When you are studying public policy, you see public policy everywhere.

Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, told me about a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It concerned Vietnam, and the $64,000 question: What would John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he lived? R.F.K.’s answer was: J.F.K. would have gotten us out of Vietnam. He would have waited until after the ‘64 elections, and then “fuzzed it up.” [25]

Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny — particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology. —Errol Morris

I had no idea how much reading I wasn't doing for this class this week:

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 2 “Political Culture and Public Administration”

Florence Heffron, Organization Theory and Public Organizations, Ch. 7 “Organizational Culture”

M. S. Haque, “The Diminishing Publicness of the Public Sector under the Current Mode of Governance”, Public Administration Review, 2001, 61 (1), 65-82

J. S. Jong and H. Muto, “The Hidden Dimension of Japanese Administration: Culture and its Impacts, Public Administration Review, 1995, 55 (2), 125-34.

J. Jabes, N. Jans, J. Frazer‑Jans and D. Zussman Managing in the Canadian and Australian Public Sectors: A Comparative Study of the Vertical Solitude, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Volume 58, Number 1, 1992, pp 5‑21.

J. Jabes and D. Zussman, Organizational Culture in Public Bureaucracies. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 55 (1), 1989, pp 95‑116

Anne M. Khademian, “Is Silly Putty Manageable? Looking for the Links between Culture, Management, and Context”, in J. L. Brudney, L. J. O’toole, Jr., and Hal G. Rainey (Eds.), Advancing Public management: New Developments in Theory, Methods, and Practice, 2000, Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, pp 33-48

Hal G. Rainey, “Building an Effective Organizational Culture”, in James L. Perry (Ed.), Handbook of Public Administration, 2nd ed., 1996, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp 151-166

D. Zussman and J. Jabes, The Vertical Solitude: Managing in the Public Sector, Halifax, NS: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1989

Lecture

Civil society. Since four of my electives have covered this subject to varying degrees, there's nothing new here I have a great opportunity to review and consolidate my learning.

Student Presentations

Bangladesh

Unitary system, Westminster government.

Village life model after independence, then administrative state during military rule, then adversarial, village life, and back to administrative state (under current caretaker government).

Singapore

Detailed powerpoint. Not especially relevant to the assignment, which was "Whether the model describes the politico-administrative relations in your country?" I feel inspired to dig out the stopwatch for the next presentation.

China

First, you must understand why China chooses socialism. It was chosen by the people, with the belief that only socialism can liberate China from a semi-feudal role. Only socialism can prosper the new China. (Sound of Joel smacking his forehead into the table. China didn't chose socialism any more than Taiwan chose capitalism. A communist army conquered China.) China has the party first, then the state. (Which is a feature of authoritarian states, not socialist states.)

Five administrative levels. ... As have many others, I've recommended against reading from slides. Well, I've found something worse than reading from slides. Reading the formal constitutional procedure by which China's senior leadership is selected, from slides.

I'm seriously considering walking down to interrupt the current presenter, in front of 20 classmates, and turning off the projectors, taking the notes out of the hand of my classmate (who is a very nice person), physically turning him around to face the crowd instead of the screen, and encouraging him to complete his presentation in five more minutes or less. The presenter is, let me repeat, a nice person whom I like, and I generally try to avoid criticizing classmates on this public blog, but this is just about the worst presentation I've seen here. Not just for the technical issues of posture, but the content: a detailed analysis of the Chinese government as it is claimed to function. What's the point of that? I certainly hope that not a single person in this class, including the presenter, is that naive. On the plus side, a weakness is listed. Perhaps that's on an official list of approved criticisms, part of some anti-corruption campaign? Ah, yes, the presenter just said "corruption".

If it weren't for the extreme rudeness to my classmate, I would replace the first two minutes of my own presentation (were I called upon next) with a discussion of the technical aspects of the last presentation: the poor time management, looking at the screen, back turned from the audience, reading from paper with head tucked down, the obvious lack of practice, reading from slides.

Papua New Guinea

274 local governments. Westminster government. Queen is ceremonial leader, represented by the governor-general. Three levels of government. Strong parliamentary democracy.

Taiwan

Five branches of government, the usual three plus the Examination and Control branches. The control branch is like the GAO in the US. Best fit for politico-administrative relations: functional village life.

Philippines

In addition to the three branches, a Civil Service Commission with non-partisan employees.

UAE

Pakistan

Administrative model under political regimes; functional village model under military regimes.

Myanmar

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 5 “Politics and public administration”

F. R. Baumgartner, “Public Interest Groups in France and the United States”, Governance, 9 (1), 1996, pp 1-22

A notion that's been lurking around the edges in several classes is this: Is it a problem for civil society to do functions that arguably the government should do? It got sharper in Corporate Social Responsibility discussion: if CSR is primarily a means to prevent more direct regulation, then wouldn't social purposes be better met with that same government regulation than with self-regulation and regulation by the civil society sector? According to this article, France's answers are pretty clear. The state is the sole source of authority and power for action on behalf of the public, because only the state is fully accountable. Any more narrowly defined group claiming to be acting in the public interest is assumed to be a special interest seeking rent.

This simple purity breaks down in practice, however, because it turns out that the French bureaucracy differentiates between "serious" and other kinds of civil society groups. If it has enough allies in government, a civil society group is considered "serious" and becomes basically an arm of the government. Otherwise, it's a pest. The differentiation between serious and other, which is effectively a determination of what is in the general public interest and what is not, is made within the French good-old-boys club. You won't be surprised to learn that the French military industry is part of the French public interest.

Sheila Coronel, “Recovering the Rage: Media and Public Opinion”, In OECD, No Longer Business as Usual, Paris: OECD, 2000, pp 215-226

Summary: Investigative journalism is a very important element in reducing corruption. In many parts of the world there are few effective legal protections for journalists, leading to a vicious circle because journalistic investigation is a key means of improving institutions like the courts, which could provide better legal protection for journalists. Also a lot of journalists get killed.

OECD, Open Government, Paris: OECD, 2003, pp 9-21

OECD, Citizens as Partners, Paris: OECD, 2001

I fell behind this week and didn't do the reading before class.

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 5 “Politics and public administration”

F. R. Baumgartner, “Public Interest Groups in France and the United States”, Governance, 9 (1), 1996, pp 1-22

Sheila Coronel, “Recovering the Rage: Media and Public Opinion”, In OECD, No Longer Business as Usual, Paris: OECD, 2000, pp 215-226

OECD, Open Government, Paris: OECD, 2003, pp 9-21

OECD, Citizens as Partners, Paris: OECD, 2001

Lecture

The core executive. The strength and weakness of the center depends on the personalities of the people. Example: Sarkozy in France.

Accountability. The Al-Mashat Affair.

Who was Bush's eminence grise? Google calls it a tie, 4220 hits for Cheney and 3990 for Rove. Q: Is LKY in this role for Singapore?

Conflict

Evolution of thinking from avoiding conflict to managing conflict. Task-related conflict is more productive than socio-emotional conflict, which leads to escalation.

• Task independence
  • Pooled interdependence: units can function independently but are part of the same organization. Minimal task conflict.
  • Sequential interdependence.
  • Reciprocal interdependence.
• Goal incompatibility
• Scarce resources
• Differentiation
• Ambiguity
• Communication problems
• Reward structures

Joel's note: A classmate and I have been talking about conflict in terms of fundamental versus superficial causes, more or less agreeing that either or both can cause or resolve conflicts (sort of like how good pitching beats good hitting, but good hitting beats good pitching). And these causes fall variously into either category. Which reminds me that there's a third category: the conflict behavior programs that have evolved in our brains. Both superficial (communication problems) and fundamental (goal incompatibility) problems can serve as triggers for socio-economic conflict and escalation. And the next step of that argument is, are those emotional responses detrimental or, perhaps, an alternate form of intelligence?

Robbers Cave experiment, yet more data that could not be acquired since the rise of cursed Human Subjects Committees. Psychologists posing as camp counselors got two sets of kids to form in-groups, then compete with each other, then cooperate with each other.

Joel's note: If we wanted to generalize from this single data point, we would note that the Summary has direct implications for Global Issues class:

we discarded certain procedures in [the cooperation] stage, such as introducing a "common enemy" ... [cooperation between previously hostile groups was obtained through introduction of a series of superordinate goals which had compelling appeal value for both groups but which could not be achieved by the efforts and resources of one group alone. When a state of interdependence between groups was produced for the attainment of superordinate goals, the groups realistically faced common problems. They took them up as common problems, jointly moving toward their solution, preceding to plan and to execute the plans which they had jointly envisaged.

Once again I'm the designated resource for Americana, and once again I get it almost right. "Winning's not the best thing, it's the only thing." Bzzzt!

A major change in anglo-saxon culture: people now say "I work with" when referring to their boss, rather than "I work for".

Organizational Politics

A basic taxonomy:

• Attacking or blaming others
• Selectively distributing information
• Controlling information channels
• Forming coalitions
• cultivating networks
• creating obligations
• managing impressions

Note: Chinese has an idiom, "the 36 strategies"

Florence Heffron, Organization Theory and Public Organizations, Ch. 6 “Power, Politics and Conflict in Organizations”

• p 183: "Nonetheless, many of the aspects and processes of organizations that have been examined to this point refute the rational organization concept." Right on. I'm going to like this book.
• p 184: "The power approach to organizations is relatively new and definitely unsettling to those who prefer rational bureaucratic theory." Wait a minute—can't we dump rational theory without getting a new single-issue theory? Organizations are very complicated, since they are made up of humans, who are very complicated. No single point of view is likely to capture all the information we need to understand them.
• p 184: conflict. I've only worked in one environment where employee conflict was, on balance, positive and productive. That is, we had professional conflict, often intense, about the nature of the product we were creating, but the conflict was a means to create a better product, was not personal, and was regularly resolved with mutual consent, if not always agreement.
• p 188: natural conflict between line and staff units. (In other jargon, line = vertical and staff = horizontal.)
• p 191: many executives (e.g., Roosevelt) encourage line vs staff conflict, because it increases the executive's power.
• p 193: authority is legitimated power.
• p 194: the ability to reward and punish. Even in the absence of authority, you may find ways to reward or punish. Control of information. Control of resources. Control of access (always be nice to secretaries).
• p 197 to 199: the passage on the power of people low in the hierarchy is key. A tremendous amount of power is locked in the norms and habits of an organization, and nominally powerful people who cannot access and alter these norms don't have real power. However, the conclusion I draw from this is not that lower-status people have more power than is commonly realized. That's true, but not the point. The point is that the power to get organizations to function effectively to accomplish goals is often simply non-existent; the boss doesn't have it, but neither do the rank and file. The typical challenge is not to change how an organization functions, it's to get it to function effectively at all. Perhaps we could say that there's a lot more negative power in the world than positive power.
• p 202: "Political behaviour does not emerge for routine, clear-cut decisions for which specific, well-known rules exist and are followed."

That was a really good chapter. Not one to skim, but one to read thoroughly.

G. R. Salancik and J. Pfeffer, “Who Gets Power- and How they Hold on to it: A Strategic Contingency Model of Power”, Organizational Dynamics, Winter 1977, Vol. 3, No. 5, 3-21

Strategic contingency theory: when an organization faces crisis, power accrues to the unit of the organization best able to address the crisis. In heavily sued organizations, the legal department has power. In organizations that need lots of new workers all the time, recruiting has power.

• p 16: "an intelligent person might react [to this theory] with a resounding ho-hum, for it all seems to obvious ...." But there are two complications: the job to be done tends to grow itself. Napoleon as an example of scope creep. Second, power institutionalizes and lingers beyond its justification. (c.f. the Polish floppy disk procurement case from Week 1)
• p 20: "one of the more interesting implications of institutionalized power is that executive turnover among the executives who have structured the organization is likely to be a rare event that occurs only under the most pressing crisis." Once you've shaped your nest to benefit yourself, why leave?

R. M. Kanter, “Power Failures in Management Circuits”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1979, Vo. 57, No. 4, 65-75

• Organizational structure often determines who has power and how much. Three positions are "classically powerless: first-line supervisors, staff professionals, and CEOs."
• Effective power requires lines of supply (money, staff, office space, etc); lines of information; and lines of support from other people.
• p 69: a sidebar on women concludes that research shows that "when a woman exhibits the petty traits of powerlessness, people assume that she does so 'because she is a woman.' A striking difference is that, when a man engages in the same behavior, people assume that behavior is a matter of his own individual style ... and do not conclude that it reflects on the suitability of men for management." See this for a graphic illustration of the principle.

L. R. Pondy, “Organizational Conflicts: Concepts and Models”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1967, 12, 2, 296-320

• p 297: three models of conflict. Horizontal, leading to bargaining (e.g., equal units fight for budget), vertical, i.e. bureaucratic (e.g., the workers support or undermine the boss), systems (?).
• p 300: five stages of a conflict episode: latent conflict, perceived conflict, felt conflict, manifest conflict, aftermath.
• p 312: conflict is often felt negatively; minor conflict leads to pressure to stop the conflict but preserve the relationship (can't you just get along?); major conflict leads to pressure to change or end the relationship. If people are stuck together, there can be permanent conflict in a stable relationship.
• p 317: systems model of conflict. about problems of coordination. Various means of resolving conflict have costs; that is, if two departments fight over budget, giving them both a big budget resolves the conflict but is expensive. Hence, "running a tight ship" leads directly to conflict.

K. W. Thomas, “Conflict and Conflict Management”, in M. D. Dunette (Ed.), Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Chicago: Rand McNally, 1976, 889-935

G. Allison and P. Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Longman, New York, 1999

Irving Janis and Leon Mann, Decision-Making Strategies, in Barry Staw (Ed), Psychological Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, New York: Macmillan, 1991, 479-496

Charles E. Lindblom, The Science of "Muddling Through”, Public Administration Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 1959), pp. 79-88

Herbert Simon, Making Management Decisions: the Role of Intuition and Emotion, Academy of Management Executive, 1987, 1 (1), 57-64

Dennis P. Wittmer and Robert P. McGowan, “Five Conceptual Tools for Decision-Making”, in J. Rabin, W. B. Hildreth and G. J. Miller (Eds.), Handbook of Public Administration, 3rd ed., Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007, pp 315-342

Groups. Now, often called teams. Outputs of a group: productivity, satisfaction.

Despite decades of academics telling bureaucrats about the advantages of flat organizations, no changes.

While trying to pay attention to the lecture (which is fine, but covers exactly the same material as the reading), I came across this anecdote about sitting next to someone with ADD. No further comment.

Sidebar: the North Koreans were extremely good at handling US prisoners during the Korean war. First, separate officers and enlisted men to break the existing authority relationships. Second, move people around quickly, to break up group relationships that would lead to trust relationships that would lead to escape.

Primary groups (family), secondary groups. Formal and informal groups: in a well-designed organization, the formal work teams should be visible in the organization chart; cross-functional teams. Exclusive and inclusive groups. In-groups and out-groups (Joel's note: this strikes me as far and away the most psychologically powerful dimension of groups.)

T. Doherty and T. Horne, Managing public services, Chapter 6 "Managing groups and leading teams in public services", London: Routledge, 2002

This is a weird text. It defines a group in academic terms on one page and provides breezy but specific instruction on distributing meeting minutes a few pages later, in a way that is not comprehensive in scope but not especially practical or applied either. I can't really understand who the intended audience is.

• p 170: out of nowhere, a paragraph specifying how disfunctional committees actually work: "behind the scene power and influence determine what is put on or kept off the agenda. ... Excessive time allocated to earlier items can ensure perpetual deferment of unwanted issues. ... The 'public performance' usually emphasizes rational discourse; the 'backstage activity'; on the other hand, is less rational...." Thanks for telling us; what do you propose we do about all that?
• p 175: perhaps the best (the only?) convincing rationale I've read for personality tests: "Their main merit seems to be in developing a group language — a vocabulary of shared meenings. The development of this shared language seems to make it legitimate for members to discuss each other's behavior in the group. This helps with group identity and cohesiveness." But why all the "seems"? No research to quote, so you launder your opinions with 'seems'?
• p 178: "The level of anxiety" from being in a group rises "until the group reaches a size at which the person feels anonymous." Anxiety and other pressures can make it impossible to do any deep thinking in a group: "our studies have shown that silences during a two-hour group task rarely exceeded 20 seconds!"
• p 179: types of group thinking: recollective (taking advantage of the group's accumulated knowledge). Predictive. Imaginative and creative. Emphathetic and Ethical thinking. Evaluative and critical thinking.
• p 181: conflict in and between groups. The unitary view: "conflict as a malfunction ... undesirable and to be avoided." The pluralist view: "a legitimate evolutionary way of bringing about organizational change." The Marxist view: "organizations as arenas in which people battle for limited resources ..." Sadly, the bottom of the page is missing right when it starts talking about classes.
• p 182: positive and negative consequences of conflict, e.g., the search for new or better ideas; suspicion and distrust.
• p 183: managing conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, smoothing.
• p 192: "managers are well placed to be typecast as authority figures with whom the difficult person has had difficulties in the past ... It is easier for managers to turn down roles in other people's dramas when they are aware of their own histories and their own patterns of behavior."
• p 196: "when difficult people have connections in higher places" unfortunately, it's a short section and the only advice is to keep your own copies of files.

Patrick Dunleavy, Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice, New York: Prentice Hall, 1991, Ch. 3, "Reconstructing the Theory of Groups", pp 45-78

Promoting the "group identity model" as a better way of understanding how public interest groups function. Size is less important than previously believed; organization is important and leaders may have less power to set the agenda.

• p 71: "Existing public choice models portray interest groups as quasi-commercial bodies, run on hierarchical lines by entrepreneurial leaders maximizing membership. ... Yet in practice, most interest groups are much less hierarchical than business organizations ... decentralization down to local level not just in organizing activities but also in policy-making."
• p 73: "[Bendor and Mookherjee's] sophisticated game theory analysis offers a formal proof that ongoing collective action can be more easily maintained in a large group which adopts a two-tier structure ... [in realistic conditions] a centralized unit has to be added to develop and administer selective incentives, and to make all local branches conform with organizational policy. The greatest level of collective action is achieved where hierarchical control is combined with local branches, rather than displacing them." Could you analyze the WGA strike in these terms? Consider each individual picketing area to be a local branch?
• p 74: In attracting potential members interest groups stress that the are large, viable, nationally organized and worth joining. Yet simultaneously potential members are told that the group is small and local enough for their participation to make a difference ..." Come join a team so powerful that you must be a small cog, but locally everybody gets to be a big cog. It seems like the same problem as the voting paradox: since any one vote can't really matter, why does anybody vote?

John C. Dvorak, "The Groupthink Phenomenon", PC Magazine, 2001, 12, p. 75

Dvorak laments poor-quality journalism such as celebrity news, which is "driven by the paid publicity machines that cater to lazy reporters." In the computer industry, Dvorak blames carefully planned group-think conferences for the CD-ROM boom, the tablet computing fad, and "push" technology. "Very few significant dead-end ideas have independently popped up on the scene outside of this mechanism."

Sue R. Faerman, "Managing Conflicts Creatively", in James L. Perry (Ed.), Handbook of Public Administration, 2nd ed., 1996, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp 632-646

Steps toward conflict management, as applied in American history:

1. Face the conflict
2. Get the other party to face the conflict
3. Schedule a meeting in a neutral environment
4. shoot at each other

Faerman has six other steps (and her step #4 is different), so you may want to read the article.

Daniel C. Feldman, The Development and Enforcement of Group Norms, Academy of Management Review, 1984, 9 (1), 47-53

Norms are most likely to emerge when

• they facilitate group survival
• they simplify or make predictable expected behavior
• they help group members avoid embarrassment
• they express the central values and unique identity of the group

Irving Janis, Groupthink, Psychology Today, 1971 (also in Barry Staw (Ed), Psychological Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, New York: Macmillan, 1991, 514-522)

Not a lot (if any) actual research here, other than possibly talking to members of Kennedy's circle to get their Bay of Pigs anecdotes.

A Saturday morning class, pre-emptively making up for next week's class, which is on Chinese New Year's Eve.

The reading

A collection of articles in various journals from the 1950s through 1980s about rewarding and motivating employees. Some notes:

• MBO (Management by Objective) was a hot buzzword in the 1960s.
• There isn't much of a link between employee happiness or job satisfaction and employee productivity.

Lecture

Why do we study employee satisfaction? To retain workers, to motivate workers, to increase productivity, to prevent sabotage, .... Joel's note: but the reading said that productivity does not correlate with satisfaction, and so the professor notes that nobody did the reading.

The Hawthorne studies of worker productivity: a study of productivity in factory workers revealed that attention from management, rather than the variables being studied, improved productivity. Joel's note: productivity in software development is very different from many other fields, so it's hard for me to set aside the very specialized rules of thumb and think generally.

Studies show that people with a higher education tend to be more easily dissatisfied. They also show that peoples' attitudes don't predict their behavior very well. One way to get people in organizations to do things they are against: ask them to do things they don't want to do, with very little reward. When they do them (I guess because you made them), cognitive dissonance drives them to justify why they did it. A study showed that people paid a lot to do a boring job agreed it was boring, but that people who did it for little pay found reasons why the work was interesting.

"When people are interested in their jobs, you do not have to go the extra mile to give them all sorts of extrinsic rewards." Joel's note: when I'm frustrated in a job, then given a choice between more money to keep doing something doomed to failure, or the same money but an obstacle removed, it's a pretty easy choice.

Types of performance-based rewards:

• individual rewards
• team rewards
• organizational rewards

Rewards rupture relationships, ignore reasons, discourage risk-taking, weaken intrinsic motivation.

Joel's note: my own anecdotal knowledge of group motivation is that people stay in extremely exploitative situations out of loyalty to their friends in that situation. But that's also the motivation of their friends. Everybody stays in out of loyalty to each other, and the employer laughs all the way to the bank, or, in the case of the Army, all the way to the morgue.

The case study

The case covers the performance raise process at a Water Resource board. Classmates offer experiences at their various workplaces. According to the case study, almost all of the employees are disgruntled about the raise system. Q: Is the 15-issue merit raise questionnaire useful? Classmate A: yes, provided that you show the weights for each issue so that the subjective criteria are made objective through statistical measures.

Joel's note: The research on a sense of fairness in primates seems germane.

Merit systems fail because: pay is not perceived as related to performance, it is perceived as biased; rewards not viewed as rewards; degrades trust; changes emphasis from work satisfaction to reward satisfaction.

A bit of side research triggered by a joke. Bush is somewhere between 5'9" and 5'11".

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 3, "The Recruitment of Public Administrators"

Florence Heffron, Organization Theory and Public Organizations, Ch. 9 "Motivation"

D. A. Nadler and E. E. Lawler, "Motivation: A Diagnostic Approach", in J. R. Hackman, E. E. Lawler and L. W. Porter (Eds.), Perspectives on Behavior in Organizations, New York: McGraw Hill, 1977

A model of how people are motivated:

• Your perception of how much your effort affects your performance
• Your perception of how much your performance influences the outcome
• Your perception of how much different outcomes are worth to you

Key implications:

• Determine what behavior is desired
• Link desired outcomes to desired performance
• Analyze the total situation for conflicting expectancies

J Jabes and D. Zussman, Motivation, Rewards and Satisfaction in the Canadian Federal Public Service, Canadian Public Administration, Vol. 31, No 2, Summer 1988, pp 204‑224

A survey of Canadian civil service senior management. "We have found work satisfaction to be lower in the senior managers ... compared to their private sector counterparts."

Peter Self, Administrative Theories and Politics, 2nd Ed., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1977, Ch.7, "Administrative Motivation and Performance", pp. 224-246

• p 225: A senior Administrators has very elaborate accountability requirements—to her agency, to her agency's interested public, to other agencies, and to general political organs. She is remote from the final consequences of her decisions. And "political considerations ... inhibit a just evaluation of [senior officials]"
• p 228: the US has an "open" administration system and Europe a "closed" system.
• p 244: "We may be tempted to conclude that any society gets the bureaucracy it deserves, and that the virtues and vices of any system are inextricably mingled. This is too simple. Bureaucratic pathologies are capable of being reduced by corrective action." This seems like all of politics and public administration in a nutshell: yeah, it's pretty messed up, and it kind of has to be, but you can make it a little bit better if you try.

Lecture

Inner disequilibrium leads to goal-directed behavior leads to outcomes. If an outcome is blocked, frustration leads to ??? Traditionally, frustration leads to aggression. (Infants react to frustration with either anger or sadness. In rhesus monkeys, response to frustration depends on social status. I would like to state for the record that I have never thrown poop as a result of frustration.)

Two theories of motivation: need satisfaction, and process theory. Maslow's hierarchy. Alderfer's ERG theory: Existence, relatedness, growth. Herzberg's wwo factors: hygiene (if it's missing, you're unhappy) and motivators (if present, you're happy). McClellan's learned needs: the need to achieve (Protestants are much more achievement-oriented than Catholics), the need for power, the need for affiliation (which negatively correlates with the need for power). The data doesn't support any of these theories. The importance of salary as a motivator especially remains unclear. Self-actualization is hard to define and perhaps useless for our purposes. Artists made great achievements that are self-actualization if anything is, but they were broke and starving.

Joel's Research Side Note: what's the difference between safety and security? OED safety: "exemption from hurt or injury; freedom from danger". From the Latin for "sound" as in unharmed. Security: "being protected from or not exposed to danger". I tend to think of safety as more physical and short-term, and security as more social: I'm safe from a bridge collapse; I'm secure from getting fired. Sense 3 of "secure" seems better: Rightly free from apprehension.

Process theory assumptions. Behavior is a function of forces from both the environment and the person. People make decisions about their own behavior. Different people have different needs, desires, goals. People make decisions based on their perceptions of how their behavior will lead to outcomes.

Joel's research sidebar: I had no idea that Canada's tax rates are lower than the United States (which has a top marginal rate of 35%).

Equity. Rewards relative to other people.

S. S. Brehm and S. M. Kassin, "Perceiving Persons" in Barry Staw (Ed.), Psychological Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, New York: Macmillan, 1991, 187-207

• p 188: When someone acts, your mental model (if you behave as Fritz Heider models) is to try to figure out if it actor's motivation was internal or external: did they do the action for reasons that reveal something about them, or did they do the action for reasons that reveal something about the circumstance or context?
• p 190: Harold Kelly's covariation theory. "For something to be the cause of a behavor, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not."
• p 193: actor-observer effect. We think that the way we act depends on the situation whereas the way other people act depends on their nature.
• p 195: false consensus effect: "the tendency for people to overestimate the consensus that exists for their own opinions, attributes, and behaviors". I wonder how much this overlaps with projection, believing that other people behave the same way you do—so if you lie a lot, you assume everybody else lies to you frequently. It seems like projection is simply a subset of false consensus effect.
• p 196: belief in a just world. Poor people are socially unattractive because they must have done something bad or been bad to be poor. This explains so much anti-immigrant fervor, including, somewhat, the tendency to focus on South American illegal immigrants and not Canadian or British ones.
• p 197: confirmation bias. One you have a theory, you notice everything that supports your theory and discount everything that contradicts it.
• p 200: self-fulfilling prophecy

A de Carufel and J. Jabes, "Perceptual Errors in Organisations: An Attribution Theory Approach", University of Ottawa Quarterly, Vol. 56, No 4, 1986.

• p 206. Perceivers identify specific acts, which depart from expectations and have "hedonic" (that's one I had to look up, but it's just the adjective for hedonism. Special meaning in psychology: "or involving pleasurable or painful sensations or feelings, considered as affects"—OED) consequences for the perceiver. Perceivers then try to judge the cause(s): disposition, stable elements of the environment, or transient situations. Make conclusions about what was learned about the subject's aspect.
• p 208: if you know all the words on this chart, you can skip to page 214.
• p 215: what can you do to avoid these fallacies? I don't see many concrete suggestions; I think the advice boils down to, be aware of these sources of bias and try not to do them so much. These biases can really screw up communication and trigger or worsen conflicts. "It is likely that both sides will be motivated to see the other as the aggressor and justify their own actions accordingly."

J. Jabes, Causal Attributions and Sex‑role Stereotypes in the Perceptions of Women Managers, Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 1980, 12, pp 52‑63

Abstract: 144 female 22-61 yr old managers were asked to make causal attributions and give their impressions of a manager whose bogus personnel file they had read. The sex, occupation, and age of the file manager were systematically varied. Results from ANOVAs yielded only sex main effects. Bogus female managers were perceived to be more successful than males, and [subjects] attributed greater ability to them. Easier job demands and luck attributions were significantly more often used for male managers. [Subjects'] impressions of female managers were also more positive than males. Results do not support the existence of sex-role prejudices on the part of women against women.

Did you notice the abrupt and unjustified leap of logic in the last sentence? No? Try again with my paraphrasing:

We made some fake personnel files and asked 144 female managers what they thought of the people in the files. The only thing that biased their answers turned out to be sex, not age or occupation. They thought better of the women in the files. Therefore, women do not face prejudice from other women in the workplace.

Did that make it more clear? The leap, it seems to me, is to fail to imagine (or learn of) any ways in which women might feel positively towards other women in the abstract while still contributing to a sexist culture that is biased against providing women equal access.

The introductory class begins with a plea for people to move to the evening class (most full-time students are in the morning class; a quarter of full-time students, plus the part-time students, are in the evening class). Then we take attendance, which is quite protracted because many students are either still in their home countries (Nigeria, Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand) or in the process of negotiating exchanges with night-class students.

The professor taught business at the U of Ottowa for 20 years, then worked at the OECD, then the Asia Development Bank.

Case Study

Ordering Floppy Disks in Poland. The case describes the process, including four people and five steps, needed to order floppy disks in a government office in Poland in 1992.

Joel's thoughts on the case:

• the many different levels of approval have a few likely sources
• the need for many offices to stay busy?
• is there a specific angle or relation from communism or authoritarianism?
• departments conserving power

Class thoughts:

• bureaucratic processes, red tape
• too much centralization of powers
• inefficiency
• (lack of?) separation of doing and approving
• lack of trust
• micromanagement—worrying about small things
• lack of empowerment
• penny wise and pound foolish
• old procedures, time to change

Class response to my question about communist roots: no, there's nothing specific about communism behind this process. If you didn't know it was Poland, "communist country" wouldn't be obvious. Rebuttal: in classmate's experience in the US gov't, it was very flat, in fact maybe too flat. (Side note: flat is not always good.) Singaporeans: it's not necessarily true that Singapore works smoothly.

What kind of inferences can you make about this organization? Classmates: It's static. Static organizations are bound by rules and procedures. Rebuttal: rules and procedures are present in any organization, including dynamic ones. So it's overly bound by rules etc. In a static organization the culture resists changes. One of the most dynamic organization I worked with was the most strict with certain rules.

Does this case say anything about trust? Yes. At two levels: one is the prevailing culture that says not to talk to outsiders, and the other implicit in the procurement process.

Perhaps efficiency versus accountability may be a more useful dichotomy than static/dynamic. Some agencies are willing to live with a certain level of dishonesty because it's not worth the cost to get accountability in small things. Joel's note: I wonder if the Broken Windows advocates would argue that applies within organizations: letting people steal office supplies leads to embezzling?). In the Maldives, we have the same kind of process (now with CDs or USB) but we have ways of working around; the stock guy can work around for small things.

Classmates: many places have a threshold below which purchases don't need much approval. Joel's note: that seems to be the "best practice" for purchases: a gradient between efficiency and accountability, realized with different purchasing price limits for different people.. ... Micromanagement is a work that may not be very useful; it's emotional and vague. ... The complex, multi-step process may work fine if it's computerized and fast ... or it may not —example of going around in person to tell people that a computerized request has been sent.

Classmates: who is accountable and who has the power to make changes? ... Sometimes the procedures are part of a legal requirement. Our investigation showed it cost the organization 50 pesos of work for each signature, but it takes Congress to change the law requiring the signatures. Joel's note: what about forgiveness over permission: post-facto auditing instead of permission gates, especially for cheaper things? It seems like the rule of thumb for solving this problem could be formulated: if it's not too big, leave it wide open but audited; if it's getting big, require approval.

Lecture

Quasi-government agencies are sprouting up and challenging our notions of accountability. Economic growth often does lead to growth of the public sector. The public sector is labor-intensive. The goal of this class is to familiarize you with the theories, the applications, the methods, of contemporary management thought, with an emphasis on public sector.

Solutions have structural, human, and technology elements, all of which react to each other and to the problem, all happening within an environment.

Conflicts between employees and organizations. Employees respond to conflict situation: withdraw, work for promotion, lose interest, strikes, etc. Joel's note: good thing I brought my Edgar Schein books; this is clearly the class for them. I wish I'd read, instead of just skimmed, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; the library has it but on reserve. I do wonder how much more you can get out of the book if you just read the Wikipedia article. Hmm, this book looks interesting. I love intra-library loan.

Why study public management? To better predict and control, in order to influence organizational events. (Prof also says, in order to adopt better theories of reality, but why? Presumably better theories are just, unless you are a seeker of knowledge for its own sake, a means to better predict and control.)

Why do people conform? The value of empirical evidence via experiments. The Asch experiments. A classmate says there's a Youtube video of Asch experiments. Discussion of concrete and controlled studies; correlation vs causation. One of the most important differentiators between experiments and correlation studies is the role of experimenters in assigning subjects to categories.

I'm exciting about this course because, according to the syllabus, it "has a behavioral science bias for two reasons: first, most students in public administration are discovering that a firm grounding in behavioral sciences is indispensable for the diagnosis, understanding and prediction of events in public sector settings; second, my personal training and bias is heavily grounded in behavioral sciences." I think that understanding how people behave in groups is far more important to practical success than trying to "understand and manage the processes that create strategic value."

Although this is one of the core classes and I wanted to get ahead on the reading over break, the syllabus didn't go up until four days ago, and I didn't notice until my roommate asked if I had bought the books for tomorrow morning's class. Oops. I did pick up the substantial binder of class readings. Let's see what I can manage:

Robert D. Behn, "The Big Questions of Public Management", Public Administration Review, July/August 1995, 313-324

• p 315: Here are a few of those big questions:
  • How can public managers break the micromanagement cycle?
  • How can public managers motivate people ...?
  • How can public managers measure the achievments of their agencies ...
• p 316: "Scholars, journalists public managers, and public commisions have identified micromanagement as a major problem in the public sector. "Congress is commonly criticized for 'micromanaging' government agencies'" writes James Q. Wilson; "it does, and always has." Surprise! Another US-centric public administration text!

Jay W. Lorsch, "Making Behavioral Science More Useful", Harvard Business Review, March-April 1979, 171-181

The subtitle seems to summarize the article well: "situational theories of behavior are harder to apply than universal ones, but they work more often." Since a few million billion mainstream books on management have come out since 1979, and since a good fraction of those probably take behavioral science approaches, the details of this article seem pretty obsolete, if not the premise.

B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Ch. 1 "The persistence, growth and change of government and administration"

I bet this is in the textbook I forgot to buy today.

Florence Heffron, Organization Theory and Public Organizations, "Introduction"

This is also in a textbook I forgot to buy.

Herbert Simon, "The Proverbs of Administration", Public Administration Quarterly, Winter 1946, 6, 53-67

"For almost every [proposition of administrative theory] one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle. ... It is the purpose of this paper to substantiate this sweeping criticism of administrative theory, and to present some suggestions...." This is something I noticed perhaps five years into my career as a project manager: there is an infinite supply of pithy, convincingly good advice, and the real work of management is recognizing situations and realizing which pithy maxim is appropriate. In situations that are even remotely quantifiable, this means getting a blank envelope (to write on the back of) and working out, as best you can, exactly how many stitches now will save exactly how many stitches later, and what the current discount rate on stitches is.

Here's a little information on Simon's article in the context of the field:

In 1946, Herbert Simon helped launch the behavioral revolution by denouncing the theories of administration as mere proverbs, as folk wisdom with the same value to the science of administration that old wives tales have to modern medicine. In 1991, Christopher Hood and Michael Jackson accepted Simon's critique but reached the opposite conclusion: Their book, Administrative Argument, asserts that we should take the proverbs of administration seriously, not as prescientific statements to be discarded by careful research but as the appropriate subject of research.
In Simon's positivist view, the abundant contradictions and inconsistencies of the proverbs of administration undercut, if not eliminated, their value as a basis for theory and practice. Hood and Jackson, heralding a postpositive view, revel in these same inconsistencies, arguing, in effect, that Simon missed the point and by implication led a generation of public administration scholars on a false quest for an illusive eldorado of logical coherence and testable hypotheses. Hood and Jackson agree with Lindblom and Cohen (1979) that theories of administration are, and should remain, a form of ordinary knowledge, and that there is no basis for definitive arguments that would prove one concept superior to others, as would be required of a science of administration.
... their core insight that we need to view the principles of administration as arguments to be judged on their persuasiveness and acceptance, not as hypotheses to be evaluation by evidence, is an important corrective in public administration theory.
—Steven Maynard-Moody, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: J-PART, Vol. 5, No. 3. (Jul., 1995), pp. 377-379.

D. A. Nadler and M. T. Tushman, "A Model for Diagnosing Organizational Behavior", Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1980, 35-51

I went looking for this in J-STOR so I could read the electronic version, and while waiting for J-STOR to complete a search got distracted by the latest Posner-Becker blog post, about The Candidates' Health Care Reform Plans. Posner starts by summarizing the issue very well, with such rational tidbits as, "Some of the proposals for reducing aggregate costs are ... fluff, like reining in jury awards in medical malpractice cases (those awards are a tiny fraction of total health costs, and already are being reined in by judges and by tort-reform measures adopted by state legislatures)."

Then he criticizes universal health care: "the social cost (that is, the consumption of scarce resources by the program) would be the cost of administering the subsidy program and the misallocative effects that a tax increase would create. The larger social cost would be the additional health care resulting from the expansion of coverage." What about the probability that routine health insurance for uninsured will have huge social benefits because previously uninsured people will be able to get more routine, preventative care?

Might there be a compensating offset because with greater medical care the people who now are uninsured would be healthier and live longer, and thus cost less in subsidized medical care in the long run? Not necessarily, since the longer a person lives, the greater his average medical expenses because average annual such expenses grow with age. Living a healthier and longer life is of course a benefit to a person; my point is only that it need not reduce his average annual health costs.

Huh? If a bunch of people benefit, and society is the aggregate of people, then isn't this a social benefit, even if the direct cash cost increases? (And that's leaving aside the economic benefits of healthier working citizens; Posner says the uninsured tend to be younger, so they should mostly be in the workforce.)

After the promising start and bewildering economic analysis, Posner concludes, "Maybe a little patchwork here and there is the most that is both economically desirable and politically feasible by way of reform of American health care." Maybe I blinked a few too many times, but I missed the part where he substantively analyzed the candidates' proposal, Democratic or Republican.

Oh, hey, the J-STOR search results are back, not that J-STOR search is slow or anything. And J-STOR doesn't have the article; perhaps they don't include "Organizational Dynamics". Expanded Academic ASAP claims to go back to 1980, and has Winter and Spring 1980, but somehow not Autumn 1980. Nuts.

Barry Staw, "The Experimenting Organization: Problems and Prospects", Organizational Dynamics, Summer 1977, 3-18