public management: what do we know? what should we know? and how will we know it?

Public Management- hat DO we how; What Should We Know? And How Will We Know It?

Laurrence E. Lynn, Jr.

Abstract The field of public management draws on a rich and varied trove of intellectual resources. Applying scholarship and imagination, its students can recognize, interpret, and predict the reality of managing governmental organizations with considerable acuity. I f the field is to advance, however, researchers must do more than reverently assemble and digest practice wisdom. More emphasis must be placed on disciplined, theory-based inquiry.

The subject of public management encompasses a number of compelling issues, from how to create organizations and administrative arrangements in order to produce the outcomes we desire from government to how to evaluate the performance of public managers. The purpose of this article is to assess the state of our ability to address these issues and to produce useful, authorative answers. This assessment is necessarily personal. Though I have systematically examined a variety of intellectual sources in the course of writing a recent book,’ I do not pretend to have conducted a comprehensive, systematic, or dispassionate survey of the extensive resources that comprise the relevant body of knowledge.’

My argument can be summarized as follows. While we know a great deal about public management, and while knowledge in this field will always and necessarily be more conjectural and intuitive than normal social science, there has been too little disciplined, imaginative, theory-based inquiry and, as a result, too little development of our ability to learn and to deepen and extend our understanding. If public management is to progress from an “indeterminate practice” to a “craft,” i.e., to a skilled activity that can be both learned and taught, students of the subject must cool their ardor for practice wisdom and warm up to more systematic and scholarly methods of inquiry.

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 7, No. 1, 178-187 (1987) 8 1987 b the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management PublisheJ by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0276-8739187104 178-10$04.00

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WHAT DO WE KNOW?

I begin with the assertion that we already know a great deal about the problems of leading and directing public organizations, about life in these organizations, and about the relationships of public managers and their organizations to their political environments. This knowledge comes from the seminal works of outstanding social scientists, a steadily growing literature of teaching cases and case analyses, political biography and autobiography, stories by outstanding investigative reporters, a steady outpouring of reports by Congressional committees, Presidential Commis- sions, and the General Accounting Office, and the regular reporting by the N e w York Times, the Washington Post, the Wan Street Journal, the National Journal, and Congressional Quarterly.

For example, the contributions of contemporary social science to our understanding of public management are nowhere better illustrated than in Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy. Among its other contributions, this book identifies the role of appointed and career officials in public policy formation. Kingdon concludes

. . . as far as agenda setting is concerned . . . elected officials and their appointees turn out to be more important than career civil servants or participants outside of government. . . . [Ellected officials do not necessarily get their way in specifying alternatives or implementing decisions, but they do affect agendas rather substan- tially.’

Taken together, the works of Kingdon, March: Hec10,~ and Skocpo16 provide valuable insights into the nature and uses by public managers of autonomy, ambiguity, and chance in the formulation and execution of public policy.

At the same time, perhaps no book conveys the nature and dynamics of ambition and power in public life so well as The Power Broker, Caro’s richly textured political biography of Robert Moses. According to Caro, Moses had resources as a public manager which others found useful, and Moses skillfully exchanged them for the support he wanted.

As old-time Tammany ward bosses had distributed Christmas baskets filled with turkeys and sugar plums in decades past, Robert Moses distributed Christmas baskets now. But he distributed them not to voters, and not-at least not primarily-to the men the voters had elected to office, but to the men who controlled the men the voters had elected to office-many of the most powerful men in the city and the state. His “ward,” his “district,” was the uppermost precincts of politics. . . . Using the vast wealth of his public authorities, he made himself the ward boss of the highest precincts, bankroller of the inner circle, dancing master of the Four Hundred of politics. And he held his district for thirty years?

Finally, who can doubt that Kafka and Le Carre teach us fundamental truth about life in bureaucracies? Of a period of steeply declining agency morale, Le Carre writes:

Eventually, by sauntering in and out of other people’s offices, [Guillam] began to realize what everyone else had realized some weeks before. The circus wasn’t just silent, it was frozen. Nothing was coming in; nothing was going out; not at the level on which Guillam moved, anyhow. Inside the building, people in authority had gone to earth . . . now and then somebody would say they had seen Alleline leaving his

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club and he looked furious. Or control getting into his car and he looked sunny. Or that Bill Haydon had resigned, on the grounds that he had been overruled or undercut, but Bill was always resigning?

We recognize Kafka’s Castle and Le Carre’s Circus as paradigmatic; K. is the quintessential outsider trying to penetrate the defenses of bureaucracy and George Smiley is the inscrutable insider struggling to maintain the dignity and meaning of his life.

The remarkable richness of public management’s intellectual trove becomes obvious when comparing it to the literature on the private sector, and in particular to the literature on managing and working within large corporations. Glimpses of the inside seldom penetrate deeply or introspec- tively-compare the never-look-back accounts by Harold Geneen or Lee Iacocca with the more introspective reflections of Richard Nixon, Elliot Richardson, or David Stockman. I believe it can be argued that we know more about what goes on inside the typical executive agency of government than we do about what goes on inside large law firms, or organizations such as Lehman Brothers, or corporations such as the Ford Motor Company, or a typical Catholic archdiocese, or a large foundation. The right to privacy of the private sector effectively keeps us at arm’s length, whereas we penetrate the public sector easily and often.

Drawing on such sources, we can learn to recognize and interpret the reality of managing government organizations with some considerable acuity. Beyond this, we can also make confident predictions. If we know something about a public agency and its political environment, we can predict the consequences of particular managerial actions, of altering structural arrangements in certain ways, or of providing particular kinds of new information. If we know something about a particular executive’s character, temperament, background, policy orientation, and skills, we can make predictions about his or her performance in office.

This celebration of public management’s intellectual resources and abili- ties begs some important questions, however. Who is the “we” who know these things? Just what is it that we know? To what extent is our knowledge scientific-verifiable by impartial investigators-and to what extent is it impressionistic, intuitive, and subjective-a projection of our ideological or normative predispositions?

By “we”, I refer to anyone who is generally conversant with the literatures I have cited; who has studied, associated with, or served with practicing public officials; and who maintains a current interest in governmental performance. “We” are discerning people able to exercise critical judgments concerning what we read, see, and hear and to identify likely sources of new knowledge and extract what is valuable from them. Unlike the average literate (and noncynical) citizen, for example, who is inclined to take the autobiographical accounts of public figures such as Joseph Califano, Henry Kissinger, and David Stockman largely at face value, students of public management can supply a context for interpreting such works, can read between the lines, can draw on other relevant facts and accounts, and can appreciate what these people are teaching us of historical or analytical value.

By saying we “know,” I mean, in the first instance, that we have the ability, echoing Vickers’s notion, to exercise good appreciative judgments, judgments that disclose, “what can best be described as a set of readinesses to

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distinguish some aspects of the situation rather than others and to classify and value these in this way rather than in that."' This ability to appreciate the problems of public management is based in part on scientific understanding as conventionally defined. But it extends well beyond the boundaries of the scientific. Students of public management are able to find pieces of the puzzle in all kinds of places and fit them together into intelligible pictures. We admire their artistry as much as their science.

WHAT SHOULD WE KNOW?

We already know the right kinds of things about public management. There are, however, significant lacunae in our knowledge, as one would expect in an active and vital field of human affairs. Because the state of knowledge in this field is at least in part subjective, identifying the lacunae may be as much a matter of aesthetic sensibilities as of technical judgment. What follows is my sense of these things.

We should have a much better theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of individual executives and administrators in the formulation and execution of public policy. Does the behavior of individuals merely result from the contexts and circumstances in which they find themselves, as Kaufman's carefully assembled evidence seems to suggest?" Or do human intentions and mental processes influence organizational behavior and policy outcomes, as Vickers, Kingdon, and Heclo suggest also on the basis of considerable evidence? If individual managers can define their own roles at least in part, what are the possibilities, and how should they go about exploiting them? These questions strike me as important and largely unre- solved.

As a related matter, we should know more about the importance of temperament in the leadership of public affairs and about the relative importance of character, skill, and circumstances to public-executive performance. We believe from studying the lives of public men and women that aspects of personality or temperament often make a decisive difference in the shaping of events and in the performance of public organizations. Yet the systematic study of public management is too much in thrall to structural perspectives on organizations. The actors in public agencies, especially their managers, tend to be viewed as neutered occupants of assigned positions in bureaucratic authority systems-as office holders whose success depends largely on successful and obtrusive manipulation of structural variables." Prescriptions for public managers seldom make reference to what individual office holders may want to do or to the personal qualities and motivations they brin to the positions they occupy. We lack a theory of public-executive

We should have a better understanding of the general management function in government. Questions of personality and skill aside, we need to have a clearer sense of the executive role in government organizations. We know that senior public managers are subject to diverse, often conflicting demands. They must be political advisors, policy experts, administrators, and public servants all at the same time. While we can describe and trace the consequences of each type of demand, we are far less capable of discussing

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how they are balanced or integrated, though this is the public executive’s central existential problem.

We should know more about assessing organizational capacities. Public executives usually assume office believing that all of their dreams can be realized. We know that change is, as a general matter, incremental; but we lack the ability to describe the production possibilities for new policies in particular circumstances and to advise public managers on efficient strategies for formulating and achieving specific objectives.

We should make more original contributions to identifying the differences in the management of various kinds of complex organizations. We should be able to stock a subfield called comparative organizations with ideas concerning the differences in context and circumstances among different kinds of organizations and the implications of these differences for organizational structures and for managerial behavior.

If there is a theme (or bias) in these observations, it is that emphasis should shift from a largely ahistorical preoccupation with structures and technologies of choice and implementation to managerial behavior, communications, and public life viewed as an interorganizational system in historical, cultu- ral, and psychosocial perspective.

HOW WILL WE KNOW IT?

How can we advance the state of knowledge in this important field of inquiry? In answering this question the controversies begin.

Lindblom has suggested that there are three kinds of successful practices: technologies, for which good practice can be systematically described (and, one might add, scientifically rationalized) and therefore taught; crafts, or skilled activities which cannot be completely reduced to a code of prescriptions but for which skill can be enhanced through demonstration and apprenticeship; and indeterminate practices, for which success cannot be accounted for a ~ r i o r i . ’ ~ “[Glood decision-making in organizations,” Lind- blom believes, “is an indeterminate pra~t ice .” ’~ So, it might be argued (a fortiori), is public management more broadly conceived.

Most teachers and students of public management appear to believe that at least some aspects of public management can, through the systematic description and analysis of cases, biographies, and practitioners in action, be “elevated” from indeterminate practices to the status of crafts. A successful public manager can be viewed as a craftsman in the sense that “successful performance depends on an intimate knowledge of materials, tools, and processes , and on a highly personal relationship between agent and task.”” There seems to be general agreement, however, that, compared to practice wisdom distilled inductively (and intuitively) from cases and episodes of managerial activity, conventional theory-driven social science has little or nothing to offer those who seek “knowledge of materials, tools, and processes.” In other words, good managers should do certain sorts of things in particular circumstances, and these “good practices” can be demonstrated or observed on the job or in cases. Yet, most students of the subject seem comfortable with Dror’s view that “policymaking [is] an existential phenom- enon . . . much too complex and dynamic to be fully caught in concepts, models, and themes.”I6

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I disagree. If I have any personal sense of dissatisfaction with the field of public management, it is with the inchoate state of our collective ability to learn: to accumulate knowledge, add to it systematically, identify issues, generate interesting propositions, and debate them in a way that advances understanding. In a real sense, I believe, we do not know what we know and therefore have difficulty adding to it in a deliberate manner. The reason is that we place too little value on systematic scholarly inquiry, too little emphasis on developing our ability to make Vickers’ appreciative judgments.

Further development of public management as a field of inquiry will depend in significant part on engaging in the usual tasks of scholarship: formulating questions for systematic research; classifying knowledge in useful ways; constructing theories and models from which interesting propositions can be deduced; confronting these propositions with facts; and producing evidence and arguments. Because the questions motivating inquiry originate in a concern for the performance of social institutions and for the effectiveness of practitioners, scholarship is necessarily more problem oriented, multidisciplinary, conjectural, and intuitive than is true of normal, discipline-oriented social science. The point is that disciplined, theory-based inquiry is a sine qua non for intellectual progress.

This cannot be the whole story, however. Serviceable truth is as likely to emerge from examining and comparing the experiences of introspective practitioners as from systematically applying theories to quantitative data. It is as likely to be metaphorical and analogical as scientific. Indeed, truthful pictures of public management can be created only by drawing imagina- tively on disparate sources. The student of public management reads novels and newspapers during working hours.

Thus, I think the answer to the question of how will we know what we need to know is this: We will increase our knowledge, and our discernment, through good social science, through a wide-ranging, even rambunctious intellectual curiosity extending into all fields and sources that can be useful, including listening to the voices of the men and women who govern, and through attempts to distill what we learn into nontrivial propositions that have direct implications for practice.

Let me try to illustrate what I mean by disciplined, theory-based inquiry. In his excellent paper “Graduate Education in Public Management: Working the Seams of Government,” Elmore postulates that public managers can be viewed as the agents of constitutional officials who know how to work the seams of government: the boundaries between administrative agencies and legislative bodies, between levels of government, between administrative agencies and interest groups, the media, and the like.” Knowing how to work these seams, he argues, requires, among other things, mastery of a technical core of analytic and management skills.

Elmore’s idea is another addition to the stock of metaphors, ways of classifying facts, conceptual frameworks, descriptive accounts, and rules to live by which constitute a good part of the intellectual capital of public management.18 The notion of a seam is a useful metaphor. It will give students in graduate programs a way of intuitively understanding the sources of the problems which preoccupy public managers. For the most part, however, the ideas in public management’s inventory are appreciated largely for their heuristic value and verisimilitude, not for their contributions to knowledge. I believe we tend to measure intellectual progress in

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public management too much in terms of heuristic value. There are other important values to be sought, especially, an increase in fundamental understanding.

Elmore’s metaphor raises interesting and researchable questions. What kinds of things happen at the seams of government? How do they manifest themselves as demands on a public manager’s time and talents? Is this metaphor more useful, or more descriptively accurate, or more intellectually suggestive, than other ways of characterizing the problem of public management? For example, elsewhere I postulate that public managers can be viewed as participants in multiple, continuing games occurring at different levels of government.’’ Vickers postulates that the executive function “con- sists partly in maintaining the actual course of affairs in line with . . . governing relations as they happen to be at the time and partly in modify- ing . . . governing relations so as to ‘maximize the values’ . . . which can be realized through the pursuit of these relationships, whilst keeping the aggregate of activities within the bounds of possibility.”20 In other words, public managers maintain and modify governing relations in order to maximize value. Lindblom views public executives as participants in a process of partisan mutual adjustment?’ Heclo views them as participants in issue networks?* Edelman views them as actors in public dramas in which words and actions have symbolic ~ a l u e . 2 ~ March sees them as actors in organized anar~hies.2~ Kaufman sees them as elements of a system of organic interdependence tending toward stasis (in contrast to a system shaped by centrifugal forces)?’

Although I have not worked it out, I expect these perspectives to yield different prescriptions for how to deal with particular cases. Kaufman points out, for example, that the metaphor of stasis logically leads to decentra- lization, whereas the metaphor of centrifugal forces leads to centralization of authority. Moreover, some of these perspectives are likely to fit particular sets of facts better than others. Thus the choice of perspectives in relationship to specific data matters, and we should treat this choice as a serious intellectual issue.

Elmore’s formulation-agents, seams, technical core-suggests points of contact with a number of more formal intellectual approaches or traditions of inquiry. Viewing the public manager in terms of a principal-agent model, for example, raises interesting issues. From the perspective of the public- manager-as-principal, the problem of public management becomes one of securing reliable behavior from subordinates-as-agents through specifying appropriate behavior, creating incentives (and discentives) to induce appropriate behavior, and the monitoring and policing of the resulting behavior. Elmore’s formulation further suggests that public managers may be postu- lated as working at the boundaries between organizations viewed as open systems and their environments, thus invoking the intellectual structures and research findings of open systems theory. A study in this tradition concluded, for example, that mayors account for less than 10 percent of the variation in most city budget expenditures,26 a finding with interesting implications. Finally, Elmore’s formulation suggests the value of the concept of core activity: the notion that every organization has a primary task, or a primary work system, which it must perform in order to survive and which is the source of legitimacy or meaning for the organization’s employees. I suggest in another article that the concept of core activity can be used to

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evaluate systematically the performances of public managers against a criterion other than their own self-reported goals.27

After I finished a round of huffing and puffing about the significance of an executive’s temperament to the performance of given tasks and about the intellectual foundations for such a proposition, a colleague once said, “Why not just say, ‘Choose horses for courses’ and let it go at that?” The issue in question, and public-management issues in general, I am trying to suggest, ought to be seen as too complicated to be captured by aphorisms.

First, it is a mistake to leave the impression that the accumulation of knowledge about public management is mostly arbitrary and subjective. The problem with arbitrarily (or atheoretically) derived rules and classifica- tions-whether POSDCORB, Rumsfeld’s Rules, or Gordon Chase’s “bro- mides”-is that they consign public management to the status of indeterminate practice with respect to which no important intellectual developments are possible. The essential prescription becomes: remember every interesting idea because someday, somewhere, perhaps when you least expect it, you may somehow be able to put it to use. Further development of public management as a craft depends, I believe, on steadily deepening our appreciation of public management, i.e., our ability to say, based on intuition, experience, and systematically obtained evidence, this way, rather than that, is the proper way to view this case or situation.

Second, and perhaps even more imporant, to remain vital and useful, a multidisciplinary professional field must be continuously nourished by new ideas and evidence, new questions and conjectures. The field of public management will benefit from an interest in theory which draws on other fields of inquiry. Social science concepts such as bounded rationality and cognitive style, the principal-agent relationship, the state and state autonomy, organizations as organized anarchies and as open systems, organizational slack, symbolic communication, agenda formation, organizational learning, uncertainty reduction and authority leakage, organizational cul- ture, and issue networks can greatly enrich the content of the field of public management. These can stimulate identification of the kinds of practical problems and intellectual puzzles that give the field its own vitality and that serve to attract first-rate students and researchers.

LAURENCE E. LYNN, JR. is Dean and Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago.

NOTES

1. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., Managing Public Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987). 2. A useful review of intellectual progress in public management is Hal G. Rainey,

“Public Management: Recent Developments and Current Prospects,” Public Administration Review, to be published. A better one is Richard F. Elmore, “Graduate Education in Public Management: Working the Seams of Govern- ment,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 6(1) (Fall 1986): 69-83.

3. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Afternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984). pp. 208-209.


4. For a useful survey of his ideas, see James G. March, “Theories of Choice and Making Decisions,” Society, 20(1) (November/December): 29-39.

5. Hugh Heclo, Modem Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

6. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Eds. Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3-37.

7. Robert A. Caro. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of N e w York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 727.

8. John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (New York: Bantam .Books, 1975). pp. 78-79.

9. Sir Geoffrey Vickers, The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policymaking (London: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 16.

10. Herbert Kaufman, The Administrative Behavior of Federal Bureau Chiefs (Wash- ington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981), pp. 190-197.

11. Based on a study of the effectiveness of Robert S. McNamara and Melvin R. Laird as Secretaries of Defense, Richard I. Smith and I concluded “What is striking in both cases is that the general contours of their management approaches mat- tered far less to the results each achieved than their personal efforts to influence specific decisions.” [Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. and Richard I. Smith, “Can the Secretary of Defense Make a Difference?” International Security, 7( 1) (Summer 1982): 67.1

12. But see Lynn, Note 1, for a beginning toward such a theory. 13. Charles E. Lindblom, “Comments on Decisions in Organizations,” in Andrew H.

Van De Ven and William F. Joyce, Eds., Perspectives on Organization Resign and Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1981), p. 246.

14. Lindblom, Note 13. Teaching, too, is an indeterminate practice in his view. 15. Giandomenico Majone, “Introduction,” in Giandomenico Majone and Edward S.

Quade, Eds., Pitfalls ofAnalysis (New York: Wiley, 1980). p. 9. 16. Yehezkel Dror, Public Policymaking Reexamined (New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-

tion Books, 1983), p. x. 17. Elmore, Note 2, pp. 75-76. 18. See, for example, Gordon Chase and Elizabeth Reveal, How to Manage in the

Public Sector (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983); Donald H. Rumsfeld, “Rums- feld’s Rules: Rules (and Observations) of Donald Rumsfeld (and others), (pro- cessed, 1976).

19. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., “Government Executives as Gamesmen: A Metaphor for Analyzing Managerial Behavior,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, l(4) (Summer 1982): 482-495.

20. Vickers, Note 9, p. 27. 21. Charles E. Lindblom, The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making Through

Mutual Adjustment (New York: The Free Press, 1965). 22. Hugh Heclo, “Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment,” in Anthony

King, Ed., The New American Political System (Washington, D.C.: The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978), pp. 87-124.

23. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses ofPolitics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1964).

24. Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 17( 1) (March 1972): 1-25.

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25. Herbert Kaufman, The Administrative Behavior of Federal Bureau Chiefs (Wash- ington, D.C.: Brookings, 1981), pp. 190-191.

26. G. R. Salancik and J . Pfeffer, “Constraints on Administrator Discretion: The Limited Influence of Mayors on City Budgets,” Urban Affairs Quarterly, 12 (1977):

27. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., “The Reagan Administration and the Renitent Bureau- cracy,” in Lester M. Salomon and Michael S. Lund, Eds., The Reagan Presidency and the Governing ofAmerica (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 1984).

475-498.

public management: what do we know? what should we know? and how will we know it?

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