A Place at the Table: Organization Theory and Public Management

Abstract

In November 2018, the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy hosted an international workshop on the role of organization theory in public management. The intention was to renew interest in organization theory in public management research. Scholars such as Herbert Simon, Herbert Kaufman, and Richard Selznick made seminal contributions to organization theory through the study of public organizations from the 1940s through the 1960s. In our estimation, organization theory is underrepresented in public administration scholarship for the last several decades. There are natural reasons for this trend, including the discipline’s turn towards organizational behavior and the ascendancy of techniques that advance the study of large datasets and those that allow for experimental control. The recent emergence of “behavioral public administration” is a prominent example of this evolution. This symposium is an attempt to make a place at the table of public management for organization theory. The articles in this symposium contain articles from scholars who operate in the tradition of classic organization theory in new and innovative ways to lend intellectual purchase to studies of public organizations and public organizational networks.

Introduction

In late 2018, the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy hosted an international workshop on the role of organization theory in public management. The intention was to renew interest in organization theory in public management research, which, in our estimation,¹ has been underrepresented in public administration journals for the last several decades.² There are natural reasons for this trend, including the discipline's turn towards organizational behavior and the ascendancy of techniques that advance the study of large datasets and those that allow for experimental control. The recent emergence of “behavioral public administration” is a prominent example of this evolution. In comparison, research on organizations and networks of organizations is a retail rather than a wholesale data collection effort.

Perhaps another reason for the decline in organization theory in public administration is the increased attention to theory creation in public administration rather than using theories from other disciplines. Weimer (2020) argues that while public administration scholars need descriptive theory to guide their empirical research, they do not need to produce it at the same level as disciplinary scholars in political science, sociology, and economics. “Economics, political science, and sociology provide descriptive theories informing the design of institutional and organizational arrangements (Weimer 2020, 2).” Since public administration is a field connected to practice, a major part of research on public and nonprofit organizations is normative in the sense that the results make positive statements about administrative matters that should be useful to practitioners. In this case, useful means helping practitioners attend to their multiple and conflicting bottom lines—efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, responsiveness, and equity (Wilson 1967) so they can make meaningful tradeoffs among them. This normative element makes public administration a professional field.

Earlier in public administration’s evolution as a field, many theories of organizations were developed from research on public organizations. Max Weber (1946), Luther Gulick (1937), Herbert Simon (1947), Philip Selznick (1949), and Herbert Kaufman (1960) were present at the founding and added their work on public organizations to the general organization theory canon. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a spectacular array of new macro-organizational theory including transaction cost analysis (Williamson 1975), organizational ecology (Hannan and Freeman 1977), resource dependency theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978), neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), and network embeddedness theory (Granovetter 1985). Disciplines and professional fields all differentiate over time, and by the time these theories sprang to life, they claimed to be general theories that applied to private, public, and nonprofit organizations. While general theories, these theories focused on phenomena as well, for example, Williamson’s focus on mergers and acquisitions, DiMaggio and Powell’s attention to homogeneity, and Hannan and Freeman’s study of organizational births and deaths. In contrast, research in public administration is generally not focused on general theory but rather explaining variance in the outcome of organizational activities, drawing on whatever theories will work best in a given case (Provan and Milward 1995) like resource dependence theory of Pfeffer and Salancik (1978). Often the phenomenon to be explained has practical importance, for example, organizational performance, consumer satisfaction, turnover, and the analyst’s task is to identify the key variables that explain the outcome regardless of their theoretical pedigree.

Readers may object that phenomenon focused theories are somehow “impure” graphing bits and pieces of earlier theoretical works together, combined with some common sense or fieldwork perhaps, to come up with a new recipe. However, we should remember that resource dependency theory built on exchange theory which was developed in the 1960s (Emerson 1962; Blau 1964); transaction cost economics drew on the work of Herbert Simon and the Carnegie School as well as the work of Thompson (1967); Coase (1937) and Commons (1934), ecological theory borrowed heavily from Hawley (1950) and Stinchcombe (1965); neo-institutional theory similarly borrowed from the Carnegie School as well as sociology (DiMaggio and Powell 1991); and embeddedness theory drew on a long history of research on social networks and Polanyi’s (1944) classic work. This is the way explanatory theories are built as well. Thus neither theoretical exercise is more or less “pure.” Both are needed, and indeed we suspect that the next new “block-buster” explanatory theory will emerge from efforts of applied researchers to explain some ordinary organizational phenomena who will find that their explanations of the particular have broad, general applicability. It is well to remember that Van de Ven (1989) (quoting Lewin 1945) statement that “nothing is quite so practical as a good theory.”

What will a renewed emphasis on organization theory in public administration add to our discipline? We see a number of benefits coming out of this symposium. Just as public administration contributed in many ways to building the early foundations of general organization theory, modern public administration can again contribute to the production of general organization theory. For instance, public administration theory on topics as diverse as governance mechanisms, organizational networks, or routines can be important contributions to the organization theory used in other disciplines as well as our own. A renewed emphasis on organization theory will improve empirical and experimental work in public administration at the level of the network, organization, or organizational subunit. One consequence of the turn toward experiments in other disciplines is that causal inference often trumps causal explanation. In almost all cases, causal stories are rooted in strong theoretical foundations. Continued emphasis on organization theory in public administration can only improve our empirical research.

The Symposium Papers

In the opening paper in the symposium, Daniel Carpenter offers a new and intriguing view on a classic theory drawn directly from the heart of public administration: the way that James Q. Wilson used and truly pioneered the development of categories throughout his corpus of research. This paper is a foundational contribution because scholars throughout public management’s history have sought to formulate and apply categories. As Carpenter demonstrates, Wilson built and deployed categories in three basic ways: assigning observed objects to conceptual groups in the Weberian tradition; “type-dependent theorization” when thinking about the roles of incentives and styles; and measurement in the behavioralist tradition when assigning observed objects to applied analytic categories.

This paper engages some of the most important books in the public management tradition—Wilson’s Varieties of Police Behavior (Wilson 1968) and his Bureaucracy (Wilson 1989) in a way that seeks to rejuvenate the use and implementation of categorization. But the paper also moves beyond documentation and exhortations to help researchers understand the state of categorization in modern public management—as well as help us better understand the limits and consequences of categorization. In Carpenter’s framework, some quantitative and qualitative comparisons are nonsensical from first principles. While many research methods classes in our field discuss such issues as concerns, we rarely consider them as problems with how we build theory. In this way, through these elaborations, this paper helps move the ball forward in our regular conversations about what is good theory and what are its limitations.

Martha Feldman’s paper also pushes the boundaries of theorizing in public management, in ways that both complement and challenge the viewpoints documented and considered by Carpenter. From her perspective, theorizing in our space is a practice of boundary spanning because of the value of approaching topics from viewpoints drawn from both sociological studies and management practice.

Because our theorizing sits at this boundary, Feldman argues that we must also consider the way our views depend on two competing logics. One is a logic of probability, which resides within sociological studies. We may not recognize this dependence, in part, because of the nature of training programs. Our empirical focus is on documenting causes of social problems; that knowledge base is meant to inform discussions about what policies and practices may help alleviate those problems and their consequences for society. Our empirically informed beliefs about causality, and the way we assemble that empirical information, drive this process, thus forming a logic of probability. Yet, the logic of possibility is intrinsic to the practice of management. Knowledge about drivers or causes of success may not tell us much about solving tough management problems in settings that need managerial attention. As such theory building in public management must straddle the logic of probability and that of possibility—how managers create and deploy solutions in cases where the logic of probability points toward failure.

This is Feldman’s most important contribution—to force theory building and empirical research in public management to consider both logics, their entanglement, and what a lack of focus on the logic of possibility may do to limit our impact. To show this in practice, Feldman offers an introduction and valuable summary of the impact of the work done by scholars in multiple disciplines to understand organizational routines in action.

Like many others in public management, Patrick Kenis and Jörg Raab see organizational networks as fundamental building blocks for our understanding of governance arrangements. They argue in their paper that the preponderance of academic attention has been on networks as a new way to get things done, as a method of creating public value. They recognize that many obstacles get in the way of using networks for these purposes. But they also argue that one obstacle is that most of the academic literature on organizational networks has been descriptive. They also argue that efforts at building comprehensive conceptual models are useful but inevitably limited in their utility.

Instead, Kenis and Raab ask us to consider organizational networks as organizations in the sense of the classical definition of March and Simon (1958). As organizations, networks have to solve problems like task division, task allocation, reward provision, and information provision. This shift of theoretical lens offers distinct advantages, which they demonstrate through dissection of an extended case from the management of housing expenses in a Dutch municipality. This joining of lens and case offers additional opportunities in the sense that propositions can be derived to guide further research.

A broader contribution of this paper is to show the portability of widely-accepted theoretical advances in one area of organization studies to new and less-developed empirical topics such as networks. This offers a model of expanding utility—one that we hope provides a roadmap for other areas that could gain theoretical purchase through the consideration of bodies of theory developed in other areas of public management. We recognize that portability is often contentious. Carriers of a given theoretical tradition may dispute its applicability in other domains; those developing knowledge about emerging empirical phenomena may dispute the need for extant theory. In practice, though, what is true about those assessments is not known until articles, such as those presented in this symposium, take such theory and apply it in new settings.

In a departure from most theory papers, Branda Nowell and Joseph Stutler offer a grounded theory perspective that shows many of the remaining gaps in our theoretical understanding of public agencies. Their extended case comes from the late November 2016 fire in a remote area in the interior of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in the United States that had a major impact on a city, Gatlinburg, TN. They argue that natural disasters are a dramatic example of a more general situation faced by many public agencies that work on the front line in the context of more frequent disasters fueled by climate change.

They situate this case by arguing that while catastrophic events often catch agencies unaware, those same agencies often have weeks or longer before the event where they could have taken protective action. But they also argue that ex post thinking like that may be too convenient—that traditional solutions like punishing leaders or agencies often obscure the discovery of more systemic vulnerabilities.

They document the fire in painstaking detail; the fire is the largest the park’s history. But they also show that the fire’s devastation itself obscures broader and deeper dynamics—that the fire surprised an underprepared responsible agency, and that it was preceded by, and evolved out of, a known situation. As such, an innovation in this paper is to show how such surprises can happen when public managers are “inoculated” and do not recognize when they are in an unprecedented situation. They demonstrate this through an extended discussion of two kinds of organizational characteristics: those that inhibit sensemaking processes (Maitlas and Christianson 2014; Weick 1995) and those that cause organizations to take standard responses in non-routine situations (Allison 1969). In doing so, they tie the case to Karl Weick’s (1993) classic work on organizational sensemaking that was developed out of a similar wildfire disaster.

Jodi Sandfort and Stephanie Moulton turn our attention to one of the foundational questions in the study of public administration: why is there variance in success? We know that successful programs in one jurisdiction often fail in other contexts. We also know that scholars vary in their attribution of that variance: some focus on the institutional system, whereas others focus on human agency. Inevitably, scholars disagree on the relative weight of different factors in different settings.

Sandfort and Moulton sidestep this by focusing on structuration processes—specifically the use of tools like rules, routines, culture, and resources to affect implementation. While many theories in public administration center on exogenous forces, their focus is on endogenous factors within a given implementation system; rather than working purely at the macro level, their interest is on how the agency of actors within the setting can shape the use of those tools. Overall, they map from micro dynamics to meso conditions. Naturally, this leads to a discussion of the opportunities for innovation and learning.

Recently, scholars in sociology have turned attention again to the effect of levels of analysis on research studies (Fligstein and Adams 2012). In public administration, Roberts (2020) has brought a renewed concern with micro, meso, and macro differentiation. Sandfort and Moulton also push these boundaries, and in so doing, they help us better understand the prospects for improved implementation across multiple settings. This spanning has connections to Feldman’s essay that is worth consideration. At a minimum, readers should note that routines play important roles in the implementation process and that they do so because managers can try to shape them to affect organizational outcomes.

Wolfgang Seibel’s paper returns to long-standing concerns in public management about the relative amount of attention paid by researchers to the study of formal public organizations versus that paid to new organizational forms, hybrid organizations, or affiliated organizations in other sectors. He argues that the attention paid to the New Public Management (NPM) school has pulled researchers away from the study of traditional, “formal” attributes such as structures that promote autonomy, the degree and practice of discretion, the nature of institutional integrity, and the role of responsibility among leaders. He argues that “to neglect these classic ingredients of bureaucracy may imply to neglect its classic virtues as well.”

His paper shows how these attributes are interrelated; then, he shows how public values connect institutional integrity and responsible leadership. The crux of his argument is that public values must be understood and specified—and that that exercise underpins the other attributes, taken together. From this, he proceeds to elaborate on the ranking of values and the ordering of basic values of democracy and more familiar second-order values.

He then grounds this theoretical position in an extended case study meant to show how public leadership serves as a prerequisite of classic bureaucracy. Yet, the overall message here is centered on this foundational statement: that the future of public management theorizing is to start with (and take seriously) the public organization itself in both an empirical and normative sense.

Julia Smith’s paper returns to the topic of network governance to focus on collaboration through the lens of network performance. Her review essay centers on the traditional question of the factors associated with performance, but in a way that pushes beyond the traditional study of networks as governance structures that started in public administration literature in the 1980s. In part, this review paper can be seen as a restatement of the importance of foundational research on networks by Provan and Milward.

Unlike economics, public administration has spent less time documenting the “history of our theory.” In economics, we know that competing and fulfilling economic theories have marched through time—and thus knowing something about how macroeconomic theory evolved helps young economics theorists avoid the mistakes already discovered by earlier traditions. Likewise, that knowledge helps researchers explain current events that do not fit with current theory by giving researchers access to older, less-discussed theories. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the resurrection of Hyman Minsky’s work on equity markets after the most recent Great Financial Crisis (Minsky 1992).

In a number of important ways, Smith’s paper helps provide this backbone for current scholars of network performance by tracing advances in “whole network theory” from Provan and Milward’s 1995 article through their later work on service delivery networks and then through researchers who have followed in this tradition.

The Future of Organization Theory in Public Administration

The papers in this PPMG symposium issue illustrate a renewed interest in organization theory to advance public administration, and they highlight how modern public administration drawing on networks, routines, and a range of governance mechanisms, can contribute to organization theory. Classic organization theory, as Kenis and Raab argue, provides insights to understand task allocation and division, information and rewards in organizational networks, for example. What is perhaps most exciting is the possibility of insight, for both practicing public administration and explaining the phenomenon, from the intricate blending and mutually reinforcing dynamics of “agency” and “structure” examined and theorized in both fields. “[A] more robust understanding of the interplay between institutional structures and human agency,” Sandfort and Moulton argue, “indicates that there is substantial opportunity for actors within TANF implementation systems to be agents of change.” Recognizing and working with the interaction of structure and agency, in turn, is an opportunity for public administration scholars to be agents of change in the capacity, reach, and insight of the field.

Just as Feldman’s work encourages us to incorporate a “logic of possibility” into our theorizing for public administration, the papers in this symposium issue project the possibilities for theory building when our focus is on the dynamics of agency and structure; on the interplay of managed networks and the context within which they operate; on suppression of sensemaking in the clash between organizational logics and predictable practices in an era of unprecedented problems; on renewed appreciation of administrative process, routines and technologies in response to quantitative, problematic measures of behavior; on the transition from “knowing what” to “knowing how” and the role of context and social dynamics in implementation efforts; and on the interplay between institutional integrity and the underlying values of leadership. Beyond “behavior” or “structure”—singular lenses that provide explanations that are most “probable” or relatable—is the rejection of dichotomies and incorporation of the logic of the possible at the dynamic intersection of agency and structure, and at the intersection of public administration and organization theory, more generally.

Several research challenges emerge when this intersection is considered. First, how can we understand networks or organizations in the context of “governance in action?” From the enactment of processes at micro, meso, and macro levels of governance, public administration is action, and organizations and networks are in constant states of organizing. In addition to categories, typologies, and snapshots in time, the organizing lens suggests we focus on the enactment of processes and practices that are evolving and contextually contingent and mutually constituent. Focusing on the role of managers in fostering transitions in the governance of networks or organizations, the informational and relational work of governance interacts with the patterns, practices, and organizing activities of members, and provides an explicit engagement between public administration and organization theory.

Second, how can we incorporate “unknown unknowns” into our theorizing or the “space” in the practice of public administration that holds potential for contextually contingent reconfiguration and new directions? What can we learn from the study of organizational networks, or the relationship between values and institutional integrity, to help managers manage the unknowable unknowns? In organizational worlds of routines and practices, consistent constituencies, and resource constraints, where are the spaces for change, and what scale and scope of management reach must be in place to bring about the transitional moments in the governance of programs, organizations or networks? Empirical insights into these moments (how goals were redefined, resources deployed, relationships built, etc.) may be a window of insight for public administration practitioners.

Third, can we understand governance practices not merely as observations, but as guides for organizing and influencing the forward-thinking efforts of managers and others? Practices become templates for how participants think about and enact their roles within networks and organizations, and any governance arrangement “easily conceals inequalities and power relations” (Nuijten 2004, 124). The concept of a network itself is a tool for coordination and policy elaboration and implementation. Rather than focus on the determinants of networks or models of governance, a deeper understanding of the purposive and strategic impetus behind the governance of networks, not only by policy makers, but by the managers of networks could be explored.

Finally, in a field long defined by an emphasis on public and professional values that shape the integrity of governance, how is institutional integrity and accountability preserved in settings that are dynamic and increasingly dispersed? In this symposium issue, Seibel argues, “for the sake of institutional integrity, public administration leadership has to be based on an appropriate understanding of public values and their specificity.” With this in mind, what role do managers play in the integration of goals, relationships, resources and representation to achieve institutional integrity and accountability?

References

Footnotes