Carpenter Forging Bureaucratic Autonomy 109

In the end, nuances such as this stem from the novel and transformational nature of
Carpenter’s contribution to our understanding of the politics of bureaucratic policy making.
Carpenter has crafted a piece of scholarship that not only stands on its own merits but also
is noteworthy in the multiplicity of ways in which it recasts existing research agendas and
opens the door to new avenues of inquiry.

Steven J. Balla
George Washington University

REFERENCES
McCubbins, Mathew D.; Noll, Roger G.; and Weingast, Barry R. 1987. “Administrative Procedures as
Instruments of Political Control.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3 (fall): 243–77.
_______. 1989. “Structure and Process, Politics and Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the
Political Control of Agencies.” Virginia Law Review 75 (Mar.): 431–82.
Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the
United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Skowronek, Stephen L. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Public-Sector Performance
Richard C. Kearney and Evan M. Berman, eds. 1999.
Public Sector Performance: Management, Motivation, and Measurement.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. 372 pp.

Much of the promise and achievement of public-sector performance management—as well

as its pitfalls and follies—is on display in this collection, a volume in the American Soci-
ety for Public Administration’s ongoing Classics series. As U.S. public administration has
evolved and become more sophisticated, there has been consistent political support for
strategies to improve agency performance and productivity. This volume does a good job of
chronicling the development of many of those strategies.
The importance of performance management is captured nicely in David Stanley’s
article, “Excellence in Public Service—How Do You Really Know?” Stanley makes an
argument, based on his 1963 study of the New York City municipal government, that the
evaluation of public service excellence too often has been based on what he calls “impres-
sionistic” and “presumptive” measures. By using such measures, people can reach capri-
cious conclusions about governmental effectiveness. We form impressions based on what
we encounter or what we read about—a nice warm impression when we read that a gov-
ernment accountant has retired after fifty years of continuous service without having taken
a single day of sick leave; an angry, frustrated impression when we get snapped at by a cranky
clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Similarly, with the use of presumptive meas-
ures, people presume that the public service is good (or bad) because certain arrangements
have (or have not) been put in place to assure its goodness (or badness). For example, we
110 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

might say that government is good because it has a merit system in place for career per-
sonnel or bad because it does not.
What we must strive for, says Stanley, is a proven standard of evaluation, even if prov-
ing or disproving government effectiveness is sometimes distasteful and often very difficult.
“It may also involve the establishment of systems of fact-finding or evaluation which will
replace or conflict with existing systems and therefore encounter that well known impedi-
ment to the improvement of public administration: resistance to change” (p. 267).
Stanley was right in 1964, and he is right today. Americans do tend to be awfully lazy
when it comes to evaluating public-sector performance, often relying on snapshot impres-
sions or the rantings of the latest anti-Washington candidate. This is the true significance of
performance management—finding ways to evaluate government programs that transcend
impressionistic and presumptive accounts by being rigorous, outcome oriented, systematic,
and as objective as humanly possible. Doing this promises several benefits, not least of
which are the provision of an empirically sound basis for the policy debates that consume
us as well as help in judging what is working and what is failing. In a sense, performance
management amounts to taking government work seriously.
Performance management is a deceptively simple concept. In its most essential form
it means setting goals, defining strategies and programs to achieve those goals, and estab-
lishing systems to evaluate progress. This conceptual simplicity is perhaps one of perform-
ance management’s greatest strengths and yet, as with so many good things, it is hard to
leave well enough alone. The wave-upon-wave of management fads that have cascaded across
the public sector in the last three decades are testament to this very human tendency to tin-
ker. The variations on performance management have included organization development,
management by objectives, total quality management, reinventing government, quality cir-
cles, performance budgeting, investment budgeting, zero-based budgeting, integrated prod-
uct teams, business process reengineering, statistical process control, cutback management,
public-private competitions, and strategic planning. Performance management strategies
may well be the Energizer bunny of government reform.
Many of these strategies have made contributions toward improvement of government
performance. The Department of Defense, for example, has used the public-private cost
competition principles laid out in Office of Management Budget Circular A-76 in hundreds
of competitions over the last twenty years, saving the taxpayer millions of dollars while im-
proving quality, regardless of whether the public or private sector wins. As performance
management advocates have maintained, the competitive process tends to force both sides
to sharpen their pencils and put their best face forward. Cities all over the United States
have used tools such as financial trend monitoring and revenue and expense forecasting to
improve municipal budgeting processes and to help their jurisdictions weather economic
ups and downs. Agencies at all levels of government have developed comprehensive strate-
gic plans to better define where they are headed and how they are going to get there. Con-
gress recognized the importance of strategic planning when it passed the Government Per-
formance and Results Act in 1993.
This is all good news. But we must also remember that performance management must
be pursued seriously if pursued at all. While the last forty years of public administration
history demonstrate the imagination and resilience of the average public manager, they are,
unfortunately, also littered with numerous examples of performance management done on
the cheap, or just outright faked. Delivering a few speeches at employee town halls on the
importance of goal setting is fine, but it must be followed with action. Printing up lami-
 Kearney, Berman Public-Sector Performance 111

nated reinvention cards for employees to carry around in their coat pockets is not the same
thing as implementing a serious strategic plan. Amassing ponderous lists of agency activi-
ties, programs, projects, and initiatives for the annual report to Congress is not prima facie
evidence that your organization is doing a better job this year than last. Yet, many of us
have encountered public-sector managers who pat themselves on the back for engaging in
these very activities. As a former public-sector manager, I have at times been guilty of just
such self-congratulatory behavior.
The management-fad-of-the-week syndrome, though it may seem harmless, can have
detrimental effects. Festering employee cynicism is the most worrisome and the most cor-
rosive. You cannot confront a workforce year after year with new management initiatives,
strategies, plans, task forces, and blue ribbon commissions and not expect that some portion
of that workforce is going to lose interest and tune you out. Anyone who has taught a pub-
lic management class to a group of seasoned government executives has encountered this
cynicism firsthand. I once led a seminar for senior government managers at which a few
members of the class whiled away the dry spells during lectures playing a clever little game
called Buzzword Bingo. The buzzwords included the usual suspects, including “thinking
outside the box” and “high-performing organizations.”
To their credit, Richard Kearney and Evan Berman have selected a balanced set of ar-
ticles for this volume, articles that sing the praises of performance management but also
sound some of the cautionary notes I have highlighted. The Stanley article is a good exam-
ple of the former—to read it is to realize that performance management has been a kind of
administrative religion for its most vocal advocates. Even this article, however, notes that
performance management done halfway may be worse than no performance management at
all, a point repeated in many other selections. For example, Harry Hatry’s 1980 article, “Per-
formance Measurement Principles and Techniques: An Overview for Local Government,”
is careful to describe a list of criteria that managers should consult before they choose any
set of performance measures. Hatry’s list includes this gem: “A measure such as ‘the num-
ber of tickets per police officer per year’ has a large potential for encouraging harassment of
citizens” (p. 305). I hope that someone in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police De-
partment reads that, too.
Another exemplary feature of Kearney and Berman’s collection is the inclusion of some
of the most basic articles in the development of performance management. The Hatry piece
is one; it is an excellent primer on principles, tools, and techniques. Also, here is Aaron
Wildavsky’s 1972 article, “The Self-Evaluating Organization,” in which he makes the point
that evaluation is inherently political, not technical, because it advocates certain policy ap-
proaches over others and because evaluators inevitably find themselves to be the bearers of
bad news. Other selections, such as Charles Levine’s on cutback management and organi-
zational decline, Chris Argyris’s on lasting change, E. S. Savas’s on competitive contracting
at the municipal level, and Douglas Eadie’s on strategic planning, round out an impressive list
of contributions.
But there are gaps as well. For example, not one article addresses the landmark Gov-
ernment Performance and Results Act. GPRA has proven to be far from perfect, but it still
represents a major milestone in the development of performance management. Federal agen-
cies are now legally required to conduct serious strategic planning and program evaluation.
GPRA was passed in 1993, and in the last nine years a number of articles have been pub-
lished about its relative merits. None of those articles are found in this volume.
A related shortcoming is that most of the empirical or case study articles deal with local
112 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

government examples; there is not much here on either the state or the federal level of gov-
ernment. This is not surprising—after all, to a great extent, performance management in the
public sector has its roots in American municipalities. Municipal governments, as the front
line of the public sector, often provide services—including public works, sanitation, snow
removal, and street cleaning—that are quite amenable to performance management ap-
proaches. But surely performance management is not strictly a local phenomenon.
Some of these omissions point to a larger problem with the ASPA Classics series.
While this series is a welcome addition to the public administration bookshelf, particularly
for use in the classroom, its editors sometimes seem to interpret classics to mean that most
of the selected articles must be old. This edition has twenty-four complete articles; only
three of them were published within the last twelve years. Most of the selections come from
the 1980s (thirteen articles) but about one-third are much older, having originally been pub-
lished as far back as the 1940s. This is fine; surely the word classic implies a certain time-
less quality. But the mission of the ASPA Classics series is “[t]o provide the reader with a
historical and firsthand view of the development of the topic being considered” (preface to
this edition). Historical perspective is part of it, but the series also should be about the on-
going development of the topic. This development does not simply stop at a predetermined
time, nor is it fair to say that only articles of a certain age are worthy of being deemed clas-
sic; there is such a thing as the instant classic—the piece that shakes up the conventional
wisdom, or presents a compelling new vision of reality, or offers a magisterial summation
of what has come before and points the way forward.
As the editors say in their introduction, “government performance is important to cit-
izens and public managers alike” (p. 1), and improving public-sector performance helps to
address growing citizen expectations and enhance trust in public administration. These are
worthy goals. Performance management, despite occasional lapses, is much more than just
another fad; rather, as this volume demonstrates, it is an enduring set of principles, tools, and
techniques for improving public-policy outcomes. For that reason alone, it commands our
continued attention.

Joseph A. Ferrara
Georgetown University

Civil Servants and Their Constitutions

John Rohr. 2002. Civil Servants and Their Constitutions.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 208 pp.

John Rohr’s knowledge is great, his tone of address mild, and his reflective attitude calm.
Rohr has chosen four countries to study: the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and
Canada. The overt rationale for the last three countries is that they are different enough from
the United States to be interesting, and similar enough to make comparison meaningful.
Methodologically, the book is based upon the reading and interpretation of documents and,
to judge from internal evidence, interviews with significant actors. There is a pretty strict ev-
identiary standard, for at one point Rohr cites a magazine report. He says he would not nor-