Public Management Research: The Triumph of Art Over Science

Within schools of public policy, there is general recognition that public management mediates the relationship between policy analysis and policy making, on the one hand, and the concrete, documentable outcomes of public policies, on the other. Understanding this mediating process toward improving its effectiveness thus is essential if these schools are to fulfill their professional mission. How is this understanding to be achieved? The initial scholarship of the public policy schools [Allison, 1969, 1971; Bardach, 1972, 1977; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973; Elmore, 1979-1980] suggested an answer.(1) Authors drew on developments in the disciplines to structure and interpret richly-textured empirical accounts of policy formation and implementation. They debated and further developed each other's ideas. The result was insights of depth, originality, and promise for improving practice. This goal, as Graham Allison expressed it, was a balancing of art and science appropriate to the mission of professional schools. In retrospect, these early contributions can be seen as vestiges of the academic traditions in which schools of public policy necessarily began. Rather soon, their traditions began to be superseded by what has become a virtual obsession with research grounded in and resonant with the vocabulary, perceptions, and preoccupations of practitioners. The apparent goal is to identify governmental outcomes that can be unambiguously associated with the contemporaneous actions of ambitious managers. The evolution of purpose reflects the broadening of the policy schools’ mission. Conceived to provide students with entry-level skills by exposing them to the tools of rigorous policy analysis, these schools now provide learning opportunities for numerous audiences, including practitioners in various governmental roles and stages of their careers, who insist on resonance with immediate concerns. Moreover, alumni are now stakeholders in shaping these schools’ directions and opportunities, and their influence reinforces a practitioner, action-agenda orientation. A consequence of this shift of orientation, however, has been the triumph of art over science, of style over substance, and of adaptation over transformation, in public management research. These triumphs have, unfortunately, contributed to the field’s decline as a source of insights into how governmental structures affect policy achievement and into the role of public executives in purposefully shaping these structures. It is in the disciplines that one now finds intellectual developments which could, if exploited in the style of earlier works, revitalize public policy schools as sources of the deeper understanding and the conceptual skills needed for effective practice. This article argues for drawing on these developments to restore the balance between art and science, and between style and substance, in public management scholarship.