Governance as a Unifying Framework for Public Administration? 237
represented, reposition itself to deal with this growing gap between government
and the governed?
Th ese are questions of governance; they cut to the heart of the relationship
between government and society and focus the theoretical concerns of public ad-
ministration upon the problems of public management in the disarticulated state.
Frederickson (1999b) suggests a theory of administration conjunction to help
explain and understand the vexing problems of governance created by the rise of
the disarticulated state.
Th e theory of administration conjunction arises from two observations. Th e
fi rst is attributed to Matthew Holden Jr. (1964), who noted that in the United
States intergovernmental relationships in metropolitan areas could be viewed as
problems in diplomacy. In a fragmented metropolitan area, the actions of one
agency or government are likely to aff ect actors in other jurisdictions. With no
centralized authority, how can these actions be coordinated to ensure eff ective
representation and public service provision? Holden argued that systems or net-
works of cooperation evolve across jurisdictions that serve essentially the same
purpose as diplomacy in nation-states. Th ey result in agreements and under-
standings that synchronize governmental activities across jurisdictions and allow
for the smooth functioning of policy and public service provision.
Th e second observation is that political jurisdictions are still important to pol-
itics (in a narrow sense), even as they hold less importance for administration.
Politics in the sense of campaigns, elections, offi ces, and titles is still jurisdictional.
Th ese elements are mostly autonomous and only marginally interdependent (the
campaign for a mayor in one city, for example, only rarely has repercussions for
the campaign of a mayor in an adjacent suburb). Th is stands in fairly stark con-
trast with administration, which is highly interdependent, increasingly less juris-
dictional, and characterized by organized patterns of “conjunctions”—systematic
patterns of cooperation and coordination among and between administrative
operations. As Frederickson describes it, “Administration conjunction is the ar-
ray and character of horizontal formal and informal association between actors
representing units in a networked public and the administrative behavior of those
actors” (1999b, 708).
Th e power to carry out this interagency conjunction is based upon the pro-
fessional expert’s authoritative claim to knowledge rather than on some basis of
formal authority. Conjunction is thus primarily an activity undertaken by like-
minded professionals, specifi cally functional specialists dealing with a particular
issue or policy domain. Th is connection between functional specialists serves to
couple or link together administrative units across jurisdictions and coordinate
government operations within the disarticulated state.
Frederickson suggests that the ability of administration conjunctions to
impose order and coherence on public service provision depends upon sev-
eral factors. Th ese factors include the scope, strength, and duration of formal
and informal agreements among interjurisdictional executive actors. Formally