Journal Articles Flashcards
John Kirlin 1999
Governance is transforming in three ways: (1) the growing complexity of relationships between government and civil society (2) the shifting national responsibilities both in the direction of international bodies and systems and in the direction of states, localities, and community-based institutions; and, (3) the need for greater capacity to manage these relationships. Big questions and their answers in PA are needed to address this complexity. Empirical evidence is growing that competent performance of the core gov’t roles and commitment to democratic values are the largest contributors to the economic performance of nations over time. Outcome measures of political institutional performance at the jurisdictional level, not the inputs or intermediate activities of any single public agency or set of networked public, nonprofit, and private organizations.
Robert Dahl 1947
The difficulty of constructing a science of PA stems from the frequent impossibility of excluding normative considerations from the problems of public administration. Science cannot demonstrate moral values. A second major problem stems from the inescapable fact that a science of PA must be a study of certain aspects of human behavior…in the area of services performed by governmental agencies. Human behaviors limits scientific research, limits uniformity of data, independent verification is diminished due to the complexity of the human condition, and and weakens reliability of laws of PA since little is known about human action.
Robert Dahl 1947
No science of admnistration is possible unless: (1) the place of normative values is made clear (2) the nature of man in the area of public administration is better understood and his conduct is more predictable, and (2) there is a body of comparative studies from which it may be possible to discover principles and generalities that transcend national boundaries and peculiar historical experiences.
John Gaus 1950
Theory of PA is difficult to achieve as there is inherent ambiguity and the field is vast. One major component to PA theory is that of opinion formation, parties, and legislatures…that in light of postwar public policy have stimulated a re-examination of the relation of parties and legislatures to the chief executive and administration generally. The other area is the vast, multifactor and fundamental one of substantive functional fields of PA (health, public works, natural resources, defense, education, housing, economic regulation). Analysis of public institutions is mixed up with trying to make sense of the meaning of life (social science).
Robert Behn 1995
Big Questions in PA: How can public managers break the MICROMANAGEMENT cycle - an excess of procedural rules, which prevents public agencies from producing results, which leads to more procedural rules….? (A: Trust, governance, entrepreneurship) How can public managers MOTIVATE people to work energetically and intelligently towards achieving public purposes? (A: Principle-agent) How can public managers MEASURE the achievements of their agencies in ways that help to increase those achievements?
Laurence O’Toole 1997
The growing importance of networks. Complex networks are relatively common, and they are likely to increase in number and importance. Complex policy issues will likely require networked structures. Political imperatives elicit networking beyond what might be necessitated by policy objectives. As information has accumulated regarding second order program effects, efforts have been made to institutionalize the connections. Layers of mandates constitute another pressure for networked management.
Agranoff and McGuire 2001
Public Networks Research. Functional equivalent to POSDCORB. Activation of participants, Framing, Mobilizing, Synthesizing Groupware (collaborative task development), social capital, flexibility,
“The Scientific Study of Bureaucracy: An Overview”
Meier and Krause (2003)
Scientific study of bureaucracy: Weber advocated for the basis of a general explanation regarding how bureaucratic institutions should be designed, including the need for a division of labor, career personnel with specialized training/expertise, hierarchical formal organizational structures that do not duplicate other administrative units, and explicit rules and procedures ensure clear lines of authority and accountability within the organization.
“The Scientific Study of Bureaucracy: An Overview”
Meier and Krause (2003)
Scientific study of bureaucracy: Woodrow Wilson argued for an administrative apparatus that is devoid of politics and meddling arose from a normative concern of the era that American bureaucracy served as a bastion for political patronage.
“The Scientific Study of Bureaucracy: An Overview”
Meier and Krause (2003)
The Progressive Era: Goodnow, Gulick, and Taylor. Goodnow (1900), like Wilson, also proposed a politics-administration dichotomy, he considered these to be two different functions but recognized that in practice politics was rarely separate from administration. Frederick Taylor (1919) used experiments to determine how jobs should be structured. Taylor advocated a division of tasks with management charged with designing the optimal work processes and individual workers charges with responding based on the incentives offered for production. Gulick (1937) lamented the lack of research supporting the principles sketched out a research design to determine the span of control could be systematically verified.
Meier and Krause (2003)
Behavioral Revolution
The work of Progressive Era scholars arguing for a scientific approach to administration gave way to the behavioral revolution in the study of organizations. Barnard argued: (1) what motivates bureaucrats to behave as they do? (2) why are they willing to sacrifice their individual goals and belong to an organization? Simon (1947) administrative behavior focused on individuals as the key units of analysis, and his two cornerstones were (1) providing a theory of administration centered on efficiency; and, (2) analyzing the nature of information processing by bureaucratic organizations by asserting that individuals’ cognitive limitations did not allow for rational-comprehensive decision making.
Constitutional Perspectives of PA
Meier and Krause (2003)
Finer (1941) concluded that democratic institutions had sufficient methods with which to control bureaucracy and therefore abrogating their political responsibility was not necessary. Waldo’s (1946) approach eschewed empirical questions for normative ones, but was still concerned about the relationship between bureaucracy and democratic institutions. For Appleby (1949), laid the foundation for the “multiple principals problem” because he posited the separation of powers is US gov’t made lines of bureaucratic authority difficult to distinguish.
Principal Agent Model
Meier and Krause (2003)
The dual cornerstones of the principal-agent model are its emphasis on the nature of incentives and the monitoring of behavior employed by the principal (superordinate) to ensure faithful action by agent (subordinate). One advantage of principal-agent theory is that it makes relationships between superordinates and subordinates tractable, which in turn can cull generalizable theoretical and empirical insights about how public bureaucracies function (Meier and Krause 2003).
Meier and Krause (2003)
Unfortunately, the systematic, generalizable body of knowledge concerning what makes administrative agencies tick is still largely uncharted territory in need of theoretical and empirical investigation. We know little about how bureaucratic agencies make decisions in a political environment or how bureaucratic structures affect responsiveness and performance in a variety of settings.
Governing the Hollow State (2000)
Milward and Provan
Government refers to formal institutions of the state - the executive, legislative, and courts - and their monopoly of legitimate coercive power. Governance is a more inclusive term, concerned with creating the conditions for ordered rule and collective action, often including agents in the private and NFP sectors as well as the public sector. Governments around the world have chosen networks of providers to deliver taxpayer funded services. Hollow state refers to any joint production situation where a gov’t agency relies on others to jointly deliver public services. Hollow state may be more efficient at providing the service, and may be beneficial fiscally because of market competition. On the other hand, there may be a loss of legitimacy in government action (principal-agent theory). A clear principal-agent relationship increases the probability that networks of providers will be effectively governed. Principals that produce at least some services will be more effective at governing a set of providers than principals that only govern. Contracts should be rebid frequently. Resources are important but only when they are combined with other elements of effective governance.
