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Theories of Public Management 101

analysis. Although separating management and organization for conceptual and

theoretical refinement has its advantages, we do not contend here that manage-
ment and organization are distinct in an empirical sense. They are not. Manage-
ment almost always occurs in the context of organization, and organization is
seldom effective without management. Therefore, in the closing chapter, man-
agement and organization are bundled back together, as they are in the empirical
world, and theories of their relationship are presented.
The following discussion describes theories of public management in four cat-
egories. First, and most important, is traditional public management theory, thrust
forward. Second is the current popularity of leadership as public management.
Third is the theory derived from the longer-standing practice of conducting public
management by contract. Fourth are theories of governance that explain impor-
tant features of public management.

Traditional Management Theory Thrust Forward

Traditional management theory has its origins with Frederick W. Taylor and his
influential The Principles of Scientific Management, which was published originally
in  and is still in print (). His subject was business, particularly the shop.
His purpose was to move from rules of thumb, customs and traditions, and ad
hoc approaches to business management toward a body of scientific principles.
His principles were based on precise measurements of work processes, as well as
outcomes; on the scientific selection of workers; on the optimal placement of
workers in describable work roles; on the division and sequencing of work
processes to enhance productivity; and on the cooperation of workers in achieving
the organizational objective. The application of these principles, Taylor believed,
would lead managers and workers to the one best way.
As business innovations often do, these concepts soon colonized government.
They became a central part of the Progressive Era and the movement to reform
government, and they were highly influential in the development of civil service
systems in government at all levels. The widespread use of tests for hiring and
promotion, position descriptions, and employee evaluations are all reflections of
scientific management. Indeed, one could argue that modern-day testing gener-
ally—for progress in school, for admission to universities and graduate schools,
and for professional standing in law, medicine, accounting, teaching, and so
forth—are also contemporary manifestations of the logic of scientific manage-
ment. The desire for certitude, to measure precisely and thus order and categorize
the world properly and thereby make sense of it, is doubtless as strong today as it
was at the nadir of scientific management.
Luther Gulick (), one of the founders of modern public administration,
embraced the orthodoxy of scientific management, applied it to government, and
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102 The Public Administration Theory Primer

introduced the most famous mnemonic in the field—POSDCORB, which rep-

resents his theory of the seven major functions of management:

• Planning
• Organizing
• Staffing
• Directing
• Coordinating
• Reporting
• Budgeting

Until the mid- to late s, any treatment of management in public admin-
istration was essentially an elaboration of POSDCORB. Often combined with
an essentially scalar, or hierarchical, theory of organization, these principles of
management had a kind of commonsense quality that was appealing to practicing
public administrators as well as to those studying the field or preparing for prac-
tice. Early criticisms of the principles said they were top-down, they were essen-
tially prescriptive, and they underemphasized natural forms of cooperation—but
they formed the core of the field. From the s to the s, important mod-
ifications and adaptations were made to the principles of scientific management.
Chester Barnard () identified and set out the acceptance theory of authority,
which argues that authority does not depend as much on persons of authority or
on persons having authority as it depends on the willingness of others to accept
or comply with directions or commands. In classic theory, it was argued that pol-
icy, instructions, guidance, and authority flowed down the hierarchy, and com-
munication (what we would now call feedback) flowed up. Barnard demonstrated
that considerable power accumulated at the base of the hierarchy, and that theories
of effective management needed to be modified to account for the culture of work
in an organization, the preferences and attitudes of the workers, and the extent to
which there was agreement between workers’ needs and interests and management
policy and direction. He described the “functions of the executive” as having less
to do with the formal principles of administration and more to do with securing
workers’ cooperation through effective communication, through workers’ partic-
ipation in production decisions, and through a demonstrated concern for workers’
interests. In a sense, then, authority is delegated upward rather than directed
downward.
Another modification to the principles of scientific management came as the
result of the Hawthorne studies. These describe the Hawthorne effect, which ex-
plains worker productivity as a function of observers’ attention rather than phys-
ical or contextual factors. Subsequent interpretations of the Hawthorne effect
suggest that mere attention by observers is too simplistic, and that workers saw in
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Theories of Public Management 103

the experiments altered forms of supervision that they preferred and that caused
productivity to increase (Greenwood and Wrege ). The Hawthorne experi-
ments and the work of Barnard introduced a human relations approach that for-
ever changed management theory. Classical principles of scientific management
and formal hierarchical structure were challenged by the human relations school
of management theory, a body of theory particularly influenced by Douglas Mc-
Gregor (). McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y represented an especially im-
portant change in management theory. Here are the competing assumptions of
Theory X and Theory Y:

theory x assumptions
. The average person dislikes work and will try to avoid it.
. Most people need to be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with
punishment to get them to work toward organizational goals.
. The average person wants to be directed, shuns responsibility, has little am-
bition, and seeks security above all.

theory y assumptions
. Most people do not inherently dislike work; the physical effort and the men-
tal effort involved are as natural as play or rest.
. People will exercise self-direction and self-control to reach goals to which
they are committed; external control and the threat of punishment are not
the only means for ensuring effort toward goals.
. Commitment to goals is a function of the rewards available, particularly re-
wards that satisfy esteem and self-actualization needs.
. When conditions are favorable, the average person learns not only to accept
but also to seek responsibility.
. Many people have the capacity to exercise a high degree of creativity and
innovation in solving organizational problems.
. The intellectual potential of most individuals is only partially used in most
organizations.

Following these assumptions, Theory X managers emphasize elaborate controls

and oversight, and they motivate by economic incentives. Theory Y managers seek
to integrate individual and organizational goals and to emphasize latitude in per-
forming tasks; they seek to make work interesting and thereby encourage creativity.
It is important to point out that the work of Chester Barnard, the Hawthorne
experiments, and McGregor was behavioral, which is to say that it was based on
field research. The earlier work of Taylor and others, though it was called scientific
management, was less a result of nonsystematic observations and more a result of
deductive logic.
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104 The Public Administration Theory Primer

One important and different approach to management theory in the evolution

of public administration is the sociology of Max Weber (), who founded the
formal study of the large-scale complex organizations he labeled “bureaucracy.” Al-
though he did his work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was
not generally available to Americans until after World War II. Weber’s purpose was
to describe the salient characteristics of enduring large-scale organizations, which
he labeled “ideal types,” ideal meaning commonly found or generally characteristic.
He was particularly interested in rationality, or collective goal-oriented behavior,
as in the rational organization. He was opposed to the class distinctions character-
istic of Europe in the early twentieth century and to the resulting nepotism and
spoils. He argued that rational bureaucracy practices a specialization of labor. Jobs
are broken down into routine, well-defined tasks so that workers can perfect those
tasks and so that job applicants can be tested in specialized areas to meet formal
qualifications. He described the formal rules, procedures, and record-keeping char-
acteristics of bureaucracies as well as their scalar, or hierarchic, characteristics. The
bureaucracy, he argued, is impersonal and rational because individual selection and
promotion are strictly on the basis of merit, scientifically determined.
Weber’s bureaucracy was more popular with academics than with practitioners,
and it is a theory of management only in the sense that it describes what he iden-
tified as characteristics commonly found in large and complex organizations that
have endured. The critique of Weber’s work is well established. The ideal type bu-
reaucracy tends to inertia, resists change, is mechanistic rather than humanistic,
and is subject to goal displacement and to trained incapacity. Bureaucracy, in the
present day, has become the object of a political derision that blames the problems
of government on the people and organizations that operate public programs.
And bureaucracy is an equally popular whipping boy for scholars and consultants
who seek to make public programs more effective. Despite all this criticism, Weber
is acknowledged to have developed one of the most empirically accurate and uni-
versal descriptions of the large-scale complex organization in its time, a description
that is often accurate even today.
No criticism of the principles of public administration was so devastating as
Simon’s critique ()—dismissing them as proverbs. He demonstrated that the
principles of public administration were contradictory, had little ability to be gen-
eralized as theory, and were fuzzy and imprecise. In the place of the principles of
management, which he found theoretically wanting, he developed what has be-
come decision theory. This theory has had a profound influence on public ad-
ministration, most of it good. But the obliteration of the principles of
management as a straw man was not essential to the presentation of decision the-
ory and to its eventual importance. The principles of management were obliter-
ated, nevertheless—at least in the theoretical sense.
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Theories of Public Management 105

From the late s through the mid-s, little serious theoretical work was
done on management in public administration. The subject gradually disappeared
in the texts as well as in the pages of the Public Administration Review. The irony
is, of course, that management continued to be the core of public administration
practice. It is no wonder that during this period there was a growing distance be-
tween public administration scholarship and theory and public administration
practice.
During this period, fortunately, a strong interest in management theory in so-
ciology, social psychology, and business administration continued. Much of this
work was in the so-called middle-range theories, particularly group theory, role
theory, and communications theory. More recently, this past decade has seen a re-
birth in interest in management in public administration, with the prolific work
of those involved with the Texas Education Excellence Project. The contributions
of this literature are reviewed later.
Further, a revitalization of scientific management has started, with new empir-
ical attention to Simon’s critique of Gulick’s POSDCORB-derived management
principles. Kenneth Meier and John Bohte () offer and test a theory that
links span of control (the number of subordinates managed by a single supervisor)
to bureaucratic performance. Interestingly, Meier and Bohte conclude that both
Simon and Gulick were right. Simon’s critique that there is no single correct span
of control was supported, but so was Gulick’s principle that smaller spans of con-
trol are preferable when the authority has more information and skill than the
subordinates. Meier and Bohte () followed this study with another that ex-
amined diversification of function, stability, and space, which Gulick viewed as
the three important determinants of span of control. Gulick’s hypotheses were
supported, but Meier and Bohte found that span of control needs to be thought
of within the context of organizational hierarchy: What matters for span of control
at one level of an organization may not matter at another. This research suggests
that the insights and utility of Gulick’s management principles are far from over.

Group Theory
Theories of groups are primarily theories of organization rather than theories of
management, but group theory has important implications for public manage-
ment. Most of these implications have to do with contrasting approaches to man-
agerial control. In classic management theory, control is exercised by policy, rules,
regulations, and oversight. In group theory, the effective group will develop shared
goals and values, norms of behavior, customs, and traditions (Homans ; Shaw
). Effective management in the context of group theory nurtures, cultivates,
and supports group goals and norms that are compatible with and supportive of