| Review of: | Measuring the Performance of the Hollow State by David G. Frederickson, H. George Frederickson Challenging the Performance Movement: Accountability, Complexity and Democratic Values by Beryl A. Radin |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Frank Anechiarico |
| Reviewed in: | Public Administration Review |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 67, Issue 04, Pages 783-786 |
Book Reviews: The New Public Management at Middle Age: Critiques of the Performance Movement
Beryl Radin, scholar in residence in the School of Public Affairs at American University, is the Georgetown University Press editor for a series on "Public Management and Change." H. George Frederickson serves on the editorial board for the series, as do the authors of the previous two works in the series: Norma M. Riccucci, author of
The quest for and criticism of measures of public performance are traditional parts of public administration. The fact that the books by Radin and the Fredericksons have something to criticize-performance measurement and management-is itself a milestone. Neither of the books rejects the notions of performance measurement and management. Instead, both provide trenchant criticisms of a movement that has, in some cases, moved too fast, selected the wrong targets, or simply overreached. In addition to providing a basis for considering the results of administrative action, these books verify the importance of performance measurement and management.
Not all of their findings are of equal weight. However, both works consider the emphasis on performance and mission specification of the New Public Management (NPM). They engage in a serious discussion of the applicability and real and potential shortcomings of NPM reforms. This is not to say that either book offers less than a strong critique of the rigidity of the Government Results and Performance Act (GPRA) of 1993 or the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), which was developed by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and deployed in stages starting in fiscal year 2004. The Fredericksons do an excellent job of indicating how these and other performance measures and management tools have influenced the work of representative agencies in the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services. They also show, as do Radin and the earlier books in the series, how the political and structural position of an agency necessarily influences its response to the requisites of performance management.
These critiques are comparable in their importance to the work of post-Progressive Era scholars, who found the ideal of separating politics and administration to be an ideology unsustained by observation. Though Radin and the Fredericksons take different approaches, their works follow and refine the critique advanced a generation ago by public choice theorists, who derided measures of government efficiency that are not linked to definable outcome measures. For instance, one of the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has been widespread "teaching to the test." Improvements in scores, Radin observes, are taken as outcomes, but they may not be measuring even medium-term learning. She argues that reorganizing American education in the name of performance management, based on the No Child Left Behind tests, will create a system whose output is children who are attaining acceptable scores on the test. Innovation and variation in American public education will surely erode, as will the professional discretion of teachers and education program and school administrators (Radin 2006, 84-86).
One theme that runs through both books and is particularly emphasized by Radin is the aging of the NPM. Of course, each movement in turn, from the Progressives forward, has lost its edge and coherence as elements have been absorbed by fields within public administration. However, if we consider the changes and shifts in public administration scholarship since the early 20th century as a continuum, as Radin invites us to do, we find several factors prominently emphasized.
In a critique of the received wisdom of public administration that was a precursor to the performance movement, Vincent Ostrom argued that "[p]roducer efficiency in the absence of consumer utility is without economic meaning" (1973, 62). The popularization of the perspective of citizens as consumers and governments as producers came 20 years later in the work of David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (1992), who shared a great many assumptions with Ostrom about the burden of bureaucracy and the rationality of the citizen-consumer. The stream of books that followed the plain-language critique of public administration by Osborne and Gaebler, together with the adoption of the "new" approach by the Clinton-Gore administration, with Vice President Al Gore in charge of the National Performance Review, prompted scholars such as Donald F. Kettl to say, "No executive branch reform in the twentieth century-indeed, perhaps in the Constitution's 210 years-has enjoyed such high-level attention over such a broad range of activities for such a long period of time" (1998, v). Though the NPM had been a part of scholarly discourse since several years after Ostrom wrote, it entered public discourse with the National Performance Review and has had an impact on virtually every aspect of government since.
The pervasive nature of the NPM is one of the things that bother Radin. Even more troubling for her is how the aging process has turned a reform into a bureaucracy in which a one-size-fits-all bias shapes performance management. This is particularly true for programs in complex political environments, programs with little political support, and programs that are required to find outcomes that are inappropriate to their missions. Indeed, she quotes another observer who finds that the reliance of the public choice approach on policy markets is "usually imagined rather than real" (Radin 2006, 226, quoting Gregory 2001, 43).
The Fredericksons make similar points in their in-depth study of the effects of performance management on five agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Each of the studies is a carefully drawn consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the measure required by the GPRA and PART. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), working almost entirely with third-party grantees, adapted the newly required measures to its environment:
NIH has chosen to respond to the imperatives of GPRA and performance measurement by challenging the assumption that performance management must always by quantitative. The NIH use of narrative "science advances," "science capsules," and "stories of discovery" not only is a successful approach to performance measurement but also seems to be particularly promising as a link between agency performance and agency appropriations. (114)
The Fredericksons reinforce Radin's idea that "one size cannot fit all" in performance measures in a chapter on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The quintessential regulatory agency shows clearly that outcomes may be subtle, if not completely elusive, when an agency's mission entails things
It is likely the case that the translation of performance measurement into legislation and bureaucratically administered "imperatives" has neglected some of the excellent work being done to improve regulatory measurement in several places, such as the New York City Mayor's Office of Operations. Regulatory agencies such as the city's Department of Buildings, a perennially inefficient and corrupt endeavor, have developed performance measures requiring the use of rapid reporting technology by inspectors in order to monitor both effectiveness and integrity. It is a work in progress, but the Buildings Department's surveys of architects, developers, engineers, and other stakeholders in the general public show a growing level of satisfaction with an agency that was once on Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's hit list in the 1930s. Furthermore, although Radin mentions the successful use of performance management in the New York City Police Department, in addition to the analysis of the program and the spread of this prototype by Dennis C. Smith (195-96), she does not consider whether this experience is a point in favor of this NPM technique but instead uses it as a segue to a critique of citizen evaluation of service (Smith and Bratton 2001).
Radin discovers problems similar to those confronting the Buildings Department in her analysis of the World Bank. The key challenge of integrity in donee/debtor nations makes the problem of accountability very difficult to sort out. Is a World Bank project performing effectively if it is completed and a quarter of the money is taken as "access payments"? (214-15). The political climate in many countries seems to be a serious impediment to the wider use of performance management.
Overall, political structure and environment are crucial factors in the critiques of performance measurement and management in both books. Radin emphasizes the importance of agency leadership in the context of professional norms and the bureaucratic nature of measurement requirements. That is, the position of agency leaders may well make a difference in whether measures are used to begin with and how measures are defined. Because she argues that performance measures have become part of bureaucratic routine, it follows that leaders invested in that routine will make the sorts of errors that her critique of bureaucratic performance measures details. Her criticism of one-size-fits-all measures may be read as a nuanced, well-illustrated discussion of bureaucratic pathology. David and H. George Frederickson, as their title indicates, argue that the "hollow state" of third-party service providers complicates measurement, as much public work is being done by contractors or state and local political units (where outsourcing is, in part, a reaction to bureaucratic pathology).
The notion that contracts, bureaucracy, and corruption impede or prevent performance measurement is answered, at least in part, by several observations that the authors make. Radin mentions the World Bank's Public Sector Management Group, which "emphasizes administrative reform, decentralization, and anticorruption activities" (216). The Fredericksons cite the 1978 Federal Inspector General Act as part of an attempt to increase efficiency by reducing both waste and spending. It might be noted that the 1978 act included a performance assessment role for inspectors general that has all but fallen away. The point that both books are moving toward is that the assessment of management and integrity needs to be unified if measures are to have legitimacy and if now-neglected agency operations are to be included in the measures.
Integrity, in the sense that engineers use the term-performance and durability-encompasses a great deal more than anticorruption policy. For example, the use of independent private sector inspectors general (IPSIG) at Ground Zero to supervise the companies granted contracts to clear the World Trade Center site indicates how the hollow state may address the critique of bureaucratic pathologies that is implicit in both books, but only if those doing the public's work outside of government are monitored. The way in which the companies selected to do the work at Ground Zero were treated begins to answer the misgivings that Radin and the Fredericksons express.
Two of the four companies had been barred from contracting with New York City and the federal government because of fraud convictions and pending investigations. However, all had a reputation for excellent and rapid work. After preclearance by the city's Department of Investigation, existing legal units and security firms deployed squads of as many as 40 engineers, forensic accountants, investigators, and contract lawyers to permeate and monitor all aspects of each contractor's work. IPSIGs, now in use in several U.S. jurisdictions and in several places in Europe, are paid by the contractor, for whom they may work only once, and report to both the government and the contractor. IPSIGs not only prevent fraud, waste, and abuse, but also they consult with the contractor on how to comply with the rules and complete the job efficiently.
Initial misgivings by the third parties (IPSIGs have been imposed on vendors, charities, and conventional contractors) seemed to disappear when they recognized the enhancement to their reputation and the increased access to public contractors that IPSIGs garner. IPSIGs are also examples of performance management in the hollow state whereby what is left of the public sector conjoins integrity and effectiveness, bypasses public bureaucracy, and uses one third party to determine the effectiveness (integrity) of another.
Since the enormous and sensitive job of clearing the World Trade Center site was completed-in less than what were considered realistic time and budget expectations-there has been a multiyear wrangle over the use of the site, verifying the important points about political structure and environment made by both books. The city, state, and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey went back to bureaucratic business as usual (no surrogate for IPSIGs in play), and the process quickly became bogged down in the pursuit of a variety of goals that were important to protect agency turf but had little to do with rebuilding the site. An excellent example of this was the yearlong bickering over the control of the architectural design. The designs were in place fairly quickly, but the wrangle that defeated effective performance was the conflict over who would implement the design (Goldberger 2004). These books are valuable contributions to our understanding of the problems of performance measurement and management. They ought to be read by practitioners and scholars alike. What they do not do-as it would require a second volume in each case-is show us how the theoretical development of public administration indicates ways to mitigate or avoid completely the miscues and make-work of bureaucratic effectiveness enforcement (the GPRA and PART, for instance).
As for the other two books in the series, both Rosenbloom and McCurdy and Riccucci also are concerned with the way in which political structure and environment influence management. Rosenbloom and McCurdy make a point similar to the Fredericksons when they argue that current political conditions make it necessary to restate Dwight Waldo's famous rubric, "the administrative state," as the "neoadministrative state." This re-labeling indicates that Rosenbloom and McCurdy, like Radin and the Fredericksons, recognize the need to move away from one-size-fits-all bureaucratic approaches to effectiveness. In doing so, Rosenbloom and McCurdy indicate the goals of the next stage of administrative reform: "To maintain popular and legislative support, those conducting the public's business must be perceived as committed to and capable of attaining efficiency, but within the broader context of democratic values that culturally diverse citizens cherish" (2006, 196-97). This prescription is another way of stating the broad notion of integrity proposed here.
A necessary addition to this commentary on modern management is Riccucci's analysis of street-level bureaucrats in the aftermath of welfare reform. Her close reading of the job of caseworkers brings professional norms back to the center of the debate about public management, which is where the Progressives wanted ethics to be. Her argument is that the work and dedication of social workers has changed little at the frontlines despite welfare reform. In focusing on ethics, Riccucci points up crucial, nonstandard elements of performance that one-size solutions such as the GPRA and PART cannot take into account. The dedication and knowledge of professionals who retain the public service ethic is clearly something that should be built into management strategies, nurtured, and disseminated.
Concern about the definition and advancement of the public service ethic, from a rich variety of perspectives, is perhaps the broadest, if often implied, concern of the authors in the Georgetown series on Public Management and Change. The political construction of performance management is chastened by the analyses of Radin, the Fredericksons, and others in the series. The work needed to reconstruct performance management is indicated in each book. The deployment of ethics and a broad notion of integrity are places to start. However, without the signposts for change that we get from these two timely and important books, we would be left with the bureaucratic pathologies that characterize middle-aged reforms, including the New Public Management.