PUBLIC VALUE AND POLITICAL ASTUTENESS IN THE WORK OF PUBLIC MANAGERS: THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE

The public value framework, with its call for more entrepreneurial activities by public managers, has attracted concern and criticism about its implicit breaching of the politics/administration dichotomy. This article explores the role of political astuteness not only in discerning and creating public value, but also in enabling public managers to be sensitive to the dichotomy. We employ a conceptual framework to identify the skills of political astuteness, and then articulate these in relation to identifying and generating public value. Drawing on a survey of 1,012 public managers in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and in‐depth interviews with 42 of them, we examine the perceptions and capabilities of public managers in producing value for the public while traversing the line (or zone) between politics and administration. We conclude that political astuteness is essential to both creating value and maintaining allegiance to democratic principles.     

Leading and recognizing public value

This article examines the relationship between leadership and public value, which is particularly challenging in a context of explicit contest and conflict. The theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of policing rural crime. The study reveals that the police worked with multiple and competing publics rather than a single homogeneous public, and that part of their leadership role was to create and convene a public space in which different voices and divergent views could be expressed. The study notes that research needs to pay attention to the loss and displacement of public value, not solely its creation and recognition. The need to convene multiple publics required the police to lead, as part of a leadership constellation, and with political astuteness. The findings have wider relevance for other public services, and for studies of leadership and public value at the intersection between the state and civil society.     

The democratizing impact of governance networks: From pluralization,via democratic anchorage,to interactive political leadership

Initially, governance networks were intended as tools for making public governance more effective. Yet, scholars have argued that governance networks also have the potential to democratize public governance. This article provides an overview of theoretical arguments pertaining to the democratizing impact of governance networks. It claims that the initial celebration of the pluralization of public governance and the subsequent call for a democratic anchorage of governance networks should give way to a new concern for how governance networks can strengthen and democratize political leadership. Tying political leadership to networked processes of collaborative governance fosters ‘interactive political leadership’. The article presents theoretical arguments in support of interactive political leadership, and provides an illustrative case study of a recent attempt to strengthen political leadership through the systematic involvement of elected politicians in local governance networks. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactive political leadership could transform our thinking about democracy.     

Dismantling,disintegration or continuing stealthy integration in European Union environmental policy?

This symposium assesses the trajectory of European Union (EU) environmental policy and integration in light of the rising pressure for policy dismantling and disintegration. This introductory article discusses the literature and the mixed evidence of EU environmental policy dismantling. Building on the three symposium articles, we investigate the role of the European Commission in this process, evaluating its role as a general ‘motor of integration’ and more specifically as an environmental policy entrepreneur. We find that the current political context does push the Commission to reconsider its entrepreneurial role and adopt the role of a ‘normalized bureaucracy’. Nonetheless, organizational features, such as new hierarchies and presidential leadership, and ideas that frame policy initiatives explain continued policy evolution and resistance to outright dismantling. Scholars should also pay close attention to implementing measures and patterns of enforcement to detect the more subtle policy shifts.     

Accountability and hybridity in welfare governance

Hybridity has become a central characteristic of accountability in public governance. Contemporary service delivery is increasingly defined by the mixing and layering of public, market and social accountability regimes operating as overlapping ‘hybrid’ accountability arrangements. Although hybrid accountability is not a new phenomenon, recent trends have accelerated the process of hybridization, particularly in welfare state governance. In this symposium, we seek to advance our understanding of the under-theorized concept of hybrid accountability and empirically examine what is actually going on. In this introductory article, we put forward a definition of what hybridity means in public welfare governance and explore its origins and dynamics. We then present the articles of this symposium, showing how they go beyond fixed and static typologies to grasp the dynamics of interactions between actors, values and mechanisms under hybrid accountability. We conclude by reflecting on a future research agenda for studying hybrid accountability arrangements.     

Public Value as Rhetoric: A Budgeting Approach

The public value theory has been accused of serving as a “rhetorical device” for public managers to advance their interests and influence vis-à-vis politicians. This article uses Legislative Budget Offices (LBOs) as a lens to re-examine the theme of “public value as rhetoric”. It examines how an LBO can relegate itself to a lower public value-creating position that avoids conflict with politicians, which then allows politicians to employ rhetoric such as fiscal “sustainability” and “responsibility”, without making actual budget choices that incur political costs. The findings of the article suggest that the use of public value as rhetoric is a function of contradictory values held by citizens, which politicians and public managers must reconcile by choosing to divert either resources or rhetoric. Furthermore, rhetoric is bidirectional, and employable not just by public managers, but by politicians as well.     

How can network leaders promote public value through soft metagovernance?

The aim of this article is to explore the opportunities and challenges of employing ‘soft’ metagovernance to promote public value in governance networks. Soft metagovernance can be defined as a form of relational leadership that is exercised through face‐to‐face contact. This involves making an emotional connection with people to exert influence through a collaborative endeavour, rather than employing bureaucratic authority. Drawing on a case study of a local social enterprise—The Bristol Pound—in the UK, this article examines how soft metagovernance can be used by non‐state actors as a form of leadership to create public value. Evidence reveals that relational forms of leadership are a powerful asset in helping leaders of networks to create public value. Moreover, if network leaders understand how soft metagovernance functions they can use it more purposefully to maximize public value creation and mitigate the risks of public value destruction in governance networks.     

Public administration in Marshall Dimock's textbooks

This article examines the relationship between Marshall Dimock's positive, broad-based concept of public administration and his approach to writing undergraduate textbooks. Analysis shows that both Dimock's American government and public administration textbooks provide a different slant on public agencies than that available in most current introductory volumes. In particular, his American government textbook is more positive in tone about agencies than are its modern counterparts. The public administration textbook has comparative material that rarely appears in introductory-level textbooks.

This article analyzes how Marshall Dimock's conception of public administration as an important area of study with links to policy and leadership anchored his textbook writing. In the 1950s Dimock co-authored two popular textbooks for basic undergraduate courses, one in American government and the other in public administration.⁽¹⁾

Scholars still debate what textbooks in either field should teach students about public agencies. Cigler and Neiswender argue that current American government textbooks portray administration in a negative light. All authors see bureaucracy as a problem of some sort, few explain the role administrators play in shaping policy and none discuss reasons to enter the public service.⁽²⁾ Cigler and Neiswender suggest that American government textbooks must change to aid accurate perceptions of the administrative role. In particular, they believe the texts must add material on the public service as a profession and compare American agencies with those in other nations.

Since public administration textbooks are a key way that majors in the field learn material, debate ensues on what material they should contain. Recent articles explore how textbooks define key terms such as policy and how they integrate the work of various theorists.⁽³⁾

While all widely-used textbooks deal with both the political environment and internal agency functions (e.g., personnel, finance), no consensus exists on how to allocate space between political and managerial concerns nor on exactly which subtopics should be covered. No consensus exists on how much space should be devoted to policy making and policy analysis with some textbooks covering this topic and others skimming it lightly.

One often cited problem with contemporary texts is the lack of a comparative focus and a concomitant need to internationalize the curriculum.⁽⁴⁾ The thrust of current proposals is that students need a more broad-based education to prepare them for global leadership.

Interestingly, Dimock's approach to public administration led him to write textbooks that in some ways surpass what is available today. While the majority of the topics he presents (and their ordering) are similar to current efforts, he offers unique emphases that deal with the above mentioned criticisms. Far from being an exercise in academic nostalgia, examining Dimock's textbooks is a useful way of giving current writers new insights.

To appreciate Dimock's approach to textbook construction we first have to identify the core concepts behind his approach to public administration education. Afterwards, we can analyze the treatment of public agencies in American Government in Action, relating it to Cigler and Neiswender's critique of contemporary textbooks, and -examine how various editions of Public Administration conceptualize the field.     

Symposium on Democratic Governance: an introductory overview

This symposium deals with some of the major issues and concerns related to contemporary developments in public administration, policy, and governance. Although the authors of six articles covered in the symposium pay specific attention to the book Democratic Governance, they contribute to much wider debates on recent intellectual shifts in the field. The purpose of this brief introduction is to present precise summaries of these articles.     

CHANGES IN PUBLIC SERVICE BARGAINS: MINISTERS AND CIVIL SERVANTS IN DENMARK

The concept of public service bargain (PSB) has been reintroduced in recent times to the study of public administration to analyse the division of roles between ministers and the civil service in the context of public service reforms ( Hood 2000, 2001, 2002 ; Hood and Lodge 2006 ). The empirical investigation of the concept of PSB in general and changes in PSBs in particular is, however, limited. This article addresses this limitation by investigating what causes changes in public service bargains, particularly with respect to the provision of advice. As argued by Hood, we demonstrate how changes in PSBs can be explained by a combination of changes in the environments of ministries as well as the interests of the political actors. Furthermore, we point to the professional qualifications of civil servants as well as their interests as causes of change which, until now, have not received sufficient attention in the PSB literature. The article is based on a longitudinal case study of PSB between ministers and the permanent civil service in Denmark.     

Public administrators and policy legitimization: Policy analysis,politics and power

This article discusses the factors public administration faculty should incorporate into the curriculum in order to equip students to engage in the policy legitimization process. In order to produce leaders, public administration programs should emphasize the nature of the political system, an understanding of the legitimacy of subgovernments, the importance of coalition building and the psychological factors associated with policy choices.

Integration of policy analysis into the public administration curriculum requires that students be equipped with an in-depth understanding of both the political environment and the political process. This is true because public administrators are deeply involved in the stages of policy development, adoption, and implementation; activities which reach beyond the narrow confines of program management and into the realm of politics. Consequently, public administrators serve in a variety of capacities: as policy advocates, program champions, or as defenders of client interests. It is in these roles that public administrators move into the political arena. Policy analysis activities provide the discipline with the opportunity to move beyond an emphasis on a narrow concern with simply “managing” government and into the realm of policy choice, policy advocacy, political power and the exercise of leadership.

Public administration as a discipline, and teaching faculty in particular, face the challenge of increasing the relevance of the master's degree to policy leadership. Astrid Merget, past president of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, expressed this need for increased emphasis on policy leadership training quite eloquently in 1991:

“Our vision of the holder of a master's degree in our field is that of a leader, not merely a manager or an analyst. But we have not been marketing that vision.”⁽¹⁾

Merget attributes partial responsibility for the low public esteem of government service to the attitudes, teaching, and research activities of public administration faculty who have failed to link the “lofty” activities of government (environmental protection, health care, the promotion of citizen equality) with public administration. Accordingly, the academic standard of “neutrality” governing teaching and research acts as an obstacle to teaching the fundamentals of the goals of public policy. This professional commitment to neutrality places an emphasis on administrative efficiency at the expense of policy advocacy. The need, according to Merget, is to reestablish the linkage between policy formulation and policy management. Such a teaching strategy will enhance the purposefulness of public administration as a career. Failure to do so will relegate public administration programs to the continued production of governmental managers, not administrative leaders.

The integration of policy analysis into the public administration curriculum affords the discipline with the opportunity to focus on policy leadership and escape the limitation associated with an emphasis on program management. Teaching policy analysis skills cannot, and should not, be divorced from the study of politics and the exercise of political power. This is true because politics involves the struggle over the allocation of resources, and public policy is a manifestation of the outcome of that political struggle. Public policy choices reflect, to some degree, the political power of the “winners” and the relative lack of power by “losers.” The study of public policy involves the study of conflict and the exercise of power.

Teaching public administration students about the exercise of power cannot be limited to a discussion of partisan political activities. Public administrators serve in an environment steeped in the exercise of partisan and bureaucratic power.⁽²⁾ It is practitioners of public administration who formulate, modify and implement public policy choices. Such bureaucratic activity is appropriate, provided that it is legitimated by the political system. Legitimacy can be provided to public administrators only by political institutions through the political process.

Teaching public administration students about policy analysis and policy advocacy necessitates an understanding of the complexities associated with the concepts of policy legitimacy and policy legitimization.     

SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW: CONCEPTUALIZING NEW GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS

This symposium, ‘Conceptualizing New Governance Arrangements', takes up the challenge of refining governance theory to better integrate work in several disciplines, most notably politics, public administration and law. To this end, we argue for a theoretical framework that profiles three key dimensions of governance: institutional, political and regulatory. This framework, in our view, offers new insights into the nature and operation of various governance arrangements, and offers the potential to assess and measure change within such arrangements over time. After describing our methodology for selecting and analysing the case studies profiled in the symposium, we introduce each of the articles that apply our three‐dimensional governance framework. These articles employ the framework to consider a variety of contemporary governance scenarios that vary widely by sector (environmental, climate change, forestry and education policy) and level of analysis (sub‐national, national, and bi‐national).     

Neoliberal governing through social enterprise: Exploring the neglected roles of deviance and ignorance in public value creation

This article makes a case for paying greater attention to how informal relationships between government officials and civil society practitioners impact processes of public value creation. Drawing on data from a five‐year qualitative longitudinal study, we illuminate how civil society practitioners deviate from the formal objectives of social enterprise policies in order to create what they see as having public value. Through a process of theory elaboration, we demonstrate how government officials’ wilful ignorance of, or informal collaboration in, such deviance, precipitates forms of public value that are consistent with wider political objectives. Our analysis adds nuance and granularity to the debate on public value by drawing attention to the arcane ways it may be informally negotiated and created outside of the public sphere. This opens up new empirical and theoretical opportunities for understanding how deviance and ignorance might be symbiotically related in processes of public value creation.”     

New media and governance in conflict

The role of new media in shaping the interactions of formal and informal leaders with their audiences is frequently misunderstood and often narrowly focussed on electoral processes and political competition. By weaving together strands of scholarship on political communication and political settlement while engaging with concepts of hybrid governance and leadership more prevalent in the African studies literature, this article takes a different, wider focus. We attempt to knit a framework that challenges normative assumptions on institutional communicative practices and considers the role of power, leadership and communications in both exacerbating and mitigating violent conflict in emerging and consolidating democracies. By bringing together disparate strands of scholarship that are rarely in dialogue, we question a characterisation that contrasts vertical mainstream media with more horizontal and inclusive social media, arguing that a more nuanced view of the political significance of these spaces is required, one that highlights their interplay and blurs the boundaries between online and offline. In doing so, the article places power at the centre of analysis to examine how entrenched relations of patronage can be left unscathed, transformed or even reinforced by networked forms of communication.     

Doing Things with Words: The Case of 'Management' and 'Administration'

Over the last two decades, management, rather than administration, has become the dominant category through which both academics and practitioners talk, write and argue the organization of public services. More recently, the discourses of leadership have also been increasingly deployed in this context. Based on interviews with UK National Health Service trust chief executives, the article examines these particular discursive changes, exploring what the distinctions do rather than what the categories might represent. It reminds us of some of the things we do (in reality and to reality) when we deploy such words, especially in the debate about control. It also suggests possibilities for disturbing the dominance of the terms that are generally axiomatic in constructing arguments about the public sector; a dominance that has come to favour the interests of some as it denies the interests of others.     

Romania is a family and it needs a strict father: conceptual metaphors at work in radical right populist discourses

Investigating Romanian radical right populism, I evidence the gendered nature of conceptual metaphors and provide insights on the specific masculinities that they underpin in such political discourses. With the 2004 presidential elections as a backdrop, the analysis focuses on how the radical right populist candidates articulated in their discourses the conceptual metaphor of the “strict father.” At first, the theoretical standpoints on conceptual metaphors are corroborated with the conceptualization of populist charismatic leadership. Subsequently, a gendered perspective is added to the populist conceptualizations. The leaders' self-representation as messianic fathers of the national family is evidenced by investigating their discursive appeals to protect, discipline and punish the people. Furthermore, I elaborate how conceptual metaphors may be employed to consolidate a position of uncontested leadership and moral superiority of the radical right populist leaders.     

Public administrators in interactive democracy: a multi-paradigmatic approach

ABSTRACT

Currently, interactive forms of democracy that bring local politicians into dialogue and collaboration with relevant and affected citizens are mushrooming. While some research has investigated how interactive democracy affects citizens and politicians, we know little about what interactive democracy means for public administrators. This article presents the results of a case study of role perceptions and coping strategies among public administrators assisting a new type of interactive political committee in two Nordic municipalities. Guided by a multi-paradigmatic conceptual framework featuring public administrators’ roles and coping strategies in interactive governance, the study shows that individual public administrators identify with different administrative roles, and that political and administrative leadership sentiments condition their choice of coping strategies. Moreover, the coping strategy that public administrators select to handle intra- and inter-paradigmatic role dilemmas can have dire consequences for the interplay between interactive democracy and local representative government.     

Place-Based Leadership and Public Service Innovation

This article discusses two matters that are becoming increasingly important in debates about local government: place-based leadership and public service innovation. The troubling international economic outlook means that many local authorities are focusing on ‘efficiency savings’ and the prevailing mantra in public policy circles is ‘do more with less’. This article questions this approach. It aims to contribute to what one chief executive described to us as ‘more with more’ thinking. This approach strives to release the community and business energies of a locality. If this can be achieved the total resources available to improve the local quality of life can be increased, even if state spending is shrinking. A conceptual framework for studying place-based leadership is presented. This distinguishes three, overlapping realms of leadership in any given locality – political leadership, managerial/professional leadership, and community and business leadership. It is argued that the areas of overlap between these realms can be viewed as innovation zones – spaces in which established approaches can be questioned and new trajectories developed. These zones can, however, also become conflict zones with little learning and exchange taking place. Place-based leadership can influence whether such political spaces are used to promote creative problem solving or whether they become arenas for dispute and friction between sectional perspectives. By drawing on a study of the current Digital+Green initiative in Bristol, UK, the article suggests that an imaginative approach to place-based leadership – one that accepts intelligent risk taking – offers potential for improving the local quality of life as well as strengthening local democracy.     

Introduction to the Symposium on Exploring the Complexities of Performance Management

ABSTRACT

The editors of this symposium hope that this collection of articles can help advance the public administration literature stream across the multiple organizational and cultural settings in which these performance management studies were conducted. However, this symposium also focused on articles that can help advance the practice of performance management, where specific recommendations are needed to help public officials collect, analyze, and use meaningful outcome measures specifically for the benefits for making better management and policy decisions.     

DOES A PUBLIC SERVICE ETHIC ENCOURAGE ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR? PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION,ETHICAL LEADERSHIP AND THE WILLINGNESS TO REPORT ETHICAL PROBLEMS

This article aims to advance our understanding of and confidence in the relationship between employee public service motivation (PSM) and ethical behaviour by testing the degree to which PSM predicts the ethical behaviour or behavioural intention of government employees. Building on previous research, we argue that government employees with higher PSM are not only more likely to internalize values that support public interests, they also are likely to be concerned less about the potential consequences that they may experience by reporting unethical conduct within their agencies. Using data collected through a survey from 477 employees working in a large state agency, we find that supervisors with higher PSM are more likely to be perceived by their subordinates as exhibiting ethical leadership, supervisors exhibiting higher ethical leadership are more likely to have subordinates with higher levels of PSM and that subordinates with higher PSM express a higher willingness to report unethical behaviour within their agency. We discuss implications of these findings for research on PSM.