The Blind Spots of Public Bureaucracy and the Politics of Non‐Coordination

Tobias Bach, Kai Wegrich, Tobias Bach, Kai Wegrich

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319766713
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319766720
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How to better coordinate policies and public services across public sector organizations has been a major topic of public administration research for decades. However, few attempts have been made to connect these concerns with the growing body of research on biases and blind spots in decision-making. This book attempts to make that connection. It explores how day-to-day decision-making in public sector organizations is subject to different types of organizational attention biases that may lead to a variety of coordination problems in and between organizations, and sometimes also to major blunders and disasters. The contributions address those biases and their effects for various types of public organizations in different policy sectors and national contexts. In particular, it elaborates on blind spots, or 'not seeing the not seeing', and different forms of bureaucratic politics as theoretical explanations for seemingly irrational organizational behaviour. The book's theoretical tools and empirical insights address conditions for effective coordination and problem-solving by public bureaucracies using an organizational perspective.

Part IConceptual Foundations

© The Author(s) 2019

Tobias Bach and Kai Wegrich (eds.)The Blind Spots of Public Bureaucracy and the Politics of Non‐CoordinationExecutive Politics and Governancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76672-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Blind Spots, Biased Attention, and the Politics of Non-coordination

Tobias Bach¹ and Kai Wegrich²

(1)

Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

(2)

Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany

Tobias Bach (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Kai Wegrich

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Bounded rationalityOrganization theoryCoordinationSelective perceptionBureaucratic politicsPublic sector organizations

End Abstract

Introduction: Organizational Life in a Political Context

The laundry list of contemporary bureaucratic malaises is as long as it is predictable, with common complaints ranging from cost inefficiencies and inflexibility to presumed aversions to entrepreneurship and ‘customer’ orientation. When buried among these items, coordination problems—whether despite or due to their pervasiveness—might be easy to overlook. The individual citizen lost in a bureaucratic maze, shuffled from one office to another, seemingly without end, epitomizes one such problem of (poor) coordination in the public sector. But while this kind of coordination problem is certainly embarrassing and has spurred an entire folklore about the insufficiencies of bureaucratic organizations (Goodsell, 1985), coordination problems within and between bureaucracies hardly stop here.

Although the lion’s share of coordination problems do not end in large-scale disaster, more than a handful of major blunders on the part of public organizations can be related to problems of inter-organizational coordination . Those blunders—and the chain reactions some ignited in their wake—have cost numerous lives, as in the case of the US intelligence agencies ’ failure to piece together information that might have prevented 9/11 (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2004; Parker & Stern, 2002). An example on a smaller scale, though with no less of a tragic end, is the German police authorities’ protracted failure to link serial killings of mostly immigrant citizens in different parts of the country to an underground right-wing terrorist group (Seibel, 2014; this volume). And even the 2007–08 financial crisis can be partially explained by certain facets of organizational behaviour, including a lack of coordination between regulators due to ‘policy groupthink and shared blind spots ’ (Gieve & Provost, 2012, pp. 62–63) and regulators’ one-sided attention towards specific tasks (Gilad, 2015).

Although diverse, these examples illustrate three points. First, they identify organizational factors as the main causes of coordination problems and biased attention and hence speak to established literatures on pathologies of information processing in formal organizations (Parker & Stern, 2002; Pidgeon & O’Leary, 2000; Wilensky, 1967). Second, they both highlight blunders and failures and reveal coordination problems in day-to-day decision-making in organizational life. Indeed, the idea of a clear analytical distinction between success and failure in public policy seem rather elusive, as success and failure are subjective and contested categorizations (Bovens & ’t Hart, 2016). Third, whereas solutions seem to be available for some of those problems (such as one-stop shops to ease citizens ’ encounters with administrative specialization ), finding straightforward answers to other questions, such as how to reorganize intelligence services (Hammond, 2007) or how to draw lessons from government blunders (Bovens & ’t Hart, 2016), are more challenging tasks . Any attempt at addressing the source(s) of failure is likely to entail new challenges. In other words, we are facing administrative dilemmas that are inherent to organizational life (Hood, 1974; Wilensky, 1967). These themes lie at the core of this book, which puts a spotlight on the organizational foundations of biased attention and coordination problems in the public sector.

The study of coordination within and between public organizations and problems related to achieving coordination occupies a prominent place within the scholarship on organizational dysfunction, especially since coordination appears to be normatively desirable but inherently difficult to realize in practice (Bouckaert, Peters, & Verhoest, 2010; Metcalfe, 1994; Scharpf, 1994; Wegrich & Štimac, 2014). The need for coordination within and between organizations is a consequence of specialization ‘through which the organization reduces a situation involving a complex set of interrelated problems and conflicting goals to a number of simple problems’ (Cyert & March, 1963, p. 118). At the same time, specialization leads to a multiplication of organizational goals through the development of local rationalities or the well-known ‘tendency for the individual subunits to deal with a limited set of problems and a limited set of goals ’ (Cyert & March, 1963, p. 117). The above-mentioned examples are illustrations of different types of biased attention and coordination problems, sometimes causing inefficiencies and annoyance, sometimes leading to drastic failures .

This book addresses various phenomena that tend to be considered irrational or pathological behaviours of public bureaucracies . The ‘blind spots’ that figure prominently in this book are a distinct type within a larger universe of biases in organizational decision-making leading to potentially dysfunctional effects, or to accepted negative effects in the case of administrative trade-offs and dilemmas (Hood, 1974). As we argue in more detail below, those biases emerge from intentionally rational behaviour of bureaucratic organizations operating in political contexts. We study these biases with respect to their implications on coordination within and between organizations and in particular the absence or rejection of coordination, as illustrated by previous examples and which we clumsily call ‘non-coordination’. The aim of the book is to provide theoretical tools and empirical insights that address the conditions for effective coordination and problem-solving by public bureaucracies using an organizational perspective. And while one might argue that blunders have received undue attention compared to success stories in the coordination of public sector organizations, we consider a grounded understanding of the inevitable biases in organizational behaviour in a political context as critical for understanding not only what goes wrong but also how things could work out positively.

The book’s distinct contribution is looking beyond cases commonly considered to be major policy failures and government blunders by focusing on everyday decision-making and coordination within and between public organizations . That said, several contributions take disasters as their starting point, yet they provide theoretical insights that are relevant for a better understanding of how public organizations work on a day-to-day basis (see the chapters by Seibel and Renå). We seek to advance this purpose by developing a typology of four distinct biases in organizational attention and decision-making that engender coordination problems or the outright absence of coordination (non-coordination ): selective perception , inherent weaknesses , bureaucratic politics , and blind spots. These four biases reflect recent advances in public administration scholarship such as bureaucratic reputation theory (Carpenter & Krause, 2012; Maor, 2015) and blame avoidance (Hinterleitner & Sager, 2016; Hood, 2011) as well as established theorizing on the drivers of organizational behaviour, especially approaches emphasizing the boundedly rational nature of organizational decision-making (Jones, 2017; Simon, 1947) and an institutional perspective on organizations (Selznick, 1957; Wilson, 1989). Those theoretical contributions have already been somewhat influential in and of themselves, but public administration scholarship has yet to consolidate these perspectives and develop a broader agenda that tackles the permanent challenge of supposedly rational organizational behaviour exerting centrifugal forces on individual organizations and organizational units. We think this is a more than appropriate agenda at a time when the reality of power dispersion often meets unrealistic expectations regarding the potential—and logic—of collaboration and coordination .

Selective perception , inherent weaknesses , bureaucratic politics , and blind spots have three aspects in common. First, they are instances of organizational behaviour rather than individual misconduct or exploitation such as corruption a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Conceptual Foundations
• Part II. Blind Spots and Attention Bias
• Part III. Bureaucratic Politics: Reputation, Blame, and Turf
• Part IV. Achilles’ Heels and Selective Perception
• Part V. Implications
• Back Matter