Backstage in a Bureaucracy: Politics and Public Service

Chapter 1 Introduction

1 The importance of state-level administration is growing in the field of public administration for several reasons.As decentralization of the national government moves to the states, the task of the states to accept, discharge, implement, evaluate, and fund depends heavily on each state’s administrative capacities (Bowling and Wright, 1998).As a laboratory of democracy, each state must have the capacity and the leadership to innovate and successfully bring high-quality and effective public services to the citizenry. Top-level state executives are important actors in the political, policymaking , and organizational processes of state government. Bowling and Wright (1998) note that the agencies they head • perform a broad array of significant public services; • participate in a broad range of activities across the politics-administration continuum; • are active in agenda setting and policy formulation tasks; • implement policies, procedures, and administrative rules and regulations ; • turn legislative mandates into actions; • oversee organizational and staff operations; • develop and manage budgets; • are responsible for inter-organizational relations and intergovernmental networks; and • generally influence the effectiveness—or the lack of—agency performance . As this implies, the directors of government departments or agencies have challenging and complex jobs.The scope of this challenge is of course dependent upon the size of the agency and the issues that arise during the period of a director’s appointment.At the same time, no matter what the agency, the director is expected to play a number of demanding and publicly significant roles. 1 Introduction These roles include • high-level policy adviser as a member of the chief executive’s cabinet • public advocate for the administration, especially for new initiatives and in times of political turmoil and crisis • principal spokesperson to the legislature for the department • chief negotiator for the department’s needs in relation to other departments • organizational leader • department administrator • budget manager (formulator and/or cutter) • personnel director • grievance handler • flak catcher for just about everything that goes on within and outside the department • media maven • the voice of the department to the community • overall leader for the staff and • the person who is held responsible. That public institutions are always in transition, and especially so now, is an additional element that makes being a director challenging. Globally, as well as in the United States, debates about what government agencies should be doing, and how they should be doing it, permeate public and legislative discussions .These discussions have led to a variety of proposals for reform, all of which mean that the heads of agencies must deal with not only the traditional demands placed on them but also the challenge of managing change. In 1992, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler shook up the existing and some believed sluggish, unresponsive, rule-bound, rigid, and self-protective, 2 | Backstage in a Bureaucracy Managing the workload. self-serving systems inside public bureaucracies with their book Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector. By the mid-1990s, many states were actively implementing reinvention reforms and staff were becoming familiar with such terms as internal competition , performance based budgeting, steering rather than rowing, benchmarking, and monitoring outcomes rather than measuring processes. Inside most public agencies, there began a constant drumbeat to be more efficient, more businesslike, more responsive, and more accountable…all simultaneously of course. Shortly thereafter, the National Academy of Public Administration published its Priority Issues Task Force Report (Washington , D.C., January 10, 2000). The report defined transformation of governance as the academy’s major focus.The three elements most important for this transformation were (1) the growing complexity of relationships between government and civil society, (2) the need for greater capacity to manage these relationships, and (3) shifting national responsibilities, both in the direction of international bodies and systems and in the direction of states, localities, and community -based institutions. Brudney, Hebert, andWright (2000) examined the values that senior administrators held toward the goals and objectives of their organizations and contrasted them by the race and gender of the leader.The values are of interest to us, so we have listed them below. In descending order of importance , the values or goals underlying the administrators’ approaches were • organizational leadership • organizational reputation • quality • customer service • effectiveness • high morale • high productivity • budget stability • organizational growth.| 3 Introduction | 3 In 2002, Lester Salamon and Odus Elliott added another dimension to the leadership challenge when they argued that much of what government is commonly believed to do...