“Bureaucracy” by James Q. Wilson has the ambitious goal to present an analysis of “what government agencies do and why they do it.” Far from providing an easy recipe on how public agencies should be managed, Wilson focuses his study on a description of goals, tasks, activities and internal and external actors having an impact on the organization.
In the following sections I will focus on three main points: a) the pivotal role of operators and its importance in the literature on information technology in the public sector, b) the constraints on managers’ actions and c) the opportunities deriving from a proactive, “open” strategy encouraging the interaction with the external environment.
Empowering operators
Wilson chooses to start his quest from close-range observation of the activities of the operators, i.e. the people responsible to “get the job done.” This unique perspective is probably the most interesting aspect of the whole study. Operators are analyzed right in the first section, which presents an in-depth review of the literature accompanied not only by a number of facts and concrete cases as examples of the main findings, but also by the development of new theoretical frameworks. The depth of the analysis is impressive, especially when compared to the other sec
tions of the book, such as those dedicated to managers and executives.
In fact, the central role of operators defines Wilson’s particular viewpoint. Effective results can be achieved whenever a public agency is free to define its core task, gain the necessary endorsement (or tolerance, at least), and then gain enough autonomy to implement the right strategy. In this view, operators are crucial when it is time to carry out the core task of the agency. They produce (more or less) measurable output, directly influencing not only the culture, but also the overall effectiveness of the organization.
This bottom-up approach to the organization is consistent with the Human Relations / Human Resources organizational theories (see for example Roethlisberger & Dickson 2003), which consider operators as a valuable source of knowledge and new ideas for the management. In his final “modest suggestions” (p. 369), Wilson takes this appreciation of operators’ inputs a step further by maintaining “authority should be placed at the lowest level at which all essential elements of information are available” (p. 372). This view is similar to the High Performance Management theory, which is driven by the idea that lower-level employees should actually take decisions (Lawler 1986, p. 192).
Moreover, this particular focus is consistent with the subsequent evolution of network technology through the 1990s and 2000s, and in particular the opportunities offered by the Internet. In her seminal work on “virtual administration,” Jane Fountain points out that computer-based information processing enables what is described as empowerment of workers (Fountain 2001). Information systems allow for new forms of information distribution within organizations, so that the executive’s knowledge, once centralized at the highest level of the command chain, can be embedded in the system itself and made available to all the members of the organization for them to take autonomous decisions. Network-based decision-support systems “give clerks low in the hierarchy the ability to make more decisions because the rules (or standards) they are to follow are embedded in software rather than decision-maker” (Fountain 2001, p. 35).
I developed a similar decision-support system myself as my very first job in 2002. The goal was then to embed the procurement office manager’s knowledge into a new tool that buyers had to use in order to evaluate their vendors and make decisions about price and quantity of the goods the organization needed. Lower-ranked buyers put all relevant data about the vendor and its offer into the “expert system,” and then obtained a score for each vendor and its offer, based on the manager’s information, knowledge and experience. The aim of the procurement manager was to ensure faster, decentralized decisions by the members of this team, while maintaining high standards in terms of accuracy and predicted value for the organization. Wilson uses an example regarding buyers and computers in his Chapter “Innovation” (p. 223). It is a good example of how similar technology can be used to obtain opposite results, i.e. to centralize decision-making. In his example, the digitalization of the inventory control of the organization placed the power of taking decisions “in the hands of central managers and staff officers.” At the time when I started my project of developing the expert system for vendor evaluation, the inventory was already “computerized,” since every transaction and item available was traced through the central information system. The effort I describe here had the purpose of addressing the potential threat of centralization, which was seen as inefficient and slow compared to distributed decision-making.
A system-structural view focused on constraints
The view adopted in the book has much in common with the system-structural perspective described by Astley and Van de Ven as an organizational behavior “shaped by a series of impersonal mechanisms that act as external constraints on actors” (p. 248). In this view, managers react to external inputs and adapt the organization in order to cope with a very complex environment.
The number and complexity of constraints described in the book is in fact extraordinary. Perhaps the main constraint is that the managers cannot decide how to acquire and allocate the factors of production. For example, managers are not free to acquire goods and services as they like. According to Wilson, this leads to strong incentives to worry more about the constraints themselves than about tasks, that is, more about formal processes which are “known, immediate and defined by the law,” and less on outcomes, which are “uncertain, delayed and controversial” (p. 131).
While some of these constraints are concrete, well-depicted and objective, others are probably overrated by Wilson’s reasoning. For example, a manager has the opportunity to write tender invitations in ways that can allow her to be very specific about the product or service she needs. During the process of developing the tender invitation, she can list the characteristics of the items with extraordinary detail, thus giving very precise indications about the characteristics of the vendor and the products. Wilson’s example on this issue is about the acquisition of computers. In my experience, mangers do not lack the possibility to acquire good computers through formal and “Weberian” procedures; what they often lack is technical knowledge to assess the organization’s needs and the consequent technical specifications of products and services.
Opportunities from the external environment
According to Wilson, autonomy is crucial for the organization to complete the task. In his view, autonomy “lowers the cost of organizational maintenance” since it “minimizes the role of external stakeholders” (p. 181). Autonomy is the condition through which the organization is protected by external forces and so is free to pursue its core tasks. The external environment, in contrast, is mainly seen – again – as a constraint. First, the operators are constrained by the external environment as one of the circumstances of their everyday work, which Wilson calls “situational imperative.” Second, economic interests may “capture” the operators and therefore influence the accomplishment of the task. Third, the “context,” as described in the book, is a source of endless limitations on administrative autonomy, as the Congress, presidents and courts try to “control” or even “dominate” what agencies do.
While this perspective is consistent with the system-structural paradigm, other views can be considered in order to account for the opportunities the external environment can generate in order to enhance not only the public organization’s accountability and openness, but also its efficiency and effectiveness.
The strategic-choice view gives a more proactive role to the management body, able to consider both internal bodies and external environment to “embody the meanings of action of people in charge”; in fact, strategic-choice “extends to the organization’s environment,” which “is not to be viewed as a set of intractable constraints” (Astley & Van de Ven 1983, p. 248). Within this general view, many contributions can be found on the opportunity for the management to take advantage of external networks of institutions. In his work published in 1985, Granovetter maintains that economic action is embedded in ongoing structures and relations, and such embeddedness affects institutions. Since then, subsequent research has developed the concept of network relations. Agranoff and McGuire define collaborative management as “the process of facilitating and operating in multi-organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations” (2004, p. 4).
An example of such complex network relations is multi-level governance. This model has been formulated as a system in which the responsibility for policy elaboration and implementation is distributed among different levels of government (Hooghe 1996), with a key role played by sub-national governments throughout all the policy-making process. In particular, multi-level governance is now widely adopted all over the world as a means to overcome the current economic crisis (OECD 2011). Cohesion Policy of the European Union is based on this model (Hooghe & Marks 2001, Barca 2009). European regions are responsible for programming and implementing the policy, but in a context in which European, national, and local institutions actively participate in defining policy goals, monitoring the progress and evaluating the results. While Wilson would have “protected” the work of operators from external, divergent inputs, in fact the effectiveness of Cohesion Policy highly depends on the capacity of the operators at different agencies (operating at different tiers of government) to work together toward a common, and more ambitious, goal. For example, the work of operators at an Italian regional government is very much influenced by what operators at the European Commission or at the Italian government do. Regional officers are embedded in a diverse network composed of representatives of at least three different “Directorates General” of the European Commission, national auditors and policy-makers, local officials from provinces and municipalities that are in charge of programs implementation and professionals from different branches of national and regional government that have a role in specific phases of the process (national ministries and independent agencies, regional departments, evaluation task forces).
In conclusion, the three aspects that I considered here show not only Wilson’s accuracy in presenting, starting from the bottom-up, the work of public organizations (“what people do”), but also his view of public administration as a closed system.
Bibliography
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