Public Administration and the Evolving World of Work

Author(s): Anthony P. Carnevale and David G. Carnevale

Source: Public Productivity & Management Review , Autumn, 1993, Vol. 17, No. 1
(Autumn, 1993), pp. 1-14
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3381044

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 PRODUCTIVITY IN REVIEW

Public Administration and the

Evolving World of Work

Anthony P. Carnevale, David G. Carnevale

Public administrationfaces new performance and skills standards.

There is wide agreement that a new economic order is emerging in America

and throughout the world (Piore and Sabel, 1982; Reich, 1984; Osborne,
1988; Choate, 1986). The modern arrangement is founded on a fresh set of
performance standards and flexible technologies that are transforming orga-
nizations and skills. According to Salamon (1991, p. 13), these standards and
technologies stress "quality over quantity and put a special premium on flex-
ibility, decentralization, rapid application of new technology, and competi-
tiveness." At the heart of this revolution is the recognition that success
ultimately depends on an able, energized, and committed work force. These
are certainly not new ideas. However, they are finding their way into practice
at a rapid rate and are seen as necessary elements in high-performing organi-
zations (Lawler, 1986).
Government plays a tripartite economic role as a producer of goods and
services, a regulator of private enterprise, and a complementary asset to pri-
vate production. Society cannot be strong without able public servants and a
robust, productive private sector. These are the cornerstones of a free
economy and crucial to the maintenance of democratic institutions (Staats,
1988).
The historical flexibility of the public administration community is being
tested again today as the requirements of the changing world of work impact
on public organizations, as well as on public workers and their unions. In this
article we argue that the public administration community must confront
these demands in at least two ways. First, government must put its own house
in order by developing its human capital by means of education and training.
Second, government at all levels must restructure public work processes and
organizations to fully capitalize on a work force freshly empowered with
greater autonomy and enabled with skill. This is a "capacity-building" agenda
that will strengthen the human dimension in organizations (Balk, Olshfski,

PUBLIC PRODUCTIVITY & MANAGEMENT REVIEW, vol. XVII, no. 1, Fall 1993 ( Jossey-Bass Publishers 1

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 2 Carnevale, Carnevale

Epstein, and Holzer, 199 1)

qualitygoods and services i
production of which it is a
We doubt that there will
ment of the entire gamut
tions based on the suppose
led public organizations to ingest administrative techniques not entirely
suited for their unique operating domains (Swiss, 1992; Hyde, 1992). Manag-
ing government institutions is not the same as operating private businesses,
and experience shows that management routines that originate in the private
economy do not always travel well between areas (Downs and Larkey, 1986).
Our underlying argument is instead based upon the belief that any orga-
nization's productive success is tied to its ability to develop and tap into the
know-how of its people (Kee and Black, 1985).

The Evolving World of Work

The sense that we are confronting a new order is widely shared. Historically,
institutions competed principally on the basis of efficiency and prices. Eco-
nomic success, for instance, was measured by the ability to mass produce: to
fight for greater market share by manufacturing higher volumes of goods and
services with the same or fewer resources, thereby reducing costs and increas-
ing availability and access for a growing share of the population. The primary
operational values were efficiency and economy.
In the modern era competitiveness is based not only on efficiency and
economy, but also on the ability of institutions to deliver quality, variety,
customization, convenience, and timeliness (A. P. Carnevale, 1991). These
latter criteria maybe considered as subdimensions of "effectiveness," which,
along with efficiency, constitute the broader idea of productivity. Moreover,
these standards demand greater competencies, especially from front-line
employees.
The emergence of new performance standards represents a profound
shift in the way organizational performance isjudged. The efficiency standard
characteristic of the old economy, for instance, was "production-centered."
Today, new performance criteria shift the emphasis from the provision of ac-
cess to goods and services to an additional set of outcomes that occur in the
process of consuming the particular good or service. For example, in the pub-
lic sector it is no longer enough to guarantee access to a fixed number of years
of standardized schooling. Instead, the emphasis has shifted to providing
quality education, including a variety of choices customized to meet indi-
vidual and local needs, and delivered conveniently through state-of-the-art
methods and technologies. Moreover, public education institutions are being
asked to do all this with no appreciable increase in cost.

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Public Administration and the Evolving World of Work 3

Flexible and information-based technologies-primarily computer tech-

nologies-and the ability of workers to employ them, are central to the chang-
ing world of work. Advances in knowledge, both of the technological and
human capital variety, raise the potential for higher productivity and quality.
They provide sufficient flexibility to speed tailored outputs to people. In ad-
dition, by integrating producers and consumers into networks, they help to
create an environment in which goods and services can be delivered globally
or locally in a convenient and timely way. Finally, and most remarkably, ad-
vances in learning enable institutions to meet higher standards at mass pro-
duction prices (Office of Technology Assessment, 1988, 1990).
The role of people at work is changing. Capital-to-labor ratios are con-
tinuing to grow, and direct labor participation in the processes of resource
extraction, manufacturing, and service provision is declining. The usual dy-
namic begins with downsizing work forces and ends with fewer, more highly
skilled, and more autonomous employees working in combination with more
powerful and flexible technology in the context of more adaptable organiza-
tional structures and work processes. Indeed, as the recent report Civil Service
2000 (Hudson Institute, 1988) points out, the federal government has already
begun to evolve along these lines, and is headed toward becoming what is
characterized as a research and development (R&D) enterprise staffed pri-
marily by highly educated, white-collar, technical elites.
As technology takes on more and more of the workplace's repetitive
physical and mental tasks, human responsibilities and skill requirements in-
crease and become less job-specific. Job assignments become more flexible
and overlapping. Employees spend more time exploiting machine capabili-
ties, interacting with one another, and interfacing with customers and clients.
Flexible, highly skilled work teams and information networks within and
among institutions are the basic units of production in contemporary work
organizations. Demands for quality and convenience are difficult to meet
without teamwork. The need to customize outcomes requires closely inte-
grated working groups. The trend toward more general skills and shared re-
sponsibilities means that work becomes more of a collective activity
conducted by groups of people. As a result, organizational formats are shift-
ing toward flexible networks that employ bottom-up access to information to
complement top-down authority to integrate work, expedite strategic
changes, and improve performance.
A functionally more democratic and less elitist workplace is a possible by-
product of the dawning economic order. This new kind of workplace will
come into being because a major share of continuous improvements in orga-
nizational performance will be made toward the bottom of the organizational
pyramid by employees actually making the product, delivering the service, or
interacting with the public. As a result, organizations are pushing increased
autonomy and resources down the line.

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 4 Carnevale, Carnevale

Performance Standards

The distinctive signature of the changing world of work is the extension of

performance standards beyond the simple efficiency criteria of the mass pro-
duction age to include five additional standards critical to organizational suc-
cess (see Figure 1).
Quality. Quality implies that products and services have attributes other
than their gross number. There are two dimensions to quality: (1) product or
service integrity, and (2) compliance to standards. Products and services
demonstrate integrity to the extent their various aspects combine to meet a
particular need (Clark and Fujimoto, 1990). The trick to achievingproduct or
service integrity is, first, to understand the outcome that is the raison d'etre for
the product or service, and second, to build performance metrics to measure
conformance to the outcome desired. There are two roughly sequential do-
mains for crafting basic integrity and compliance to quality standards: built-
in quality and perceived quality. Built-in quality focuses on the design,
production, and delivery of a good or service; perceived quality focuses on the
experience of consuming the good or service (Garvin, 1988; Hummel, 1987;
Segalla, 1989). Quality in the public sector begins, as it does in the private sec-
tor, by understanding the ultimate purpose of the enterprise.
Building outcome standards is easier in concept than in practice, espe-
cially in the public sector. However, it is not impossible. The Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), for example, is in the business of
improving worker health and safety. It does so by setting standards enforced
by inspecting workplaces and penalizing rule breakers. Yet there is no clear
evidence that inspection and penalties have resulted in general increases in
either health or safety. In fact, most safety improvements come from volun-
tary compliance to OSHA standards by employers and employees (or their
unions) working together. According to former secretary of labor Ray
Marshall, a more sensible strategy might be to help employers and workers

Figure 1. Performance Standards in the New Economy

Efficiency The ability to produce higher volume with the same or fewer
resources.
Quality Matching products or services to a human need with a consistent
conformance to standards.
Variety Providing choices to suit diverse tastes and needs.
Customization Tailoring goods and services to individual clientele.
Convenience Developing user-friendly products and services and delivering them
with high levels of customer satisfaction.
Timeliness Delivering innovations to customers, making continuous
improvement, and developing new applications quickly.

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Public Administration and the Evolving World of Work 5

comply with safety norms by embedding labor-management safet

tees in every workplace and providing them with technical assistance (R.
Marshall, conversation with the authors, 1991). Built-in and perceived qual-
ity of health and safety regulations would be simultaneously enhanced by the
involvement of end users. The standards of variety and customization would
be more easily met because each labor-management committee would craft a
safety strategy tailored to the workplace in which it is nested. Convenience
and timeliness are inherent in such a structure because responses to specific
health and safety issues, large and small, can be anticipated and acted on by
on-site committees and do not have to await federal standard setting or en-
forcement of noncompliance. Quality, and related issues, are receiving sub-
stantial attention in public organizations. Programs, for example, based on
strategic planning, total quality management (TQM), and coproduction
abound. A survey of federal administrators, for example, shows that more
than 60 percent of responding organizations were involved in some sort of
quality effort (Hyde, 1992).
Variety and Customization. In the family of competitive principles,
customization is closely related to variety. With the advent of flexible organi-
zational and machine technologies, the standardization of goods and services
once thought critical to high volumes and low prices has given way to an ex-
plosion of variety and customization with no additional cost (Noyelle, 1989;
Wei, 1989; Goldhar andJelinek, 1983). In the public sector, there is a need to
provide variety and to customize services and regulatory procedures. Indi-
viduals, families, and groups have different needs and preferences, and ser-
vices ought to be delivered through user-sensitive delivery systems that
conform to differences in clientele. The regulatory case is more complex but
essentially similar. Regulators need to build in sufficient flexibility to tailor
responses articulately to the variety in the conditions of regulated entities.
Convenience. Attention to convenience begins with a focus on the cus-
tomer (LeBoeuf, 1987; Zemke and Schaaf, 1989). Customers can be internal
(for example, co-workers or other organizational units) or external (other
organizations or individual citizens). Institutions, public and private, tend to
be either producer- or customer-driven. Producer-driven organizations are
motivated by their own internal needs rather than by the needs of their cus-
tomers. They do not perceive their co-workers or clients as the final judges of
the goods or services they produce. The problem of achieving a customer fo-
cus is complicated in the public sector because of its complex web of bosses,
including public and political executives, legislatures, regulatory bodies, and
public boards, which focuses attention upward and internally rather than
downward and outward toward clients. Public organizations are strongly in-
fluenced by actors "up the line" in ways that differ from private institutions.
This upward tug makes achieving client-driven organizations more problem-
atic in the public sector. However, with the loss of oligopoly power and the

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 6 Camnevale, Camnevale

intensification of competition, private employers have had to learn more

about their customers' wants and needs lest they lose them to competitors.
Current experimentation with market mechanisms and the clamor for
"choice" are attempts to introduce a similar dynamic into public organiza-
tions. Less controversial approaches, like those that constitute experiments
with TQM, tend to utilize technologies and processes that involve citizens,
develop feedback mechanisms that link them to the organization, and reorga-
nize delivery around their needs. The point is that public organizations are
demonstrating that they can be more sensitive to both employee and client
preferences "down the line" despite the consequential differences in the reali-
ties of their unique work circumstances.
Timeliness. Contemporary institutions and their employees are involved
in several successive races against the clock. The first event is the develop-
ment of innovations. The second contest is the competition to move the inno-
vation off the drawing board and into the hands of users. The third contest is
the race up the learning curve while making continuous improvements in the
original innovation. The final challenge is to capture and use knowledge accu-
mulated to develop further innovations (Flynn, 1989; Berger, 1989; Womack,
1989; Office of Technology Assessment, 1988; Stalk, 1988; Blackburn, 1991;
Hout and Stalk, 1990; Peters, 1990).
Time-based competition, and the other demands, challenge both public
and private organizations to expedite learning processes in organizations.
Ultimately, the lion's share of competitive advantage comes from learning at
work. It is a commonplace finding among economists that only 40 percent of
performance improvement results from direct investment in such things as
educated workers and new technology. The remaining 60 percent of perfor-
mance improvement comes from innovations and improvements in the way
human and technical capital is utilized on the job (Denison, 1974; Baumol,
Blackman, and Wolfe, 1989). This means that 40 percent of competitive im-
provements can be bought, but 60 percent have to be learned in the world of
work. Most new learning of consequence occurs in the process of actually
making the product or delivering the service and interacting with customers.
As a result, a substantial share of learning by doing occurs down the line at the
point of production or service delivery, and at the interface with the final con-
sumer. Stated differently, the importance of "learning by doing" at work con-
fers a competitive edge on organizations that are structured to capture and
utilize bottom-up knowledge. The challenge for the public service organiza-
tion is to utilize the on-the-job experience of all of its employees. This is not
just a private economy issue. Public employees also have innovative ideas for
improving services. The difficulty is the same in both sectors: how to maneu-
ver imaginative concepts through the thicket of stifling roles, rules, and pro-
cedures that still characterize the vast majority of organizations.
There is evidence of mounting pressure for improved performance from
public organizations. Public education provides a prime example of the pen-

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Public Administration and the Evolving World of Work 7

etration of modem performance standards in the government secto

variety, customization, convenience, and speed have joined access as the
principal standards of excellence in American education. In many states edu-
cation hierarchies are being collapsed, and resources, autonomy, and new
flexible technologies are being driven into the classroom in order to meet the
new performance standards. Reformers in individual states and at the federal
level also are struggling with measures of educational outcomes that articulate
and measure the new outcome standards.
It is a monumental task for the education delivery system to reinvent itself
along the lines of the new performance ideals that emphasize less top-down
control and more involvement from employees, students, and citizens.
"School-based management" experiments in New York City; Chicago; Roch-
ester, N.Y.; Los Angeles; Denver; and Dade County, Fla., push autonomy and
resources toward the point of service delivery and incorporate the belief that
parents, teachers, and local community residents know the needs of their
schools and students better than central office administrations, which, it is
believed, ultimately will result in more effective education. There have been
problems in implementation of this revolutionary concept-most notably
political dissension and a lack of managerial and consensus-building skills
among the new coproducers (Wilkerson, 1991; Celis, 1991). Still, these start-
up problems have not discouraged others from initiating similar programs.
An important question for public administrationists is whether bureau-
cratic organizations absolutely preclude opportunities for meeting new per-
formance measures. The answer is "No." Bureaucracy guarantees equality of
access and is a major achievement in both the public and private sectors. Bu-
reaucracy also realizes economies that reduce costs. Bureaucracy rationalizes
work; the integrating, engineering knowledge it represents does have its
place. Finally, some measure of formalization and standardization, key fea-
tures of bureaucratic organizations, are critical performance standards in
their own right in an era in which consumers demand consistent and reliable
treatment from government institutions. The problem arises when bureau-
cracies are not configured to address the internal-external contingencies
found in their operating milieu. The real question is what type of bureaucracy
is appropriate given certain situational elements such as the nature of the
technical system, the extent of stability of the external environment, and the
character of the work force. There are various forms of bureaucratic design
that are friendly to the idea of decentralization and enhanced flexibility at the
point of production (Mintzberg, 1981). These forms can accommodate nec-
essary links between strategic choice and organizational structure. In other
words, bureaucratic structures not only evidence valuable characteristics but
do not foreclose opportunities to meet changing performance criteria in the
evolving world of work.
In every structural configuration, the processes of adaptation to unfold-
ing performance measures require a focus on human capital development.

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 8 Carnevale, Carnevale

Skills

New performance standards require broader and deeper skills, especially for
nonsupervisory employees. Quality is a case in point. In order to meet quality
standards, everyone needs a solid grounding in the three R's and substantial
occupational preparation. But the basics are not enough anymore. Everyone
knows people with sound preparation in the basics who do shoddy work. Ul-
timately, quality requires the ability to take responsibility for more than one's
job assignment or work effort. Quality requires the ability to take responsibil-
ity for the final product or service. At a minimum, the ability to take respon-
sibility requires a set of self-management skills including self-esteem,
motivation, and goal setting. Taking responsibility for final products and
services also requires individuals to know how to influence others and to
work effectively in groups and with clients. This means that employees need
skills in influencing others, interpersonal relationships, negotiation, team-
work, organizational effectiveness, leadership, and communication (A. P.
Camevale, Gainer, and Meltzer, 1990).
Competitive standards other than quality require new skills as well. The
ability to handle variety, to customize, and to provide timely responses re-
quires adaptable employees who can learn, problem solve, and think cre-
atively. The ability to provide convenience for consumers requires the full
range of self-management, communication, adaptability, and interpersonal
skills. (See Figure 2.)
The new skill set is required for all workers-not only for those in the
upper echelons, but for those down the line where continuous improvements
in meeting new standards are essential as products are made, services deliv-
ered, and customers served.
Executives and managers also need a new mix of competencies to deal
with the changing world of work. The recently issued Report of the Task Force
on Executive and Management Development (1990), written by the U.S. Office
of Personnel Management (OPM), lists several. Among those that directly
address environmental change, organizational and sector interdependencies,
and human capital development requirements of the new economy are: (1)
the ability to work in climates of remarkable uncertainty and change; (2) the

Figure 2. New Skill Requirements

The academic basics Reading, writing, computation

Self-management skills Self-esteem, goal setting, motivation, employability, an
career development
Social skills Interpersonal, negotiation, and teamwork
Communication skills Listening and oral communication
Influencing skills Organizational effectiveness and leadership

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Public Administration and the Evolving World of Work 9

ability to use a wide range of skills; (3) the ability to form partnersh
with participative management, and to engage in peer collaboration; (4) hav-
ing a sensitivity to changing technology; (5) possessing knowledge of organi-
zational roles and the work environment; (6) exhibiting brokerage and
negotiation skills in working with other organizations; and (7) being sup-
portive of staff development (U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 1990,
pp. 2-3).
The emerging workplace is increasingly appreciated as a learning envi-
ronment where high performance depends on fully utilizing the skills of ev-
eryone. What is required are both "lower-level learning," which means
learning to repeat past behaviors and detecting and correcting errors within a
given system of previously established rules, and "higher-level learning,"
which involves the capacity to understand when central norms, frames of ref-
erence, and basic assumptions need to be changed (Fiol and Lyles, 1985). It is
the difference between "single loop" and "double loop" learning (Argyris and
Schon, 1978). Line workers are given greater "scope of action" (D. G.
Carnevale, 1992a) in such systems and the role of managers is not just to give
orders but to manage the learning process. Managers are pivotal in the design
of work processes and training for formal and informal skill acquisition. They
also serve as listening posts and important conduits in the accumulation of
new organizational learning that is captured at the point of production or ser-
vice delivery, and in interaction with customers.
Few public institutions at the federal, state, or local level have made hu-
man capital development a high priority in their own organizations. While
there are encouraging changes currently underway, recently published data
estimate, for example, that the federal government spends about 0.8 percent
of total payroll on training as compared with progressive firms that spend
considerably more on their human assets. Nationwide private employers ex-
pend more than 1 percent of payroll on training. Individual employers expend
much more. Motorola expends almost 3 percent of its total payroll on train-
ing. IBM and Federal Express spend almost twice that amount. In France and
Australia employers have to invest at least 1 percent of payroll on training or
pay the residual as a tax to a national training fund.
Public agencies in the United States have been criticized for not having
strategic plans for training and development and linking such designs to long-
term organizational goals (National Commission on the Public Service,
1989). In general, it is fair to say that, in the recent past, government at all lev-
els has been helping the corporate sector address its human capital needs
while ignoring its own (Katz, 1990; McGregor, 1990). This is not the result of
a lack of strategic vision nor ignorance of the truth that human capital devel-
opment matters. Rather, there is a persistent set of paradoxes and obstacles
evident in the public domain that frustrate upgrading the skills of public
employees. While many qualify as the "usual suspects," they are no less
challenging.

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 10 Carnevale, Carnevale

Enduring Problems in Developing Public Human Capital

A number of management innovations, founded on developing and exploit-

ing human capital, have come and gone in public organizations over the years.
These include Rucker, Scanlon, and Improshare plans, quality of work life
(QWL) initiatives, sociotechnical systems, job redesign and enrichment
methods, a wide variety of organizational development (OD) interventions,
quality circles, management-by-objectives (MBO), and, most recently, TQM.
Nearly all of these first found expression in the private sector and then
worked their way into public practice. At the heart of these management tech-
nologies is a belief that it is the quality of human systems that ultimately drives
productivity in organizations. Each framework, in its own way, has attempted
to increase the opportunity for employees to increase and employ their know-
how for productive purposes by enlarging their participation in the design
and operation of work processes. In the public case, administrators have faced
considerable challenges in their efforts to develop their human capital base.
Some of these difficulties are common across sectors. Others, however, are
the result of peculiar operational realities evident in the public domain.
First, upskilling employees is done so that they can exercise the kind of
discretion called for in every management innovation for the past fifty years.
Yet, the paradox is that many managers, and the public itself, fear the exercise
of much discretion by unelected bureaucrats. Therefore, as Kelman notes in
his contribution to a symposium, the more workers are enabled, the more
likely is the tendency for a countervailing force to awaken that relies exten-
sively on rules in the management of public organizations (Dilulio, Kelman,
Foreman, Katzmann, and Nivola, 1991).
Second, one of the principal aims of increasing the human capacity of
public employees is to improve the quality of services. However, there is al-
most no meaningful relationship between how the customers of public orga-
nizations experience service delivery and their attitudes about government. In
other words, most individuals have positive interactions with government
officials but do not generalize positively from these events (Katz, Gutek,
Kahn, and Barton, 1975). It is difficult to encourage greater investment in cul-
tivating skills when the payoffs are much less reliable in the public sector than
in the private sector in terms of customer satisfaction (Swiss, 1992).
Third, a consistent factor associated with every new management method
is the importance of leadership in facilitating positive change in public orga-
nizations. The problem is that many elected officials have little incentive to
campaign on "good government" initiatives like human capital development
when they believe they can make more political capital by simply attacking
the very governments they hope to lead (Rainey, 199 1). Worse yet, the kind of
human capital investment necessary to make public service a rewarding ca-
reer is intentionally frustrated by some politicians, who have no real interest
in employee excellence, and who even fear it for ideological reasons

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Public Administration and the Evolving World of Work 1 1

(Heilemann, 1990). Such sustained assaults on the public service "discourage

recruitment and retention of the most able public servants" (Holzer and
Rabin, 1987, p. 7); no amount of human capital development can be expected
to overcome the corrosive effects of such behaviors.
Fourth, at the center of all management modernization schemes that sup-
port human capital development is an increased measure of trust in the abil-
ity of employees to make greater contributions to organizational performance
if provided with the necessary skills and ability to use them (see, for example,
McGregor, 1990; Likert, 1961; Ouchi, 1981). The problem is that civil service
systems view human nature in low trust terms and are managed accordingly
(Thayer, 1978; D. G. Carnevale, 1992b). The underlying thrust of most pub-
lic human resource systems needs to be "completely refocused" if quality is to
be achieved (Hyde, 1992, p. 33).
Fifth, as discussed previously, public managers have less money to spend
on human capital development than do private executives. In both sectors,
training and development activities must overcome the perception that they
are "soft," a false perception that regularly leads to their being trimmed at ev-
ery opportunity. In the private sector, efforts are being made to measure the
return on investment of human capital development. It is a difficult, complex
undertaking. In the public sector, it is an even more daunting problem, given
that government institutions tend to be absorbed by process rather than re-
sults, conflicting values and multidimensional, often intangible products that
defy measurement (Kee and Black, 1985; Downs and Larkey, 1986).
Sixth, the influence of human capital development activities on organiza-
tional performance must be evaluated over the long term. Public political ex-
ecutives, who might have a profound effect on strategic decisions involving
human capital development, come and go at an alarming rate. There is a per-
ception that, because of their short time horizons, top public executives are
pushed toward a more external political role and pay less attention to internal
management considerations (Rainey, 1991). Building internal capacity for
the long term does not qualify as a priority under such circumstances.
In summary, there are a set of contextual realities in the public domain
that work against human capital improvement of the kind necessary to ad-
dress the expanding set of organizational performance standards emerging in
organizations. They can be summarized as constituting a difficult and non-
supportive political environment (Wooldridge, 1991-1992). They are persis-
tent, but not impossible to overcome (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992).

Conclusion

The driving force for change in private sector performance arose from the
competitiveness challenge. The need for change arises in the public sector
because citizens are increasingly likely to insist upon similar performance
standards in both government and business. The quality of life of the nation

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 12 Carnevale, Carnevale

depends upon a highly qualified public work force. Government must be

competent in its own right while enabling private production at the same time.
America's public institutions have been extraordinarily successful in ex-
tending access to public goods and services and in regulating the harmful ef-
fects of private production. But there are still too many people who remain
unserved, and regulatory policies continue to be needed to control the abuse
of monopoly power, protect public health and safety, safeguard and inform
consumers, and ensure environmental quality. Indeed, the provision of access
and stern vigilance alone are no longer sufficient. The nation cannot move
forward hobbled by a public work force that is not of the highest caliber.
The task is to rebuild the human capacity of public organizations. When
this challenge is met, it makes government more efficient and effective in its
activities and more credible and able to perform its cultural, political, and
economic mission in general. Government also becomes more responsive and
accountable to citizens to the extent it adopts the emphasis on building capa-
bility at the point of service and involving the public in the design and deliv-
ery of public services. Moreover, social and economic equity is enhanced
where skills are upgraded and workplaces made more democratic, giving
people a real chance to be part of the economic system. Upward mobility de-
pends more and more on having valuable skills.
Finally, emerging organizational norms tend to serve the participatory
values of the polity as well. A literate, skilled work force with a real stake in the
future life of the nation is more likely to participate in the political system than
those who do not have a sense of personal efficacy that comes with being pro-
ductive and valued.

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Anthony P. Carnevale is president of the Institutefor Workplace Learning, American Society

for Training and Development.

David G. Carnevale is assistantprofessor of labor relations and organizational behavior in the

Department of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma.

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