“Public Administrative Behavior and Complexity: A Preliminary Model with Applications ,” co-authored with Barbara Romzek. Paper prepared for delivery at the 2nd National Public Management Research Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison, September 30-October 2 1993.
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The document discusses the development of a middle-range theory of public administrative behavior centered on adaptation, environment, and complexity.
Need for Middle-Range Theory in Public Administration
- Public administration scholars have long sought useful theories to explain bureaucratic behavior.
- Efforts over decades have led to frustration and a crisis of identity in the field.
- Various approaches include new paradigms, diversity of perspectives, and middle-range theories.
- Merton’s middle-range strategy emphasizes theories that are empirically grounded and focused on specific phenomena.
- Such theories are attractive because they reflect the complex, dynamic nature of American public administration.
- A synthesis of existing research is needed to advance understanding rather than just summarize past studies.
- The authors propose adaptation as a core concept for this middle-range theory.
- Adaptation emphasizes the flexible, complex, and dynamic character of bureaucratic behavior.
- The approach aims to provide a normative and explanatory framework for future research.
Conceptual Foundations of Adaptation in Public Administration
- Adaptation is a fundamental process observed across natural and social systems.
- Holland’s unified approach to adaptation involves seven key questions about environment, structures, mechanisms, and limits.
- The environment includes physical, technological, social, and political factors influencing public agencies.
- Situations are meaningful contexts for individual administrators, often emerging under ambiguity or conflict.
- Structures undergoing adaptation are enacted social actions that define experiences and responses.
- Enactment structures serve functions like relevance determination, navigation, and response formulation.
- Signals from the environment influence enactments, but enactments also shape which signals are perceived.
- The relationship between environment and structures is dynamic and reciprocal.
- Expectations, based on past experiences and norms, influence adaptive responses.
- Expectations are complex, variable, and can generate problematic situations like dissonance, confusion, fuzziness, or vulnerability.
- The internal content of expectations includes values, norms, practices, and cause maps.
- Adaptive mechanisms are operators like premises, coping strategies, rules, and collective procedures.
- Motivation for adaptation includes diverse factors like self-interest, passions, norms, and anxiety reduction.
- Individual, organizational, and institutional levels all contribute to adaptive plans.
- Multiple selection mechanisms operate at each level, creating a vast array of possible adaptive responses.
- Organizational and institutional routines serve as stable yet flexible adaptive plans.
- Limits to adaptation are defined by the total set of possible structures and the complexity of the environment.
- The spatial and dynamic limits of adaptation are analyzed through complex systems theory.
- Different patterns of adaptive behavior include fixed points, limit cycles, quasi-periodic, and strange attractors.
- Parameter spaces, influenced by environmental factors, determine the scope and stability of adaptation.
- Changes in the environment or internal states cause shifts within the manifold of possible behaviors.
- The model emphasizes that public administrative behavior is inherently adaptive and complex.
- The approach provides a framework for understanding how public agencies respond to problematic situations.
- It highlights the importance of context, signals, expectations, and mechanisms in shaping behavior.
Applications to Public Agency Management and Reform
- The model offers insights into whether public agencies are manageable and how they can be improved.
- Management success depends on recognizing and responding adaptively to signals from the environment.
- Poor management results from ignoring or misinterpreting environmental cues and adaptive limits.
- The U.S. Postal Service case illustrates how institutional and organizational changes can face resistance if not aligned with adaptation.
- Privatization debates are viewed through the lens of local, situational responses to resource constraints and demands.
- Privatization occurs at different levels, including individual, organizational, and institutional, depending on context.
- Reforms are more likely to succeed if they stay within the parametric limits of adaptation.
- Major institutional reforms often face resistance due to the complexity and limits of adaptive responses.
- The Civil Service Reform Act and the Senior Executive Service example show how reforms can be constrained by existing adaptive structures.
- The model suggests that reforms should be incremental and context-sensitive to avoid chaos.
- The National Performance Review’s proposals are seen as moderate and within the limits of existing adaptive plans.
- Radical reforms risk pushing agencies into unstable or chaotic states, reducing effectiveness.
- The concept of parameter space and complex dynamics helps explain the success or failure of reform efforts.
- The model emphasizes that change involves shifts within the manifold of possible behaviors, not abrupt transformations.
- Understanding the limits and patterns of adaptation can guide more effective management and reform strategies.
- The approach advocates for contingent, context-aware responses to the complex environment of public administration.
Author’s Note:
This odd paper was part of my long collaboration with Professor Romzek, which resulted in several publications. In this case, Professor Romzek deferred to my fascination with complexity theory and its potential for developing a middle-range theory of public administration rooted in accountability. Eventually, some PA scholars did see the applicability of complexity theory. (See Teisman, G. R., & Klijn, E. H. (2008). Complexity Theory and Public Management: An Introduction. Public Management Review, 10(3), 287–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030802002451)