Foundations of Public Service by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Terrorism, General
ISBN: 9780765616128
Google: dfovCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 4675569
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

The communitarian aspects of public service discussed here may be viewed by some as detracting from the efficient pursuit of public purposes. Reformist rhetoric tends to emphasize a strictly instrumentalist view of administrative process, promising politicians and taxpayers the “best bang for the buck,” above all else. Everything else is expendable. This reform doctrine is propagated for the sake of political expediency, despite decades of research demonstrating its insufficiency. Since at least the 1940s, organization theorists have emphasized the productive tension between the pursuit of task effectiveness on the one hand, and development and maturation of individuals in organizational contexts on the other. Job enrichment, employee empowerment, and career enhancement serve both ends. Group dynamics, participative decision making, and democratic styles of leadership figure prominently, not only as pragmatic elements of organizational effectiveness but also as normative principles appropriate to democratic life.

The literature on organizational culture has broadened our understanding of complex organizations by looking at underlying values, assumptions, and symbols that shape people’s views on what, how, and why things are done in an organization, irrespective of rational-instrumental explanations. These insights point to other important dimensions of daily life that suffuse and transcend organizations. Human beings may find great meaning or value in work, but they also exhibit sociality, family, convention, religiosity, tradition, ritual, political affiliation, and community. Work life, especially in complex organizations, cannot exist in complete isolation from these phenomena, nor should it.

The communitarian aspects of organization call attention to the play of ideas, power, authority, status, rights, and entitlement in the administrative process. They emphasize the propriety of means as well as ends in defining who we are as a people, and beyond that, define ways of living together in the face of ambiguous and conflicting values. American government embraces conflict and tension as inherent characteristics of governance, and it institutionalizes them through a multitude of checks and balances, legal-political jurisdictions, and various decision processes based in opposing administrative traditions. These dynamics engender quasi-autonomous centers of power divided among levels of government, among competing agencies and programs, and among governing powers ceded to private, economic, and social spheres of life. The public service reflects this richly diverse and complicated plurality of forms, processes, and powers. Public servants are not mere instruments of society but fully active members of a political community who live out much of their lives in its governing institutions, exercising their own shares of power.

It is the role of human resources managers in this system to mediate among the conflicting centers of power in order to help preserve the viability of the public service. Thus, they cannot serve exclusively as extensions of an executive branch but must operate betwixt and between the full array of superintending principalities and powers. They must strike a balance between competing interests, rights claims of employee groups, and the imperatives of managers and politicians to control costs, effectively reform programs, and deploy personnel for new initiatives. The tendency to place more HRM functions under the direct control of elected executives inevitably shifts the balance in favor of executive and managerial agendas.

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