PADM 510 American Public University System Decision Making in Public Organization Paper Choose a public organization and describe its organizational cultur

PADM 510 American Public University System Decision Making in Public Organization Paper Choose a public organization and describe its organizational culture? Do not choose pharmaceuticals. How do they address decision making? How is ethical decision making best integrated into their administrative practice? How would the theories we have studied inform your discussion (attached references)?

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DOI 10.1007/s11115-013-0219-x
The Consequences of Conflict: An Evaluation of Racial
Disparity and Organizational Performance
Erin K. Melton
Published online: 14 February 2013
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract The study of public administration is based primarily on two schools of
thought; some theorists espousing political control with others supporting the inner
check. Heretofore, studies have failed to examine the effects of goal conflict on
relationships between political principals and bureaucratic agents. Using Texas
school districts, this analysis demonstrates that goal conflict has significant effects
on student performance. Goal conflict also influences relationships among school
boards, teachers, and school district populations. Overall, this study advances the
discipline in that it determines the ramifications of goal conflict for political principals, bureaucracies, and the public being served utilizing the most common form of
bureaucracy, school districts. The arguments and implications embedded in this
analysis speak to the age-old public administration question of how to reconcile
bureaucracy with democracy.
Keywords Goal conflict . Representation . Racial disparity . Organizational
performance
Introduction
According to Harold Lasswell (1936), politics is defined as the fundamental process
of deciding who gets what, when and how. The nature of politics can be, and is often
theoretically, likened to a game of strategic choices to achieve desired ends. The
relative possession of influence is of import when determining the outcome in a
struggle for power in any context. Influence can be distributed across multiple
“players” in a game, and therefore, does not necessarily produce a clear winner or
loser, but instead a situation wherein the leverage of a group or set of groups is
critical. In politics, there exist innumerable opportunities for “players” to succeed, but
E. K. Melton (*)
Department of Public Policy, University of Connecticut, 1800 Asylum Avenue, Library Building,
West Hartford, CT 06117, USA
e-mail: erin.melton@uconn.edu
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E.K. Melton
also to fail, according to desired goals. In situations of concentrated or diluted
influence among actors, what are the outcomes for a given policy area?
The nature of politics in the United States blurs the distinction between political
and administrative functions (Davis 1971; Meier 1993). In the area of public administration, it is assumed that the American bureaucratic system and the executive and
legislative branches engage in a “game” at multiple levels across policy areas. The
potentiality for the advancement of bureaucratic interests over congressional or
presidential ones is fathomable. When bureaucrats are successful in advancing their
own interests, what does this mean for the relationship between bureaucracy and
democracy as it relates to the American public?
The literature suggests two competing schools of thought in an effort to reconcile
the relationship between democratic practices and bureaucratic efficiency. One is the
idea of political control, a top-down approach that calls for congressional or presidential commandeering and oversight of the bureaucracy. Here, the bureaucracy is
assumed to observe the values of Congress or the president and consider such values
indications of public preferences in order to better serve the public. The idea is that
the public has elected these individuals so they must share some of their values or
preferences on certain issues. The competing idea introduces the concept of the inner
check. Here, bureaucrats are treated as information agents in understanding the values
of the public to better serve them. Bureaucratic interaction with the public at the
street-level allows for the bureaucrat to gauge the needs of the public and serve them
directly without the control or influence of an elected body. The question remains,
under certain conditions of goal conflict, what happens to the influence of political
actors versus bureaucrats? Additionally, when goal conflict exists, does it always
influence the actors involved?
The purpose of this paper is to answer the preceding research questions using a
common type of bureaucracy, namely, school districts. Heretofore, research on
student performance has ignored the consequences of goal dissension between the
school board and teachers. Using the theory of representative bureaucracy, this
analysis determines that goal conflict negatively affects school district performance
on standardized testing. The findings suggest goal conflict has deleterious effects on
overall student performance with differential effects for minority students in
particular.
Literature Review
Control of bureaucracy theory is an approach to public administration particularly
associated with matters of compliance or responsiveness. The central question of this
literature is: does the bureaucracy comply with the law or with preferences of law
makers and elected executives? To answer this question, control of bureaucracy
theorists accept some form of the politics-administration (or policy-administration)
dichotomy (Frederickson and Smith 2003).
The politics-administration dichotomy traces to the origins of modern public
administration. The dichotomy was broadly accepted in American public administration until the mid-1900s, when Dwight Waldo and Herbert Simon challenged the
dichotomy, each for different reasons (Waldo 1946; Simon 1947). To Waldo, all
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269
administrative acts were undoubtedly political at a fundamental level. For Simon, it
was difficult, if not impossible, to empirically unbundle politics from administration.
For some time after their contributions, the dichotomy was non-existent; however, its
viability reemerged and is now alive and well and found in control of bureaucracy
theory (Frederickson and Smith 2003). One of the most frequently used, contemporary approaches to control of the bureaucracy is principal-agent theory or, more
simply, agency theory.
Agency Theory
In the 1980s a framework emerged in an effort to understand the nature of the
bureaucracy. This framework, titled principal-agent theory was an attempt to theorize
about controlling the bureaucracy, an entity regarded as an unbridled behemoth
resistant to change and control (Mitnick 1975; Wood and Waterman 1994).
Agency theory explicitly assumed that elected officials (principals), such as the
president and members of Congress, had political incentives to control the bureaucracy
(agents). The applicability of this theory was supported with quantitative evidence.
Quantifiable outputs from bureaucracies were shown to covary consistently with the
changing preferences of the president, Congress, and courts. And overhead democracy
was shown to be alive and well in the United States (Wood and Waterman 1994).
Agency theory posits that the relationship between elected leaders and non-elected
bureaucracies is hierarchical. This alludes to the top-down nature of the perspective in
that values, demands, and preferences are filtered from Congress or the president to
the bureaucracy. Charles Perrow (1986) furthered this notion by stating that the
relationship of the bureaucracy to the public is similar to the concept of contracts.
Bureaucracies are bound by contract to serve law and elected institutions. Concerning
this conceptualization of the bureaucracy, Perrow (1986) wrote, “In its simplest form,
agency theory assumes that social life is a series of contracts. Conventionally, one
member, the ‘buyer’ of the goods or services, is designated the ‘principal’, and the
other, who provides the goods or service, is the ‘agent’–hence the term ‘agency
theory’. The principal-agent relationship is governed by a contract specifying what
the agent should do and what the principal must do in return.”
The principal seeks to manipulate and shape the behavior of the agent to perform
work in a manner consistent with the principal’s preferences. The ‘contractual’
agreement is one tool for accomplishing this end. However, difficulty ensues when
disjunctures develop between the interests of politicians (principals) and the bureaucracy (agents). This is problematic for two reasons: 1) bureaucracies develop separate
interests through institutionalization and changing external relationships, although
bureaucratic interests may in fact be divergent from politicians’ interests from the
start; and 2) it is impossible to construct contractual agreements that encompass the
range of contingencies between the political principal and the bureaucracy. Thus, a
potentially confrontational setting develops in which the goals and objectives of
principals and those of agents are often at odds (Wood and Waterman 1994).
Agency theory posits a dynamic process of continual interaction between principals
and agents (i.e., evolving, persistent exchange over time). Throughout this process,
bureaucracies have distinct informational and expertise advantages over politicians and
elected officials. As a result, the pendulum shifts allowing for bureaucrats to have a
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E.K. Melton
considerable amount of leverage and power and thus manipulation over politicians and
processes for political gain. “The key question for agency theory, then, is how politicians
vested with contemporaneous legitimacy can overcome these uncertainties and the
bureaucratic tendency to shirk” (Wood and Waterman 1994).
It is from these uncertainties of possible ‘shirking’ that the concept of political control
is derived. According to agency theory, the way to remedy the potential consequences of
uncertain bureaucratic behavior is to exert control over bureaucracy using monitoring
mechanisms and incentives. This can be done because elected principals in fact create
bureaucracies. They design bureaucracies with various incentive structures to facilitate
effective control (McCubbins et al. 1989). The literature on political control is extensive;
the following section briefly discusses that literature.
Political Control
According to one view, the bureaucracy operates with considerable independence
from elected representatives. Legislators are unable or unwilling to perform meaningful oversight (Niskanen 1971; Dodd and Schott 1979) and the president, although
perhaps effective on a few selected issues, faces severe constraints of power and
resources in controlling his subordinates (Calvert et al. 1989). On the other hand, a
host of studies argue that the decisions of federal agencies directly reflect the wishes
of elected officials in Congress and the White House (Arnold 1979; Fiorina 1981;
Moe 1985; Calvert et al. 1989). In this view, elected officials gain leverage over
bureaucrats through informal oversight, using tools such as decentralized information
gathering (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984; Weingast 1984; Aberbach 1987) and
carefully structured administrative procedures (McCubbins 1985; McCubbins et al.
1989) to guarantee that the relevant legislative constituents are well served.
In sum, the concept of political control is the idea that political officials, such as
Congress or the president, should regulate the actions of the bureaucracy in an effort
to enforce Congressional or presidential preferences or bureaucratic efficiency. As
agency theory suggests, it is the goal of the principal to further its interests through
the actions of the agent it controls. Agency theories, and thus political control
theories, assume attitude incongruence or goal conflict, wherein it is the responsibility
of the principal to ensure that the agent remains aligned with the principal’s desired
ends. The political control as well as principal-agent literature suggests that such
control could potentially rectify the lacuna between bureaucracy and democracy in
that the values and preferences of elected officials are representations of the values
and preferences of the public.
“The Inner Check”
Contrary to the top-down approach of political control, proponents of the inner check
argue that bureaucrats themselves should directly observe the values and preferences
of the public to better serve them. Scholars arguing for the validity of the inner check
contend that street-level bureaucrats are able to better gauge the needs of their
constituencies as a result of both consistent interaction and closeness in proximity.
This approach frequently does not include the role of the governing political entity,
rather it includes the values and preferences of the bureaucrat or agency itself as an
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271
approach toward modeling bureaucratic outcomes and agency performance. The
inner check also suggests that there are internal checks within the agency that foster
positive outcomes for the public. In other words, such checks have the potential to
reconcile bureaucracy with democratic practices.
Instead of being an explicit concept or terminology found in the extant literature,
the idea of the inner check is conceptualized in multiple ways. For example, Larry
Terry (2003) seeks to legitimate the exercise of bureaucratic leadership. By evaluating
literature from legal, managerial, and institutional perspectives, he suggests that
legitimacy is a prerequisite for the reconciliation of bureaucratic leadership with
democratic governance. Terry offers a normative theory of bureaucratic leadership
that gives administrative executives an active and legitimate leadership role in
governance. His coined term, administrative conservatorship, stems from the argument that administrative executives are entrusted with the responsibility of preserving
the integrity of public bureaucracies and, in turn, the values and traditions of the
American constitutional regime.
Commonly noted in the literature following the theoretical development of the
inner check is research grounded in the theory of representative bureaucracy. The
theory proposes that a bureaucracy reflecting the diversity of the community it serves
is more likely to respond to the interests of all groups when making policy decisions
(Krislov 1974; Selden 1997; Frederickson and Smith 2003). Representative bureaucracy is the foundation upon which the current theoretical argument is built; it is
discussed in the next section.
Theoretical Argument
Representative Bureaucracy
In an explicit attempt to address the central problem of democratic administrative
theory, Dwight Waldo (1952) raised the following question: How might a theory that
embraces the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of bureaucracy be reconciled with
the seemingly contradictory egalitarian and ultimately inefficient values of democracy? The theory of representative bureaucracy responds by legitimating the political
power of the bureaucracy in the context of democratic values. If bureaucracies are
sensitive to a diversity of interests, and such interests are represented in bureaucratic
decisions and behavior, the argument is that bureaucracy itself can be considered a
representative institution (Frederickson and Smith 2003).
The first study to systematically examine the issue of public work force representation was conducted by J. Donald Kingsley (1944) where he posed the argument that
civil service should reflect the characteristics of the ruling social class “because the
civil service must be sympathetic to the concerns of the dominant political leadership” (Selden 1997). Kingsley’s work was grounded on the notion that the representativeness of the public bureaucracy should be measured in terms of social class.
In like manner to Kingsley, Meier (1975) focused on the American civil service,
but deviated in that he measured bureaucratic responsiveness using multiple factors
such as: age, father’s occupation, region of birth, and education. Contemporary
scholars of representative bureaucracy address racial, ethnic, and gender-based
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E.K. Melton
representativeness (Selden 1997) of the American bureaucracy for two reasons. The
first reason suggests that the literature had simply failed to incorporate these types of
representation in previous studies. The second and more systematic reason is the
under-representation of certain racial and ethnic groups as well as women in bureaucracies, thereby, creating potential for these groups to be disproportionately affected
by bureaucratic decision-making.
The existing literature makes apparent the linkage between passive and active
representation. This linkage suggests that passive representation, or the extent to
which a bureaucracy employs people of diverse demographic backgrounds, leads to
active representation, or the advocacy or pursuit of policies reflecting the interests and
desires of those people (Mosher 1982; Meier and Stewart 1992; Meier 1993; Selden
1997). Establishing a representative bureaucracy is not arduous in and of itself, but
what are the implications of having this type of agency? Does it translate into a better
relationship between bureaucratic decision-making and democratic values? More
importantly, is the public better served by an agency that represents the diversity of
its constituency?
Sally Selden (1997), in her work on representative bureaucracy, suggests that there
are numerous benefits of establishing such an agency. First, a bureaucracy that reflects
the diversity of the general population implies a symbolic commitment of equal access
to power (Mosher 1982; Gallas 1985; Wise 1990; Meier 1993). Guinier (1994) maintains that the symbolic role results from both the personal characteristics of distinctive
group members, with the assumption that because of these characteristics, the bureaucracy has had experiences in common with other members of that group. Second, and of
greatest import to this study, is the idea that a representative bureaucracy is likely to
influence what issues are placed on the political agenda (Kingdon 1984; Guy 1992).
Without a diversity of interests, values, and preferences in an administrative body,
certain interests or groups might be overlooked. A bureaucracy that reflects the demographic composition of society will incorporate a greater spectrum of opinions and
preferences into the agenda-setting and decision-making processes, and, as a result,
should be more responsive to those groups (Kranz 1976). Lastly, several scholars also
suggest that previously underrepresented groups will be more closely bound to the
agency as their representation increases within that agency. Such increases in representation likely lead to greater levels of cooperation with bureaucratic agencies. Potential
clients or the public in general, may be more apt to participate in government programs
when they perceive identification with members of the agency (Hadwiger 1973).
This paper uses the theory of representative bureaucracy to examine consequences of
goal conflict in school districts. When a school district does not have characteristics
constituting a representative bureaucracy for its respective constituency, it is conceivable
that the needs of certain groups may be omitted due to differences in values and
preferences (i.e., goal conflict). If goal conflict exists, what becomes of the relationship
between the political principal (school board) and the bureaucracy (teachers)? School
districts are an optimal venue to analyze the preceding empirical questions.
The Case for School Districts
According to Meier and O’Toole (2006), the theory of bureaucratic representation
provides an attractive alternative to the principal-agent framework because it can
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273
offer predictions about the most crucial question in the political control puzzle: how
the bureaucracy would act in the absence of political pressures. The focus of this
research is predicated on that exact tenet, but is also a natural extension. In instances
of goal conflict, what ha…
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