Administration & Society

Scholars and journalists have devoted a wealth of attention to White House organization and management, but have produced only modest conclusions on how presidential staffing is related to performance. This article assesses findings from two schools of staffing studies—personalist and institutionalist—and suggests that re-searchers ultimately need to examine the interactive effects of management style and organizational factors on performance. To this end, a typology is developed based on two dimensions of variation: a president's managerial assertiveness and staff cohesion. The four resulting patterns are discussed in terms of the nine most recent administrations.

The increasing intensity of American individualism and the corresponding decline of a sense of community have been documented by Robert Bellah and four associates in the important new book Habits of the Heart. One striking implication of this trend is that public administration is becoming lost in the wilderness of individualism. The regime values of modern American politics dictate an emphasis on power and on the clash of individual interests, to the detriment of administrative effectiveness. However, public administration is in actuality founded on the other side of a constitutional duality of power and morals. Public administration relates directly to conceptions of classical republicanism, civic virtue, and cooperative effort. The true constitutional model of public administration derives from Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike in a system of modern politics and classical administration. This model is essential to the continuing viability and effectiveness of public administration in a representative democracy.

Political systems are most effective when authority is widely dispersed without diminishing the ultimate responsibility of top leadership for results. Administrative effectiveness depends upon the capacity and willingness of leaders to delegate operational responsibility to subordinates without reducing supervisory prerogatives and correctional potential. Insofar as leaders must rely upon nonpersuasive forms of power (e.g., coercion, corruption, or intimidation), their capacity to delegate responsibility is limited. The more elastic the organization or political system, the softer are the more normal manifestations of power, allowing and encouraging delegation of responsibility, decentralization, widespread participation, deregulation, communication from below, and constructive criticism. At the same time, supervision remains effective, facilitating the introduction of more intrusive forms of power (coercion, discipline, and punishment) as needed. Political elasticity theory is here used to overcome such persistent dichotomies in administrative literature as: leadership followership; conflict/harmony; centralization/decentralization; regulation/deregulation; private sector/public sector control; and elitism/pluralism. It is also used to revaluate development administration literature.

When regulatory inspectors deal with uncooperative violators who initially refuse to correct violations, inspectors must exert various kinds of power to persuade or force the violators to comply with regulatory requirements. This article draws upon interview data from a case study of food and dairy inspection in Wisconsin to identify the ways in which inspectors' power to gain compliance is undermined by the formal policies and informal organizational culture of the agency. Because of inadequate training, pressure to spend less time on inspections, and norms discouraging assertiveness, inspectors' power to obtain compliance through persuasion is limited. Inspectors' power and their desire to use formal enforcement mechanisms is also circumscribed. As a result, inspectors may allow violations to continue unabated because they lack the capacity to persuade or force the violator to make the needed corrections.

This article juxtaposes the functionalist and the Marxist perspectives on organizations in an attempt to assess the feasibility of theoretical pluralism as an alternative research strategy. While the coexistence of rival modes of organizational inquiry may contribute to the stock of knowledge about organizations and facilitate theoretical confrontation, it becomes necessary to evaluate the knowledge claims made by different modes of social inquiry, in the light of their assumptions and ontological and epistemological foundations. Theoretical pluralism may have an uncertain status as a research method, since it does not constitute an unambiguous agenda for organizational intervention. Constructive dialogue across paradigms is not to be eschewed. However, theoretical pluralism as a conscious strategy may result in a compromise of fundamental values for and thus be anathema to Marxists committed to the task of demystifying production relations in society.

Virtually autonomous bureaucratic actors pursuing technological goals are discussed in terms of the cultural and political beliefs in "autonomous technology." In this theoretical construct, examples are drawn from the history of space and defense projects in order to suggest some institutional relationships between the two streams of thought that comprise the title. It concluded that conventional theories of policy formation that presently dominate American politics and public administration are inadequate to account for either the entrepreneurial behavior of administrative actors or the "telic inclination" of certain large-scale public technologies.