Knowledge and Power in Public Bureaucracies

From Pyramid to Circle

David Carnevale, Camilla Stivers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000007879
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ever since Max Weber and Frederick Taylor, public organizations have been told that effective practice lies in maximizing rationality through science. Yet science-based management reforms have had only marginal impact on performance. People in entry-level positions possess knowledge from direct experience of the work, management knowledge is often science-based and distanced from the work, and appointed top executives struggle to join bureaucratic rationality with political exigencies. Knowledge and Power in Public Bureaucracies: From Pyramid to Circle offers fresh thinking about public organizations, arguing that conflicting forms of knowledge may be found within the bureaucratic pyramid.

Answering the question of why management reforms over the past century have failed on their own terms, this book examines the existence of conflicting forms of knowledge within public bureaucracies, how these contradictory perspectives interact (or fail to interact), and the ways in which these systems preserve managerial efforts to control workers. Authors Carnevale and Stivers argue that bureaucratic rationality is not the "one best way," as Taylor promised, and indeed, there is no one best way or model that can be deployed in all situations. The bureaucratic pyramid can, however, be made more effective by paying attention to circular processes that are widespread within the hierarchy, the authors argue, describing such circular processes as "facework." This book will serve as an ideal supplement to introductory public administration and organizational theory courses, as well as courses for mid-career professionals, helping to frame their work experiences.

PART I

The Pyramid

1

THE FAILURE OF MANAGEMENT REFORMS

A History

Since for human beings knowledge defines reality, those who have the most invested in a particular reality must protect and defend, with the police if necessary, the system of knowledge on which not only their power but their very existence rests.

(Carnevale & Hummel, 1994)

Reflecting on more than a century of management thinking, even a half-awake mind would have to note a certain repetitiveness in the history of management reforms. Early iterations of this book’s argument were entitled “Why Management Reforms Fail” (Carnevale & Hummel, 1994, 1996). The authors asked: What is it about modern management that needs ever new reforms but is unable to sustain them? Their answer was clear: No reform could prevail if it threatened the dominance of management knowledge. More than two decades later, reforms continue to fall short of promises, because the root of the problem lies at the interface of knowledge and power.

If this argument is going to persuade, it is important to begin by giving a brief account of management thinking over the previous century-plus, in order to make the pattern clear: Why was management, the magic formula that would transform industrial corporations and government operations, seen early on as in need of reform? Why has every reform effort eventually failed to live up to its promises? Clearly, the transformative power of reforms has been oversold. The roots of continued failure lie in management’s inability, or unwillingness, to go to the heart of the problem: divergent organizational knowledges. Management’s use of a science-based ideology to control the actions of workers has denied the legitimacy and indeed the existence of knowledge gained from direct contact with the work itself. In the public sector, this neglect of the link between management knowledge and management power has had political as well as practical consequences.

Scientific Management

Management reforms have repeatedly aimed at tempering the negative effects of the first deliberate scheme: scientific management. Frederick Taylor’s (1911) vision of transforming operations on the factory floor soon became the rationale for turning the public agency from a sinecure for party loyalists into an expert, neutral system. Taylor created the model—management through standardization—and all subsequent public management reforms have tinkered with aspects of Taylor’s plan: striving for the efficiency and control over workers it promised to achieve, while finding ways to soften its side effects.

In scientific management, the worker’s craft knowledge, gained through experience, is seen as a hindrance to control from the top because much of it remains in the mind and hands of the worker, and therefore evades systematization and efficiency. A new class, “managers,” armed not with craft knowledge but with concepts, would devise the best way to do the work, not by trial-and-error (as workers supposedly did) but by means of controlled experimentation, which would reveal the one best way to do each job. Among government reformers, even though public-sector work consisted more of service delivery than of factory-like physical labor, a consensus developed that scientific management could be the means to de-politicize the ranks of public bureaucracies by substituting science for party loyalty in the selection and training of employees.

Scientific management introduced an alternative to ordinary management, which had regulated work processes through orders given by a gang boss who worked along with the group. Pre-Taylor management recognized that the worker knows something important. In fact, Taylor himself may have been the last management thinker to pay full attention to working knowledge, though because of his negative view of it, he tried to transcend it by turning it into science. Previous management approaches had aimed to regulate work processes through orders, discipline, and incentives—in Taylor’s words,

the management of “initiative” and “incentive,” in which those on the management’s side deliberately give a very large incentive to their workmen, and in return the workmen respond by working to the very best of their ability at all times in the interest of their employees.

(Taylor, 1947, p. 39)

Taylor believed that work organized in this fashion was not adequately controlled because workers still retained their grip on the actual labor process (Braverman, 1974). His move to get workers to accede to the superiority of scientific knowledge over their own experience must be called genius. With science, regulation of the labor process would be in the hands of managers who would “assume … the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae” (Taylor, 1911, p. 36).

Taylor’s most complete statement of the principles of scientific management opened with a quotation from President Theodore Roosevelt about the importance of “national efficiency.” Whereas the President emphasized natural resource conservation as the preeminent goal of national efficiency, in Taylor’s eyes the wasted physical effort that rendered human work awkward and inefficient was a more pervasive and important issue. Employers’ focus simply on finding the right man (sic) for any organizational job was a mistake. Most men could be trained to greater efficiency through the application of proven scientific techniques; therefore, the key to efficient organizational effort was “the true science of management, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles” (Taylor, 1911, p. iv).

Taylor’s entire system was based on the belief that the interests of employers and employees were basically the same rather than at odds. Both were primarily interested in money. Scientific study would reveal the most efficient way to do any job, and this “best way” would be taught to workers. They would work faster and more efficiently, and they would be paid more. Taylor claimed that workers did not have the intelligence necessary to figure out the best way on their own. Employers would pay workers at a carefully calibrated rate that was just enough to motivate them to follow the efficiency scheme. They would work more productively than under the old system, under which workers agreed among themselves to maintain a pace that was brisk but less than the theoretical maximum (a practice known as “soldiering”). Under Taylor’s system, as production efficiency increased, the employer’s prosperity would rise. It was a win-win situation. Workers wanted higher wages, and owners wanted higher profits. Under scientific management, both would get what they wanted, and control would remain safely at the top, mediated by the cultural authority of science and the structural authority of managers.

The only way to guarantee that the system operated at maximum efficiency, however, was enforcement of standardized working moves, of the best implements and working conditions, and of cooperation. Enforcement would be the responsibility of managers, who would show workers the right techniques, and watch and help them until they reached the proper pace. Taylor emphasized that scientific management was a new type of work that employers had never done. Managers, not workers, would develop the scientific approach to each kind of operation, select and train workers, and eliminate (sic) any who would not, or could not, learn and practice the proper methods at the most efficient rate. Managers would provide “constant help and watchfulness” throughout the work process. Managers and workers would share the production process equally: the workers doing the work, and the managers coming up with the best ways to do the work, teaching workers how to do it, watching them, and helping as needed (Taylor, 1911, p. 43).

Taylor was emphatic on the point of rendering the labor process independent of the worker’s knowledge. “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department …” (Taylor, 1911, pp. 98–99). In this sense, he did not fully grasp the distinctive nature of experiential knowledge. Yet he clearly saw that he had to convince managers to twist their minds around a paradox: that ultimately the workers still knew more than managers about the work itself.

Taylor argued that analyzing and capturing the working moves of employees would bring an end to the situation in which:

employers derive their knowledge of how much of a given class of work can be done in a day from either their own experience, which has frequently grown hazy with age, from casual and unsystematic observation, or at best from records which are kept, showing the quickest time in which a job has been done.

(Taylor, 1911, p. 22)

In a sense he was right: When the engineers and technicians of scientific management had amassed enough knowledge to produce products in line with their tolerances, working knowledge was simply obscured.

Scientific management caused workers to lose control over the full expression of their work. The philosophy of science was enlisted to separate work into two parts—conception and execution (or idea and action). Through the use of intrusive analytic techniques like time-and-motion studies, the mental aspects of work were separated from its physical manifestations (much as the philosopher Descartes separated “I think” from “I am”). Where once workers enjoyed a broad scope of action over their jobs, they were now deskilled, reduced to carrying out the directives of knowledge elites ensconced above them in the organizational pyramid. For front-line workers, the consequences proved severe. As Braverman (1974, p. 125) notes, “Hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human.”

Workers became cogs in the machine—tools in the production process—under scientific management. They were given narrowly specialized jobs to perform under strict supervision. Workers were expected to do less thinking and more doing. Yet even here the terms did not mean what they meant to workers. Doing meant making motions deduced by the efficiency expert and engineer, eliminating even an iota of hands-on working judgment. What was lost in this process of objectifying jobs through science was the circumspection (the “felt sense” [Gendlin, 1981]) so essential to everyday coping and the usefulness of the product (see ensuing chapters). Braverman (1974, p. 136) cites an editorial from the International Molders Journal which captures this truth:

We think of craftsmanship ordinarily as the ability to manipulate skillfully the tools and materials of a craft of trade. But true craftsmanship is much more than this. The really essential element in it is not manual skill and dexterity but something stored up in the mind of the worker. This something is partly the intimate knowledge of the character and uses of the tools, materials and processes of the craft which tradition and experience have given the worker. But beyond this and above this, it is the knowledge which enables him to understand and overcome the constantly arising difficulties that grow out of the variations not only in the tools and materials, but in the condition under which the work must be done. [Emphasis added]

Craftsmanship requires felt sense and some measure of independent judgment about how the work needs to be done. It is this freedom of mind and hand that was obliterated by the efficiency expert’s stopwatch and slide rule.

Taylor’s ideas spread rapidly, not only in private industry but among those who were concerned to systematize the operations of government agencies. For example, U.S. Naval engineering officers were attracted to scientific management, not only because they saw it as a form of human engineering (the American Society of Mechanical Engineering was an early advocate) but because it promised to help engineers gain control of navy yard operations. Unfortunately, line officers perceived that they would lose power under the new system, so ultimately the effort was a failure (Petersen, 1990).

An attempt to institute scientific management at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts also fell short because of resistance by unionized workers, including a brief strike (Aitken, 1985). Widespread efforts to rationalize municipal government agencies had limited success. Reformers claimed to be men of science “cleaving the Gordian knot of politics with one swift blow” by replacing it with scientific disinterestedness and rigor. The scientific public manager would be “the man in control of affairs” (Stivers, 2000, p. 26). Early efforts to systematize government agencies suggest that, despite its objective clothing, when scientific management was introduced into an organization, it was met by existing interests, relationships, and cultural dynamics. Social change, it would seem, may not be as rational a project as scientific management made it out to be. Nevertheless, educated reformers climbed on board.

Why did managers support a production process that deskilled their workers? In private industry, managers and the owner-investors they served were interested mainly in profit that came as a result of producing more at as little cost as possible. In government agencies, reformers succeeded in persuading some legislators and executives that the modern era required government run by experts rather than party loyalists, which appealed to a growing class of professionals. Management, in government as in business, welcomed Taylorism because it increased quantity, raised efficiency, and reduced dependency on skilled (high-priced) labor, and because science seemed to guarantee objectivity. In the public sector, objectivity promised political neutrality. Managers were blindsided, however, by the inevitability that this ruthlessness of numbers would eventually be applied to them as well. In the modern corporation, many a white-collar worker has learned this truth the hard way, downsized out of their careers by the very philosophies they helped to institutionalize in the modern organization. In modern government bureaucracy, “Reinventing Government” and New Public Management had a similar impact, as we will see.

Facts, not Votes

Interest in scientific management was especially keen among the men of the municipal research bureaus, formed in cities in the early 1900s to open government ranks to professionalism (Stivers, 2000). Scientific management seemed to offer an objective rationale for exerting control over public employees in city governments, the majority of whom had gotten their jobs as a reward for political party service. Reformers’ talk of municipal inefficiency became more than just talk once there was a system for making all kinds of work scientific. They could present reform as objective improvement, rather than a transfer of power from party loyalists to well-educated experts like themselves. Not only did the reformers exert pressure on mayors (or take steps to get like-minded candidates elected), they invented a new form of municipal government that actually had the word “management” in its name. City management not only put an appointed manager rather than elected official in the municipal driver’s sea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: The Pyramid
• PART II: The Pyramid in Action
• PART III: The Circle
• Index