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111 Many Americans express frustration, and sometimes anger, with public organizations . In the extreme this comes out as,“Bureaucracies! Who needs them? We’d be better off without!”To wrap up this inside look at a public bureaucracy we share our thoughts about these frustrations. We begin with questions that echo the unhappiness: • Why didn’t you (Chandler) force the issues and do more to improve things? • Doesn’t your experience prove that change is hopeless and big organizations just can’t be improved? • Isn’t it clear that the answer is to run public agencies more like businesses ? • When people get into these public sector organizations, why do they seem to lose their minds? Contrary to what these questions suggest about the hopelessness of government agencies, data show that Americans’ personal experience is much more positive than their generalized opinions. In fact, in some cases it is more positive than their private sector experiences. (For a detailed analysis of relevant studies, see Charles Goodsell’s book The Case for Bureaucracy , especially chapter two.)This disconnect is a good place to start in thinking about the issues these questions raise. A number of explanations are possible. Maybe Americans don’t like to be critical of the flesh-and-blood people they meet in agencies but express their real feelings when they can do so anonymously. Given the value of frankness and candor in mainstream American culture, that seems unlikely. Another possibility is that individual experiences are indeed positive, but people are affected by stories they hear and incidents that are given notoriety in the media.This seems more plausible, especially the media aspect. There always seems to be space in the newspaper or on television news for stories that point to the absurd behavior of a public official or agency. A more persuasive interpretation is that Americans usually have good individual experiences with public sector organizations but are prone to 20 FinalThoughts 112 | Backstage in a Bureaucracy expressing dissatisfaction with government and bureaucracy because of a powerful inherited political culture. Early Americans accepted government only reluctantly or, as Gary Wills has put it, as a necessary evil.The nation’s founding was animated by an emphatic rejection of the authority of the state and the church—two powerful interwoven institutions. Over the life of our country, being critical of and even vilifying public institutions has been seen as a way to protect freedom and democracy and prevent the emergence of an authoritarian government. In the context of that political culture,the criticisms are manifestations of a deeply felt,inherited skepticism as well as an embrace of individual freedom. From a broader perspective, we can see that Americans share little of the view held in other nations: government and public bureaucracies, though not necessarily loved, are seen as a way to improve society. Governments that work can elicit patriotic pride. (A recent case in point is the reaction of British citizens to the repeated negative statements directed at their National Health Service [NHS] by American politicians in the healthreform debate.The criticisms elicited a defense of the NHS that reflected their national pride in it.) While Americans want many of the things that only government can provide, they are much more inclined not to want government itself.This allows them to have both good personal experiences (they obtain the service they want) and negative attitudes (government symbolizes something they don’t like). With that perspective in mind, we now can respond to the questions. Why not force or mandate change? The power of an executive director in the public sector, and even a CEO in the private sector, to bring about change by force or mandate is really quite limited. Or perhaps we should say that it is short lived.Yes, it is possible to fire staff who are unproductive or unresponsive or just incompetent . However, even Jack Walsh—the corporate leader who proudly says that when he ran General Electric, he turned over twenty percent of his staff each year—believes it is best if the employees themselves recognize they are not a good fit for the work that needs to be done.Leaving is much better than being fired. Public sector agencies in a small state like Hawai‘i— and we expect elsewhere as well—do not have the capacity to fire and replace twenty percent of their workforce each year.The pool of trained workers does not exist, and the loss of staff knowledge would be disas- [13...

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