Administration & Society

The role of cabinet member as policy entrepreneur has received little attention in the literature of political science and public administration. Cabinet members have no formal authority or constitutional mandate. Additionally, their identification with particular agency missions has subjected cabinet secretaries to the suspicion of "going native," thus further diminishing their capacity for policy initiation. Presidential concern with controlling the executive branch perhaps reached its peak during the Reagan administration, when virtually all political appointments and policy decisions were controlled within the office of the president. This research examines the role of Cabinet Secretary Otis R. Bowen, MD in the evolution of Medicare catastrophic coverage within the Reagan administration. It demonstrates the potential of the cabinet member as policy entrepreneur, identifying weaknesses in the ability of even an ideologically cohesive administration to control fully its legislative agenda.

In this article, a theory on local government development based on extensive empirical research in Dutch local government is presented. Most public administration literature, both in the United States and in Europe, that focuses on the development of government and its bureaucracy deals entirely or predominantly with central government. There are various reasons why local government development merits separate attention. The time span of 400 years brings out in full how the major shifts that occurred in the Netherlands from the late 19th century onward had been "prepared " since early modern times. Attention will be paid to the degree to which the Dutch case is unique as well as representative for developments at local levels elsewhere in the Western world. The theory allows for variation over time as well as differences in types of local government.

The legitimacy of public administration within the constitutional separation of powers has been repeatedly questioned. Attempts to address this challenge have emphasized the public interest as a fundamental concept in defining the administrator's role in governance. In its landmark decisions on political patronage, the Supreme Court explicitly considered this issue. This analysis examines the court's reasoning using three alternative models of the public interest. Judicial perspectives in the patronage cases are found to contrast sharply with contemporary administrative theory. This divergence underscores some of the theoretical dilemmas that confront the field in developing new models of public administration in governance.

Developments in public administration are better understood as rhetorical rather than scientific in Herbert Simon's meaning. Administrative arguments succeed by using the six keys to acceptance of classical rhetoric: symmetry, metaphor, ambiguity, private interest presented as public good, selective use of information, and suspension of disbelief To test this proposition, we compare managerialism with cameralism and utilitarianism, which were earlier attempts at new public administration. Cameralisi, which was developed by a body of academics and practitioners who might be termed consultants in today's nomenclature, influenced administrative developments in central Europe from the 17th century extending its force even to Russia. Utilitarianism was the dominant social and moral philosophy of Victorian England. Its best known exponents were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who exercised a great influence on their contemporaries. This article demonstrates that managerialism, cameralism, and utilitarianism each used the six keys to acceptance of rhetoric to advance its case and concludes that changes in fashion in public administration are achieved by rhetoric, not by scientific analysis of data.

This case study compared the attitudinal behavioral outcomes of participants and nonparticipants involved in strategic cultural change. The research was conducted in a large public organization using the Human Relations Model (i.e., participation -+ satisfaction -+ organization change) to facilitate organization change. It was hypothesized that participants would have higher levels of quality-of-working life than nonparticipants. The results of the study did not support the hypothesis. It appears that a more systemic change process is required in strategic change processes. A discussion of a holistic change model, Subsystem Congruence, is also presented.

This article reports on a 10-item scale to measure the propensity for participative decision making (PPDM)—the proclivity of present and prospective managers for participative decision making. The scale development procedure employed suggests that PPDM is composed of two key dimensions: organizational effectiveness and managerial perceptions concerning power.