What is meant by “policy? What are the stages of public policy-making?

1. Mar. 5 Bureaucracy as policy-making organizations (accountability and performance as complicated issues); Bureaucratic reasoning • What is meant by “policy? What are the stages of public policy-making? • Goals/goal-setting in public agencies—not as rational or systematic as one might think. Many agencies take on difficult missions in complex environments important throughout course. In a public admin. Text, Smith&Licari claim “the goal is not efficiency or effectiveness. It is to mollify and abide by the conflicting political interests that make their way into law. This makes no business sense, but perfect political sense.” (2005 67) The way agencies set goals and tasks may be more important that the goals and tasks themselves. • …to mollify and abide by the conflicting political interests implies that accountability is a tough issue. Public agencies are subject to multiple expectations of accountability; see Figure 1.3 (here Romzek and Dubnick break out four; but the list could include many more as well) Thus, the notion of accountability “to the people” is rather meaningless. • An extremely strong sense of accountability in public organizations is that among individuals to each other (probably categorized as ”professional accountability” in Figure 1.3)—important throughout course. • “Performance” is just as difficult an issue as “accountability.” • Appeals for “better performance” often serve somebody’s political purposes—such as advocates of the “New Public Management” • Performance can mean different things(This is a figure from a paper by Dubnick making this argument.) • Performance, perception, and complexity of goals/mission: how do these relate? Skim Chapter 7 looking at the figures and propositions

2. Mar. 5 Bureaucratic Reasoning • What’s meant by bounded rationality and satisficing: what’s the difference between “being rational and trying to be rational?” • Note the various simplification strategies (all will not be discussed in class) • Why are the issues of task environment, cohesion, and risk aversion important and necessary in how people think and act in public agencies? Hint: revisit Smith and Licari’s quote (last slide) • Introducing the important concept of “institution” or “institutional” (roughly speaking, institution refers to the outside forces affecting a bureaucratic hierarchy plus the norms and motivations of those within it • The focus on organizations as institutions derives from a sociological view of organization. This perspective is basic to these important ideas/problems in evaluating networks (later in course) • Embeddedness—reasoning, behavior, and actions of organizations are constrained by social relationships (norms, motivations, expectations) within as will as those placed on them from outside (society as whole)—this would pre-empt the idea of any kind of independent, rational choice—”Where you stand depends on where you sit.” • Enactment(a fundamental idea in the Fountain book)—the tendency of individuals to create the “realities” in their midst. (This suggests that people—such as bureau-crats—will force-fit new problems and situations in terms that they are familiar with and can deal comfortably with.)