The urban realm and the municipal bureaucracy: Recognizing the role of place as disruptor to organizational traps

Urban place offers potential to disrupt municipal bureaucratic cultures—conceptualized as organizational traps in public administration theory—that stymie policy formulation, implementation, and innovation. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with policy actors and survey responses from 103 urban households, this paper offers three interventions in the policy diffusion literature. First, I demonstrate that policy leaders and workers engage with multiple actors outside of the organization, and those actors also interact amongst themselves and at times magnify different policy ideas and advocacy. These activities occur in the bureaucratic realm, which overlaps the urban realm and is thus informed by the features of an urban way of life. Second, this complex and intertwined realm involves lateral learning and transfer of policy through the city and amongst a broadly defined set of policy actors with varying levels of formal connection to the municipal bureaucracy. The learning that occurs is not only of policy advancement: external actors also learn about internal organizational traps that stymie policy development and implementation. Third, respondents offered place-based, or “hyper-localized†methods, to disrupt organizational traps and municipal bureaucratic deficits known as managerialism.