Leadership as Public Management 115
- Good managers do not necessarily have to choose between competing
goals. Th ey take advantage of positive spillovers, and use training and
incentives to simultaneously achieve goals that are normally thought to
require tradeoff s.
Meier and O’Toole are not simply pointing out the limits of NPM; their
argument is that to advance public management theory—and certainly to im-
prove management practices—we need sustained, rigorous, empirical research.
Improving the study of public management requires hard data rather than the
repackaging of principles into doctrines and their sale under a new acronym.
Leadership as Public Management
Th e most interesting aspect of management’s resurgence in public administra-
tion is the prominence of leadership as an energizing and legitimating idea. Th e
sources of contemporary literature on leadership in public administration are
found in the schools of public policy or policy study. Most were established in the
1970s at many of America’s most prestigious universities, in several replacing or
subsuming existing graduate programs in public administration. Together they
formed the American Association for Policy Analysis, later changed to the Ameri-
can Association for Policy Analysis and Management, and established the Journal
of Policy Analysis and Management. One part of the agreed-upon or understood
methodology was the case study, preferably with participant observation, de-
signed to escape “the dead hand of social science.” Policy analysis, particularly
the tools of microeconomics, was the second acceptable form of methodology.
Th e approach is interdisciplinary, following Lasswell’s description of the policy
sciences.
In the early years, the scholarship emanating from the schools of policy study
mostly consisted of cases and policy analysis, the most famous being Graham
Allison’s description (1971) of high policymaking as bureaucratic politics in
the Cuban missile crisis. In the Allison perspective, bureaucratic politics means
the mingling of outside informed experts, agency or departmental offi cials, and
political (usually appointed rather than elected) offi cials to solve problems. Bu-
reaucratic politics came to be a preferred way to theorize about the role of public
managers in making policy, certainly preferable to theorizing about the day-to-
day management of a bureau or an offi ce. Bureaucrats, in high policy, are under-
stood to be leaders, a very legitimating perspective.
Over time, the leadership approach to management has grown and is now
in full fl ower. Leadership is among the leading topics in the hundreds of cases
in the heavily used Kennedy School of Government Case Program. Th e study of
management in the policy schools has come to be the study of what leaders do,
rather than the study of management theories, in either the original or the con-
temporary form.