No abstract

Networks have assumed a place of prominence in the literature on public and private governing structures. The many positive attributes of networks are often featured—the capacity to solve problems, govern shared resources, create learning opportunities, and address shared goals—and a literature focused on the challenges networks pose for managers seeking to realize these network attributes is developing. The authors share an interest in understanding the potential of networks to govern complex public, or “wicked,” problems. A fundamental challenge to effectively managing any public problem in a networked setting is the transfer, receipt and integration of knowledge across participants. When knowledge is viewed pragmatically, the challenge is particularly acute. This perspective, the authors argue, presents a challenge to the network literature to consider the mind‐set of the managers—or collaborative capacity‐builders—who are working to achieve solutions to wicked problems. This mind‐set guides network managers as they apply their skills, strategies, and tools in order to foster the transfer, receipt, and integration of knowledge across the network and, ultimately, to build long‐term collaborative problem‐solving capacity.

The authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor‐network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and nonhuman actants and the associations that connect them. This thinking is applied to policy issues, which the authors propose should be understood as ways of knowing. The fluidity of such ways of knowing provides opportunities for public managers to use the inclusive practices associated with boundary experiences, boundary objects, and boundary organizations to facilitate deliberation.

In this article, we focus on the role of the public manager in bringing about inclusion. While inclusion often implies public participation, we have observed that one of the challenges for public managers practicing inclusive management is the necessity of combining information and perspectives of three domains: the political, the technical, and the local or experiential. Inclusion, from this perspective, involves the creation of communities of participation in which representatives of these three domains can use their knowledge to address public problems. We examine the ways in which managers do informational and relational work to enact such communities of participation.

To Manage Is to GovernGovernance structures constrain and enable the actions of public managers. Principal-agent theory has played a dominant role in our understanding of governance structures. This theory suggests that politicians create relatively static governance structures in a top-down fashion and hold managers accountable for mandated results. In other words, public managers are influenced by governance structures but do not affect governance structures. However, we argue that public managers do affect governance structures, and, in order to understand how this influence takes place, we need a new way of thinking about governance structures. We propose thinking about governance structures as relationships created through the interactions of people in different and reciprocal roles that are relatively dynamic. Public managers are an important source of the multiple, reciprocal, and dynamic interactions that produce governance (relationship) structures. As such, managers are accountable not only for policy outcomes, but also for the appropriateness of the relationships they create and support. Martha S. Feldman is a professor of political science and public policy and an associate dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She has published work on public management, on culture, communication, information, and decision making in organizations, and on qualitative methods. She is currently working on the application of practice theories and structuration to understanding changes in routines and other processes in organizations.