Karen M. Hult

Governing Public Organizations: Politics, Structures, and Institutional Design.

Organizations and organization policy. Metaphors and models of organizations. Governance structures. Organizational decision settings: confronting uncertainty and controversy. Responding to uncertainty and controversy: the search for appropriate governance structures. The real world of organizations. Governance networks. Organizational policies and citizenship in organizations. The challenge of organizational design.

Right Turn?: Political Ideology in the Higher Civil Service, 1987-1994

Principal-agent models can justify political management of career officials, while at the same time predicting challenges to it, in part reflecting the different ideological goals of careerists and political appointees. Indeed, the “administrative presidency” strategies Ronald Reagan pursued anticipated and heightened such conflict through attempts to “politicize” the federal executive. Such strategies may help account for the findings of Aberbach and Rockman that the political views of the permanent bureaucracy moved to the right from 1986-1987 to 1991-1992. We extend their work, using data from mail surveys sent to senior careerists in 1987-1988 and 1993-1994 to test propositions about the responsiveness of senior careerists to political principals and the relationships between careerists and appointees. The findings underscore not only the importance of agency mission in explaining senior civil servants’ relations with appointees, but also the flexibility in managing agencies available to appointees that careerists’ overall centrism and professional norms appear to provide.

Organizing the White House: Structure, Environment, and Organizational Governance

Presidential capacity has an important and enduring organizational dimension. Yet, scholars tend to focus upon presidential styles, roles, and objectives, or on the pressures of the political system-frequently overlooking organizational concerns. We develop an organizational-level analysis of the White House staff, relying on a variant of organization theory-the governance approach-to generate propositions about the staffs structure and dynamics. The organization of the White House places constraints upon and provides opportunities for presidents. Organizational analysis helps clarify problems of presidential governance within (and, ultimately, outside) the White House and suggests options for addressing them.

Civic Engagement and Internet Use in Local Governance Hierarchical Linear Models for Understanding the Role of Local Community Groups

Civically and politically interested individuals often use the Internet to facilitate and augment their civic and political participation. At the local level, such people also use the Internet to communicate and share information with fellow members of the local community groups to which they belong. In doing so, local groups help to create awareness and draw citizens into public deliberation about local issues and concerns, not only offline (a role they have played for many years) but also online. This research examines the interplay of individual-level and local group-level factors through an analysis of household survey data from the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, and surrounding areas in 2005 and 2006. It seeks to reconcile different levels of analysis—individual and group levels—relating to the use and impact of the Internet on civic engagement. This study identifies the distinctive influences at both the individual level and the community group level by applying a multilevel statistical model (specifically, the hierarchical linear model). First, at the individual level of analysis, this study found that internal and external political efficacy and community collective efficacy were significant individual-level factors explaining the Internet use for civic and political purposes. Second, at the group level of analysis, community group Internet use—which includes listservs, discussion forums, and blogs, among other emerging Internet technologies—and group political discussion were revealed as key influences on citizens’ perspectives on the helpfulness of the Internet for civic and political purposes. Finally, in multilevel analysis, when taking individual-level variables into account, the group-level variables (group Internet use and group political discussion and interests) are positively associated with the views of the helpfulness of the Internet in connecting with others in the community and becoming more involved in local issues.

Varieties of organizational learning: Investigating learning in local level public sector organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the learning dynamics in the local level public organizations due to a policy intervention in collaboration with university. This study aims to identify the existence of four different types of organizational learning in different localities and to explain their implications to public sector organizations as well as private firms.Design/methodology/approach – The paper used both the secondary data collected for over a period of more than four years and quantitative analysis for parameter estimation. It also collected the primary data by deploying a semi‐structured survey instrument for their collection. Two sets of data were triangulated to derive the learning types.Findings – The study measured the presence of a learning environment that was hypothesized to influence the degree of organizational learning and evaluated learning variations as approximated by the penetration rate in local departments of social services. Evidence was found of differential, di...

The Bush Staff and Cabinet System

hroughout most of the modern era of the presidency, a lively debate has raged over the optimal size and organization of the president’s staff and its proper relationship to the cabinet and the rest of the executive branch. To a considerable extent, this has been a partisan argument. Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt and Hany Truman had developed a tradition of “spokes-of-the-wheel” White House organization. This meant a relatively nonhierarchical senior staff, with no formal chief of staff standing between top aides and the president. The top assistants themselves tended to be generalists. Democratic presidents from FDR through Jimmy Carter opted for a version of this organizational model, at least at the outset of their administrations. In areas other than national security, at least, this model has also stressed the importance of “cabinet government,” in the form of strong cabinet secretaries with easy access to the president. Republicans, by contrast, have a tradition of more hierarchical White Houses that stems originally from the organizational philosophy of Dwight Eisenhower. In this version, the president is assisted and protected by a strong chief of staff, who monitors access on the part not only of White House advisers but also of all or most cabinet secretaries. Republican White Houses have tended toward specialized offices and advisers, coordinated by the chief of staff, and an extensive “staffing” system consisting mainly of memos on paper and coordinated by a staff secretary who reports to the chief of staff. This approach seeks to attain the kind of “multiple advocacy” that decision-making scholars have

Policymakers and Wordsmiths: Writing for the President under Johnson and Nixon

The writing of speeches for the President is inevitably connected to public policy. Speeches provide opportunities to articulate policy, and their preparation often forces the setting of agendas and the determination or clarification of policy positions. This makes the growing disjunction between presidential speeches and the clear, accurate expression of administration goals and policy initiatives noted by observers of the contemporary presidency all the more arresting. We locate the beginning of this trend in the Johnson White House and compare the organizational responses of Presidents Johnson and Nixon to the challenge of creating a viable writing operation linked to policymaking. Of the two, Nixon was more effective, particularly during his first term, and his experience suggests lessons that his successors have largely failed to follow.

Games Advisors Play: Foreign Policy in the Nixon and Carter Administrations. By Garrison Jean A.. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999. 224p.

tation and decision making in the United States, much less in non-Western nations. Second, these volumes provide some compelling evidence in support of specific biases in decision making and certain rules and procedures that govern these processes, but many critical questions lie outside the area of analysis. Most important, although the authors are willing to ask some hard questions about the nature of argumentation and the aggregation of preferences, no clear answers emerge about how or why a particular leader would choose one argumentation strategy over another in a particular instance. Obviously, this makes prediction difficult, and it leaves open on-going questions about the origins of such strategies and preferences. The search for specific decision rules or procedures in this manner is a bit reminiscent of the old studies in social psychology on the nature of persuasion, which systematically altered numerous characteristics of the environment, including the nature of the communicator, message, and audience, all to no systematic avail. It took the emergence of Leon Festingers more unified theory of cognitive dissonance both to explain and predict the nature of persuasive communication in terms of motivation, not cognition.