Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2020, 1–6

doi:10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008
Article

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008/5810402 by Universidad de los Andes user on 24 April 2020

Article

A Place at the Table: Organization Theory and

Public Management
Andrew B. Whitford,* H. Brinton Milward,†, Joseph Galaskiewicz,†
Anne M. Khademian‡
*University of Georgia; †University of Arizona; ‡Virginia Tech

Address correspondence to the author at milward@email.arizona.edu.

Abstract
In November 2018, the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy hosted an
international workshop on the role of organization theory in public management. The intention was
to renew interest in organization theory in public management research. Scholars such as Herbert
Simon, Herbert Kaufman, and Richard Selznick made seminal contributions to organization theory
through the study of public organizations from the 1940s through the 1960s. In our estimation, or-
ganization theory is underrepresented in public administration scholarship for the last several dec-
ades. There are natural reasons for this trend, including the discipline’s turn towards organizational
behavior and the ascendancy of techniques that advance the study of large datasets and those that
allow for experimental control. The recent emergence of “behavioral public administration” is a
prominent example of this evolution. This symposium is an attempt to make a place at the table of
public management for organization theory. The articles in this symposium contain articles from
scholars who operate in the tradition of classic organization theory in new and innovative ways to
lend intellectual purchase to studies of public organizations and public organizational networks.

Introduction for experimental control. The recent emergence of

In late 2018, the University of Arizona’s School of
Government and Public Policy hosted an international
workshop on the role of organization theory in public
management. The intention was to renew interest in
organization theory in public management research,
which, in our estimation,1 has been underrepresented
in public administration journals for the last several
decades.2 There are natural reasons for this trend,
including the discipline's turn towards organizational
behavior and the ascendancy of techniques that ad-
vance the study of large datasets and those that allow
1 “The following workshop participants through their comments and
critiques added to the rigor and quality of these papers. They are Mary
Feeney, Tom Hammond, Kim Isett, Robin Le Maire, Angel Saz-Carranza,
and Ian Turner.” The workshop was dedicated to our late friend and
colleague, Keith Provan.
2 Public management and public administration will be used
interchangeably in this article.
“behavioral public administration” is a prominent ex-
ample of this evolution. In comparison, research on or-
ganizations and networks of organizations is a retail
rather than a wholesale data collection effort.
Perhaps another reason for the decline in organiza-
tion theory in public administration is the increased
attention to theory creation in public administration
rather than using theories from other disciplines.
Weimer (2020) argues that while public administra-
tion scholars need descriptive theory to guide their
empirical research, they do not need to produce it at
the same level as disciplinary scholars in political sci-
ence, sociology, and economics. “Economics, political
science, and sociology provide descriptive theories
informing the design of institutional and organiza-
tional arrangements (Weimer 2020, 2).” Since public
administration is a field connected to practice, a major
part of research on public and nonprofit organizations

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association. 1
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
2 Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2020, Vol. XX, No. XX
is normative in the sense that the results make positive
statements about administrative matters that should
be useful to practitioners. In this case, useful means
helping practitioners attend to their multiple and
conflicting bottom lines—efficiency, effectiveness, ac-
countability, responsiveness, and equity (Wilson 1967)
so they can make meaningful tradeoffs among them.
This normative element makes public administration a
professional field.
Earlier in public administration’s evolution as a
field, many theories of organizations were developed
from research on public organizations. Max Weber
(1946), Luther Gulick (1937), Herbert Simon (1947),
Philip Selznick (1949), and Herbert Kaufman (1960)
were present at the founding and added their work on
public organizations to the general organization theory
canon. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a spectacular
array of new macro-organizational theory including
transaction cost analysis (Williamson 1975), organiza-
tional ecology (Hannan and Freeman 1977), resource
dependency theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978), neo-
institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), and
network embeddedness theory (Granovetter 1985).
Disciplines and professional fields all differentiate
over time, and by the time these theories sprang to
life, they claimed to be general theories that applied
to private, public, and nonprofit organizations. While
general theories, these theories focused on phenomena
as well, for example, Williamson’s focus on mergers
and acquisitions, DiMaggio and Powell’s attention to
homogeneity, and Hannan and Freeman’s study of or-
ganizational births and deaths. In contrast, research
in public administration is generally not focused on
general theory but rather explaining variance in the
outcome of organizational activities, drawing on what-
ever theories will work best in a given case (Provan
and Milward 1995) like resource dependence theory
of Pfeffer and Salancik (1978). Often the phenomenon
to be explained has practical importance, for example,
organizational performance, consumer satisfaction,
turnover, and the analyst’s task is to identify the key
variables that explain the outcome regardless of their
theoretical pedigree.
Readers may object that phenomenon focused the-
ories are somehow “impure” graphing bits and pieces
of earlier theoretical works together, combined with
some common sense or fieldwork perhaps, to come up
with a new recipe. However, we should remember that
resource dependency theory built on exchange theory
which was developed in the 1960s (Emerson 1962;
Blau 1964); transaction cost economics drew on the
work of Herbert Simon and the Carnegie School as
well as the work of Thompson (1967); Coase (1937)
and Commons (1934), ecological theory borrowed
heavily from Hawley (1950) and Stinchcombe (1965);
neo-institutional theory similarly borrowed from
the Carnegie School as well as sociology (DiMaggio
and Powell 1991); and embeddedness theory drew
on a long history of research on social networks and
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008/5810402 by Universidad de los Andes user on 24 April 2020
Polanyi’s (1944) classic work. This is the way explana-
tory theories are built as well. Thus neither theoretical
exercise is more or less “pure.” Both are needed, and
indeed we suspect that the next new “block-buster” ex-
planatory theory will emerge from efforts of applied
researchers to explain some ordinary organizational
phenomena who will find that their explanations of the
particular have broad, general applicability. It is well
to remember that Van de Ven (1989) (quoting Lewin
1945) statement that “nothing is quite so practical as
a good theory.”
What will a renewed emphasis on organization
theory in public administration add to our discipline?
We see a number of benefits coming out of this sym-
posium. Just as public administration contributed in
many ways to building the early foundations of general
organization theory, modern public administration can
again contribute to the production of general organiza-
tion theory. For instance, public administration theory
on topics as diverse as governance mechanisms, or-
ganizational networks, or routines can be important
contributions to the organization theory used in other
disciplines as well as our own. A renewed emphasis on
organization theory will improve empirical and experi-
mental work in public administration at the level of the
network, organization, or organizational subunit. One
consequence of the turn toward experiments in other
disciplines is that causal inference often trumps causal
explanation. In almost all cases, causal stories are
rooted in strong theoretical foundations. Continued
emphasis on organization theory in public administra-
tion can only improve our empirical research.
The Symposium Papers
In the opening paper in the symposium, Daniel
Carpenter offers a new and intriguing view on a classic
theory drawn directly from the heart of public admin-
istration: the way that James Q. Wilson used and truly
pioneered the development of categories throughout
his corpus of research. This paper is a foundational
contribution because scholars throughout public
management’s history have sought to formulate and
apply categories. As Carpenter demonstrates, Wilson
built and deployed categories in three basic ways:
assigning observed objects to conceptual groups in
the Weberian tradition; “type-dependent theoriza-
tion” when thinking about the roles of incentives and
styles; and measurement in the behavioralist tradition
when assigning observed objects to applied analytic
categories.
Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2020, Vol. XX, No. XX
This paper engages some of the most important books
in the public management tradition—Wilson’s Varieties
of Police Behavior (Wilson 1968) and his Bureaucracy
(Wilson 1989) in a way that seeks to rejuvenate the use
and implementation of categorization. But the paper
also moves beyond documentation and exhortations
to help researchers understand the state of categoriza-
tion in modern public management—as well as help us
better understand the limits and consequences of cat-
egorization. In Carpenter’s framework, some quantita-
tive and qualitative comparisons are nonsensical from
first principles. While many research methods classes in
our field discuss such issues as concerns, we rarely con-
sider them as problems with how we build theory. In
this way, through these elaborations, this paper helps
move the ball forward in our regular conversations
about what is good theory and what are its limitations.
Martha Feldman’s paper also pushes the boundaries
of theorizing in public management, in ways that both
complement and challenge the viewpoints documented
and considered by Carpenter. From her perspective,
theorizing in our space is a practice of boundary span-
ning because of the value of approaching topics from
viewpoints drawn from both sociological studies and
management practice.
Because our theorizing sits at this boundary, Feldman
argues that we must also consider the way our views
depend on two competing logics. One is a logic of prob-
ability, which resides within sociological studies. We
may not recognize this dependence, in part, because of
the nature of training programs. Our empirical focus is
on documenting causes of social problems; that know-
ledge base is meant to inform discussions about what
policies and practices may help alleviate those prob-
lems and their consequences for society. Our empiric-
ally informed beliefs about causality, and the way we
assemble that empirical information, drive this process,
thus forming a logic of probability. Yet, the logic of
possibility is intrinsic to the practice of management.
Knowledge about drivers or causes of success may not
tell us much about solving tough management prob-
lems in settings that need managerial attention. As such
theory building in public management must straddle
the logic of probability and that of possibility—how
managers create and deploy solutions in cases where
the logic of probability points toward failure.
This is Feldman’s most important contribution—to
force theory building and empirical research in public
management to consider both logics, their entangle-
ment, and what a lack of focus on the logic of pos-
sibility may do to limit our impact. To show this in
practice, Feldman offers an introduction and valuable
summary of the impact of the work done by scholars in
multiple disciplines to understand organizational rou-
tines in action.
3
Like many others in public management, Patrick
Kenis and Jörg Raab see organizational networks as
fundamental building blocks for our understanding of
governance arrangements. They argue in their paper
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008/5810402 by Universidad de los Andes user on 24 April 2020
that the preponderance of academic attention has
been on networks as a new way to get things done,
as a method of creating public value. They recognize
that many obstacles get in the way of using networks
for these purposes. But they also argue that one obs-
tacle is that most of the academic literature on or-
ganizational networks has been descriptive. They also
argue that efforts at building comprehensive concep-
tual models are useful but inevitably limited in their
utility.
Instead, Kenis and Raab ask us to consider organ-
izational networks as organizations in the sense of the
classical definition of March and Simon (1958). As or-
ganizations, networks have to solve problems like task
division, task allocation, reward provision, and infor-
mation provision. This shift of theoretical lens offers
distinct advantages, which they demonstrate through
dissection of an extended case from the management
of housing expenses in a Dutch municipality. This
joining of lens and case offers additional opportunities
in the sense that propositions can be derived to guide
further research.
A broader contribution of this paper is to show the
portability of widely-accepted theoretical advances
in one area of organization studies to new and less-
developed empirical topics such as networks. This
offers a model of expanding utility—one that we
hope provides a roadmap for other areas that could
gain theoretical purchase through the consideration
of bodies of theory developed in other areas of public
management. We recognize that portability is often
contentious. Carriers of a given theoretical tradition
may dispute its applicability in other domains; those
developing knowledge about emerging empirical phe-
nomena may dispute the need for extant theory. In
practice, though, what is true about those assessments
is not known until articles, such as those presented in
this symposium, take such theory and apply it in new
settings.
In a departure from most theory papers, Branda
Nowell and Joseph Stutler offer a grounded theory
perspective that shows many of the remaining gaps in
our theoretical understanding of public agencies. Their
extended case comes from the late November 2016 fire
in a remote area in the interior of the Great Smoky
Mountain National Park in the United States that had
a major impact on a city, Gatlinburg, TN. They argue
that natural disasters are a dramatic example of a more
general situation faced by many public agencies that
work on the front line in the context of more frequent
disasters fueled by climate change.
4 Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2020, Vol. XX, No. XX
They situate this case by arguing that while cata-
strophic events often catch agencies unaware, those
same agencies often have weeks or longer before the
event where they could have taken protective action.
But they also argue that ex post thinking like that
may be too convenient—that traditional solutions like
punishing leaders or agencies often obscure the dis-
covery of more systemic vulnerabilities.
They document the fire in painstaking detail; the fire
is the largest the park’s history. But they also show that
the fire’s devastation itself obscures broader and deeper
dynamics—that the fire surprised an underprepared
responsible agency, and that it was preceded by, and
evolved out of, a known situation. As such, an innov-
ation in this paper is to show how such surprises can
happen when public managers are “inoculated” and
do not recognize when they are in an unprecedented
situation. They demonstrate this through an extended
discussion of two kinds of organizational characteris-
tics: those that inhibit sensemaking processes (Maitlas
and Christianson 2014; Weick 1995) and those that
cause organizations to take standard responses in non-
routine situations (Allison 1969). In doing so, they tie
the case to Karl Weick’s (1993) classic work on or-
ganizational sensemaking that was developed out of a
similar wildfire disaster.
Jodi Sandfort and Stephanie Moulton turn our at-
tention to one of the foundational questions in the
study of public administration: why is there variance
in success? We know that successful programs in one
jurisdiction often fail in other contexts. We also know
that scholars vary in their attribution of that variance:
some focus on the institutional system, whereas others
focus on human agency. Inevitably, scholars disagree
on the relative weight of different factors in different
settings.
Sandfort and Moulton sidestep this by focusing on
structuration processes—specifically the use of tools
like rules, routines, culture, and resources to affect im-
plementation. While many theories in public adminis-
tration center on exogenous forces, their focus is on
endogenous factors within a given implementation
system; rather than working purely at the macro level,
their interest is on how the agency of actors within
the setting can shape the use of those tools. Overall,
they map from micro dynamics to meso conditions.
Naturally, this leads to a discussion of the opportun-
ities for innovation and learning.
Recently, scholars in sociology have turned atten-
tion again to the effect of levels of analysis on research
studies (Fligstein and Adams 2012). In public adminis-
tration, Roberts (2020) has brought a renewed concern
with micro, meso, and macro differentiation. Sandfort
and Moulton also push these boundaries, and in so
doing, they help us better understand the prospects
for improved implementation across multiple settings.
This spanning has connections to Feldman’s essay that
is worth consideration. At a minimum, readers should
note that routines play important roles in the imple-
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008/5810402 by Universidad de los Andes user on 24 April 2020
mentation process and that they do so because man-
agers can try to shape them to affect organizational
outcomes.
Wolfgang Seibel’s paper returns to long-standing
concerns in public management about the relative
amount of attention paid by researchers to the study
of formal public organizations versus that paid to new
organizational forms, hybrid organizations, or affili-
ated organizations in other sectors. He argues that the
attention paid to the New Public Management (NPM)
school has pulled researchers away from the study of
traditional, “formal” attributes such as structures that
promote autonomy, the degree and practice of discre-
tion, the nature of institutional integrity, and the role
of responsibility among leaders. He argues that “to
neglect these classic ingredients of bureaucracy may
imply to neglect its classic virtues as well.”
His paper shows how these attributes are inter-
related; then, he shows how public values connect insti-
tutional integrity and responsible leadership. The crux
of his argument is that public values must be under-
stood and specified—and that that exercise underpins
the other attributes, taken together. From this, he pro-
ceeds to elaborate on the ranking of values and the or-
dering of basic values of democracy and more familiar
second-order values.
He then grounds this theoretical position in an ex-
tended case study meant to show how public leader-
ship serves as a prerequisite of classic bureaucracy.
Yet, the overall message here is centered on this foun-
dational statement: that the future of public manage-
ment theorizing is to start with (and take seriously)
the public organization itself in both an empirical and
normative sense.
Julia Smith’s paper returns to the topic of network
governance to focus on collaboration through the lens
of network performance. Her review essay centers on
the traditional question of the factors associated with
performance, but in a way that pushes beyond the
traditional study of networks as governance structures
that started in public administration literature in the
1980s. In part, this review paper can be seen as a re-
statement of the importance of foundational research
on networks by Provan and Milward.
Unlike economics, public administration has spent
less time documenting the “history of our theory.” In
economics, we know that competing and fulfilling
economic theories have marched through time—and
thus knowing something about how macroeconomic
theory evolved helps young economics theorists avoid
the mistakes already discovered by earlier traditions.
Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2020, Vol. XX, No. XX
Likewise, that knowledge helps researchers explain
current events that do not fit with current theory by
giving researchers access to older, less-discussed the-
ories. Perhaps the most notable example of this is
the resurrection of Hyman Minsky’s work on equity
markets after the most recent Great Financial Crisis
(Minsky 1992).
In a number of important ways, Smith’s paper helps
provide this backbone for current scholars of network
performance by tracing advances in “whole network
theory” from Provan and Milward’s 1995 article
through their later work on service delivery networks
and then through researchers who have followed in
this tradition.
The Future of Organization Theory in Public
Administration
The papers in this PPMG symposium issue illustrate
a renewed interest in organization theory to advance
public administration, and they highlight how modern
public administration drawing on networks, routines,
and a range of governance mechanisms, can contribute
to organization theory. Classic organization theory, as
Kenis and Raab argue, provides insights to understand
task allocation and division, information and rewards
in organizational networks, for example. What is per-
haps most exciting is the possibility of insight, for both
practicing public administration and explaining the
phenomenon, from the intricate blending and mutu-
ally reinforcing dynamics of “agency” and “structure”
examined and theorized in both fields. “[A] more ro-
bust understanding of the interplay between institu-
tional structures and human agency,” Sandfort and
Moulton argue, “indicates that there is substantial op-
portunity for actors within TANF implementation sys-
tems to be agents of change.” Recognizing and working
with the interaction of structure and agency, in turn, is
an opportunity for public administration scholars to
be agents of change in the capacity, reach, and insight
of the field.
Just as Feldman’s work encourages us to incorp-
orate a “logic of possibility” into our theorizing for
public administration, the papers in this symposium
issue project the possibilities for theory building when
our focus is on the dynamics of agency and struc-
ture; on the interplay of managed networks and the
context within which they operate; on suppression
of sensemaking in the clash between organizational
logics and predictable practices in an era of unprece-
dented problems; on renewed appreciation of admin-
istrative process, routines and technologies in response
to quantitative, problematic measures of behavior;
on the transition from “knowing what” to “knowing
how” and the role of context and social dynamics in
5
implementation efforts; and on the interplay between
institutional integrity and the underlying values of
leadership. Beyond “behavior” or “structure”—sin-
gular lenses that provide explanations that are most
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008/5810402 by Universidad de los Andes user on 24 April 2020
“probable” or relatable—is the rejection of dichoto-
mies and incorporation of the logic of the possible at
the dynamic intersection of agency and structure, and
at the intersection of public administration and organ-
ization theory, more generally.
Several research challenges emerge when this inter-
section is considered. First, how can we understand
networks or organizations in the context of “govern-
ance in action?” From the enactment of processes at
micro, meso, and macro levels of governance, public
administration is action, and organizations and net-
works are in constant states of organizing. In addition
to categories, typologies, and snapshots in time, the or-
ganizing lens suggests we focus on the enactment of
processes and practices that are evolving and context-
ually contingent and mutually constituent. Focusing
on the role of managers in fostering transitions in the
governance of networks or organizations, the infor-
mational and relational work of governance interacts
with the patterns, practices, and organizing activities
of members, and provides an explicit engagement be-
tween public administration and organization theory.
Second, how can we incorporate “unknown un-
knowns” into our theorizing or the “space” in the
practice of public administration that holds potential
for contextually contingent reconfiguration and new
directions? What can we learn from the study of or-
ganizational networks, or the relationship between
values and institutional integrity, to help managers
manage the unknowable unknowns? In organizational
worlds of routines and practices, consistent constitu-
encies, and resource constraints, where are the spaces
for change, and what scale and scope of management
reach must be in place to bring about the transitional
moments in the governance of programs, organiza-
tions or networks? Empirical insights into these mo-
ments (how goals were redefined, resources deployed,
relationships built, etc.) may be a window of insight
for public administration practitioners.
Third, can we understand governance practices not
merely as observations, but as guides for organizing
and influencing the forward-thinking efforts of man-
agers and others? Practices become templates for how
participants think about and enact their roles within
networks and organizations, and any governance ar-
rangement “easily conceals inequalities and power
relations” (Nuijten 2004, 124). The concept of a net-
work itself is a tool for coordination and policy elab-
oration and implementation. Rather than focus on the
determinants of networks or models of governance, a
deeper understanding of the purposive and strategic
6 Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2020, Vol. XX, No. XX
impetus behind the governance of networks, not only
by policy makers, but by the managers of networks
could be explored.
Finally, in a field long defined by an emphasis on
public and professional values that shape the integrity
of governance, how is institutional integrity and ac-
countability preserved in settings that are dynamic and
increasingly dispersed? In this symposium issue, Seibel
argues, “for the sake of institutional integrity, public
administration leadership has to be based on an appro-
priate understanding of public values and their speci-
ficity.” With this in mind, what role do managers play
in the integration of goals, relationships, resources and
representation to achieve institutional integrity and
accountability?
References
Allison, Graham. 1969. Conceptual models and the Cuban missile crisis. The
American Political Science Review 63 (3): 689–718.
Blau, Peter M. 1964. Exchange and power in social life. New York, NY: John
Wiley & Sons.
Coase, Ronald H. 1937. The nature of the firm. Economica 4:386–405.
Commons,  John  R. 1934. Institutional economics: Its place in political
economy. New York, NY: Macmillan.
DiMaggio,  Paul  J., and Walter  W.  Powell. 1983. The iron cage revisited:
Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational
fields. American Sociological Review 48:147–60.
———. 1991. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and col-
lective rationality in organizational fields. In The new institutionalism in
organization analysis, eds. Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, 63–82.
Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Emerson,  Richard  M. 1962. Power-dependence relations. American
Sociological Review 27 (1): 31–41.
Fligstein, Neil, and Doug McAdam. 2012. A theory of fields. New York, NY:
Oxford Univ. Press.
Granovetter, Mark. 1985. Economic action and social structure: The problem
of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91 (3): 481–510.
Gulick, Luther. 1937. Notes on the theory of organization. In Papers on the
science of administration, eds. Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick, 1–45.
New York, NY: Columbia Univ.: Institute of Public Administration.
Hannan, Michael T., and John Freeman. 1977. The population ecology of or-
ganizations. American Journal of Sociology 82 (5): 929–64.
Hawley, Amos H. 1950. Human ecology: A theory of community structure.
New York, NY: Ronald Press.
Kaufman,  Herbert. 1960. The forest ranger: A  study in administrative be-
havior. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Lewin, Kurt. 1945. The research center for group dynamics at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Sociometry 8: 126–35.
Maitlas, Sally, and Marlys Christianson. 2014. Sensemaking in organizations:
Taking stock and moving forward. The Academy of Management Annals
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ppmgov/gvaa008/5810402 by Universidad de los Andes user on 24 April 2020
8 (1): 57–125.
March,  James  G., and Herbert  A.  Simon. 1958. Organizations. New York,
NY: Wiley.
Minsky,  Hyman  P. 1992. The Financial Instability Hypothesis May 1992.
The Jerome Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 74. Available
at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=161024 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/
ssrn.161024
Nuijten,  Monique. 2004. Governance in action: Some theoretical and prac-
tical reflections on a key concept. In Globalization and development, eds.
Don Kalb, Wil Pansters, and Hans Siebers. Dordrecht: SpringerLink.
Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Gerald R. Salancik. 1978. The external control of organ-
izations: A  resource dependence approach. New York, NY: Harper and
Row Publishers.
Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The great transformation: The political and economic ori-
gins of our time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press (2001 edition).
Provan,  Keith  G., and H.  Brinton  Milward. 1995. A preliminary theory of
interorganizational network effectiveness: A  comparative study of four
community mental health systems. Administrative Science Quarterly 40
(1): 1–33.
Roberts,  Alasdair  S. 2020. Bridging levels of public administration:
How macro shapes meso and micro. Administration and Society
52(4):631–56.
Selznick, Philip. 1949. TVA and the grass roots. Berkeley and Los Angles: Univ.
of California Press.
Simon, Herbert A. 1947. Administrative behavior. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Stinchcombe,  Arthur  L. 1965. Social structure and organizations. In
Handbook of organizations, ed. James  G.  March, 142–93. Chicago, IL:
Rand McNally.
Thompson,  James  D. 1967. Organizations in action: Social science bases of
administrative theory. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Van de Ven, Andrew H. 1989. Nothing is quite so practical as a good theory.
Academy of Management Review 14 (4): 486–9.
Weber, Max. 1946. From max weber: Essays in sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
Weick, Karl E. 1993. The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann
gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (4): 628–52.
———. 1995. Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Weimer,  David  L. 2020. Public administrative theory: Normative necessity.
Perspectives on Public Management and Governance 3 (1): 7–11.
Williamson,  Oliver  E. 1975. Markets and hierarchies. New York: The Free
Press.
Wilson, James Q. 1967. The bureaucracy problem. The Public Interest 6:3–9.
———. 1968. Varieties of police behavior: The management of law and order
in eight communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
———. 1989. Bureaucracy: What government agencies do and why they do it.
New York, NY: Basic Books.