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Preface to the Second Edition
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
