Networks are structures of interdependence involving multiple organizations or parts thereof, where one unit is not merely the formal subordinate of the others in some larger hierarchical arrangement. Networks exhibit some structural stability but extend beyond formally established linkages and policylegitimated ties. The notion of network excludes mere formal hierarchies and perfect markets, but it includes a very wide range of structures in between. The institutional glue congealing networked ties may include authority bonds, exchange relations, and coalitions based on common interest, all within a single multiunit structure. In networks, administrators cannot be expected to exercise decisive leverage by virtue of their formal position. Influence in larger networks is more difficult to document, predict, and model than it is in relatively simple two-or threeparty relationships.Scholarly work on public administration has proceeded for decades from the seminal contributions of Herbert Simon (1976) and others, who argued that hierarchy can "push back" the decision-making weaknesses experienced by individuals -converting their human limitations (like selective perception) into organizational strengths. This result is not inevitable, and it is the challenge of the manager to craft the contexts in which others must make decisions so that they will have what they need to make sound choices efficiently.

Thanks are due to Peter deLeon, Kenneth J. Meier, Beryl Radin, and especially Ann Chih Lin for helpful comments on the earlier draft. Responsibility, of course, remains with the author.

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Does public management matter for the performance of public programs? And if so, how? In what ways and via what routes does management shape what happens? Scholars of the subject are convinced of the importance of public management for performance.Considerable literature suggests myriad ways that the actions of managers seem to shape the outputs and outcomes of public policy.Still, for all the investment by researchers and practitioners in the assumption that management matters --and that, indeed, the requisites of good public management are reasonably well known, codifiable, and teachable --precious little careful analytical attention has been devoted to an explication of the basic questions.How might one test the crucial proposition that public management matters? Even more fundamentally, how ought one to model explicitly the impact of public management on governmental performance? To this significant question, surprisingly, there has been virtually no attention paid. This paper constitutes a first step on the road to modeling the performance of public management --in particular, how one might conceive of the relationship between the management and certain other important variables, vis-à-vis performance. 1 efforts by Ingraham and colleagues via the Government Performance Project. In that effort, the concept dealt with is "management capacity," rather than management (Ingraham and Kneedler 1999;Joyce and Ingraham 1998). Another approach is offered by Rainey and Steinbauer (1999), who sketch elements of a theory of "effective government organizations" (our units of analysis are government programs). They consider features of "leadership" and other possible elements of public management (like "development of human resources") but do not model the relationship among any of these elements, nor between them and other variables. Still, they seek a theoretical explanation of effectiveness and draw from empirical evidence to sketch propositions for testing. Rainey and Steinbauer base their work on the "argument that such theories as we have need much more articulation" (p. 2, note 2) and argue that not all hypothesized relationships should be expected to be linear. And, like us, they attend to the "accounts of the most influential and innovative agency leaders" which "emphasize their ability to turn into opportunities the constraints that supposedly impede many executives, and otherwise to cope with the pressures and complexities of their roles" (p. 20). The present effort seeks, among other things, an explicit representation of this opportunities-cum-constraints core of the public management function. We shall argue that public management encompasses significantly more than the POSDCORB notions of yesteryear, and we use our sketch of some of public management's requisites to develop what we regard as a plausible model for its impact on performance. 2 Models of Public-Managerial Impact: A Rationale for Two Steps ForwardWhat kinds of models have been developed to indicate --or hypothesize --the influence of the manageme...

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Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.Public policies are developed and implemented in complex networks. Analysts have documented this phenomenon in a number of countries and have sketched myriad reasons for its ubiquity (Bogason and Toonen 1998;

This paper presents the first large study of public management quality and its effect on program performance. Using 5 years of data from more than 1000 Texas school districts, the authors measure quality as the additional salary paid to school superintendents over and above the normal determinants of salary. This measure of managerial quality is positively correlated with 10 of 11 performance indicators covering organizational goals ranging from standardized tests to school attendance. These relationships hold even in the presence of controls for other determinants of program success. The measure has the potential to be used in tests of existing management theories, thus moving the literature beyond case studies to more systematic research involving many subjects. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy and Analysis and Management.

Miles and Snow, among others, argue that strategy content is an important influence on organizational performance. Their typology, applied recently to public organizations in the United Kingdom, divides strategic actors into four general types: prospectors, defenders, analyzers, and reactors. This article begins by integrating work on strategy content or strategic management into the O'Toole-Meier formal theory of public management. This study shows that strategy content is a subset of generally accepted management functions in public organizations. The article then proceeds to test the strategic management concepts in a large, multiyear sample of public organizations. The results show that strategy can be separated out from other elements of management for a distinguishable assessment of its impact on organizational performance. Unlike the predictions of Miles and Snow and the empirical findings of Boyne and Walker, however, we find that the defender strategy is the most effective for the primary mission of the organization and that the prospector and reactor strategies work best in regard to the goals of the more politically powerful elements of the organization's environment.Systematic evidence has accumulated in recent years that public management makes a difference in a variety of ways when programs are implemented (for recent coverage, see Ingraham and Lynn 2004; also Lynn et al. 2001). Particularly salient in this regard have This article is part of an ongoing research agenda on the role of public management in complex policy settings. We have benefited from the helpful comments of