forum 510

75th Anniversary Article

Kenneth J. Meier is Charles H. Gregory

Chair in Liberal Arts and Distinguished

Professor of Political Science at Texas

A&M University. He is also professor of

public management in the Cardiff School

of Business, Cardiff University, Wales. His

current research includes studies of public

management (in the United States, United

Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and

Africa), race and public policy, methods

in public administration, democracy and

bureaucracy, and theories of decision mak-

ing and public management context.

E-mail: [email protected]

Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration 15

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 1, pp. 15–24. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12288.

Kenneth J. Meier Texas A&M University

Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of essays we will publish in 2015 to commemorate PAR’s 75th anniversary. This essay, by Kenneth J. Meier, focuses on Herbert Simon’s “Proverbs of Administration.” Meier reviews Simon’s original critique of the field, the article’s import, and offers his ideas about steps important for the next wave of progress for the field.

JLP

Abstract: Herbert Simon, in his 1946 essay “Th e Proverbs of Administration,” indicted public adminis- tration as having confl icting and contradictory theories and an absence of a knowledge base that could provide a guide to practice. Simon proposed that public administra- tion defi ne concepts, adopt effi ciency as its objective, focus on the study of decision making, and construct models that could predict effi cient results. Th is 75th-anniversary article revisits Simon’s essay in light of contemporary public administration. It examines the progress that has been made and what still needs to be accomplished, and it ends with a list of barriers to further progress.

Public administration is a science of the artifi cial, concerned as much with how things might be as with how things are (Simon 1969). Th is concern with how things might be, with improving on the state of administration, has always meant that public administration as a fi eld of study seeks two ends—scientifi c quality and practical relevance (Perry 2012, 479). To be useful, to be relevant, means that the prescriptions of public administration must have empirical validity, that they must be supported by strong scientifi c evidence. Scientifi c validity is a neces- sary condition for practical relevance.

In “Th e Proverbs of Administration,” Herbert Simon (1946) lodged two criti- cisms of existing scholarship in public administration—that the theories of administration

were inconsistent and often contradictory and that the body of empirical knowledge was completely lack- ing. Th eory was viewed as a logical and coherent set of principles that generated testable hypotheses. Such theory is a guide to both research and practice. Simon then proposed a preliminary road map to a solution with four parts: creating clear concepts, establishing effi ciency as the guiding principle for public admin- istration research, focusing on decision making as the essential element of public administration, and weighting how various criteria or actions might lead to effi ciency. His essay was more in the tone of nailing 95 theses to the door of a church than a systematic empirical critique of the literature; it was as much an invitation to debate as it was the fi nal word on the status of public administration at that time.

Th is essay revisits Simon’s criticism in light of the evolution of public administration. It asks what progress we have made in terms of Simon’s arguments. Th e task of evaluating progress on Simon’s prescrip- tion is more diffi cult for fi ve reasons. First, Simon’s objective of a general theory of public administra- tion was highly ambitious, even by today’s standards. Whether such a theory is attainable in public admin- istration or any other design science is debatable. Second, Simon himself moved on to focus on the cognitive process of decision making and a variety of other intellectual enterprises. Although much of his work remained relevant to public administration (Augier and March 2001), public administration was not the focus of his later work, and his insight was directed elsewhere. Th ird, many of the contributions to the scientifi c study of organizations, including public organizations, have occurred outside the fi eld of public administration in sociology, psychology,

economics, business, and other disciplines. Th is situation leaves public administration in the unenviable position of respond- ing to developments in a wide range of other disciplines but, at the same time, having little

Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration

Simon’s objective of a general theory of public administration was highly ambitious, even by

today’s standards.

16 Public Administration Review • January | February 2015

communications channels; and organizing by purpose, process, clientele, and place provided little guidance or any clear priorities as how to organize (i.e., should purpose have priority over clientele, etc.). Th e lack of consistency and the ambiguous guidance of the principles led Simon to dub them “proverbs.” Th e critique of the principles of public administration, however, was not unprecedented or even original. It diff ers a great deal in orientation and tone but not in application from Gulick (1937a), who essentially argued that the “principles” were unsupported by empirical research, in addition to noting the inconsistencies in regard to how organizations should be structured (see also Gaus 1931 for a similar critique). Gulick (1937b) attempted to specify a set of research designs based on experience to guide future research (see Hammond 1990). Simon was less specifi c on this dimension. Th e greater attention paid to Simon’s essay likely refl ects his more direct and accessible writing style and his subsequent contributions to the fi eld.

Moving from Simon’s time to the present and using the perspec- tive of logical, coherent empirical theories of public administration, one would have to characterize the state of theory developed within public administration as disappointing. Th e dominant theories applied in public administration, including Simon’s, have been developed outside of public administration as generic theories (e.g., Organizations, March and Simon [1958]; A Behavioral Th eory of the Firm, Cyert and March [1963];1 Organizations in Action, Th ompson [1967]; Th e Social Psychology of Organizations, Katz and Kahn [1966]; Economic Organization, Williamson 1986]). Simon himself did develop an elaborate theory of the politics of administration (Simon, Smithberg, and Th ompson 1950), but it has essentially been ignored within the fi eld of public administration.

Th e logical coherence that Simon was seeking from theory is consistent with work in formal theory in political science that is at times applied to bureaucracy (e.g., McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987; see also Gill 1995), with special emphasis on political control over bureaucracy. Much of that work uses the logic of principal– agent models. Th e infl uence of these theories within public admin- istration in contrast to political science has been modest. Perhaps the lack of infl uence refl ects Simon’s own critique of principal–agent models as incomplete, with their focus solely on incentives to the omission of values, and Simon’s rejection of purely rational formal decision-making models (Simon 1997, 120–22). Formal theories of bureaucracy are also generally a poor guide to practice, for many of the reasons that Simon criticized the “economic man” of rational decision making, that is, such theories rarely fi t the situation faced by managers, and managers rarely have the information necessary to implement such a decision strategy.

Th e political science movement that seeks to bring more relevance to this formal work, termed the empirical implications of theoretical models, might play a role in developing coherent theory informed by empirical evidence, but its use in public administration has been modest (see Lavertu and Moynihan 2013; O’Toole and Meier 2011).

Less mathematically rigorous but deductive theories that seek to generate coherent and logical predictions also exist, although their use has been scattered. Anthony Downs’s Inside Bureaucracy (1967) addresses a variety of issues that are central to the current

infl uence over the literature or discussion in those fi elds (Wright 2011). Fourth, Simon’s view of public administration was not uncontested (Waldo 1948), and even today, his approach is rejected as either too simplifi ed relative to the world of practice (Behn 1988) or simply wrong (Raadschelders 2008). Many scholars, as a result, have focused on objectives diff erent from those of Simon. Finally, public administration is a very diverse fi eld ranging from those who are concerned about the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy to those interested in what motivates workers to those focused on optimal governing structures to those concerned with ethical issues. Descriptions of public administration frequently use the parable of blind men feeling an elephant and describing vastly diff erent animals (Rainey and Steinbauer 1999, 2; Waldo 1978). Public administration is many things with many research agendas; any single characterization, including this one, by defi nition will be incomplete. In some areas, much progress has been made; in other areas, movement along Simon’s paths has been less successful or even rejected as inappropriate.

Th e challenge issued by Simon has not gone away, however. A size- able portion of the fi eld accepts his basic criticism and has gener- ated a modest literature assessing the state of the fi eld. Periodically, articles examine the quality of research in public administration, focusing on doctoral dissertations (Adams and White 1994; Cleary 1992, 2000; McCurdy and Cleary 1984; White 1986), publications in journals (Houston and Delevan 1990; Perry and Kraemer 1986; Stallings and Ferris 1988), or the quality of training in graduate pro- grams (Brewer, Facer, and O’Toole 1998; Rethemeyer and Helbig 2005). Th is body of literature suggests that the problems outlined by Simon have not been resolved, and so returning to the original essay to assess progress is a worthwhile enterprise.

At the outset, it is important to note that “Th e Proverbs of Administration” is a very preliminary sketch, particularly in com- parison to Administrative Behavior (1947), a book that includes “Proverbs” as a single and not especially crucial chapter. “Proverbs” does not discuss the concept of satisfi cing, although elements behind the eventual logic of that concept are contained in the article. Similarly, bounded rationality is not directly discussed. Both concepts provided the foundation for Simon’s future work and also played a signifi cant role in the intellectual development of public administration.

Th is essay proceeds in four steps. First, I briefl y discuss current progress on Simon’s two criteria of consistent theory and a body of empirical evidence. Second, I revisit Simon’s road map and ask how well we are doing generating clear concepts, fi nding the determi- nants of effi ciency, learning about decision making, and being able to weight the factors that aff ect effi ciency. Th ird, I select two areas of research—representative bureaucracy and political control of bureaucracy—to illustrate two cases in which progress has been made on Simon’s fi rst two criteria. Fourth, I discuss what I see as several problems or barriers to further progress.

Consistent and Coherent Theory Simon’s initial critique of the existing principles of public admin- istration was essentially that they were not logically consistent: unity of command ran counter to the principle of specialization; minimizing span of control generated ineffi ciencies by lengthening

Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration 17

Step 1: Generating Clear Concepts Simon thought the development of public administration needed to start from scratch and proposed that the fi rst step would be to gen- erate clear concepts. Progress in this area has been uneven, although there are clear examples of successes. Simon actually mentioned the concepts of hierarchy and authority as central to public adminis- tration. In the scholarly literature, progress on these two concepts has been modest. “Hierarchy” as a term used to designate internal provision of goods and services in contrast to markets or contract- ing out (see Williamson 1975) has received substantial attention in organization theory and economics. Within public administration, hierarchy has been extended to the distinction between government bureaucracies in contrast to networks as a method of organizing policy action (Hicklin, O’Toole, and Meier 2008; O’Toole 1997, 2015). In contrast to these extensive literatures, there is a modest scholarly literature on span of control, although the concept seems to thrive in terms of management consulting practices. Management consulting fi rms frequently use span of control rules of thumb often based on a fairly sophisticated set of contingencies to make recom- mendations on the degree of administrative overhead. Th is is an area with clear practical relevance that is amenable to scientifi c research but has generally been ignored by the academic literature. In these cases, however, hierarchy is defi ned structurally rather than behav- iorally; much of Simon’s concern was behavior and focused on the informal aspect of the organization based on the work of Barnard

(1938) and others. Simon (1969) later used the notion of hierarchy in organizational decision making in his work on near decom- posable systems. Large problems, in this view, could be broken into small parts that could be solved and then aggregated back together. Th e literature on networks generally takes issue with the hierarchical principal of near decomposability. In comparison to hierarchy, the concept of authority is virtually uncharted in the public administration literature.

One decision-making concept that does link to “Proverbs” is incrementalism. Simon’s criticism of synoptic rational decision making and his advocacy of satisfi cing (developed more fully in Administrative Behavior) characterized decision processes as incre- mental. Incrementalism was popularized by Lindblom’s (1959) classic essay on muddling through and later defended as an optimal decision strategy (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963). An extensive research literature, particularly in the area of budgeting, has devel- oped using incrementalism as its basic concept (Wildavsky 1964), even though the concept has been highly criticized empirically (see Berry 1990). Th e concept has received extensive examination in recent years as scholars such as Baumgartner and Jones (1993) have sought to explain how incremental processes could at times generate major changes in policy. Under the rubric of “punctuated equilib- rium theory,” a substantial literature focused primarily on budget outcomes has developed.2

Th ere are three cases of extended conceptual development that might fi t what Simon had in mind—networks, publicness, and pub- lic service motivation. Th e conceptual development of networks is addressed by O’Toole (2015) in his 75th-anniversary essay. We have a great deal of evidence on the existence of networks, what they look

public management literature, but a scan of the articles in Public Administration Review that cite Downs shows the work is used in a cursory manner rather than as a central theoretical work. Gary Miller’s Managerial Dilemmas (1992) and his focus on credible commitments as the key to hierarchical relationships has been used extensively, but in behavioral economics and political science rather than public administration.

Th is brief overview suggests that public administration is no closer to a coherent general theory of public administration of the form that Simon envisioned. Such a goal is perhaps too ambitious, and the development of more specialized midrange theories, either within public administration or in other fi elds but applicable to public administration, may be a more appropriate goal. One way to build such theories is inductively from the existing base of research; to that base, I now turn.

A Body of Empirical Evidence Simon asserted in his essay that public administration lacked a signifi cant body of empirical fi ndings; his conclusion echoed that of Luther Gulick (1937b) in Papers on the Science of Administration and that of John Gaus (1931). Th e Papers were intended to bring together what was known about structure and management in organizations at that time (Gulick and Urwick 1937); Gulick’s concluding essay was a systematic documentation of a series of ques- tions that had yet to be answered. Th e lack of a body of fi ndings was highly problematic to Simon given his rejection of deductive economic models of decision making and his embrace of behavioral models. Simon’s approach to theory was inductive, and the absence of a research base meant that one could not build theory inductively from the knowledge that existed at the time.

If we take the empirical studies of public administration since Simon’s essay, it is clear that we now have a wealth of data points. How cumulative the research is, how extensive the coverage of topics is, and how useful it is to practice is not as clear. Part of the problem is that the fi eld does not place a high priority on integrative literature reviews or meta-analyses that might sum- marize what is known (and not known) and point to new areas of research (for excellent examples, see Boyne 2003; Ringquist 2013; Walker and Andrews, forthcoming). At the same time, at least one major textbook (Rainey 2014) seeks to comprehensively cover the literature in public administration as well as that of rel- evance outside the fi eld, and at least two theoretical eff orts claim to have been built inductively from the existing literature on governance (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001) and public manage- ment (O’Toole and Meier 2011). None of these eff orts directly addresses Simon’s critiques, however, so some tentative assess- ments are in order.

Progress along Simon’s Plan Simon proposed that public administration needed to generate clear concepts, examine the determinants of effi ciency, focus on decision making, and estimate how various factors aff ect effi ciency. Th is essay now turns to the progress made in public administration along these dimensions.

Simon’s approach to theory was inductive, and the absence of a research base meant that one could not build theory

inductively from the knowledge that existed at the time.

18 Public Administration Review • January | February 2015

as theoretically and politically more relevant than effi ciency (e.g., Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001; O’Toole and Meier 2011; Provan and Milward 2001) in sustained bodies of empirical work in the United Kingdom (Andrews, Boyne, and Walker 2006), Denmark (Andersen 2008; May and Winter 2009), the Netherlands (Klijn, Steijn, and Edelenbos 2010; Schalk, Torenvlied, and Allen 2010), and other countries. Th e use of contracting and collaborative governance mechanisms could trigger greater studies of effi ciency, although Frumkin and Kim (2002) fi nd that nonprofi t funding is not allocated in greater amounts to the nonprofi ts with the most effi cient operations (measured as the ratio of administrative expenses to total expenses). Simon’s proposal of effi ciency as a central organiz- ing concept of public administration has simply not taken hold.

Step 3: Decision Making Th e study of decision making is a fl ourishing fi eld, but it is more often studied in psychology, political science, or behavioral econom- ics than in public administration. Simon’s interest was in both how individuals make decisions, which ended up as the focus of much of his own research, including his foray into artifi cial intelligence, and the impact of those decisions on effi ciency. Th e public administra- tion literature, in contrast, tends to focus on the factors that infl u- ence decision making by public offi cials. Keiser (2010), for example, examines street-level decision making in the Social Security Disability program using Simon’s bounded rationality approach. She fi nds that decisions are aff ected by both agency goals (albeit a subset of agency goals), the perceptions of others in the organi- zation, and how quickly the decision must be made. Gusmano (2013), as another illustration, examines decisions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the role that the public plays in this process (see also Carpenter 2010). Th ere is little published research on the impact of decisions, but there is a reasonable literature on normative ways to improve decision making at the individual level (Kim, MacDonald, and Andersen 2013) or the societal level (Fung 2006). Similar to effi ciency, Simon’s proposal for a focus on deci- sion making has not become the predominant approach in public administration.

Step 4: Weighting the Factors That Affect Effi ciency Given the relative lack of studies focused on effi ciency and the similar lack of studies that examine the impact of decision making on effi ciency, it comes as no surprise that we have made little process on a model of effi ciency that precisely weights the organizational and managerial factors that lead to greater effi ciency. Whether an effi ciency production function is even possible is an open question, especially if one thinks in terms of generic models that could be applied to all organizations, as the original proverbs were alleged to do. Even literatures with well-developed production functions (although not based on effi ciency) such as education rarely include a role for management or decision making (Hanushek 1989). Given the skepticism in public administration about effi ciency as the cen- tral concept, the lack of progress on weighting is understandable.

Assessing Progress on Other Dimensions Although progress on the specifi c dimensions outlined by Simon has been mixed, it is also fair to note that Simon can be taken as a gen- eral approach that could be applied to specifi c problems rather than all of public administration. When this is done, one can see measur- able progress in terms of theoretical development and empirical

like, and a reasonable amount of literature linking them to perform- ance (in several countries). Scholars have other key questions to address, such as how networks are built (perhaps diff erently if they are voluntary versus imposed) and whether or not the structural dimensions of networks aff ect performance. My view is that theory is far ahead of empirical work; as an example, we are a long way from being able to operationalize the sophisticated nature of the concept set forth by McGuire (2002).

Publicness as a concept is important because of the long-running debate on whether or not public organizations are diff erent from private organizations and thus merit separate study (see Andrews, Boyne, and Walker 2011; Meier and O’Toole 2009, 2011; Perry and Rainey 1988; Rainey 2011; Rainey, Backoff , and Levine 1976; Walker and Bozeman 2011). Over time, the concept of publicness has evolved from a simple distinction of ownership as a dichotomous variable to a multidimensional concept that includes ownership, funding, and control. Recent work even suggests that these empirical concepts of publicness should be supplemented and contrasted with normative dimensions of publicness (Bozeman and Moulton 2011).

In the case of public service motivation, there is much work on measuring its existence (Perry 1996) and additional work on how it infl uences performance or moderates the relationship among vari- ables (Crewson 1997). Much still is not known, such as the extent to which public service motivation is a function of self-selection or organizational socialization (Moynihan and Pandey 2007). Th ere are also some questions of discriminant validity in regard to the concepts of motivation in general, agency identifi cation, and altru- ism (Perry 2000; Wright and Grant 2010). Th e focus on values in this literature, however, is very much consistent with Simon’s notion of authority coming from below and the need to incorporate values when dealing with members of an organization.

Step 2: The Determinants of Effi ciency “Proverbs” stressed effi ciency as the key value to be attained in the study of public administration; effi ciency was defi ned as produc- ing a given output at the least possible cost or maximizing output for a given cost. A reading of the contemporary literature on public administration suggests that public administration scholars are skeptical of effi ciency as the sole or primary goal of public adminis- tration (Langbein 2010). When effi ciency-linked studies are done, they are often tied to specifi c techniques such as benchmarking (Ammons and Rivenbark 2008) and the factors that infl uence the use of such techniques. Th ere are a modest number of effi ciency studies using data envelopment analysis (DEA) on public sector organizations, including Nyhan and Martin’s (1999) study of local police services, Hughes and Edward’s (2000) study of Minnesota counties, and Abbott and Doucouliagos’s (2003) widely cited study of Australian universities. DEA has a far more extensive private sec- tor use, and it is fair to note that even the public sector studies are generally not placed in public administration journals.

Boyne (2002) argues that studies need to focus on multiple dimen- sions of performance that refl ect the multiple goals of public organi- zations in contrast to a focus on a single outcome such as effi ciency. A growing literature on the linkage between public management and performance follows this dictum and rarely addresses effi ciency but rather focuses on eff ectiveness or agency outputs/outcomes

Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration 19

gone so far as to use the theory of representative bureaucracy as a macrotheory to test hypotheses in areas such as political control of the bureaucracy (Meier and O’Toole 2006) or organization theory (Meier and Bohte 2001).

Political Infl uence on the Bureaucracy A second area of substantial research that has generated an extensive body of empirical work and some additional theoretical refi ne- ments is the literature on political infl uence on bureaucracy, often termed “political control of the bureaucracy” within political sci- ence. Using formal theories of hierarchy, primarily principal–agent models (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987), the literature has documented political infl uence on the actions of a large number of agencies, primarily federal regulatory agencies (Moe 1982; Wood and Waterman 1994). Th e literature has evolved from an almost exclusive focus on Congress (Weingast and Moran 1983) to include the actions of elected chief executives and the courts (Ringquist 1995). Initially, the political control work operated on the simple hypothesis that political actors could infl uence the actions of bureaucracy, although many mechanisms were not particularly eff ective (Balla 1998).

Th e simple top-down theories of bureaucratic control have been challenged as incomplete (Krause 1996; Waterman and Meier 1998). Th e focus of much criticism has been on the eff ort to study the relationship between electoral institutions and bureaucracy with- out actually considering any bureaucratic variables (see the chapters in Krause and Meier 2003). Th eoretical and empirical work has been reformulated in response to these critiques by focusing on the reciprocal relationships between bureaucracy and electoral institu- tions (Krause 1999). Additional work directly incorporates measures of bureaucratic values to determine whether the correlation with political variables refl ects political infl uence or simply the bureauc- racy acting on its own values that happen to correspond with politi- cal pressures (Clinton et al. 2012; Meier and O’Toole 2006).

Th e cases of representative bureaucracy and political control indicate that in some areas, progress has been made in developing an empiri- cal literature with coherent theoretical predictions. As noted earlier,

similar contentions could be made about the literature concerning the distinction between public and private organizations, public service motivation, networks, red tape, and other areas. Although public administration does not have universal principles, it does have a collection of research areas in which signifi cant progress has been made. At the same time, it is fair to ask the question, why

has there not been greater progress in the 70-plus years since the publication of Simon’s original essay?

Barriers to Progress Th e objective plan in “Proverbs” was to generate reliable fi ndings that relate to important questions in public administration. To Simon, that meant how well government performed or how effi - ciently it performed, but his approach could apply to a wide range of other major issues, including such macro issues as the relationship of democracy and bureaucracy. Whether one sees the public admin- istration scholarship glass as half empty or half full, it is clear that additional progress needs to be made for public administration to

evidence. Two examples will serve to illustrate this progress—repre- sentative bureaucracy and political infl uence on bureaucracy. Similar arguments could be made in regard to the distinction between public and private organizations (Walker and Bozeman 2011), public service motivation (Wright and Grant 2010), networks (see O’Toole 2015 in this symposium), red tape (Bozeman and Feeney 2011), and other areas.

Representative Bureaucracy Within public administration, the literature on representative bureaucracy has seen extensive conceptual development, the genera- tion of an elaborate contingency-based theory, and the development of a substantial body of empirical work. Conceptually, the literature has moved from a concern with demographics to a focus on bureau- cratic values and then to a specifi cation of when representation values aff ect agency outcomes. Th e original theory in representative bureaucracy was fairly simple (see Long 1952). Political control over bureaucracy is limited (or hierarchical control in general), and this allows bureaucratic discretion in making decisions. Decision makers seek to maximize values, including personal values, with the discre- tion they are aff orded. Bureaucratic values are determined in part by socialization experiences, and thus demographic origins become important. It follows, then, that a bureaucracy that is representa- tive of the people in terms of demographic origins is also likely to make decisions that benefi t the general public. Empirical data on the theory were generally limited to reporting on the demographic origins of the bureaucracy, often in comparison to the general public (Warner et al. 1963).

Conceptual development in the fi eld has led it to move away from the study of demographics to the more proximal infl uence—values (Dolan 2000; Meier and Nigro 1976)—and then to an examina- tion of agency outputs and outcomes (Hindera 1993). Th e litera- ture initially showed that actual cases of descriptive representative bureaucracy producing outcomes that benefi t the represented were not common and occurred for race but not gender (Hindera 1993; Meier, Pennington, and Eller 2005). Keiser at al. (2002), in an appli- cation of the theory to gender, traces the theoretical linkages, focus- ing on the need for bureaucrats to exercise discretion in areas where the demographically linked values would be salient. Th eir theory further specifi es the representation relation- ship can be limited by hierarchy, profession- alization, and agency missions (Keiser et al. 2002). Th e theory led to a series of studies by Keiser and her colleagues fi nding evidence of bureaucratic representation in child support agencies (Wilkins and Keiser 2006), public schools (Atkins and Wilkins 2013), police departments (Meier and Nicholson-Crotty 2006; Riccucci, Van Ryzin, and Lavena 2014), and fi re depart- ments (Andrews, Ashworth, and Meier 2014), among other areas. Th eoretical innovations have moved the literature beyond race, ethnicity, and gender to other demographics such as veterans’ status (Gade and Wilkins 2013) or sexual orientation (Th ielemann and Stewart 1996). Conceptual and empirical discussion has further evolved to focus on what active representation means (Bradbury and Kellough 2005; Lim 2006; Meier and Morton, forthcoming; Selden 1998) and the microbehavior that links representation to policy outcomes (Th eobald and Haider-Markel 2009). Some work has even

Although public administration does not have universal princi- ples, it does have a collection of research areas in which signifi - cant progress has been made.

20 Public Administration Review • January | February 2015

Effi ciency and Data Generation Several years ago, a PhD student came into my offi ce, announced that he was interested in studying public administration, and asked if I could give him a list of the major data sets so that he could take a look at them and the questions that were analyzed. I laughed because, unlike international relations or other fi elds, there are no major public administration data sets. Th e data gen- eration and research process in public administration is incredibly ineffi cient. Hundreds of individuals who seek to answer a question do so by either (a) taking whatever data exist or (b) starting from scratch and building a data set. Th e “whatever data exist” option is problematic for three reasons. First, it limits one to questions that are politically defi ned as important enough to have offi cial data and thus prevents the analysis of questions that might not have offi cial sanction. In many policy areas, government is interested in questions of eff ectiveness but not questions of equity, or the performance data available refl ect political biases (e.g., PART scores; see Gilmour and Lewis 2006). Second, we have to make do with data that are not designed to precisely answer the ques- tion that we want to address. Th e various federal surveys, such as the Federal Human Capital Survey (now the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey), have been used to great eff ect, but using them to study, for example, public service motivation means creating a new measure rather than using an existing measure that has been validated (Fernandez, Moldogaziev, and Resh 2013). Th ird, most government databases care little about management and rarely ask managerial questions. Heinrich and Lynn (2002), for example, discuss an excellent drug abuse treatment data set with individual- level data and a wealth of program-level variables; the management variables in the data set are limited to managerial tenure, staffi ng levels, and funding. Th ere is nothing on important concepts such as managerial strategy, leadership style, networking patterns, or similar measures. Th is is not unusual—the excellent Add Health data set, the national data sets on Hospitals and Nursing Homes, and the myriad education data sets all cover a wide range of per- formance and organizational factors, but these data sets contain little to no management variables.

Th e solutions to the effi ciency problem are three. First, all journals should require that data sets used for publication be archived and publicly available, as is the case for major journals in political sci- ence and other fi elds. Th is permits other scholars to use the existing work as a base to extend research into new areas (e.g., see Flink 2014), and it avoids losing major databases simply because they were not archived (e.g., the Warner et al. 1963 database). Second, we need more investment in transforming existing databases to be useful to public administration scholars; we need to essentially put the management and public administration factors into existing performance databases, as scholars have done through targeted surveys with English local governments and Texas schools. Neither database is perfect; in fact, there are no perfect databases, but more such databases would go a long way in determining how generaliz- able our current knowledge of the fi eld is. Th ird, American scholars should emigrate. Th ere are databases in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, South Korea, and a variety of other countries that are far superior to U.S. databases, perhaps because governments in these countries fund public administration research or perhaps because these are political systems where actual program performance is considered important.

achieve the twin goals of scientifi c validity and practical relevance. My own view is that much progress can be made by focusing on fi ve items—improving the skill set of scholars in public administration; improving the review process of our journals; making the research process, particularly data generation, more effi cient; engaging in a serious eff ort to develop theory; and seeking to generalize our research fi ndings.

Skill Levels Many of the overall assessments of doctoral dissertations and journal quality have focused on the need to improve the skills of scholars in public administration (e.g., Perry and Kraemer 1986), and some have even issued methodological manifestos (Gill and Meier 2000). Casual observation indicates that a variety of PhD programs have made serious upgrades to methods training, but the practice is far from universal (DeLorenzo 2001). A general lack of training in qualitative methods is evident, and a focus on formal theoretical skills is still the province of disciplines such as economics and politi- cal science rather than public administration. Journal articles can do no more than refl ect the level of research skills in the profession. Two examples will serve as illustrations of the refl ection. First, questions of selection bias (see Konisky and Reenock 2013) that have concerned policy scholars in economics have generally been ignored in public administration despite the obvious problems that can be created by biased samples. It is diffi cult to argue that our work should be relevant to practice if the analysis is based on a biased sample with a return rate of 10 percent or less. Second, the nuances of panel analy- sis have been slow to be adopted in public administration despite the proliferation of panel data sets (Zhu 2013) and the serious problems that can be caused by misspecifi cation. Numerous other issues could be raised, including measurement validity, a more serious concern with causality, and the consideration of the dynamic nature of gov- ernment programs. At a more fundamental level, the fi eld is trapped in an econometric paradigm that focuses on minimizing squared error rather than optimizing outcomes subject to constraints, as man- agers in the world of practice do (Gill and Meier 2000). Th e absence of Bayesian methods, despite the reliance on prior information and updating in a manner that mimics many public administration deci- sions, has also been generally lacking (Gill and Witko 2013).

The Review Process Th e quality of research in the profession can be no better than the quality of the review process for journals. Unfortunately, the fi eld has never done a systematic assessment of the quality of the blind review process. My own experience-based perceptions are that the process has severe problems.3 Negative reviews of the quality of journal publications go back almost 30 years (Houston and Delevan 1990; Perry and Kraemer 1986; Stallings and Ferris 1988), and edi- torial calls for improvements in research (Perry 2012) suggest that serious problems of reliability and validity are not being caught in the review process. A recent assessment of the use of surveys in pub- lic administration is highly critical of the poor quality of surveys and the lack of documentation in the research (Lee, Benoit-Bryan, and Johnson 2012). A similar analysis of the use of the self-assessments of performance that are commonly used in much public manage- ment research is equally critical (Meier and O’Toole 2013). Th e pro- fession needs to fi nd a way to encourage investments in this public good both to improve the reliability of the process and to generate useful comments for authors to improve their work.

Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration 21

variety of topics. At the same time, the idealized end of Simon’s essay has not been attained. We are a long way from knowing precisely how various actions of public administrators aff ect the effi ciency or eff ec- tiveness of programs. Th eoretical development has also not kept pace

with the empirical work, and much of public administration looks to other fi elds and other disciplines for its basic theories.

Th e future prospects for the development of a science of administration as Simon envisioned will progress in an incremental fashion. Much of the time of public administration scholars is devoted to training individuals for prac- tice or contributing directly to government programs by off ering advice or doing applied research rather than producing type of scientifi c

scholarship that Simon envisioned. Public administration faces its own version of bounded rationality constrained by limited resources and problems that are not amenable to quick and fi nal solutions. Some progress will continue simply as a result of inertia. Professors will need to publish to get tenure, and journals will demand quality research. We are witnessing incentives off ered by universities in a wide variety of countries to faculty who publish in the top-ranked journals. Graduate students seeking faculty positions in public administration face similar incentives. Progress will continue; the modest proposals off ered here have the potential to accelerate that progress at the margins.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Amanda Rutherford and Laurence J. O’Toole for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes 1. Recent work by Greve (2008), Salge (2011), and Nielsen (2013) has taken up

the approach of the behavioral theory of the fi rm. 2. Th eory in this case is a misnomer because the theory is post hoc rather than

predictive, although there are modest eff orts to transform the literature into one that is capable to testing.

3. In various guises, I see approximately 250 reviews a year, many of these by oth- ers on articles that I review. I make no claims that this is anything other than a biased sample based on my own opinions as to what constitutes a good review. Because a substantial portion of my own research is focused outside of public administration in political science and, to a lesser extent, public health and economics, some of this information is comparative.

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Investing in Theory Th e puzzle of empirical theory in public administration is that very little theoretical work seems to appear in our journals, based on my unscientifi c assessment, yet at the same time, many of the most widely cited works are theoretical. To build theory, as Simon envisioned it, as an inductive process requires individuals who can take the various individual studies and fi t them into a broader mosaic and show us how the elephant of public administration really looks. Th eory could take a variety of forms, such as literature reviews that develop theoretical propositions (see Boyne 2003), meta-analyses (Ringquist 2013), mathematical presentations (O’Toole and Meier 2011), or a more informal genera- tion of propositions (Rainey and Steinbauer 1999). Judging by the space allocated to such articles in the profes- sional journals, the incentives for generating theory appear to be too low, especially in light of the high citation counts of such articles. Whether the solution is a new journal devoted to theory or an initiative by an editor or editors to showcase theory, the intellectual payoff s of such an eff ort seem self-evident.

Investing in Generalization We know a great deal about public administration based on a limited number of highly productive data sets (see Walker and Andrews, forthcoming). Th e challenge both for scholarship and for practice is whether what we know about English local governments or Texas school districts is relevant to the administration of national security or social welfare programs. Th e literature on representa- tive bureaucracy suggests that we should be skeptical because, although racial and gender representation matter a great deal in schools (Atkins and Wilkins 2013), police departments (Meier and Nicholson-Crotty 2006), and housing programs (Selden 1998), they do not appear to matter at all in contemporary U.S. welfare programs (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Watkins-Hayes 2011). Studies that focus on similar concepts and similar relationships in diff erent national contexts or organizational contexts could add a great deal to building a research base in public administration simi- lar to that envisioned by Simon. We need to know whether public administration principles work in diff erent countries or diff erent agencies, whether concepts change meanings when contexts change (e.g., what does public service motivation mean in a nondemocratic state?), and whether even what is thought of as public administra- tion changes as the political context changes (see Dahl 1947). Some recent cross-national work in public service motivation provides an example of the type of work that could be done (see Kim et al. 2013). Although a systematic study has not been conducted, it appears as though cross-country collaborations are more frequent now than they have been in the past.

Conclusion Th is assessment of the status of scholarship in public administra- tion in light of Simon’s essay on “Th e Proverbs of Administration” generates a relatively mixed picture. Some progress has been made. Research techniques have improved and dispersed greatly among scholars. Current graduates of PhD programs and even master of public administration programs possess a far higher level of skills than they did in Simon’s time. Systematic bodies of work appear on a wide

To build theory, as Simon envisioned it, as an inductive

process requires individuals who can take the various individual

studies and fi t them into a broader mosaic and show us how the elephant of public administration really looks.

22 Public Administration Review • January | February 2015

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