Th eories of Public Management 257
about public actors as both these concepts become less meaningful. As the impor-
tance of sovereignty and jurisdiction erode in an increasingly fragmented state,
institutional theory retains the capacity to explain relationships between and
within the various administrative units that make up the decentralized whole, and
so continues to provide a coherent understanding of their success and eff ective-
ness (or lack thereof) as suppliers of public goods and services.
Although institutional theory undoubtedly performs yeoman’s service to a
wide range of scholarship, its strength is also its key weakness. Perhaps more
than any other branch of public administration theory, institutionalism is dog-
gedly pluralistic. Institutional theory shares a loose understanding of defi ni-
tions and terminology (though even here diff erences are not diffi cult to detect),
and a general conclusion that institutions matter. Th ese are characteristics
broad enough to describe and include a good deal of public administration
scholarship ranging from new public management to theories of democratic
control of bureaucracy. But although we may all be institutionalists under its
generous terms of inclusion, we are obviously not all relying on a single easily
identifi able theoretical framework. Institutional theory lacks a center, a core
conceptual framework that provides some universal comprehension of pub-
lic agencies, a frustration Wilson (1989) gave voice to in his claim that useful
theory in public administration was unattainable. Although institutional the-
ory provides rich contextual detail to the descriptive capacity of organization
behavior, its extreme pluralism robs it of any claim to parsimony and makes it
diffi cult to assess the theory’s explanatory and replicative capacities, as well as
its empirical warrant. Th e fact that most public organizations operate as low-
reliability systems, subject to constant trial and error, and that such systems are
ever expanding to include nongovernmental actors, creates further problems
for its predictive capacities.
Because institutional theory (singular) lacks a conceptual core, it is probably
more accurate to use the plural, institutional theories. Taken individually, the
contributions of the many frameworks traveling under the umbrella of institu-
tional theory are signifi cant. Considered as a whole, however, institutional theory
gets more mixed reviews.
Th eories of Public Management
About a century ago, the scientifi c management movement created what is prob-
ably the most enduring set of intellectual tools in public administration (Taylor
1911/2010). Frederick W. Taylor’s purpose was to take the “science” of scientifi c
management literally, that is, to reduce management to its most elemental op-
erations and reassemble it on the basis of universal principles discovered and
confi rmed by the scientifi c method. Discovering those universal management
principles was a project that occupied a good deal of eff ort in the fi rst fi fty years
of public administration scholarship; indeed, famous and enduring off erings