Laurence E. Lynn

A place at the table: Policy analysis, its postpositive critics, and future of practice

Postpositivist critics have brought a new stridency to the ongoing discourse about the nature, applications, and usefulness of policy analysis. Regrettably, their critique is based on a decontextualized caricature, virtually a parody, of policy analysis training and practice. Their assertions are chilling but false, ideological rather than analytical, and detached from the inconvenient realities of policy making and management. Far from being narrowly technocratic and scientistic, policy analysis is dedicated to improving the craft of governance. It is fueled by intuition, argument, and ethical promptings; clearly engaged with the world of political action; and often identified with interests and values otherwise unrepresented at the table. Q-methodology and other approaches to values identification and analysis can be important contributors to policy analysis practice, but postpositivists have a very long way to go if they are to be relevant to the practical challenges of democratic governance that arise in the many roles that working policy analysts perform.

Social Services and the State: The Public Appropriation of Private Charity

Charitable choice is another milestone in the transformation of the social services sector into a deliberate instrument of public policy, building on intentional federal appropriation of private social service capacity and skill that began in earnest during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. With private social services now predominantly financed by government, benefits accrue in part because public policy is more likely than private charity to ensure well‐financed, equitable, efficiently administered, and uniformly available social services. But voluntary social service agencies may find that sustaining the distinctive normative climates that ensure uniqueness and selectivity is increasingly difficult.Charitable choice is another milestone in the transformation of the social services sector into a deliberate instrument of public policy, building on intentional federal appropriation of private social service capacity and skill that began in earnest during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. With private social services now predominantly financed by government, benefits accrue in part because public policy is more likely than private charity to ensure well‐financed, equitable, efficiently administered, and uniformly available social services. But voluntary social service agencies may find that sustaining the distinctive normative climates that ensure uniqueness and selectivity is increasingly difficult.

Public Management Research: The Triumph of Art Over Science

If the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord. Confining ourselves to practice, we may lose sight of basic principles, and when these have been entirely forgotten, we may apply the methods derived from them badly; we might be left without the capacity to invent new methods, and only able to make a clumsy and an unintelligent use of wise procedures no longer understood.

Globalization and Administrative Reform: What is Happening in Theory?

Governments everywhere are engaged in self-conscious projects of administrative and managerial improvement. Scholars of public management thus confront a fascinating array of talk, conjectures, and facts on administrative and managerial change that can be assembled from myriad sources. There are as well stylized facts, stories, conjectures, and ideological glosses – these might be termed ‘theory substitutes’ – that may or may not be consistent with actual developments worldwide and which are provocative in their implications. Our goal as scholars of governance and management must be to penetrate appearances to ascertain whatever lessons and meanings might lie beneath. A variety of theoretical frameworks ranging from conceptual classifications to synoptic speculations to causal accounts of state building are available for this intellectual work.

The logic of governance in health care delivery

Abstract A multi-level analytic framework termed a ‘logic of governance’ is used to identify systematic patterns of health care governance from the findings of disparate research studies. Using a subset of 112 studies on health care service delivery, we use an ‘inside-out’ interpretive strategy to construct an empirical overview of health care governance. This strategy incrementally aggregates findings from studies of adjacent then of non-adjacent levels of governance until a coherent overall picture emerges. In general, the choices of organizational arrangements, administrative strategies, treatment quality and other aspects of health care services by policy makers, public managers, physicians, and service workers, together with their values and attitudes toward their work, have significant effects on how health care public policies are transformed into service-delivery outputs and outcomes. Investigations that fail to account for such mediating effects in research designs or in the interpretation of results may provide inaccurate accounts of how health care governance works.

Public Management in the Shadow of the Constitution

An unresolved issue in American constitutional governance is the role of public officials in a Madisonian scheme of separated institutions sharing power. Proposed answers range from broad delegation with reliance on expertise and professionalism to minimal delegation with formal checks on official discretion. In between are various pragmatic or realist views that accept discretion as both necessary and inevitable and offer normative principles of administrative conduct to guard against official abuse of power. None of these answers, however, satisfies criteria of constitutional legitimacy. The authors argue that such criteria can be derived by combining insights from traditional, normative literatures of public administration and from positive political theory and political economics. If the role of public managers is defined as maintaining a credible commitment to performing their duties pursuant to a precept of managerial responsibility that incorporates accountability, judgment, balance, and rationality, then, the authors argue, the Madisonian scheme of government embraced in the Constitution is complete.

New Frontiers of Public Administration: The Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice

The 2007 John Gaus Lecture was presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, on August 31, 2007.

Government executives as Gamesmen: A metaphor for analyzing managerial behavior

Public management requires a diffuse set of activities that extend far beyond the simple activities once encompassed in the study of public administration. The study of public management is hampered by the lack of theory to guide research on the roles and contributions of public managers. By viewing the government executive as a player in a game-more accurately, as a player in many games occurring simultaneously and at different levels, each with its own rules of play-we can begin to gain an integral view of the reality in which they operate.

Public Administration in the Twenty‐First Century

Books reviewed in this article: Donald F. Kettl, The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for the Twenty-First Century America Lester M. Salamon (ed.), The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance H. George Frederickson and Kevin B. Smith, The Public Administration Theory Primer

Public management: What do we know? what should we know? and how will we know it?

The field of public management draws on a rich and varied trove of intellectual resources. Applying scholarship and imagination, its students can recognize, interpret, and predict the reality of managing governmental organizations with considerable acuity. If the field is to advance, however, researchers must do more than reverently assemble and digest practice wisdom. More emphasis must be placed on disciplined, theory-based inquiry.