Week 1 - Assignment 1: Write a Memo About Basic Concepts and Theories Related to Public Management and Week 2 - Assignment: Analyze a Case Study on Management and Organizational Behavior

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i n t r o d u c t i o n

Power and Public Management

Sheldon Wolin begins his rich and stimulating account of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought with an assessment of the emergence of modernity and the ties between modern political theory and modern power. The proliferation of the vol- ume and forms of power was one distinctive milestone in the birth of modern society. In classical and medieval worldviews, power was finite. Individuals and various social groups contended for this scarce resource so that they could enforce their particular conceptions of the well-ordered society (Wolin 2001, 13). The ascent of western civilization, including advancements in science and technology, in economic orga- nization, and in world exploration, along with the growth of populations energized by new social, economic, and political ideas, brought a shift in perspective ‘‘from the acquisition of power to its production.’’ Further, whereas classical political theorists had to contend primarily with the problem of how to preserve and ration power to stave off the chaos of an otherwise uncivilized world, modern political theorists faced the problem of ‘‘a growing sense of helplessness amid a world bursting with new forces’’ (15). The challenge was to bring the profusion of powers into harness. ‘‘The modern project was not to renounce the commitment to increasing power but to find a saving formula whereby it could be rendered ever more predictable, ever more obedient’’ (18). That project of modern theorists involved hierarchical organization and extensive administrative arrangements dedicated to the ‘‘pursuit of truth’’ under centralized direction and control (26). This in turn defined the lives of individuals in modern society around their roles ‘‘as workers, employees, administered beings, and occasional citizens’’ (30).

In Wolin’s view, the project of modernity—of modern theorists—was to expunge

Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson's Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318366. Created from ncent-ebooks on 2021-09-20 19:50:58.

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‘‘the political’’ from society. Many and diverse individuals politically engaged meant that power would be uncontrolled and fragmented, and conflict rampant. The aim of developing politically thoughtful, politically mature citizens could in the end only undermine good social order. Wolin thus depicts a developmental dynamic for human society in which individuals first lived in subjugation to the singular power held by a family, clan, or absolute monarch. Then, in the modern age, with power multiple and abundant, the lives of individuals became defined by the influence of multitudinous powers consolidated in the hands of a central state and its similarly centralized and bureaucratized appendages of economy and technology—princi- pally the corporation and the university—which were meant to ensure the contin- uous generation of power as nearly an end in itself. This is a tale told best by Karl Marx. Yet even Marx ‘‘envisaged . . . a system for exploiting the power potentialities of modern science and industry, a system that held a promise of the continuous repro- duction of power’’ (18).

Wolin’s biography of Tocqueville is built on his well-established concern for the waning prospects that modern society will choose an alternative path to a demonstra- bly more democratic, more participatory, more political future. His emphasis is on Tocqueville’s titanic and ultimately failed struggle against central elements of the modernity project. Tocqueville sought to preserve valuable vestiges of ‘‘the classical notion of culture as shared and publicly accessible, a preparation for participation in the polity, and hence inseparable from civic life’’ (29) and to reconcile them with the reality that modernity, including the rise of the idea of mass democracy, had forever changed the world. Without such a theoretical reconciliation, however, the great mass of the people would find no collective pathway to control of hierarchical power but would instead remain subjugated to it in their multiple, fragmented roles requir- ing only occasional citizenship. Through the lens of Tocqueville’s theoretical jour- ney, Wolin thus sends us a clear warning that our identity as politically self-aware beings, energetically engaged in self-rule and the shaping of our collective future prospects, is rapidly vanishing from common experience.

w o o d r ow w i l s o n ’ s m o d e r n i t y p r o j e c t

In his second book, The State, based to a considerable extent on his first set of lectures on administration, Woodrow Wilson offered his own rendition of the drama related by Wolin. In Wilson’s version, the first act had much the same plot. Families, clans, and tribes were part of the developmental ascent of human civilization to nation-states, with individuals merely subjects serving the state as embodied by absolutist monarchs. Wilson’s second act introduced a striking twist, however. He

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recounted what he called the ‘‘modern de-socialization’’ of the state (Wilson 1890, 645–46). The relationship between the state and the individual had turned upside down, such that ‘‘ ‘The individual for the State’ had been reversed and made to read, ‘The State for the individual’ ’’ (Wilson 1890, 646; see also Link et al. 1968, 5:688). The result was the emergence of ‘‘new ideas as to what constitutes social conve- nience and advancement.’’ In adopting many such ideas, the modern state’s aim was ‘‘to aid the individual to the fullest and best possible realization of his individuality, instead of merely to the full realization of his sociality. Its plan is to create the best and fairest opportunities for the individual; and it has discovered that the way to do this is by no means itself to undertake the administration of the individual by old- time futile methods of guardianship’’ (Wilson 1890, 646–47, emphasis in original).

Wilson saw the modern state as marshalling power to minister to society in accord with new ‘‘standards of convenience or expediency’’ (Link et al. 1968, 5:671, emphasis in original; see Wilson 1890, 638). But what was the nature of this modern power? Wilson was at best evasive on the question. Nearly two decades later, however, writing on ‘‘Education and Democracy’’ (see Link et al. 1974, 17:131–36), Wilson described three primary modern powers: science, or more precisely ‘‘exact science applied’’; economic enterprise and the drive for competition and profit; and admin- istration, the ‘‘coordination of organizations’’ in both the private and public spheres (Thorsen 1988, 176). These modern powers were progressive in the sense that they facilitated adjustments to changing conditions, but the social progress they moti- vated, especially the first two powers, was generally ‘‘the expression of anarchy and selfishness’’ (179). Administration was already bringing them under some discipline, for administration was cooperation and coordination; Wilson contended that coop- eration ‘‘is the law of all action in the modern world’’ (Link et al. 1974, 17:135). But to integrate the three powers fully in order to constitute harmonious and cooperative national, and eventually international, progress required ‘‘the growth of a fourth power, the power of leadership’’ (Thorsen 1988, 179).

From the earliest steps in the progression of his political thought, Wilson had accepted the reality of a modern world of new conditions and flux in the fortunes of men, ‘‘a kinetic society, a sociogram of forces of unprecedented weight and extent, actual and latent, thrusting ceaselessly, colliding and absorbing, but always trans- forming and being transformed,’’ as Wolin has described it (2001, 14). In the further development of this thinking, Wilson conceived an evolutionary ascent for demo- cratic states characterized by the accumulation of habits and character over a long period but also the need for adaptation and adjustment to changing conditions. Such adjustments and adaptations brought with them the accumulation of social and political experience that was the basis of law. Modernity brought an unprece-

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dented acceleration in this dynamic, with increasing demands and pressures on individuals from such forces as technological advancements, the development of large and dominating economic entities, burgeoning international migration, and rapid urbanization. Simultaneous with the very first vestiges of modernity’s arrival came the embrace of the idea of mass democracy and the eventual expectation of most peoples around the world that they would have some hand in determining how society would respond to modern conditions and thus how their lives would be shaped. In the United States, the Civil War was a clear marker for the beginning of the effects of modernity. The war’s end and subsequent territorial development had also brought with them the distinctive growth of an increasingly strong American nationalism and, with the completion of the settlement of western lands, the turn toward global engagement.

For Wilson, the integration and coordination of modern powers was an enterprise of creation and innovation. Such ‘‘governing power’’ (Thorsen 1988, 65)—what Wil- son thought was the proper understanding of the meaning of sovereignty—belonged in the hands of political leaders. In his 1891 lecture on sovereignty, Wilson distin- guished between power and control in the nature of democratic rule. Sovereignty ‘‘is the highest political power of a State lodged in active organs of the State for purposes of governing. Power is a positive thing; control, a negative thing. Power belongs to government, is lodged in governing organs; control belongs to the community, is lodged with the people’’ (Link et al. 1969, 7:339). This control concerned, of course, the selection of political leaders and by dint of that the ability to say no, at least on occasion, and thus the capacity to constrain the innovations of leaders.

In Wilson’s view, then, the self-government expected by peoples experiencing modernity, especially the citizens of the United States, could not be the democracy of the local mass meeting, could not direct decisions on policy. This would be impossible at the national level for national purposes, for national greatness. Instead, modern mass democracy at the level of the nation would have to be, indeed already was, virtual. Citizens participated through thought and discussion. Political leaders stood at the center (Thorsen 1988, 62), interpreting the thought and discussion of the people, finding in or drawing out of the diverse and sometimes conflicting views a common opinion and community will. On the basis of this public opinion formed, leaders took initiative and action, to which citizens gave their active support, or at least their assent. Sometimes they expressed their dissent in the selection of others to lead.

Wilson’s normative understanding of the nature of modern democracy was com- plex, with subtle shifts and modifications over time. But two dominant threads are evident, one political, the other social. The political one was that democracy in-

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volved the choice of leaders by citizens, which implied scrutiny and discussion of the initiatives and actions of political leaders. The social one was the absence of privilege or division into status groupings or social classes. Echoing Tocqueville, Wilson referred to this as ‘‘equality of conditions’’ (see Link et al. 1974, 17:81). The two threads were intertwined, for Wilson argued that one of the most distinctive features of democracy was that the reservoir of potential leaders was the society as a whole, rather than limited pools based on wealth, class status, or privilege. Those with the requisite talents and abilities would rise above their fellow citizens and be selected to lead and exercise power. This was true even in administration, under a system of merit selection; indeed, for Wilson it was important to argue that it was especially true in administration, which under modern conditions would be increasingly domi- nated by technical specialists. Merit selection thus was consistent with modern tenets of democratic representation.

For Wilson the prospect of a democratic future of increasing organization, cen- tralization, and limited, virtual, participatory rule was positive, not negative. It was the only possible road to an appropriately modern form of political democracy at a national, and eventually international, level. It was the only possible link to and means of citizen engagement in the creation and exercise of national power and the only recognizable form of national self-government that could be preserved in the modern world. The exercise of power, or more precisely the creative coordination of modern powers by government, was safely democratic because the state was oriented toward social convenience and advancement with the individual’s development in mind, because leaders came not from a special ruling class but from the people, and because statesmen could not devise and undertake actions beyond what popular thought was prepared to accept.

A particularly distinctive component of Wilson’s stance on modern democratic rule was that most of the matters toward which citizen thought, discussion, and scrutiny would be directed were primarily administrative. They concerned the prin- ciples and purposes underlying national policy plans and the organization and ex- ecution of those plans. Questions concerning how the polity would be constituted had largely been settled, although the shift in national politics to an administrative center was itself an important, and necessary, reconstitution of the regime. It was a systemic reorientation that Wilson sought both to raise awareness of and to cham- pion and guide to its proper realization.

In Wilson’s view, administrative power was the central focus of modern, integra- tive democratic statesmanship because administration was at the center of modern democratic politics. In the main, modern democratic politics was administration. As a political institution, administration was intimately tied to the dynamic of demo-

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cratic progress through both its foundations ‘‘laid deep in stable principle’’ (Link et al. 1968, 5:370) as well as its accumulation of experience from the immediate and everyday adjustment to conditions as the ‘‘daily and most constant force’’ (Link et al. 1970, 9:25) of the state. The creative exercise of sovereignty—governing power— would draw on the adjustments and accumulated experience of administration, transform it into changed habits, and codify it in rules, viz., statutes and, ultimately, constitutions (Thorsen 1988, 65). The organizations of administration would carry out the laws in their executive mode, but they would continue to make adjustments in response to conditions—rapidly changing in the modern age—and thus admin- istration had ‘‘a life not resident in statutes’’ and was ‘‘indirectly a constant source of public law’’ (Link et al. 1969, 7:129, 138, emphasis deleted). As Wilson argued in both his lectures on administration and several key speeches during the 1912 presidential election, administration was especially actively engaged in defining and redefining the terms of the engagement between public and private, arguably the very essence of modern liberal democracy (Elkin 1985).

One might conclude that Wilson belongs in the pantheon of minor theorists of the modernity project. He sought to facilitate in theory and in practice the establish- ment of a modern administrative state within the American polity, which in many ways was the last democratic holdout on earth against the intrusions of modern powers and the transformation of social life into an administered existence. Yet one might also conclude that, like Tocqueville, Wilson sought to preserve some vestiges of the truly political in American culture and tradition (see, for example, Seidelman 1985, 40–44). His political thought, at least in its early to middle stages, was well anchored in Tocqueville and especially Burke, who was ‘‘a historical witness to the enduring power of traditionalism in politics’’ (Thorsen 1988, 37). Despite Wilson’s ‘‘enduring bias against localism and sectionalism in almost any conceivable form’’ (180), he worked to preserve party government and the accompanying congressional prerogatives in a system of national leadership oriented principally toward the ex- ercise of administrative power. Such effort much chagrined progressives who defined national, integrative leadership as incompatible with party leadership and as the province of the executive. It was, however, the success of democracy under modern conditions through national integration and political synthesis that was Wilson’s chief concern. As he argued in Constitutional Government in the United States, his last major work of scholarship, ‘‘synthesis, not antagonism, is the whole art of govern- ment, the whole art of power’’ (Wilson 1908, 106; see also Thorsen 1988, 16).

Power is thus an appropriate theme for assessing and interpreting Wilson’s ideas about democracy and administration. His modernity project was centered on getting the American polity to recognize, accept, and harness administrative power and to

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define its proper sphere in a democratic regime facing the pressures, fluxes, and transformations of the new age. This was, at least from Wilson’s perspective, a project of progress and transformation of the political, not its exorcism. The centering of political thought and political action on administration and the positioning of the people outside the sphere of immediate and day-to-day initiative and action in governing was in Wilson’s analysis the inexorable outcome of the evolution of the modern democratic state. Although there might be many practices of businesslike efficiency universally applicable across regimes, matters of social convenience and advancement—even the associated organizational arrangements and administrative practices—were fundamentally of a political nature and regime-specific. The enter- prise was not just a matter of insuring the ‘‘democratic accountability’’ of govern- ment bureaucracy in the rather reductionist sense that seems to dominate current political thinking and practice. Political leadership would link administrative exper- tise, political habits and traditions, public thought, and political experience in a grand, creative synthesis that would fortify and enrich democracy—make it more democratic—in the only way possible under the conditions of modernity.

In all this one may find a very compelling way of understanding Wilson’s forty- year project of scholarship, public rhetoric, and national and international states- manship. But what of its relevance to modern public management?

p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t a n d m o d e r n p ow e r

Public management as currently conceived by many scholars and practitioners is the heir to Norton Long’s effort to focus administrative theory and practice on matters of power (see Kettl 2002, 79). Long argued that ‘‘power is only one of the considerations that must be weighed in administration, but of all it is the most overlooked in theory and the most dangerous to overlook in practice’’ (1949, 257). Long principally focused on the deployment of power in practice, and his was a modern power orientation in Wolin’s sense of the term. Long wanted theorists and practitioners to attend to the power production problem—how administrators could generate an adequate amount of power that would allow them to put public policies into effect. Administrators could not rely for their power solely on the authority granted by Congress and the president in statutes and executive orders or on the power inherent in the bureaucratic structure of hierarchy and command. In order to advance the missions of their agencies, administrators had to produce power by devising strategies, creating alliances, and neutralizing opposition.

This way of thinking about, and acting toward, public administration and manage- ment has become the principal focus of the executive management orientation in the

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study and practice of public management (see, for example, Heymann 1987). Its special focus is high-level political appointees. But Long made no distinction be- tween high-level, politically appointed executives and career middle managers in his advocacy of a power orientation toward practice. Career executives and managers also had to be concerned with the matter of producing enough power to effect policy change and realize public outcomes. In an important sense, Long’s orientation bridged what subsequently became something of a bifurcation in the field of public management. The currently dominant conceptualization of the field of public man- agement in both study and practice thus can be said to combine the executive management focus on strategies and tactics aimed at advancing agency missions with the mantra of performance that places the onus for the measurement and demonstra- tion of results on middle managers (see Rainey 1990; Brudney, O’Toole, and Rainey 2000, 4–6; Behn 2001, 23–27; but also see Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003).

Public management thus consists of public executives and managers employing ‘‘judgment or discretion’’ (Lynn 2000, 15) in the design and deployment of organiza- tional, fiscal, financial, budgetary, analytical, and human capital resources and tech- niques. Together the actions of executives and managers constitute the harnessing of what Wilson called the power of organization and coordinated effort—the power of administration. Indeed, in modern public management, especially under the aus- pices of the ‘‘New Public Management,’’ public executives and managers attempt to harness Wilson’s other modern powers—exact science applied, economic enterprise —in their efforts. But to what end is all this directed?

Presumably the ‘‘public’’ in public management refers to public purposes or the public good. On this basis, even individuals running purely private entities are public managers if they are engaged in pursuing a public purpose (see, for example, Behn 1997, 3–8). One might regard executives and managers of even the most private of entities—profit-making enterprises—as public managers because they pro- duce goods or services people enjoy and value, and the wealth they generate directly improves the lives of those associated with their enterprises and thus indirectly improves the lives of their communities and even society at large. Many of the largest and most influential for-profit enterprises fall into a public classification—joint-stock companies are public corporations, chartered by state governments, and their direc- tors have obligations to both the company owners and the relevant public authori- ties. More important, it was almost standard doctrine of both the populist and progressive eras that publicly chartered corporations had to operate, and have their behavior evaluated, with an eye toward the public interest. Wilson pressed this view quite strenuously, as when he envisioned in his 1910 American Political Science Association presidential address an era combining the statesmanship of thought and

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of action, in which ‘‘even corporations may seem instrumentalities, not objects in themselves, and the means may presently appear whereby they may be made the servants, not the masters, of the people’’ (Link et al. 1976, 22:271–72).

The academic literature on public management includes an extensive debate over what the differences between public and private management are, and whether they are really meaningful (see, for example, the brief treatment in Rainey 1990, 160, 161–62). Getting caught up in that debate would be counterproductive, however. It is more useful to consider the matter of public versus private management from the perspective of the exercise of power. From this we can begin to see the value of a comprehensive reconsideration and reinterpretation of Wilson’s ideas as part of the continued development, especially in the United States, of scholarly and practi- tioner thinking about public management.

Both private, corporate managers and public managers (including those in not- for-profit entities) wield administrative power. In many instances, they wield that power for public purposes. For public managers, the public purposes for which they wield administrative power are always in contention. The public purposes for which private managers exercise administrative power also may be in contention, but that is a secondary matter because the public purposes they may be pursuing are tangential to the primary objective: making money for the owners of the organization. (This assumption about the profit motive as the prime driver of managerial behavior in firms has been the subject of significant scholarly challenges in the law and eco- nomics literature; see Malloy 2002.) This primary purpose for which private, corpo- rate managers wield administrative power is never in contention in a liberal democ- racy—a political economy combining a market economy with a democratic state. Thus one distinction between public and private managers is the much greater extent of the very public political contention over the purposes for which public managers employ administrative power. It is a permanent feature of their operating environment, well captured by Rainey’s characterization of a focus on ‘‘the purpose- ful, effective behaviors of public administrators discharging managerial functions in a political environment’’ (1990, 173–74). Here ‘‘political’’ clearly means conflict and contention over public goals, particularly among competing interests (see Wilson 1989).

As Norton Long insisted his readers acknowledge about a strategic, power- oriented approach to the practice of administration (and the theory of that practice), however, ‘‘attempts to solve administrative problems in isolation from the structure of power and purpose in the polity are bound to prove illusory’’ (1949, 264). This is the crucial distinction between private and public management that another look at Woodrow Wilson helps to reveal. The distinction consequently makes at least the

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initial case that a careful, detailed interpretation and assessment of Wilson’s ideas can add to the continued development of public management thought and practice.

An executive or manager of a profit-making entity may argue that in the pursuit of wealth creation and the delivery of goods or services that people want and value, she is contributing to a broad, vital public purpose: maintaining economic vitality and the foundations of prosperity that reinforce citizen commitment to the regime, thus preserving its order and integrity. One might even argue that the efforts of private executives and managers go beyond even such significant instrumental values and effects. The efforts of some private executives and managers, some inadvertently, others intentionally, may have formative effects on the regime; they may alter some constituent elements or characteristics of social and political life. For public man- agers, however, the fusion of the instrumental and the constitutive is not just inadver- tent or occasional, it is central, frequent, and permanent. Not only must public managers wield administrative power in service to political purposes that are always in contention, they wield that power in ways that raise questions and seek answers about what administrative power is, what public purposes are and should be, and how people’s lives—their individual and group interrelationships, their interactions with social and political institutions—will be altered by those purposes and the strategies and methods used to try to achieve them. Public managers not only engage in the task of considering and reconsidering public purposes, they also consider what public means, and what the relationship between public and private is and should be.

This fusion of the instrumental and the constitutive most distinguishes public management. It is the struggle of public executives and managers, and front-line workers as well, to negotiate a careful and conscious recognition of the constitutive as they work to generate and deploy administrative power in pursuit of contested public purposes. The time and energy of public managers will always be devoted primarily to the strategies and tactics—as well as the demonstrations of results—that are the keys to the efficient, competent, and responsible realization of public pur- poses. It is what thoughtful citizens and their elected representatives generally regard as good governance. But public managers ignore the constitutive effects, the mean- ing of what they do for the constitution of the public and private life of the regime, at their peril and the peril of the citizens and polity they have pledged to serve. It is from this perspective that the value of attention to Wilson’s ideas becomes especially clear.

Woodrow Wilson was very careful to give primary emphasis to the instrumental facet of administration as a form of power, a kind of politics, and a distinct political in- stitution. Americans have always regarded administration as primarily an instrument of political power and the public will, and in many ways that is appropriate (Cook

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1996). Yet Wilson found himself compelled to illuminate the regime-reconstituting dimension of administration. He had several prominent ideas to offer regarding organizational design and good methods of practice in governmental administration and management. But these ideas were anchored in a concern for the nature of a modern democratic regime, the United States in particular, and the legitimate place for modern managerial methods and practices in that regime. He was concerned for administration in the context of ‘‘the structure of power and purpose in the polity,’’ that is, he sought to understand, and to promote a broader appreciation of, the appropriate place and practice of administration in a modern liberal democracy.

Within the core functions Wilson designated for administration, he saw a con- stitutive force or, more accurately, a reconstitutive force. The core functions in- cluded not just the execution of the law but also the observation of and interaction with changing societal conditions, the day-to-day necessity of responding to those conditions and changing them through public action, and the accumulation of experience from daily action that goes into the making and remaking of laws and constitutions. Because this constitutive effect particularly concerned the line be- tween public and private, and thus involved liberty, the wielding of administrative power in the modern democracy that was the United States required a special legitimation effort. Wilson ultimately anchored this effort in his concept of the regime-integrating power of political leadership.

Not only Wilson’s ideas but also his efforts and struggles once he attained a position of national political leadership are thus instructive in considering how his thinking reflects on and can advance both theory and practice in public manage- ment. An integrated exploration of Wilson’s thought and practice concerning ad- ministrative power in a modern democracy supplies something heretofore unavail- able: a public management perspective on Woodrow Wilson—and a Woodrow Wilson perspective on modern public management.

s t r u c t u r e o f t h e a n a l y s i s

Much consistency, and even repetition, is evident in Wilson’s articulation of his ideas. Yet not all of his ideas about democracy and administration emerged early in his scholarly career, to receive only further embellishment and reinforcement later on. Wilson’s thinking underwent recognizable developmental advances, including some conceptual dead ends. His best-known published works—Congressional Gov- ernment, ‘‘The Study of Administration,’’ The State, and Constitutional Government —mark key advances. Yet some of his most significant thinking emerged in his less- known published work, especially many short essays for an informed and politically

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attentive general readership in such vehicles as the Atlantic Monthly, and perhaps even more so in his many classroom lectures, public talks, and political speeches, all of which reflect even more firmly a consistent body of thought subject to constant refinement.

My interpretation of Wilson’s ideas and practices hews to the rough chronology that reflects the arc of Wilson’s scholarly and political career. Nevertheless, I attempt some synthesis, bringing together the ideas he developed across the several decades of his scholarship and incorporating what I see as notable further insights he achieved in his political campaign rhetoric and in his service as governor and president. I also subject Wilson’s ideas to considerable stretching, tugging, compacting, and rearrang- ing—smoothing over or even ignoring a number of contradictions, misdirections, and incongruities that scholars may find in Wilson’s published papers—to tie together his ideas in at least an approximation of a logically consistent whole. I make no claims for anything approaching perfect consistency, however; there is much fodder in these pages and in the Wilson papers themselves for further scholarly analysis and debate.

My core argument is that administration was at the center of Wilson’s attention from almost the very beginning of his concern for politics and political reform and for much of his scholarly and political career thereafter. Wilson saw a regime trans- formation already under way, first through his attention to the aftereffects of the Civil War, especially a nascent nationalism, and further in connection with the under- standing he developed about the nature of the evolution of modern democratic states. Wilson viewed the regime transformation the United States was experiencing as a reflection of the forces of modernity. Democracy had to adapt to a new set of societal conditions, including considerable social and economic flux, which brought with them a new political reality dominated by administrative matters and the need to harness administrative power to cope with and, if necessary, alter those conditions. Wilson sought to guide and legitimate the transformation through the development of new political leadership theory and practice. This new kind of political leader of a modern democracy would be concerned primarily with ensuring good administra- tion and management through the adoption and legitimation of new administrative structures and practices and, more generally, through the integration of lawmaking and execution.

In addition to developing and promoting new leadership concepts, arrange- ments, and practices, Wilson saw it as his particular task to develop and promote the key administrative structure and practice concepts that could be adopted to improve public administration and management and, more important, the ideas and argu- ments about the proper place and function of administration in a modern democ- racy. The new leaders would need to adopt and convey to citizens both the ideas and

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the practices necessary to cement the regime transition’s success for the long term under the harsh conditions of modernity on a national and international scale.

After developing my interpretation of Wilson’s ideas, I consider what he did upon assuming a position of political leadership himself. He attempted to follow many of his ideas and arguments about leadership and administrative legitimacy and prac- tice, most certainly in his rhetoric but in his actions as well. In doing so, he ran into some insurmountable difficulties, which reveal much about both Wilson’s own thinking and some of the long-standing challenges of democratic governance and public management. Through my effort to bring Wilson’s ideas and his ideas vis-à-vis his practices to bear on public management studies and practices today, I try to reveal many of the insights and struggles evident just below the surface of Wilson’s work. My broad reconsideration of his ideas thus can be the launch pad for further thought and action in the continuing effort to improve the management of the people’s business and the further refinement of self-government in the United States and around the globe.

In unfolding the details of my analysis, I have divided the presentation into three parts. In part 1, I attempt a survey and interpretive synthesis of Wilson’s ideas about democracy and administration. I begin, in chapter 1, by looking at the core elements of his critique of the separation of powers and his promotion of a ‘‘cabinet govern- ment’’ arrangement resting on the principle of ‘‘ministerial responsibility.’’ Wilson’s attack on the separation of powers doctrine was not an assault on this principle of governmental design in and of itself but rather an attempt to remove it as an obstacle to the emergence of new political leadership made necessary by the growing pres- sures of modern conditions that had to be confronted at the level of the nation. Thus, I interpret Wilson’s initial analysis and critique as a call for the creation and nurtur- ing of a new kind of public executive in the American regime, a new, centrally situated set of political leaders who would overcome the fragmentation and parochi- alism of American constitutional design and political practice by overseeing both policy formulation and policy management. In particular, these new public execu- tives were to instruct the public about administration and to stimulate public scru- tiny and criticism of public measures while at the same time keeping public opinion at arm’s length from execution, especially where it involved the most purely ‘‘busi- nesslike’’ activities of public management.

In this first major stage of his work, Wilson did not really come to grips with the normative implications of an administrative state, taking the central importance of administration as a given and needing only sufficient articulation and emphasis to justify either constitutional reforms or substantial alterations in established patterns of governing practice that would ensure the more effective and more responsible use

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of national administrative power. Wilson’s permanent conviction that transforma- tions in the institutional design and patterns of practice of modern American democ- racy were necessary clearly took root in this first major effort, yet his ideas about the nature of modern democracy and the proper place and legitimate and necessary practices of administration and management had only begun to germinate.

All modern public management theory and practice, at least in democratic na- tions, assumes a stable, settled conception of democracy in its political and social dimensions. Rarely, however, do scholars or practitioners scrutinize these assump- tions. During the prolonged and chaotic birth of the American administrative state, Wilson did not have the same luxury. He took it as his task to understand the historical, philosophical, and developmental underpinnings of modern democracy and to develop a new conception, borrowed heavily from German organicism, that would be suitable for guiding the development, legitimation, and design of sound structures and practices of public administration and management under the stren- uous conditions of modernity. In chapter 2, I delineate what I have found to be the central tenets of Wilson’s democratic theory. The central importance Wilson placed on leadership was clearly an outgrowth of his Congressional Government analysis, but he subjected his ideas in this regard to much more extensive examination and development. The other major ideas in his thinking about democracy were primarily outgrowths of the purposeful effort Wilson undertook to understand the historical origins and modern character of the democratic state that followed the publication of his first book. This was largely the result of following backwards the logic of what he needed to know in order to pursue his principal objective: developing and promoting an understanding of the nature, legitimacy, and necessary structures and practices of public administration and management that political leaders needed to guide the adjustment and adaptation of American democracy to a new age.

In chapter 3 I present in detail Wilson’s ideas about the nature, proper roles, and functions of administration in a modern democracy. Wilson’s mature understanding went far beyond a simple instrumental notion of administration’s role in the regime to reach a recognition, although not stated in quite this way, of administration’s constitu- tive qualities. Wilson’s promotion of administration as the central form of political power in a newly emerging American regime, which expanded administration’s functions and roles in that regime far beyond traditional conceptions, thus posed a considerable legitimacy challenge. Thus, part of Wilson’s endeavor with respect to studying administration involved making the case for its legitimacy. This he grounded in his democratic theory, particularly the organic-developmental nature of the mod- ern democratic state and the central importance of political leadership. I include in my examination of Wilson’s ideas on administration’s roles and functions a review and

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interpretation of his thinking regarding the separation of politics and administration and the special role of and limitations on technical expertise.

In chapter 4, I present Wilson’s ideas about institutional and organizational struc- ture, policy design, and managerial practice. Wilson did not write and lecture on these matters as extensively as he did on administration’s regime roles, functions, and legitimacy, but he promoted several primary ideas that rarely show up in treatments of his thinking in the public administration literature. Wilson addressed matters of hierarchy and command, centralization versus decentralization, autonomy and dis- cretion, and responsibility and accountability, including the requirements of statu- tory design to increase the likelihood that public managers and front-line workers will use their discretion responsibly. Wilson’s treatment of these matters was at times simplistic and moralistic, but that in itself does not make his ideas unworthy of closer consideration, and in fact they raise significant questions relevant to the concerns of public management today. Of particular note are Wilson’s ideas about the structure and systemic function of cities and the need for administrative integration on a national scale.

The edifice of theories and practices associated with current public management thinking has at its core a rejection of the designs and practices for the administrative state that came to prominence in the middle of the twentieth century. Many scholars and practitioners now reject this once-dominant model as outmoded and coun- terproductive. They thus reject with it the Wilsonian ideas they see resting at its foundation. The representation of Wilson’s ideas in the literature of this new think- ing is largely the repetition of half-truths about and misperceptions of Wilson’s ideas, aims, and practices long extant in the public administration literature more gener- ally, reflecting both limited access to a more representative sample of Wilson’s published and unpublished work and an insufficiently careful consideration of what Wilson actually said and did. I attempt to remedy this inadequate treatment of Wilson’s ideas about administrative design and practice in parts 2 and 3. Proponents of the new thinking and practice in public management may still reject what they find, but at least they will have a broader foundation on which to base their rejection.

In chapters 5 and 6 I carry my consideration of Wilson’s ideas about administra- tion’s systemic roles, functions, designs, and practices forward to an assessment and interpretation of his actions in political service. Although Wilson remains highly rated in periodic assessments of the presidents by American historians, and although he is widely recognized for several major domestic policy triumphs and the deft diplomacy he exercised during and immediately after World War I (an assessment that includes one obvious devastating political defeat), he has not fared as well in scholarly assessments of his administrative and managerial practices, whether as

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governor of New Jersey or as president. Scholars have criticized his lack of sustained support of and attention to his plans for administrative reform, his failure to adhere closely enough to civil service reform principles in his administrative appointments, his inconsistent relations with members of his cabinet regarding delegation of policy authority, and, most damning of all, his nearly disastrous lack of adequate organiza- tion and execution of plans for war mobilization. Overall, in the view of several scholars, Wilson failed to serve adequately as midwife to the birth of the American administrative state, leaving the nation incapable of coping with the demands of a modern world.

I look at what Wilson said and did, primarily as president, with respect to matters of administration and management, specifically in the areas of relations with his cabinet, regulation of the economy, and war mobilization. I find considerable con- sistency with the ideas he articulated before entering public service. More impor- tant, his struggles with and departures from his established thinking, when con- fronted with the considerable and often unpredictable demands of governing, reveal a great deal about his ideas and practices as they relate to the ongoing challenges of democratic public management in a postindustrial social, economic, and political order. The shifts in his thinking about political leadership and its importance for integrating and legitimating modern administrative power and the practical prob- lems these shifts created for Wilson and his successors are at the heart of the conclu- sions I draw from my analysis of Wilson’s governance.

In chapters 7 and 8, I address the significant challenges for public management today that are a result of the effects of Wilson’s ideas and practices, which can be seen in sharper relief in the light of the analysis I have offered. I consider the recent scholarly treatment of Wilson’s ideas and the identification of intellectual crises for which scholars have held Wilson at least partially responsible. I argue that these treatments are in significant respects mistaken. I attempt to show that some of the distinctive features of the bold new thinking about public management as a new kind of governance have identifiable antecedents in Wilson’s ideas and governing practices and that the emphasis on public management today can itself be traced back to Wilson. This developmental legacy reveals that Wilson’s central project— securing the integration and legitimation of modern administrative structures and techniques through political leadership—remains to be completed. It remains crit- ical because, consistent with Wilson’s most profound insight, public administration can influence the very constitution of a liberal-democratic polity.

I explore in some detail which national governmental institutions might serve as the appropriate home for the cultivation of the statesmanship Wilson envisioned, including the possibility that it might arise from within public administration and

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management itself. I argue, however, that the leadership public administration and management needs to cement its legitimate place in the regime must arise from the national legislature. I examine what changes in Congress are necessary so that this national political leadership can emerge. Public administration and management cannot itself provide the integrating, legitimating leadership it needs to secure its place and role in the regime. Thus, I challenge those developing the audacious new ideas about public management as the ‘‘new’’ governance to expand their ambitions to include Congress and its design of legislation. It is only along this path that the ambitious new theories can make a vital contribution to a future polity composed not of administered beings but of fully active citizens and responsible leaders.

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