How effective are public managers as they seek to influence the efforts of
public organizations to deliver policy outputs and outcomes? How, and how
much, is management related to public program performance? What aspects
of management can be distinguished, and can their separable contributions
to performance be estimated? How domanagers deal with internal operations,
opportunities in the environment, and threats or shocks from outside the
organization? Can the networking behavior of managers and the networked
structures in which many public organizations sit shape policy results – for
good or ill?
In this book we address these salient questions – and more. Whereas in
an earlier volume (Meier and O’Toole 2006) we explored the relationship
between democratic governance systems and public bureaucracy via the
literatures of political science and public administration, and used empirical
analyses to sort through the issues, in this new book we put the politics-andadministration
theme to one side – mostly – to focus on management and
performance. This approach does not mean that we reconstruct some sort
of implicit politics/administration dichotomy. Indeed, the role that public
managers occupy includes some highly political elements, and some of our
work on management and performance demonstrates some explicitly political
patterns. It turns out, for instance, that managerial interactions with
external stakeholders shape the outcomes of their organizations in ways that
reflect the distribution of power in their settings. It is also the case, furthermore,
that maintaining personnel stability within the organizations we have
been studying provides particularly strong benefits for the least advantaged
clientele of the agencies. Public management certainly involves political
themes and potentially controversial outcomes. What is distinctive about
this volume, instead, is that our focus is directly on managers and how they
shape results.