Public Administration as a Developing Discipline

Part 2: Organization Development as One of a Future Family of Miniparadigms

Robert T. Golembiewski, Golembiewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351552783
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book identifies nine guidelines for the conceptual development of public administration. It shows how one specific approach—the laboratory approach to organization development (OD)—can facilitate the development of public administration.

Contents of Part 1

Section 1

WHERE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION CAME FROM

Perspectives on the Past

Chapter 1

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS A FIELD

Four Developmental Phases

Chapter 2

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS A FIELD

Three Comprehensive Paradigms

Section 2

WHERE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IS

Evaluations of the Present

Chapter 3

THE PUBLIC-POLICY APPROACH

Gentle Metaphor or Major Transformation?

Chapter 4

THE NEW PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Revolution by Rhetoric–Status Quo in Skills and Technology

Chapter 5

“DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION” AS THE PARADIGM

A New Synthesis and Some Old, Tough Problems

Section 3

WHERE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION MAY GO

Toward Miniparadigms in the Future

Chapter 6

THE CASE FOR MINIPARADIGMS IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Some Guidelines Implicit in Historical Development

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AS A DEVELOPING DISCIPLINE

Chapter 1

AN ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT APPLICATION AT THE TOP
Toward Creating a New, Effective, Open Giant

This chapter begins the work of describing in some detail one miniparadigm that can accelerate the development of public administration. That is to say, this volume seeks to provide detailed counterpoint to its companion volume, which sketched the conceptual development of the discipline over time and which led to nine guidelines that provide useful direction for future development of public administration. The chapters that follow will seek to meet those guidelines in various ways, beginning with a top, down view in this chapter.

The target of this volume is the “laboratory approach to organization development,” or OD, and this chapter provides both orientation to and example of a burgeoning field of inquiry and application. The immediate focus is on OD in an organization in the act of early becoming, with dual purposes in mind. They are (1) to describe briefly OD goals or values and (2) to illustrate an application at the top levels of a new but soon to be large public agency. The focal agency is MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. In addition to introducing and illustrating one application of OD, the experience at MARTA can be instructive to those who are contemplating start-up efforts of their own, as well as to those who are interested in specific applications of “organizational humanism” in public agencies.¹

Authorized by a 1971 referendum, MARTA sought to gear up quickly to launch a program whose estimated cost was $1.3 billion and whose developmental phase was projected to cover five years. MARTA thus qualifies as “the biggest game in town” and is in fact the largest regional public project since the TVA days.

Precedents to Build Upon and Beyond

This focus on MARTA has a deep relevance in public administration, and yet it differs from almost all of the available literature in an important particular. Both facets will be introduced, in turn.

Available Public Administration Literature in Brief

This chapter is comfortably in the tradition of some well-known work in public administration. Although empirical research is rare, a number of studies have dealt with the development of public agencies from the beginning. Commonly, such studies emphasize the substantial freedom available to public executives during start-up periods, despite the usual assumption that the enabling legislation or executive orders, with their attendant public processes and legalisms, create a managerial straitjacket. This conclusion is appropriate when the focus is relatively narrow and the observational period is brief, as it was in Simon’s study of the Economic Cooperation Administration² or Thompson’s insider’s view of the Office of Price Administration.³ The same global finding is justified when the analytical perspective is quite broad and extends over a long time frame, as in the study of TVA by Selznick⁴ or in Kaufman’s analysis of the U.S. Forest Service,⁵ among numerous others.⁶

Reaching beyond the Available Public Administration Literature

This chapter also seeks to differentiate itself from the bulk of the literature in one critical particular. Specifically, this chapter describes an effort to induce a set of processes or behaviors within MARTA and, as such, it has very little company in the public administration literature. This is a significant conclusion implying as it does a major deficiency of that literature.

This conclusion about a critical gap in the literature applies in two distinct senses. That is, little published work dealing with public agencies seeks to create specific processes in specific organizations,⁷ and almost none of this work is by political scientists or public administrationists.⁸ Basically, the public administration literature rests on description of what exists, rather than on prescriptions about how to achieve relatively specific desired states. In terms of the terminology used earlier, the OD intervention in MARTA illustrates one goal-based, empirical theory applied to organizations. Moreover, most of the available description in public administration tends to emphasize legal or institutional features, as opposed to emphases on managerial styles or values or the quality of organizational life. Notable exceptions to this generalization do exist, but they are definitely a small minority.⁹ This study of MARTA joins the company of that minority.

Some Central OD Values

What, then, is the specific goal-based, empirical theory supporting the intrusive attempt to induce specific processes and behaviors in MARTA? To begin an answer, OD is rooted in a quite specific set of values or normative goals. Hence it is definitely putting the horse before the cart to introduce these OD values at the very outset.

Organization development programs based on the laboratory approach are first of all self-consciously value-loaded in complex ways that can only be sketched here. In brief, three classes of laboratory values and their characteristics guide the development of interpersonal and intergroup relations. These are listed below, without comment for three reasons. First, the elements are straightforward in meaning, even though they are often difficult to approach in practice. Second, these values or goals have received long and explicit treatment elsewhere.¹⁰ Third, the concluding section of this chapter will deal in some detail with the meta-values of the laboratory approach, the first set sketched below. The hope is that this approach–an initial brief sketch, and then substantial discussion after the application as MARTA is described–will permit the reader to track the values on his own and then compare mental notes with the concluding section of this chapter.

1. Meta-values of laboratory approach
   1. An attitude of inquiry reflecting (among other things) a willingness to analyze and to experiment with behavior
   2. An expanded consciousness about the effects of behavior and a sense of increased alternatives available to the individual
   3. A value system stressing a spirit of collaboration and open resolution of conflict through a problem-solving orientation
   4. An emphasis on mutual helping relationships as the best way tc express the interdependency of people
2. Operating values of laboratory approach
   1. Emphasis on “here-and-now” occurrences
   2. Emphasis on the individual act rather than on the total person acting
   3. Emphasis on feedback that is nonevaluative in that it reports the impact on the self of others’ behavior, rather than feedback that is judgmental or interpretive
   4. Emphasis on “unfreezing” behaviors the trainee feels are undesirable, on practice of replacement behaviors, and on reinforcement of new behaviors
   5. Emphasis on “trust in leveling,” on psychological safety of the trainee
   6. Emphasis on creating and maintaining an organic community of mutual helpers
3. Proximate goals of laboratory approach
   1. Increased insight and self-knowledge
   2. Sharpened diagnostic skills at the levels of the individual, group, organization, and society
   3. Awareness of, and practice of, skills in creating conditions of effective functioning at all levels
   4. Testing of self-concepts and skills in interpersonal situations
   5. Increased capacity to be open, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Contents
• Contents of Part 1
• Original Half Title
• Chapter 1 AN ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT APPLICATION AT THE TOP Toward Creating a New, Effective, Open Giant
• Chapter 2 TEAM BUILDING ON A MASS SCALE Inducing Change in Mature, Multiunit Organizations
• Chapter 3 TRAINING AND ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT IN FIVE CITIES SIGN, or Suburban Intergovernmental Network for Management Development
• Chapter 4 INDIVIDUALS SEEKING TO BUILD NEW WORK RELATIONSHIPS An Action Design for a Critical Intervention
• Chapter 5 ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING Optimum Discrepancies and Their Role in Basic Research
• Chapter 6 ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE Three Types of Change in Applied Research
• Chapter 7 ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT AND INTERVENING VARIABLES Social Desirability as Critical in Basic and Applied Research
• Chapter 8 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT OD as Institutional and Generic
• Index