INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

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.

Institutionalism is not a theory in the formal sense; it is instead the framework, It begins with an argument about the salience of collective action as a basis for understanding political and social institutions, including formal political and bureaucratic organizations. This is a challenge to political science, which sees institutions primarily as the framework for rational individual choice and emphasizes conflicting interests and competition.

Institution theory captures and comprehends the rather long series of scholarship on coproduction, multiple stakeholders, public-private partnerships, privatization and contracting, and the increasingly fuzzy distinctions between things public and things private. Institutional theory has the particularly useful capacity to describe favorably the linkages, networks, and couplings of institutions coping with fragmentation, disarticulation, asymmetry between public problems and public jurisdictions, and high interdependence.

The perspective and tone of institutionalism in public administration were set in 1989 with the publication of the foundation documents, James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It and March and Olsen’s Rediscovering Institutions. These authors point to the limitations of economics and market logic as theory that accounts for institutional behavior, and instead build their theories on the consideration of structure, particularly hierarchy, and individual and group behavior in institutional contexts; on the interaction of individuals and organizations and their wider political, social, and economic contexts; and on the influence of professional and cultural norms on institutional behavior patterns and institutional longevity and productivity.

Many of the same variables—centralization-decentralization, costs, productivity, and hierarchy—are as applicable to the study of organizations in the public sector as to private firms.

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.

An adhocracy is the least formally organized hierarchy; it tends to emphasize mutual adjustment and to engage in team projects, to use matrix forms, and to mix centralization and decentralization. Role clarity, sharp divisions of labor, chains of command, and standardization are weak in adhocracies, but the search for innovation is strong.

Trial and error process is a feature of low-reality systems.  High-reliability systems have the following features.  First, the physical technologies (radar, nuclear generating plants, and so forth) of these systems are tightly coupled; Second, this tight coupling is characterized by fixed and relatively rigid standard operating procedures; Third, humans operating at any point in the production process of high-reliability systems require extensive technological training and constant retraining; Fourth, such systems are ordinarily funded to a level that will guarantee high efficiency; Fifth, such systems are highly redundant; Sixth, these systems are highly networked; Seventh, these systems are composed of a marvelous mix of governmental, non- governmental, and commercial organizations; Eighth, when the systems are working properly, error reporting is encouraged and not punished; Ninth, ordinarily such systems are rather hierarchical, both within the system and within the organization making up the system.

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. And, too, fragmentation theorists tend to use the logic of individual bureaucratic preferences to explain institutional choices. Likewise, consolidated systems theorists use individual, family, and bureaucratic preference as units of analysis, but they also use overall measures of whole system effectiveness.

In the garbage can one finds order, but this order is neither sequential nor consequential and turns much of the rational logic of decision theory on its head. Order may not be sequential because the relationship between means and ends is often temporal; that is to say, public problems, public institutions, and opportunities for choices mingle in nonlinear ways as independent, exogenous streams flowing through a system (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972; March and Olsen 1989; Weick 1979). Public problems in the garbage can seek solutions; at the same time, public institutions may be attracted to particular problems. Problems, solutions, and decisionmakers are temporal phenomena simultaneously available and can form a temporal order. “A computer is not just a solution to a problem in payroll management, discovered when needed. It is an answer actively looking for a question. Despite the dictum that you cannot find the answer until you have formulated the question well, you often do not know what the public policy question is until you know the answer” (March and Olsen 1989, 13). In the absence of structural constraints, simultaneity, not means-ends sequences, determines the linkages between problems and solutions and between institutional answers and questions.

Patterns of diffusion (some are more comfortable simply calling diffusion “change”; those who favor a particular diffusion tend to call it a reform or an innovation) are explained by a series of attendant hypotheses.