A Framework for Professional Action in Government

Abstract

Government agencies depend on professionals to initiate action, but traditional applied theories of public administration are rather discouraging. Unproductive-and unnecessary-false dichotomies, especially involving facts and values, make it difficult for agency insiders to relate to the need to become proactive. To help professionals determine when and how to be proactive, the authors propose a framework composed of three planes-policy, operations, and evaluation-that defines a scope of action. Four pairs of widely debated claims are examined using this framework. Key findings are that (a) public agencies face broader scopes of action than occur in commercial enterprises, reducing the utility of the business paradigm to public administrators; (b) public agencies are unlike commercial entities, where smaller scopes of action are more likely to form a coherent and inclusive focus that can concentrate professional action more methodically; (c) proactive public agency professionals extend their allegiances beyond agency walls in ways that blur distinctions between traditional facts and values; (d) agency professionals limit their ability to shape policy, correct operations, and advance evaluations by adopting traditional facts-values distinctions that reinforce continuation of the outworn dichotomy between politics and administration; (e) proactive professionals can concentrate on challenging the significance of facts that inevitably must address underlying values; and (f) liabilities to proactive risktaking by professionals remain high as long as they threaten the primacy of traditional political and management stakeholders. The construct helps professionals navigate these risks more ably as it integrates facts and values tensions more fully.

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