According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Public Management Reform. A Comparative Analysis

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data on the workforces of 708 private-sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality, focused on organizational structures allocating responsibility for reducing segregation.

Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bi...

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Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies:

Study in administration

Theory: Scholars have long debated the question of what assurance the populace can have that government bureaucracies, operating on the basis of specialized knowledge and exercising considerable discretionary authority, will act in a manner consistent with the public interest. One approach to this problem involves the representation of certain groups, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, in the public work force. This research systematically explores the potential for "representative bureaucracy" by examining how minority employment or "passive" representation is translated into the "active" representation of minority interests in the decisions of public agencies. The article proposes as the crucial intermediary concept in this process the assumption of a minority representative role perception by public administrators. Hypotheses: The article presents a model to explain the minority representative role as well as its likely consequences for decision-making affecting minority groups. Adherence to a minority representative role is influenced by an individual's personal characteristics, including race and ethnicity, organizational factors, and perceived expectations of their work obligations. To the degree that public administrators adopt a minority representative role they will be more likely to make decisions that reflect the interests of minorities. Methods: Ordinary least squares regression is used to test the hypotheses in data collected from a sample of county supervisors from the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHA) responsible for making loan determinations. This assessment offers a rigorous test of a theory of representative bureaucracy since the FmHA has not demonstrated great sensitivity to minorities in either employment or policy implementation. Results: Race, education, age, party identification, years employed by the federal government, and perceived work obligations are found to affect adherence to a minority representative role among the sample of FmHA administrators. Assumption of this role, in turn, increases the likelihood that these officials will make loan decisions favoring minority applicants. These results provide strong confirmation for the minority representative role concept and the underlying theoretical linkages of representative bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy as a Representative Institution: Toward a Reconciliation of Bureaucratic Government and Democratic Theory

A growing consensus among administrators and academic researchers is that merit pay based on individual performance has failed in the public sector. At the same time, however, governments continue ...

The Paradox of Merit Pay in the Public Sector Persistence of a Problematic Procedure

The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that a public workforce representative of the people in terms of race, ethnicity, and sex will help ensure that the interests of all groups are considered in bureaucratic decision-making processes. The theory posits that the active representation of group interests occurs because individual bureaucrats reflect the views of those who share their demographic backgrounds. Research in the public administration literature, however, includes only a relatively small number of studies providing evidence consistent with active representation. In addition, that literature is, for the most part, composed of studies that are conducted at an organizational level, making it impossible for us to draw inferences about the behavior of individual bureaucrats without committing an ecological fallacy. Researchers in the field of criminal justice studies, on the other hand, have long tested the relationship between workforce demography and government outcomes and have done so at the individual level and in contexts that allow confidence that the outcomes observed are indeed the product of action by minority or female public servants. Those studies are reviewed, and their findings provide the first definitive evidence of a connection between the presence of diversity in the public workforce and the representation of minority interests.

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Representative Bureaucracy: Assessing the Evidence on Active Representation

The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that a demographically diverse public sector workforce (passive representation) will lead to policy outcomes that reflect the interests of all groups represented, including historically disadvantaged communities (active representation). Implicit in the passive-active link is the expectation that minority public administrators, in particular, will have similar attitudes to minority citizens on issues of critical import and relevance to those citizens, and those attitudes, in turn, will influence policy decisions. This research examines the attitudes of citizens and administrators on a series of survey items focused on the responsibilities of local government administrators to advocate for the interests of the African-American community. The survey results confirm the hypothesis that African-American citizens and administrators are more likely than white citizens and administrators to support governmental behaviors that specifically target the interests of the African-American community and that African-American citizens and administrators hold markedly different attitudes from white administrators. Most significantly, attitude congruence with the views of African-American citizens by administrators is shown to be a significant predictor of the adoption of an African-American representative administrative role, overwhelming the influence of other variables including race.

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Representative Bureaucracy: Exploring the Potential for Active Representation in Local Government

In the mid-1990s, the State of Georgia launched a major reform of its personnel system. One part of the reform included a new approach to compensation called GeorgiaGain. With pay-for-performance as its centerpiece, GeorgiaGain was a comprehensive effort to modernize many of the state’s human resources management (HRM) practices. Its goals included the establishment of a state-of-the-art performance management system, implementing performance measurement and evaluation procedures that supervisors and subordinates alike trusted, setting up a competitive compensation plan, and streamlining the state’s position description and classification system. This article reports on the findings of major survey of state employees conducted early in 2000 designed to explore employees’ perceptions of the impact in areas such as job satisfaction, trust and confidence in the state’s HRM system, and the effects of pay-for-performance. Overall, employees were highly critical of the reform and believed that it had not produc...

J. Edward Kellough

Papers

Bureaucracy as a Representative Institution: Toward a Reconciliation of Bureaucratic Government and Democratic Theory

The Paradox of Merit Pay in the Public Sector Persistence of a Problematic Procedure

Representative Bureaucracy: Assessing the Evidence on Active Representation

Representative Bureaucracy: Exploring the Potential for Active Representation in Local Government

Pay for Performance in Georgia State Government Employee Perspectives on GeorgiaGain After 5 Years