INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION - Deneme Sınavı - 6

The golden age of public administration hegemony disintegrated in the 1950s.

Modern institutional theory is not limited to the study of government bureaucracies and as a result has moved well beyond the traditional study of jurisdictional public administration.

Institutionalism assumes that policy preferences are neither exogenous nor stable but are molded through collective experience, institutions, education, and, particularly, professions. Institutionalism further assumes the centrality of leadership, management, and professionalism. Institutionalism recognizes the salience of action or choice and defines choice as expressions of expectations of consequences.

March and Olsen assert that most institutionalists work from a few key ideas: First, institutions are understood to be a formal bounded framework of rules, roles, and identities. Second, within the formal frameworks, “preferences are inconsistent, changing and at least partly endogenous, formed within political institutions” Third, institutional theory emphasizes the logic of appropriateness based on institutional structures, roles, and identities. Fourth, the logic of appropriateness is based on matched patterns of roles, rules, practices, and structures, on the one hand, and a situation, on the other.

A well-functioning hierarchy structures people in a way that meets these organizational needs: to add value to work moving through the organization; to identify and fix accountability at each stage; to place people of necessary competence at each organizational level; and to build a general consensus and acceptance of the unequal segmentation of work and the necessity for it.

Managerial hierarchy, or layering, is the only effective organizational form for deploying people and tasks at complementary levels, where people can do the tasks assigned to them, where the people in any given layer can add value to the work of those in the layer below them, and, finally, where this stratification of management strikes everyone as necessary and welcome.

There is, however, a very different category of public institutions: the high-reliability systems. The best examples include commercial air travel; the provision of electricity, gas, and cable television services; and the operation of nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers, and submarines.

Fragmentation theory uses the individual or the family as the appropriate unit of analysis and the aggregation of individual and family choices as measures of rational preferences and institutional effectiveness.

Borrowed from economics and applied to public policy studies, rents are the description of a market having multiple firms (institutions) and the differences between their total costs and their total incomes (rents are not to be confused with profits; economists are fussy about this). These rents can be thought of as a surplus in a completely efficient public sector.

To Max Weber: Bureaucracy is an ideal type, rational organization and technically superior to other forms of organizations.

Theories of bureaucratic politics seek to explain the policymaking role of administration and bureaucracy.

Waldo did not construct a theory of bureaucratic politics in this book, but here and in later writings he made two critical contributions that have supported all subsequent efforts to do so.

As Waldo pointed out, this [maximized outputs for a given set of inputs] is a concept fundamental to businesses operating in capitalistic markets, but it is not nearly so important to democratic government.

The main question is: How do we construct a theory that accommodates the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the bureaucracy, the foundation of the modern administrative state and a seemingly necessary component of contemporary government, with the seemingly contradictory egalitarian, inefficient ideals of democracy

The significant claim generated by these studies [examining decision-making in the executive branch] was that government decisions were products of bargaining and negotiation among interested political actors.  As these studies focused on the executive branch, the central player in these bargaining frameworks was the president.  The president, however, was argued to have little unilateral decision-making power; he had to accommodate the interest of the various institutional factions in the executive branch. Bureaucracies and bureaucrats, in short, played high-level politics, and usually played the game very well. Bureaucracies and executive branch officials were not portrayed here as neutral agents of implementation, but as active participants in determining the will of the state.

A bureaucratic environment, Merton argued, pressures people to conform to expected patterns of behavior—to follow rules, to be methodical and detailed. Given these pressures, bureaucracies will often substitute rules for ends, and they will adhere to standard operational procedures even when those procedures clearly interfere with the organization’s main mission.

 

Wilson concluded that successful bureaucracies are those in which executives have created a clear sense of mission, identified the tasks that must be achieved to fulfill that mission, distributed authority within the organization according to those tasks, and provided subordinates (particularly operators) with enough autonomy to achieve the task at hand, a fairly tall order given the complex environment of public agencies. Wilson’s argument suggests that agencies given clear objectives and high levels of autonomy are more likely to be successful in achieving those objectives.

Contracting with a private firm to perform various public functions has its advantages. Private companies, for example, are subject to lower levels of oversight and accountability, which gives them an operational flexibility public agencies frequently lack. Using private companies also helps reduce the number of civil servants on the public payroll, an important consideration for presidents dealing with the size of the public bureaucracy, always a politically sensitive issue. The downside to these arrangements is the loss of accountability and the high resistance of private firms to changes in the public bureaucracy because their livelihoods are dependent upon preserving the status quo.

Some recent research has identified a “dark side” of networks — that network managers respond to elements of the network that are more politically influential, and thus the result is that networks may actually exacerbate already present inequality.

The central tenet of the representative bureaucracy theory is that a bureaucracy reflecting the diversity of the community it serves is more likely to respond to the interests of all groups in making policy decisions.