Recovering the public management variable: lessons from schools, prisons, and armies

Does public management matter? Under what, if any, conditions does how public organizations are led, structured, and coordinated affect the quality of citizens’ lives? This exploratory essay recommends an approach to public management studies that is directed at answering these questions and “recovering” the public management variable. Using examples from the recent literature on schools, prisons, and armies, and drawing on various theoretical literatures, it is argued that the future of public management studies should lie in efforts to specify what ends given public organizations ought to achieve and how best to achieve them. Although a disputatious lot, public management scholars tend to agree strongly, if implicitly, on one thing: public management matters. They share a belief (“faith” may be a better word) that how public organizations are managed has a significant bearing on how, and how well, those organizations perform. They assume that how public executives, managers, and line workers behave affects significantly what and how much their organizations produce in the way of public safety, health, education, environmental protection, national security, and so on. This assumption undergirds every public administration text and many books and articles on the organization of the White House, Congress, and the lesser bodies that form each institution. The discussion here focuses not on individual public executives or managers(1) but on what may be termed the public management variable. The general argument is that the immediate future of public management studies ought to lie largely in exploratory efforts at “recovering” this variable, which means defining it, measuring it, and specifying the conditions (if any) under which it matters to the actual quality of citizens’ lives, either in conjunction with or independent of variables that are not directly related to how public organizations are led, structured, and coordinated. The approach proposed here is (1) directed by explicit normative concerns, (2) focused on concrete public policy problems, and (3) dedicated to improving public service. The working image of public organizations is as the “hands and feet” of important public purposes. A question, perhaps the question, to ask about any public organization is: What public ends ought it to achieve, and how can it best achieve them? There is, of course, nothing genuinely new or fancy in this conception of public organizations and how to study them. In some respects, it harkens back to a tradition in political science and public administration that predates even “ancient” New Public Administration conferees.(2) At one level, the effort to recapture the public management variable is part of the “return to the state”(3) in political science, meaning essentially a return to studies in which the behavior of government officials, acting in accordance with their own preferences, is viewed as an independent variable that can affect policy choices, implementation decisions, and policy outcomes. At another level, it is part of the “new institutionalism”(4) in political science, meaning essentially an approach to the study of political institutions that embodies some or all of the following: (1) a resistance to the notion that political institutions can be understood mainly or solely in terms of patterns of interaction among rational, self-interested individuals and groups; (2) an unwillingness to be swept away by the elegant representations of that notion as they appear in the work of formal (mathematical) theorists; (3) an embrace of the idea that political institutions are to a large degree self-determining, or so to speak, have a life of their of their own; (4) a concomitant belief that these institutions are often, though not always, as capable of shaping the social and economic forces that swirl about them as these forces are of shaping the institutions; and (5) a rejection of fatalism and determinism in human affairs. The “new institutionalism” should take shape as an approach to public management studies that directs scholars (1) to observe how members at every level of an organization “really behave,” (2) to relate systematically these observations to the formal character of the organization in order to see what (if any) connections exist, and (3) to search systematically for the connections (if any) between organizational activities and real-world outcomes. This approach requires the kind of willingness to immerse oneself in administrative life that is implied by the methodological rubric “participant observation.” The most apt description of participant observation comes from Richard F. Fenno's study of House members in their districts: “soaking and poking—or gust hanging around.”(5) But especially where the attempt to discover connections between “management” and “outcomes” is concerned, it may also involve a willingness (not to mention ability) to engage in high-powered quantitative analysis of one stripe of another—soaking, poking, and computing. There are many rich case studies of administrative life, most of them published as books. And then there are journal articles such as those contained in the post-1970 editions of Administrative Science Quarterly. The former score big on the participant-observation dimension, tending to be descriptive, qualitative, and (here and there) theoretically informed. The latter score big on the quantitative analysis dimension, with numerous monographs measuring the performance of organizations without establishing the least idea of how or by whom the organizations were managed. The approach advocated here, however, is something more than a badly needed bridge between these two ways of approaching public management studies. It aims to do something that neither approach does (at least not consistently); namely, to integrate closely the empirical and normative dimensions of research on public organizations. The first step in any analysis would be to argue that the agency under study ought to achieve certain ends and to embody certain values. In the main, the research would be dedicated to discovering the relationship (if any) between these ends and the way that the organization is led, structured, and coordinated. In other words, it would examine the efficacy of the public management variable in relation to carefully specified performance criteria. In this approach, any pretension to “value-free” or “ethically neutral” public management scholarship would be abandoned without remorse. In the simplest form, successful research would conclude in a statement to the effect that “For these reasons, public organization X ought to achieve goals A, B, and C, and research demonstrates that the best way to manage it toward these ends is thus and so.” If the empirical analysis is competent, then those who oppose goals A, B, and C would find the research useful as a source of knowledge about how to frustrate their realization. And if in any given study it turns out that the efficacy of public management is called into question because carefully documented variations in management practices bear little or no connection to real-world outcomes, then academicians will have learned something that is empirically true and intellectually interesting, if not practically useful or morally instructive. The public management variable will be “recovered” once a reliable stock of generalizations exists about how, whether, and to what extent different types of management practices matter to the quality of citizens’ lives, and what (if anything) can be done to change the management of given public organizations in ways that are likely to achieve specified public purposes. Some works in the literature on public organizations—particularly parts of the recent literature on schools, prisons, and military units—are small cobblestones on the path to recovering the public management variable.