Organizational Design: A Post Minnowbrook Perspective for the "New" Public Administration

Levine, Charles H.; Backoff, Robert W.; Cahoon, Allan R.; Siffin, William J.

doi:10.2307/974548

Cited by 26 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The external environment of a public organization is littered with political considerations. The views of opinion leaders, outright manipulation by legislators and interest groups, and opposition to an agency's prerogatives are more important than economic issues, which are crucial for private organizations (Levine et al 1975). Disagreements, reciprocity, and quid pro quos can occur at any time and, within limits, are permissible ingredients in public decisions.…”

Section: Authority Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Public and Private Sector Decision-Making Practices

Nutt

2005

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

185

135

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Public and private sector decision making is studied with an experiment. The study compares decision making in a tax-supported general purpose governmental agency with that done by a business firm selling to a market, using a simulation to capture differences in the preferences and practices of mid-level managers working in the two sectors. The simulation calls for participating managers to assess the risk and prospect of adopting budgets tailored to match each sector. A cognitive culture that stresses analysis, speculation, bargaining, or networking is employed to fashion a budget appropriate for a public and a private sector organization, each with a controversial and a noncontroversial budget amount. The literature on public/private differences was consulted to make predictions, suggesting that public sector managers would favor bargaining and networking and private sector managers would favor analysis and speculation. The cognitive style literature suggests that managers favor budgets constructed with an approach that is consistent with their preferred cognitive style and see less risk in the choice, except in a public setting where risk would be unaffected. The study finds that private sector managers are more apt to support budget decisions made with analysis and less likely to support them when bargaining is applied. Public sector managers are less likely to support budget decisions backed by analysis and more likely to support those that are derived from bargaining with agency people.

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Section: Authority Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Public and Private Sector Decision-Making Practices

Nutt

2005

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

185

135

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“…The promise and perils of design also suffuse basic tensions in the study of public administration (Levine et al 1975). Practitioners who criticize the limited real-world relevance of scholarship are often frustrated by the lack of clear design prescriptions: what should we do?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Design and Practice of Integrating Evidence: Connecting Performance Management with Program Evaluation

Kroll

Moynihan

2017

Public Administration Review

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In recent decades, governments have invested in the creation of two forms of knowledge production about government performance: program evaluations and performance management. Prior research has noted tensions between these two approaches and the potential for complementarities when they are aligned. This article offers empirical evidence on how program evaluations connect with performance management in the U.S. federal government in 2000 and 2013. In the later time period, there is an interactive effect between the two approaches, which, the authors argue, reflects deliberate efforts by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations to build closer connections between program evaluation and performance management. Drawing on the 2013 data, the authors offer evidence that how evaluations are implemented matters and that evaluations facilitate performance information use by reducing the causal uncertainty that managers face as they try to make sense of what performance data mean.

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“…Leadership may best be understood as problem solving in which the activities of a collectivity are directed by an individual toward the resolution of a perceived performance gap, i.e., a disparity between an actual and a preferred state of affairs (Levine, et al, 1975). Performance gaps or problems confronting organizations and leaders tend to fall into three categories: (1) those stemming from internal states of an organization; (2) those stemming from relations between an organization and its immediate or proximal environment; and (3) those involving relations between an organization and its remote or distal environment.…”

Section: Leadership Theory and The Levels Of Analysis Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Triumph and Failure of Albert Speer's Administrative Genius: Implications for Current Management Theory and Practice

Singer

Wooton

1976

The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

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In this article the authors explore Albert Speer's (Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War) theories of organizational change "with the specific purpose of framing and accentuating the anomaly that organizational change agents such as Albert Speer represent in technological societies. On the one hand, Speer was an exponent of some of the most advanced, participative, and 'humanistic'... management theories being endorsed today. At the same time, however, he utilized these theories and practices to promote the goals of one of the most inhumane societies in the history of mankind.. The crimes of the Third Reich are essentially modern crimes, made possible by 20th century technology, which holds within it both great promise and great danger for human values." The authors discuss the limitations of present forms of organizational change and suggest new directions and perspectives for an emerging theoretical base.

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Organizational Design: A Post Minnowbrook Perspective for the "New" Public Administration

Cited by 26 publications

References 4 publications

Comparing Public and Private Sector Decision-Making Practices

Comparing Public and Private Sector Decision-Making Practices

The Design and Practice of Integrating Evidence: Connecting Performance Management with Program Evaluation

The Triumph and Failure of Albert Speer's Administrative Genius: Implications for Current Management Theory and Practice

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