Public Administration and Society

Critical Issues in American Governance

Richard C Box

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317461920
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

For instructors who want to expose their students to the social, political, and historical context of the practice of public administration, this book provides a unique approach to the introductory PA course. The author's own text is skilfully interwoven with a collection of seminal readings and documents that illuminate the key issues of past and present for public service professionals in a democratic society.More than an overview of public administration, Public Administration and Society offers students a broad perspective on the American Founding Era, the relationship of citizens to government, and how the structure of government reflects societal values. The premise of the book is that understanding the societal context is important to the success of the practitioner and to the practitioner's role as a responsible agent of change in a democratic society.Introductory essays and readings offer students perspectives on five important thematic areas in public administration: the Founding-Era debate over the size and scope of government, the relationship of the community to the individual, public organizations and policy making, values and public administration, and the role of the public service practitioner in a democratic society. This new edition of features five new readings, and, based on input from adopters, an entirely new section on public policy making (Part IV: Public Organizations and Policy). The author's part-opening sections have all been extensively revised and updated.

PART I

INTRODUCTION TO THE CENTRAL ISSUES

CONTEXT, CHANGE, AND DEMOCRACY

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SCOPE AND CONTENT OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

People in contemporary society are surrounded by information about aspects of public life. The media—including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet—offer many stories every day about politics and government at the international, national, state, regional, and local levels. It would seem that people would be saturated with information about the public sector. Readers of this book have by definition more than an ordinary interest in public-sector matters, so we might expect them to be quite knowledgeable about government.

Instead, what we often find with the public and even with students of political science and experienced public-sector professionals, is knowledge of scattered, seemingly unrelated facts about various parts of the public sector, but only sketchy awareness of governmental history, systems, structures, and how government (the legislative, administrative, and judicial parts of the public sector) works. Public administration ethicist Terry Cooper notes that people come to the university with “a wooden, oversimplified conception of the way public policy is formed and implemented” (2006, 76).

This is often true of graduate students as well, even those with significant experience in the public sector. Several years ago, an MPA student in the author’s class used a vivid metaphor to describe this phenomenon, as she said her elementary, high school, and college undergraduate course work in American government left her with a “pastel, pink-and-blue” view of the nation’s governance systems, a view that was simple and did not convey a sense of the American governmental experience as an exciting, often passionate, on-going debate over fundamental issues.

Many public-service practitioners play a significant role in guiding public agencies, policies, and programs, impacting the lives of real people on a daily basis. If these practitioners do not have a broad understanding of their institutions, what can be said about the outcomes of their work? Without such knowledge, on what basis do they make decisions about their public-service roles in a democratic society? In the absence of this knowledge, results of actions taken by public-service practitioners may be based on doing the same thing that has always been done, or on intuition about what might be best, or on selection of alternatives that seem most acceptable to those in positions of power. Any of these can be useful guides to action in a particular situation, but without greater breadth of knowledge, it is difficult to sort through the options in an informed, meaningful way.

[“Public-service practitioner,” instead of “public administrator” or “public professional,” may be used to indicate that not all public employees are administrators or in occupations usually considered professional. “Administrator” suggests a person who plans and supervises the work of others, and a “professional” is someone who applies a recognized body of knowledge to daily practice. However, in this book these terms are often used interchangeably.

More importantly, the people referred to by use of these terms are career public employees selected for their jobs on the basis of job-related education and experience rather than personal affiliation with, or loyalty to, a political party or leader. They are not to be confused with elected officials/politicians, or their political appointees (such as cabinet members, department heads, or appointed subordinates) who are in office during the term of a particular elected leader and are chosen, at least in part, on the basis of acceptance of the beliefs of the leader or party.]

The paradox of limited knowledge of the public sector in the midst of a flood of information suggests problems with the media and the educational system, but that is outside the scope of this book, which is about public-sector governance. It is assumed here that people involved in career public service have a greater responsibility to understand the nature of our society, democracy, and government than do most citizens, in part because such knowledge can improve professional practice. But beyond this practical value, to keep a society intact someone needs to carry the knowledge of how it came to be what it is, passing it on to others. People who do the work of public service are well positioned to play this role.

INSTRUMENTAL AND CONTEXTUAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Many think of public administration as a largely technical, applied field of study and practice, all about how to do budgeting and manage personnel, send the Social Security checks out on time, or keep the potholes filled. This view of public administration is instrumental, that is, it views public administration as a tool used by elected representatives of the citizenry to accomplish public goals. This is not inaccurate, because a significant part of public administration can be reasonably described in this way, but it is incomplete. The instrumental view leaves out the sometimes difficult and conflictual process of identification of public purposes and how public employees interact with citizens and elected officials in helping shape governmental action. It assumes that millions of public employees wait quietly at their desks for orders to be handed to them from a mysterious other place, and that these orders are fully developed by knowledgeable people who comprehend the social world and public needs in their full complexity.

Of course, that is not how things work. Instead, describing public purposes and taking action toward fulfilling them in the daily “lifeworld” of citizens is a dynamic, repeating process. In this process, public professionals interact with peers, elected representatives, and citizens in formulating and reformulating programmatic goals and plans for action, putting them into effect, and revising them during implementation. New circumstances can emerge at any point, causing perceptions of the initial problem or the public action to change, for reasons that may operate singly or in combination, such as:

1. New information emerges about the problem (an example would be discovering there are many more homeless people than first thought when a program to house and feed them in cold weather was created);

2. The program produces on-the-ground results suggesting the need for modification (continuing the homeless example, maybe few homeless people want to participate and a significant number are still freezing to death on the streets);

3. The program causes peoples’ perceptions of the situation or public action to change (some political leaders and media personalities say the program is pointless because the homeless would rather freeze, but a citizen’s advocacy group thinks the program should be expanded by picking people up and taking them to shelters); and/or,

4. The broader social context of the problem has changed such that the program should be modified (for example, the economy weakens and even more people are living on the streets).

The process of identifying a problem, discussing potential solutions, finding resources, putting the plan into action, and in each phase accommodating new information, ideas, and perceptions, can be top-down, operating at the level of political and economic leaders and higher-level administrators. It can also take place from the bottom up, with citizens and public employees generating ideas from their daily experience, and top-down and bottom-up activity may occur simultaneously.

As public employees engage in these processes, they move outside the common role expectation of the value-neutral tool used to achieve predetermined ends. They are the people with detailed knowledge of techniques and practices and they also have considerable knowledge of social conditions and the needs of the population. This knowledge of public needs may differ from that of elected representatives because it is gained in forms of contact and interaction that are different. Nevertheless, it is important in shaping actions taken by public legislative bodies and tailoring services to the people who receive them.

So, commonly held views about public administration may not take in the full reality of the field. Public administration is not only instrumental—public -sector decisions and actions are often complex, involve multiple possibilities, and change with time; and public-sector practitioners are involved in determining what government does in addition to how it does it. Public employees work in political, economic, and social environments shaped in part by past events and accumulated ideas, values, and cultural preferences about the purposes and operation of the public sector. Those who know something about these environments may have a greater chance of succeeding because they are better able to craft options and alternatives appropriate for their circumstances. As a bonus, they may find that deeper understanding of the broader society leads to greater satisfaction in their careers and as citizens outside the professional role.

Providing a portion of that deeper understanding of the social context of public administration is a focus of this book. The reader will find that standard management subjects in public administration are not covered here. This is because the book is not about management techniques for motivating employees, designing or evaluating a public agency program, understanding financial relationships between the national government and state and local governments, and so on. Instead, the book is about macro-level aspects of American society that influence how management of public agencies takes place, how history and practice have brought us to this point, and what options there may be within this context for future action. This is not dry history or settled fact to be memorized. It is a complex, tumultuous story, full of intrigue, interesting lives, grand purposes, and failures and successes, stretching through historical time and across several scholarly disciplines. Given this scope it is possible here to highlight only a few areas, emphasized because of their particular importance to the public sector. Readers are encouraged to use the book as a starting point, identifying events or ideas not included that they think should be discussed as well.

THE UNIQUE PUBLIC SECTOR

People often have trouble conceptualizing the idea of public administration as a whole, aside from specific tasks or functions such as issuing drivers’ licenses. This is not surprising, because public administration covers such a broad range of activities that its boundaries and contents can easily seem unclear. If we visualize ourselves in an introductory public administration course early in the semester, the professor may ask people to introduce themselves. In turn, students describe their education, work history, and future career interests. In a typical introductory course it is common to find, for example, a captain in the military, a program manager in a nonprofit social service organization, a police officer or firefighter, a person who has recently graduated from college, a state highway engineer, a child welfare caseworker, a land use planner for a local community, a wildlife manager for the national government, and a person who has worked for years in the private sector and wishes to move into public service.

Today, the boundaries between the three sectors of institutional and economic endeavor—private, public, and nonprofit—can be shifting and indistinct. This is due to several trends, including: the public sector contracting out work to nonprofit and private organizations, growth in the nonprofit sector, and increased emphasis in the public sector on businesslike efficiency. Our imaginary introductory course includes students representing experience in all three sectors—this cross-sectoral interest in education for public-sector management has become common in MPA programs. In many areas of management, concepts and techniques carry across sectors. For example, not only are there elements of leadership, motivation, accounting, human resource management, and information technology that cross sectoral boundaries, much of the innovation in these areas comes from the private sector and is adapted for use in the public sector. These similarities, and the cross-sectoral usefulness of certain management techniques, have led some to believe that management is management, regardless of sectoral location. However, a feature of public administration that is unique, that differentiates it from the private and nonprofit sectors, is that it is public, which indicates it involves every person in a defined geographic area. This simple word carries with it implications at the level of management practices—for example, the problem of potential intrusion of partisan politics into administration of personnel recruitment and hiring, or requirements for published, independent audits of the financial practices of public organizations. At a broader level, it implies a democratic expectation of citizen access to the process of policy making and implementation.

Though the effects of the public character of organizations on management are important, it is at the broader, macro level of organizational purpose and the relationship of organizations to the people they serve that publicness becomes not just important, but crucial. Those who argue that the sectors are becoming more alike and that management is management are partially correct when they consider technical aspects of management practice. But when attention shifts to organizational purpose and relationships with those served by public administration, we find clear differences between sectors. These differences appear in areas such as identifying problems to be addressed and who is involved in problem solving, procedures for decision making and who the decision makers will be, to whom and in what ways organizations are accountable for their performance, whose interests shape organizational goals, and what appropriate roles are for public-service practitioners.

Often, action taken by public-sector decision makers is described as being in “the public interest.” This is a vague, poorly defined term that might mean only that a particular outcome pleases or benefits the person who uses it (“I think this is in the public interest!”), but it can also be a useful idea with more general application. We can distinguish two types of public interest, aggregative and substantive. The aggregative public interest consists of the sum of individual preferences, the pooled wishes of everyone who expresses a preference. Voting and surveys are ways to find the aggregative public interest; since they rarely produce unanimity on a particular issue, we usually recognize the public interest as the preference expressed by the greatest number of people. The advantage of identifying the public interest in this way is that it is relatively clear and straightforward. The disadvantage is that the aggregative public interest can reflect short-term and largely uninformed public opinion.

The substantive public interest is a more elusive concept, consisting of whatever would be in the best interests of the public over a longer period of time. How to determine what is best and for whom becomes the problem, often resulting in considerable disagreement over the public interest. One way to think of the substantive public interest is that the majority of people would choose it if they had full information on an issue, the opportunity to interact with others whose interests may be different, and time to consider the long-term effects of each potential policy alternative. This version of the substantive public interest describes a decision-making process very different from voting or opinion surveys, one that involves well-informed people whose views have been shaped by dialogue with others in addition to their own preconceived interests. Unsurprisingly, achieving this level of sophistication in determining the public interest is difficult and unusual. However, the concept can be used to inform our thinking about democratic decision making and how individual preferences are taken into account in the public sector.

The ways citizens, elected officials, and public employees involved with a particular organization approach these issues are shaped by American expectations about government, expectations formed by more than two hundred years of dealing with balancing demands for open, democratic governance and desires for efficient, effective management. The American attitude about the relationship of the public sector to the broader society is quite different from t...