.
Public managers must make the best of it. They must be capable of reconciling the tensions between political rationality and technical rationality. They must do so, moreover, in environments where organizations, people, and resources constrain what they can do, instead of enable what they could do if they were managing in the private sector. The jobs of public managers are often regarded as impossible: no matter what they do, critics will say they should have done something else.
So how can public managers do the impossible? One thing above all is essential: their guiding principle must be accountability to and within the rule of law. Accountability means, in the first instance, legality: finding and complying with the laws governing a situation. Most agencies are governed by numerous statutes, regulations, court rulings, and administrative guidelines. Exactly what the law is may not always be clear, however; court rulings and interpretations may be in conflict. The manager must make every effort to know and be answerable to lawmakers, even when the law may change from one legislative session or court session to the next.
Accountability is about more than observing the letter of the law, however. It is also about acting in accordance with the spirit of the law: minding the public and community interests that the rule of law is intended to serve. As citizens, we obey the letter of the law when driving a car on public roadways. We obey the law not only to avoid
iiPew Research Center for People and the Press, “Trust in Government Nears Record Low, but Most Federal Agencies are Viewed Favorably,” Survey Report, October 18, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/10-18-13%20Trust%20in%20Govt%20Update.pdf.
getting a ticket but also because safety is in the community’s interest as well as our own. Likewise, a public manager’s lawfulness, while a personal interest, also serves public interests—in public health, an educated citizenry, fairness in law enforcement, the protection of civil rights—that inspired enactment of the laws. In Aristotelian terms, lawfulness means managing in the interests of collective justice.
Public managers must have the capacities to make decisions, manage people, and cope with the stress that is associated with uncertainty, ambiguous authority, limited resources, and political conflict. Beyond these abilities, public managers must have the capacity to think critically and analytically about what the law, the task, common sense, and collective justice require. By doing so, they are more likely to perform effectively and produce results that earn the public’s trust.
PUBLIC MANAGEMENT’S THREE DIMENSIONS
This book lays out a framework for analyzing the challenges faced by public managers. The framework conceptualizes three distinct but interrelated dimensions of public management:
• Structure: the lawfully authorized delegations to administrative officials of the authority and responsibility to take action on behalf of policy and program objectives;
• Culture: the norms, values, and standards of conduct that provide meaning, purpose, and motivation to individuals working within an organizational unit; and
• Craft: the manager’s own individual efforts in goal setting, taking appropriate actions, leading, and explaining and justifying what the organization is doing.
This framework draws on many concepts and tools derived from the social sciences and public policy analysis. It fully encapsulates public managers’ dual roles as both creatures of their political environments and creators of the capacity to implement public policies that arise within those environments.
Each dimension is evident in responses to Hurricane Katrina. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the City of New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast, creating the costliest natural disaster in American history to that point. Hurricane Katrina was public management’s perfect storm: a confluence of events, politics, policies, and personalities that pushed America’s Constitutional scheme of governance, like New Orleans’s levee system, beyond its breaking point. What happened during and following the storm, while revealing acts of responsible and selfless heroism, also exposed fundamental weaknesses in our governing institutions.
The story of Hurricane Katrina is partly about politics, such as the politics of public works spending by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and partly about policy, such as the federal government’s responsibilities for responding to emergencies and assisting state and local governments to confront them. It is foremost, however, a story about what officials with managerial responsibilities did prior to, during, and after the storm—and why they did it.
The story of public management in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina constitutes an appropriate touchstone for the issues and ideas in this book. The introductions to Parts II through V include examples, through the lens of each dimension, of how the Katrina emergency was managed. The source of these examples is the U.S. Senate report on the response of governments to the unfolding emergency.iii
iiiU.S. Senate, Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared: Special Report of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/ katrinanation.html.
PART I OVERVIEW
Part I of this book comprises three chapters:
• Chapter 1 describes the domain of public management and its distinctive challenges, the basic logic of public management in the three-dimensional framework, and a model deliberative process for public management analysis.
• Chapter 2 describes the fundamental role of public managerial accountability to the rule of law, the meaning of the rule of law, the practice of lawful and accountable public management, and the importance of thinking institutionally.
• Chapter 3 presents a case study of the events surrounding revelations in 2013 and beyond of U.S. National Security Agency surveillance of private communications. Immersion in the case’s details is an opportunity to apply the ideas and analytical frameworks from Chapters 1 and 2 and to confront the complexity of many intersecting features of public governance in the United States.
This part of the book provides answers to three questions:
1. What do public managers do and why?
2. How are unelected public managers held accountable to citizens affected by what they do?
3. What insights might be gained into the fundamental issues of democratic governance and of managerial responsibility by studying the dauntingly confusing case of what leaked classified documents revealed about the U.S. government's surveillance of Americans' private communications?
Public Management’s Three Dimensions Structure,Culture,Craft
PUBLIC MANAGERS AND THE DOMAIN OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
Public managers are all around us. They work in the departments, agencies, bureaus, and offices of federal, state, and local governments. The responsibilities of public organizations vary from providing basic public services, such as education, fire fighting, and law enforcement, to regulating environmental pollution and the safety of coal mines, gathering and analyzing intelligence needed for national security, and providing health care to military veterans. The characteristics of public organizations vary as well, in terms of budgets and personnel, diversity of mission, complexity of tasks, degree of centralization or decentralization, extent and sources of political support. But the secretary of defense and the official in charge of a local animal control office have one thing in common: they are both public managers.
Across all these settings, public managers are responsible for translating the goals and objectives of policymakers into tangible operating results. Public management is the process of ensuring that the allocation and use of resources available to governments are directed toward the achievement of lawful public policy goals. What does this mean in practice? What factors determine the purposes and responsibilities of public managers’ roles? How much discretion do they have in deciding how to do their jobs?
Broadly speaking, public managers may be thought of as both creatures of their political environments and creators of capacities needed to achieve results for themselves and their organizations. Put another way, they are both constrained and enabled in how they implement public policies.
Characterizations of public management that emphasize its creature aspects focus on structural arrangements such as organizational hierarchies. In these accounts, the emphasis may be on elements such as bureaus, offices, job descriptions, and reporting relationships. An essay written by Luther Gulick for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Committee on Administrative Management” in 1937 illustrates this perspective, in which public managers were depicted as obediently carrying out specific functions
Public management is the process of ensuring that the allocation and use of resources available to governments are directed toward the achievement of lawful public policy goals.
necessary for the operation of public departments and bureaus: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting, functions (POSDCORB).1 An early doctrine in American public administration, the politics-administration dichotomy held that politics and administration could (and should) be separate and distinct activities.2 This sentiment reflected in part a desire to eliminate corruption and partisanship from the administration of public programs and in part a view that administration was a scientific, not a political, activity.
Characterizations of public managers as creators tend to assume that managers (especially senior officials) have considerable latitude to exercise their own judgment. Public managers create opportunities, policy, direction, administrative structures, and organizational relationships within their spheres of influence. For example, in The Functions of the Executive, Chester Barnard argued that a primary task of the organization’s leader is to create and shape a culture that can unify employees and improve organizational performance.3
This book’s definition of public management views the public manager both as creature—of politics, law, structures, and responsibilities—and as creator—of strategies, capacity, and results. The reality of how governments work does not support a politics-administration dichotomy: Politics and policymaking result in mandates that are often ambiguous, subject to conflicting interpretations, politically controversial, and inadequately supported with resources and structures of communication and cooperation. As a consequence, public management necessarily completes policymaking by making concrete decisions within the limits of delegated authority and motivating subordinates and organizations to act in appropriate ways. Thus, in addition to the directive activities uniquely associated with managing, the job of a public manager often involves the realms of politics, policymaking, and institutional leadership. Each of these roles, depicted in Figure 1.1, has a distinctive influence on public policy outcomes.
The domain of politics is concerned principally with the distribution and use of control over government resources, summed up nicely in the title of political scientist Harold Lasswell’s book Politics: Who Gets What, When, How.4 According to the U.S. Constitution, citizens have sovereign power, and their wishes are given expression through elected representatives in the political branches of government. Politics gives expression to citizen preferences, traditionally referred to as “the public will” and allocates resources among political jurisdictions, interests, policies, processes, and programs in order to express that will.
The domain of policymaking is concerned with defining substantive goals of politics and choosing from among alternative courses of action that reflect the values, interests, and facts of given situations and actors. Policymaking involves the subject matter of governmental activity, the making of specific choices concerning the substantive content of statutes, appropriations, organizations, regulations, budgets, strategies, and precedentsetting decisions. Policymaking is inevitably influenced by political values and processes, but the reverse is also true: as political scientist E. E. Schattschneider observed, “new policies create a new politics.”5
In the context of a particular setting, situation, program, policy, or deliberation, certain individuals assume the responsibility for clarifying purposes and inspiring others to take action toward a focused goal. According to historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns, leadership occurs “when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers . . . in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers.”6 Leadership is essential when purposes are unclear, when a sense of direction is absent, when the situation is characterized by confusion and conflict, or when motivation is lacking.
In the following sections of this chapter, additional ideas and concepts that are central to this book’s argument are explained: historical origins of public management as a distinctive function of societal governance; essential
