Post-Progressive Public Administration: Lessons from Policy Networks

Abstract

Traditional-Progressive Model: Supply-Side Public Administration Critiques of closed-system organizations and Weberian, Wilsonian, and Tayloristic management practices have long flourished the literature. In practice, however, it has been the Weberian, Wilsonian, and Tayloristic practices that have flourished, and continue to do so despite the intellectual battering they have taken. Waldo (1984) wrote of the perdurability of the politics-administration dichotomy and linked its endurance to the institutionalization of the civil service system and the embedment of the dichotomy in the political culture-particularly those aspects of political culture that emphasize science and efficiency. Rosenbloom (1993) further suggests that the model served the interests of executive power. In this progressive model of public administration, nonelite bureaucrats were to focus their energies on how questions, on the assumption that method is a technical consideration that can be resolved rationally while what-to-do questions were inherently political. To protect the domain of technique and rationality, political pressures to recruit public administrators into partisan political activities were outlawed. The job of die public administrator turned inward to focus on professionally and hierarchically defined tasks; political neutrality was demanded of them. Meanwhile, the organizational culture of technical rationality (Ingersoll and Adams, 1992) served to further channel the attention of specialists along narrow slices of occupational terrain. This control-and-coordinate model can indeed claim its share of successes. Centralized hierarchy has faithfully put into effect the intentions of innumerable statutory laws. The bureaucratic model also contains a logic that makes it compatible with accountability to those who set policy. The characteristic organizational control mechanisms usually tighten fiscal control of public money - one of the more conspicuous aims of progressivism. Further, the impersonality of public that is often criticized may actually be an appropriate distancing tactic that accommodates equal opportunity and equal treatment. For all its high ideals, the heyday of progressive public is, I argue, past. Its premises no longer fit experience, and it is abundantly clear that Wilson's (1887, p. 18) vision of public was more an urging than a description: The field of is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics.... Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate the offices. Political Professionalism Political neutrality has never been a description of the role of public administration, but as an ideal it is also losing favor.(1) Public administrators are policy activists in Heclo's (1978) model, and recently they have been beseeched to be more activist on the basis of their demographic representativeness, or because of their public-interest bias, or because of their historically aware, long-term perspective. And there is more. Osborne and Gaebler's (1992) activist prescription is referred to as entrepreneurial government. Rohr (1986) sought to legitimate the administrative state in terms of constitutional principle. In Wamsley et al 1990) there is perceived a legitimacy crisis sufficiently severe as to require refounding public administration so that it can become a constitutionally grounded yet active agent of the public interest. Cooper (1991) referenced citizenship and not neutral competence as the bedrock principle of public administration. Bryson and Crosby (1992) called their shared-power formula leadership for the common good while Nalbandian (1991) described a transformation in roles and values of city managers. Esman (1991) emphasized that a pluralistic approach is needed in development because of the preponderance of multiorginizational networks through which (public administrators) increasingly function. …

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