96 5: Th eories of Public Management
literature on high-reliability systems, covered in Chapter 4, is also oft en an ap-
plication of operations research and concepts of scientifi c management (LaPorte
and Consolini 1991).
Of the early features of American public administration—a merit-based civil
service, the separation of administration from politics, the “principles” of admin-
istration, administration as part of executive government, and the application of
scientifi c management—it can be plausibly argued that both the theory and the
logic of scientifi c management have been the most infl uential and enduring. Sci-
entifi c management theory and logic are so persuasive in many important parts
of government and the public sector that they are simply assumed, understood,
and therefore usually invisible to the ordinary citizen; they are evident only when
a system built on such theory and logic breaks down. When an airplane falls out
of the sky, a child dies of E. coli bacteria, or a soldier dies from “friendly fi re,” the
citizens and their elected leaders “see” complex public systems built and operated
on the assumptions of scientifi c management. When the people “see” an airplane
fall out of the sky, they oft en fail to see that at 5:00 p.m. on any workday aft er-
noon in the United States, more than 300,000 people are hurtling safely through
the skies at fi ve hundred miles per hour. By any reckoning, this is a scientifi c
management miracle combining technology, private enterprise, and government
control and management. Yet all agree that as air travel increases, these systems
must be made even safer (Perrow 1999; Frederickson and LaPorte 2002). How-
ever one describes it—the one best way, Total Quality Management (TQM), the
high-performance organization, or continuous improvement—the legacy of sci-
entifi c management is ubiquitous.
In the early years of modern self-conscious public administration, scientifi c
management theory and application were most oft en found in the fi eld of pub-
lic works, then a close cousin of public administration. Indeed, until the 1960s
the American Society of Public Administrators, the American Public Works As-
sociation, and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA)
shared the same headquarters building on the campus of the University of Chi-
cago. Leonard White’s original text (1929) contains a chapter on public works
administration, and many of the early ICMA publications had to do with public
works. Gradually, the two fi elds drift ed apart, engineers identifying with public
works and comfortable with scientifi c management techniques, public admin-
istrators identifying with the staff functions of government, such as budgeting
and personnel administration, and seemingly more interested in the arts of man-
agement. In the academy and in the literature—textbooks and journals— public
works and public administration, with just a few exceptions, are now almost en-
tirely separate (Felbinger and Whitehead 1991a, 1991b). In practice, however,
every county has a department of public works; every county has extensive data
management systems for property assessment; every state has elaborate social
service data management systems as well as highway and other transportation
systems; and the national government has engineering and systems operations