Laurence J. O'Toole

Treating Networks Seriously: Practical and Research-Based Agendas in Public Administration

How well equipped are todays public administrators to face the challenges they confront from the involvement of businesses, not-for-profits, other units of government, and even clients in complex patterns of program operations? Not very well, if judged by the extent to which practitioners and scholars have incorporated the network concept and its implications into their own work. Discussions in the field contain little to help practicing managers cope with network settings. In fact, conventional theory may actually be counterproductive when applied inappropriately to network contexts. And yet, these arrays are now consequential and becoming increasingly so. Practitioners need to begin to incorporate the network concept into their administrative efforts. The challenge for scholars is to conduct research that illuminates this neglected aspect of contemporary administration. The author sketches a set of agendas that offer prospects for helping to address this need.

Public Management and Educational Performance: The Impact of Managerial Networking

Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.

Policy Recommendations for Multi-Actor Implementation: An Assessment of the Field

One goal frequently professed in the research field of multi-actor implementation is to assist those actually involved in the policy process by developing good, empirically-based recommendations. The primary objectives in this article are to investigate the degree of progress attained thus far toward this aim and, as a consequence, to suggest an agenda for future research. The literature is found to impose a number of restrictions on the quality of advice available to practitioners. The field is complex, without much cumulation or convergence. Few well-developed recommendations have been put forward by researchers and a number of proposals are contradictory. Almost no evidence or analysis of utilization in this field has been produced. Two reasons for the lack of development are analyzed: normative disagreement and the state of the fields empirical theory. Yet there remain numerous possibilities for increasing the quality of the latter. Efforts in this direction are a necessary condition of further practical advance.

Structures for policy implementation: An analysis of national legislation 1965-66 and 1993-94

Public administration has long considered the administrative agency as the core institution shaping action. But specialists in policy implementation, in particular, have suggested that networks spanning multiple organizations may be important phenomena. National legislation from two Congresses is analyzed to determine the kinds of structures explicitly stipulated or encouraged for new or amended programs. The most important questions have to do with the extent to which single-agency or networked (multiactor) structures are used and the relative degree to which intergovernmental versus intragovernmental programs are prominent. The evidence shows that the great majority of legislation requires multiactor structures spanning governments, sectors, and/or agencies; intergovernmental programs are especially prominent; and the multiactor character of the structures has remained relatively constant. These findings carry implications for the study and practice of public administration.

Managing upward, downward and outward: Networks, hierarchical relationships and performance

It is particularly difficult, but also valuable, to try to estimate the relative contributions of different managerial functions to the outcomes of public programs. Building from a formal treatment of public management and performance, this study explores this research task with empirical analyses of several hundred public organizations and their top managers over a five-year period. Using Moores distinction among managing upward toward political principals, downward toward organizational agents and outward toward the networked environment, we examine managerial impacts on ten different performance criteria. Findings validate the points that these three functions are distinct, public management has performance-relevant impacts and managerial networking outward can be an important contributor to the achievement of public objectives.

Implementing Public Innovations in Network Settings

Practitioners and scholars have devoted considerable attention in recent years to initiating public innovations-to the relative neglect of how to ensure the implementation of such efforts. Executing innovations over the longer term, particularly in complex networksettings, can be expected to be problematic. And yet networks are likely to be crucial institutional settingsfor the implementation ofpublic innovations. The analytic approach of game theory, used heuristically, can identify a set of actions useful to public managers in enhancing prospects that sound innovations will succeed. The implications of this inquiry run counter to some of the themes used as mantras in the recent reinvention discussion andfocus attention on the centrality of institutional infrastructure, trust, and obligation for innovative success into the future.

Strategies for intergovernmental management:implementing programs in interorganizational networks

Despite the increasing importance of inter-governmental issues, as well as the volume and quality of research that has been conducted on interorgani-zational relations, thus far relatively little explicit application of the latter to the former has occurred. Although much work remains to be done to develop the field of interorganizational relations, research already completed, especially investigations of policy implementation in interorganizational networks, demonstrates that substantial assistance can be provided to those who are involved with intergovern-mental management. Research-based strategies for intergovernmental management are discussed: influencing policy design; mobilizing, nurturing, and managing the interorganizational structure; and utilizing information on behalf of the common effort. Examples indicate how such strategies might be pursued effectively.

Shaping Formal Networks throug the Regulatory Process

Recent research has shown that, at the federal level, new or amended programs typically create networks consisting of multiactor structures spanning governments, sectors, and/or agencies. This study examines the implementation structures created through the regulatory process. We find that in a majority of cases the regulatory process adds to the complexity of implementation patterns; previously simple implementation structures often became more complicated and new actors are brought into the process. Rules also serve a key function in clarifying the general language that is often used by Congress. These findings have implications for the study and practice of public administration.

Determinants of graduate research productivity in doctoral programs of Public Administration

Given that research is the first step in improved practice, how can public administration doctoral programs train more productive research scholars? This article reports details on the first systematic attempt to answer this question empirically. Specifically, the authors collect data from 47 NASPAA-affiliated doctoral programs and test conventional wisdom distilled from the literature. Three factors prove to be important in doctoral programs that train productive research scholars: (1) engaging students in structured research experiences that culminate in student research productivity, (2) providing students with adequate financial support, and (3) employing productive faculty members. These three factors explain approximately 70 percent of the variation in graduate research productivity across doctoral programs, and they represent action steps for programs interested in improving the research productivity of their graduates. The implications for improving the quantity and quality of scholarship in public administration are discussed.

Rational Choise and Policy Implementation; Implications for Interorganizational Network Management

Research on interorganizational policy implementation continues to be characterized by diverse theoretical approaches. It is perhaps surprising to observe, however, that formal and especially rational-choice approaches have been essentially neglected in the study of policy implementation processes. This article focuses on this matter and reaches mixed conclusions. An examination of how rational-choice approaches such as game theory might contribute to the enhancement of interorganizational management shows that serious limitations constrain what may be possible theoretically through the formal rational-choice representation and analysis of many interorganizational implementation settings. Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, exploring these qualifications suggests a set of practical implications for the actual conduct of management in policy network settings.