Radical ideas become problematic, however, when they are based on powerful wording, but little consideration of the practicalities of implementing the idea or its possible consequences. For a political vision to be meaningful, it has to be possible to do it, to put it in practice, too. That means having a notion for how it should be organized. Who should do what, when, with what mandate, and under what accountability? To answer those questions, we land right in the issue of public administration, which many consider to be the least sexy of all topics in politics (I know, I thought so once). However, the questions cannot be avoided for anyone who wants to do anything political.
It thus behooves those who want to change society to understand public administration and how it works. Those who don't will not be able to assess the potential consequences of moving a political vision from words to action.
Grid/Group Cultural Theory is very helpful for this type of work. It was developed to categorize different forms of bureaucracy based on their a) level of regulation and b) how socially coherent they are as a unit:
From Hood, Table 1.1(9) Four styles of public management
organization: Cultural theory applied, in Hood, C (2000) The Art of The
State: Culture, Rhetoric and Public Management, Oxford: Clarendon
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Group
(Social cohesion)
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Low
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High
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Grid
(Rule-boundedness)
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High
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The Fatalist Way
Low-co-operation, rule-bound approaches to organization.
Example: Atomized societies sunk in rigid routines.
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The Hierarchist Way
Socially cohesive, rule-bound approaches to organization.
Example: Stereotype [sic] military structure
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Low
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The Individualist Way
Competitive approach stressing negotiation and bargaining.
Example: Chicago-school doctrines of ‘government by
the market’ and their antecedents.
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The Egalitarian Way
High-participation structures in which every decision is ‘up for
grabs’.
Example: ‘Dark green’ doctrines of alternatives to
conventional bureaucracy.
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The four types of administration are:
The Hierarchist Way
This is the classic bureaucracy. It is top-down organized, has clear ranks with senior managers, middle managers, and frontline clerks and case officers who are supposed to act on orders. In political science, it's known as Weberian bureaucracy. The military is the most clear example of it, but it has been so popular that it has been the go-to model for how to structure a government agency since World War II, if not longer.It's good at decision-making and allocating responsibility. The buck stops in a clear location (the top) and the pyramid structure makes it easy to quickly take a decision and send an order down the ranks. It's bad at allowing for bottom-up impulses and flexibility for local needs. I.e. if the front-line case officers notice that the order makes little sense for conditions in their area, they have little recourse, and little chance of making their concerns heard in upper levels.
The Fatalist Way
This is the go-to model for catching cheaters. It's not necessarily as rigidly structured as Hierarchism, but builds on the assumption that the world is a hostile place and people are out to get you. For that reason, it introduces randomized controls to catch free-riders and rule-breakers and makes sure that the staff rotates so they can't form cliques that could undermine the top's control.Those randomized controls does make it a decent model for catching cheaters, as evidenced by its prolific use in, for example, traffic controls or by revenue agencies. But like Hierarchism, it's bad for flexibility and also tends to systematically destroy trust among the people involved, so it quickly stifles innovation ("what's the point?") and undermines cooperation ("too much work and risk if the others will just rip me off"). It's generally incapable of responding to rapidly changing conditions.
The Egalitarian Way
This is the classic communitarian way of management, where the objective is to eliminate the difference between producer and user entirely. It has been seen in a range of experiments by "alternative" communities for the last century, including, of course, hippies and deep green environmentalists. We saw similar attempts when the Occupy Wall Street wanted to eliminate the leadership cast. In short, the organization should be as flat as possible. Unlike the Hierarchist and Fatalist Ways, which are both top-down, this model is bottom-up, decentralizing decision-making to provide grassroots with much more power. Likewise, accountability is exercised through peer pressure. Versions of this model has been practiced in mainstream politics as well, and includes collaborative models that see public agencies partner with community groups - for instance law enforcement collaborating with the neighbourhood watch, or parent-school councils and so on.The strength of this model is that when decisions are made, they have strong buy-in or legitimacy from the membership. Among small groups of like-minded, it can thus work very well However, if the group fails to reach consensus or if factionalism develops, it can very quickly grind to a complete halt because the discussion never ends. As such, if there is disagreement, it can be very hard to get a decision made at all, and that has often been the Achilles heel that made Utopian community experiments come crashing down.
The Individualist Way
This is the classic free-market solution. The most recent incarnation that made a big impression and triggered a global reform wave was New Public Management (the implementation of which is a whole can of worms in itself, requiring a separate blog post). The idea is to use the free market to make the public administration more cost-effective and less burdened by red tape. "Let managers manage" and "let users vote with their feet" were two typical slogans for this management type. Like the Egalitarian Way, it is designed to have considerable space bottom-up flexibility. Vouchers or procurement could be used where the public sector bought services from professional service deliverers, and users would then pick the provider they felt most comfortable with. Thus, users have power over service delivery.It's good at presenting users with more than one type of service, and can work when there are plenty of service delivery producers who compete with each other for the user's favour. It doesn't work well when in-depth cooperation is needed, however, because the competitive nature of the model undermines stable networking.
What's the point of all this?
What, indeed, is the point of this theory? There are a couple of points, really. First, organizational theory scholars (the research field where this typology was developed) have shown that there is only a limited number of models that have been used to organize public agencies and what they do in history. There's just so many ways of doing things, in other words. Second, every organizational type has its strengths and weaknesses. There are good ways and bad ways of doing things, but there is no silver bullet, no magical formula, no one-size-fits-all solution. They are good at some things and bad at others, and the public management literature has a lot of material about when they succeed and fail. The difficulty, when implementing a policy, is to know which type of organization that actually can have a hope of delivering the desired outcome. Choosing a screw-driver when you need a hammer will set you up for failure. It's the same thing in politics. Unfortunately, very few pundits, activists or politicians seem to be aware of this - or at the very least they neglect to discuss how they want to achieve their goals.
In future posts, I will use these four types to evaluate political platforms on the left and the right in terms of what they imply about public administration and thus what effects they would have if carried out as actual politics.
