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Between Policy and Management: Common Ground and Shared Opportunities

I am honored to receive APPAM’s Kershaw award. The list of people who deserve credit for it is very long; it includes my teachers and colleagues at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University where I received my degree, those who nominated me and those who selected me, and my coauthors over the years, and my colleagues at the La Follette School at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Rigorous research in the common ground between policy and management can be fruitful and offer profound research opportunities. This idea is somewhat at odds with an underlying tension in the field of public affairs between the study of policy and administration, an artificial separation more a result of scholarly division of labor than a reflection of the actual policy process. Policy studies rest upon, sometimes implicit, assumptions of administrative quality and preferences, assumptions often not recognizable to those who directly study public administrators. In some cases, administration is considered as a variable only to the degree it represents a troubling deviance, for example as when we talk about fidelity concerns in the implementation of evaluation-inspired policies. Administration is also sometimes “rediscovered” in policy circles as Dwight Waldo observed in his characterization of implementation studies in the 1970s, and the current emphasis on implementation science as a distinct area raises similar concerns. At an extreme, policy designs are treated as self-implementing, assumed to have the same effect regardless of administrative context. Public administration scholarship too often treats the policy setting as a given, not considering how policy design affects administrative variables. At an extreme, scholars treat policy as an object administrative actors implement, subvert, or ignore, a theme I will refer to later. Scholars give too little attention to the basic question of how administrative factors can be designed to facilitate the success of policy goals.