Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftmanship

737 Pages·1998·1.75 MB·English

by  Eugene Bardach

Getting Agencies to Work Together : The
title: Practice and Theory of Managerial
Craftsmanship
author: Bardach, Eugene.
publisher: Brookings Institution Press
isbn10 | asin: 0815707983
print isbn13: 9780815707981
ebook isbn13: 9780585034430
language: English
Administrative agencies--United States--
Management, Public administration--United
subject
States, Intergovernmental cooperation--
United States.
publication date: 1998
lcc: JF1601.B37 1998eb
ddc: 352.2/6/0973
Administrative agencies--United States--
subject: Management, Public administration--United
States, Intergovernmental cooperation--
United States.
Getting Agencies
to Work Together
The Practice and Theory of
Managerial Craftsmanship
EUGENE BARDACH
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS
Washington, D.C.
ABOUT BROOKINGS
The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted
to research, education, and publication on important issues of
domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring
knowledge to bear on current and emerging policy problems. The
Institution maintains a position of neutrality on issues of public policy.
Interpretations or conclusions in publications of the Brookings
Institution Press should be understood to be soley those of the authors.
Copyright © 1998
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036
www.brook.edu
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Bardach, Eugene.
Getting agencies to work together: The practice and theory of
managerial craftsmanship/Eugene Bardach.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8157-0798-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8157-0797-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. administrative agenciesUnited States-Management. 2. Public
administrationUnited States. 3. Intergovernmental cooperation
United States. I. Title.
JF1601 .B37 1998 98-25467
352.2'6'0973ddc21 CIP
987654321
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information
SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984.
Typeset in Palatino
Composition by R. Lynn Rivenbark
Macon, Georgia
Printed by R. R. Donnelley and Sons
Harrisonburg, Virginia
Page v
Preface
as an idea for a study of the more ambitious and
THIS BOOK ORIGINATED
innovative forms of interagency collaboration in American state and
local government. Since I began studying policy and program
implementation in the early 1970s I have considered difficult
interagency working relationships, which are usually strained if not
absent, a significant but surmountable barrier to effective
implementation. So have many other people, though with varying
degrees of skepticism and hopefulness. Harold Seidman, a
distinguished scholar of public administration, once mocked
"interagency coordination" as a public administrator'sand
academic'sphilosophers' stone.
Nonetheless, a bit more interagency collaboration is probably going
on these days. In its most interesting manifestations it goes beyond
traditional cost sharing in order to achieve economies of scale. It
extends to the creation of joint-production capabilities, both in service
delivery and in regulatory enforcement. My interest in the
phenomenon was shared by the Innovations in American Government
Program of the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard, which have generously provided the
principal support for this book. Interagency collaboration is often a
needed platform for product innovations. A surprisingly large number
of product innovations (or at least those found among the innovations
program award winners) appear to require interagency collaboration
of some kind to get them up and keep them running. In a sample of
forty-six Ford Foundation innovations program award winners
between 1986, when the program started, and 1994, I counted about
half that fit this description.
Moreover, interagency collaboration in joint-production activities is in
an important sense an innovation per se, albeit a process rather than a
product innovation. I have often found a remarkable enthusiasm for
Page vi
the process among people engaged in it, a belief that they were doing
something new and remarkable, even heroic. The collaborators say
they often have to learn a new way of thinking, a new way of doing
business, to put results ahead of procedures, capacity building above
turf protection, trust ahead of suspicion, joint problem solving ahead
of accepted, time-worn methods.
I hope that the book makes a contribution to the understanding of
innovation in the ways I had originally imagined it would. I have
grander hopes as well. As my research progressed I came to see an
even more important connection between interagency collaboration
and innovation. Both are special cases of a broader
phenomenonnamely, creativity in public management, or perhaps
more precisely, the creation of new things out of old materials.
The existing literature, both in government and in the private sector,
sheds some light on this phenomenon, but not much. What is missing
is something even more fundamental than an understanding of
managerial creativity: It is a conceptual framework for understanding
purposive activity altogetherwhat I eventually came to call
craftsmanship activity. The conceptual problem is in making space for
purposive activity in the more or less deterministic worldview of
workaday social science. I realized that if I was going to be able to
understand interagency collaboration, I would need to do some work
at this basic level first.
I welcomed the prospect. I have long felt that the study of public
management and public administration could not make further
progress until this basic problem has been solvedor, if not "solved,"
then at least softened up. Interagency collaboration would be, I
thought, a medium through which I might explore more fundamental
issues.
Whether I have succeeded at all in softening up the basic conceptual
problem is for readers to judge. I can only say that I have enjoyed the
challenge and have been deeply grateful to the many people and
institutions who have offered one or another form of support. Over the
years I have benefited from discussions about many issues dealt with
in this book with friends and colleagues: Rebecca J. Bardach, Michael
Barzelay, Robert D. Behn, Jon Brock, David K. Cohen, John Ellwood,
Richard F. Elmore, Jane E. Fountain, Judith E. Gruber, Meredith I.
Honig, Judith E. Innes, Robert A. Kagan, David L. Kirp, Todd R.
LaPorte, Cara Lesser, Leo Levenson, Martin A. Levin, Frank Levy,
Laurence E. Lynn Jr., Lawrence M. Mead, H. Brinton Milward,
Page vii
Lawrence B. Mohr, Mark H. Moore, Michael O'Hare, Ellen Schall,
Eugene Smolensky, David L. Weimer, and Mark Yessian. I received
valuable comments on the manuscript, in addition to more general
intellectual guidance, from Robert Agranoff, Alan A. Altshuler, Edith
D. Balbach, Hector Cardenas, Xavier Castaner, Stephen Page, Bill
Parent, Beryl A. Radin, Craig W. Thomas, Marc D. Zegans, and
anonymous reviewers. Hector Cardenas and Cara Lesser did
admirable work as research assistants for part of the project. In
addition to principal financial support from the Ford
Foundation/Kennedy School of Government Innovations in American
Government Program, I also received support from the Center for the
Study of Law and Society and the Committee on Research of the
University of California at Berkeley.
Deborah Hardin edited the manuscript; Inge Lockwood proofread the
pages; and Robert Elwood prepared the index. Nancy Davidson,
acquisitions editor for Brookings Institution Press, offered excellent
editorial advice.
Hundreds of informants and interviewees contributed time and
goodwill, too many to thank by name. I am most grateful to them. To
some of them I doubtless owe an apology as well. Some will feel that
the level of rated collaborative success I bestowed in chapter 3 is
either higher or lower than I do. Many might also think that, in my
treatment of their sites in subsequent chapters, their talents and
importance have been underappreciated. Some will feel that their
rivals have been appreciated excessively. And some will feel that they
are being criticized unfairly or invidiously. Although I did my best,
within the limits of my resources and my abilities, I am prepared to
plead guilty. As I explain in chapter 1, the objectives of this study
were primarily conceptual. I was not aiming for justice, which, if
achievable at all, would have required vastly more research effort than
I could possibly have invested. My aims were to create a conceptual