The US Internal Revenue Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 (known as RRA98) directed the IRS to redesign its structure. The IRS had operated for about half a century with the same geography-based structure; that is, the agency was organized on the basis of geographic regions and further subdivided into districts. Most of the important auditing, enforcement, and tax collection work occurred in the 33 geographic districts. The directors of these 33 districts had a lot of authority over what happened in their districts and often had considerable prestige and presence there as well. Most of the tax returns they received were sent to be processed at one of ten major service centers located around the nation.

As part of the set of reforms that RRA98 mandated, IRS executives led a major transformation in the agency's structure to a customer-focused design. The new commissioner of the IRS, Charles Rossotti, proposed the design as a version of similar approaches used by major banks. Large banks face a variety of demands from different clusters of their customers. Individual retail customers want checking accounts and small loans. Small businesses and self-employed persons have additional needs for business loans and payroll services. Very large corporations have further needs for support of their larger loans and payroll services, pension plans, and stock and bond offerings. The large banks have often designed their structures into divisions to address the needs of these different sets of customers.

The IRS developed a similar plan. The agency reorganized into four main operating divisions:

• A wage and investment division, for taxpayers filing their individual income tax returns
• A small business and self-employed division
• A large and medium-sized business division
• A tax-exempt and government entities division, which has no analog in the example about large banks; it deals with issues of concern to nonprofit organizations and tax-exempt pension programs

The IRS also established an agency-wide shared services division that handles many of the common service and support needs of the other parts of the agency, such as maintenance of personal computers and payroll processing. Many business firms and other organizations have recently established a division of this sort to handle widely shared common services.

Redesigning the IRS represented a huge undertaking, because the organization employs more than a hundred thousand people, processes more than 425 million tax returns per year, and handles well over a trillion dollars in revenue each year. The reorganization required several years and involved numerous design teams working on plans for the new organization. The new divisions came into operation in 2000 and 2001, and the success of the new design remains to be evaluated, but clearly the reorganization worked in the sense of firmly establishing the new structure.

Another organization that underwent redesign is the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, which serves as an important scientific resource for the nation and the world (see www.bnl.gov). Scientists at BNL conduct leading research in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, environmental science, and other areas. One major facility at BNL, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, allows scientists to conduct experiments in which they use this massive particle accelerator to stage collisions between large subatomic particles and to study the results of the collisions for evidence about the fundamental characteristics of atomic particles and matter. Although scientists at BNL take pride in the lab's research in part because of its peacetime applications (as opposed to nuclear research for military applications), environmentalists and local residents have worried for a long time about the danger of environmental pollution from the lab. During the 1990s, the discovery and disclosure of a small leak of tritium, a radioactive substance, caused a public outcry. Although scientists at the lab considered the leak extremely minor and not at all dangerous, the news of the leak aggravated the long standing worries about the lab. Demonstrators conducted protests at the entrance to the lab compound. Celebrities, such as a supermodel and a famous actor, pled in public for the closing of the lab and claimed that it caused cancer in local residents. They and other activists prevailed upon political leaders in the area to do something about BNL.

Amid the controversy, the secretary of energy canceled the contract for the management of the lab. The lab is a government-owned, contractor-operated organization. Years ago, when the federal government established national laboratories, the management of the labs was contracted out. Under these contracts, private business firms or consortia of universities would manage the labs. Brookhaven had been managed for more than fifty years under a contract with a consortium of major universities. After the secretary of energy canceled the contract, the Department of Energy entered into a new contract with a partnership between a university and a major research institute, who provided the new management team for the lab.

Soon the administrative structure at BNL changed significantly. The main organizational departments, called directorates, included directorates for the major scientific programs in which the scientists conducted research, such as the directorate for high energy and nuclear physics, and for life sciences. There were also administrative directorates, such as the directorate for finance and administration. The new management group added additional administrative directorates: one for environment, safety, health, and quality, which oversees environmental protection and safety procedures at BNL, and one for community involvement, government, and public affairs. The directors who headed the directorates met regularly as a group with the director of the lab – the top administrator – and often voted on major issues. Scientists at the lab pointed out that the addition of the new administrative directorates meant that the administrative functions were receiving increased emphasis and influence. For example, more directors of administrative directorates meant more votes for administrative functions in the meetings with the lab director.

Soon the new management group also introduced requirements that employees working at BNL had to complete web-based training programs in laboratory safety procedures and waste disposal and environmental protection procedures. Many of the scientists grumbled about these requirements, because they saw them as unnecessary training in elementary procedures that they already followed. They felt that the new rules and procedures wasted time and resources because they tied up employees in completing the training instead of working on research. In addition, scientists at BNL often got grants from other sources to conduct research, and overhead expenses were taken out of their grants to pay for the added administrative functions and the additional training.

In effect, then, the new administrative directorates and the added administrative rules and procedures increased the importance of administrative controls and influences relative to scientific research priorities. Why did this occur? The new laboratory director explained that something had to be done to respond to the public controversy and outcry about the environmental dangers at BNL. Although the scientists at the lab grumbled about the new procedures, they expressed great respect for the director, a former university president and a scientist himself. The scientists acknowledged that he had to do something to respond to the political and public relations pressures on the lab.

These examples illustrate why the historical overview in Chapter Two and the discussion of organizational environments in Chapter Four show that so many factors – such as environmental complexity, public sector status (including political oversight and mandates), goals, and leadership – affect organizational structures and their design.

Organizational analysts have developed more than one definition of structure. Some management researchers distinguish organizational structure from an organization's technology and tasks. They use structure to refer to the configuration of the hierarchical levels and specialized units and positions in an organization and to the formal rules governing these arrangements. Technology and tasks refer to an organization's work processes, including the knowledge involved, that often serve as major influences on the design of organizational structure. Other definitions of structure combine elements of the organizational configuration with processes. For example, Mintzberg (1979) defines structure as the ways in which an organization divides its labor and integrates efforts.

As the historical review in Chapter Two showed, the concept of organizational structure has played a central role in organization and management theory from the beginning. Researchers have analyzed organizational technologies and tasks as important elements affecting the best structure. In spite of the constraints placed on them, public managers have considerable authority over the structure of their organizations and make many decisions in relation to technology and tasks, so current thinking on these topics is important to effective public management.

This chapter first discusses whether public organizations have distinctive structural characteristics, such as more red tape than private organizations. It then examines the importance of organizational structure and its relation to political power, strategy, and other topics. Next, it describes major concepts and findings from the research on organizational structure, technology, and design. Organization theorists have generally addressed structure from a generic perspective, devoting little attention to the distinctive structural attributes of public organizations, even though some important studies have concentrated on public agencies. These general points apply to most organizations, however, and the discussion here gives examples specifically involving public organizations. The chapter concludes by turning more directly to the evidence about whether public organizations differ in structure and design from private organizations.

Do Public Organizations Have Distinctive Structural Characteristics?

Novels, essays, and popular stereotypes have all bemoaned the absurdity and inhumanity of government bureaucracies. Their observations often focus on structural matters, such as rigid rules and hierarchies. More formal scholarship often follows suit. In a virtual tradition among some economists, government bureaucracies play the role of villain, sometimes threatening both prosperity and freedom. In probably the most widely cited book on bureaucracy ever published, Downs (1967) argues that government bureaucracies inevitably move toward rigidity and hierarchical constraints. He states a “law of hierarchy” that holds that large government organizations, with no economic markets for their outputs, have more elaborate and centralized hierarchies than do private business firms. Downs's law represents a broad consensus that government bureaucracies have exceedingly complex rules, red tape, and hierarchies, even in comparison with large private sector organizations (Barton, 1980; Bozeman, 2000; Dahl and Lindblom, 1953; Lindblom, 1977; Sharkansky, 1989).

An opposite consensus also exists, however. Organization theorists' research on organizational structure offers the best-developed concepts and empirical findings on the topic. Yet as the first several chapters of this book pointed out, most organization theorists have not regarded public organizations as a particularly distinctive category. They have usually adopted a generic perspective that contends that their concepts of structure apply broadly across many types of organizations with distinctions such as “public” and “private” regarded as oversimplified and based on crude stereotypes. Many organization theorists regard other factors, such as organizational size, environmental complexity, and technology, as more important influences on structure than public or private status. Mainstream organization theory in effect sharply disputes the view that public bureaucracies have excessive red tape and highly centralized and elaborate hierarchies.

We will further examine the evidence in this controversy later in this chapter. First, however, we will review the concepts and insights about organizational structure developed by organization theorists and how they apply to public organizations – because they do. Most of the research comparing public and private organizations' structures use these concepts and methods from organization theory. After reviewing these concepts, we will turn to the evidence comparing public and private organizational structures, which will show some very interesting developments in this research, some of them quite recent. To some people, carefully examining research on the structures of public bureaucracies and business firms sounds about as inviting as reading the telephone book. But if you like to base your thinking on well-developed evidence instead of on stereotypes and the half-baked assertions we hear in popular discourse, following and interpreting the research on this topic is an intriguing challenge.

The Development of Research on Structure

We have already seen examples of the influence of political actors and government authorities on the structures of public agencies: legislation and political pressures that force structural changes; rules and clearances imposed on federal managers by oversight agencies; micromanagement by legislators who specify rules and organizational structure; legislators and interest groups jealously guarding the structural autonomy of an agency, preventing its reorganization under the authority of another organization; and President Reagan's demotion of federal career civil servants by creating new positions above them. Presidents have created new agencies and placed them outside existing agencies to keep them away from those agencies' powerful political and administrative coalitions (Seidman and Gilmour, 1986). John Kennedy placed the Peace Corps outside the State Department, and Lyndon Johnson kept the youth employment training programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity away from the Department of Labor. Interest group pressures have led to the removal of bureaus from larger agencies. Due to such pressures, Congress removed the Department of Education from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which then became the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (Radin and Hawley, 1988). Later, similar political pressures led Congress to remove the Social Security Administration (SSA) from HHS.

Interestingly, however, early in this century, public administration experts leading the development of the field did not emphasize such political dynamics in their most prominent analyses of government organizations. Proponents of the Administrative Management School argued that its principles of administration applied equally well in government and business organizations. These principles were to guide decisions about structure that would maximize efficiency and performance. Even though it tended to downplay distinctions between government and business, this drive toward developing efficient, effective structure drew strength from important issues in government at the time. A reform movement, which was active in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the earlier decades of the twentieth, attacked government corruption and mismanagement, particularly in urban areas. Reformers saw these principles as guidelines for efficient structuring of organizations to purge political patronage and slovenly management (Knott and Miller, 1987).

Later, government growth during the New Deal and after World War II brought a vast proliferation of government agencies. Gulick and other proponents of the principles of the administrative management school influenced major proposals for reorganizing the sprawling federal bureaucracy and played an important role in major developments in the structure of the federal government. For example, some of the reforms proposed grouping various federal agencies under larger “umbrella” agencies as a means of narrowing the chief executive's span of control. During past decades, some experts have argued that many government officials continue to hold the general view of proper organization espoused by the administrative management school (Knott and Miller, 1987; Seidman and Gilmour, 1986; Warwick, 1975).

As explained in Chapter Two, the classic approach to structure came under criticism as research on organizations burgeoned during the middle of the twentieth century. The contingency perspective on organizational structure rejected the quest for one common set of principles to guide organizational design. Contingency theorists contended that an organization's structure must be adapted to key contingencies facing the organization, such as environmental variations and uncertainty, the demands of technology or the production process, the size of the organization, and strategic decisions by managers and coalitions within the organization.

Empirical studies in the 1960s and 1970s added to this perspective, seeking to define and measure structural concepts. By the 1970s, research journals were filled with empirical studies analyzing these concepts. The activity led to the fairly typical version of contingency frameworks that we will examine next, and to the topic of organizational design, which we will take up after that.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the literature on organizations and the practice of management within them moved still further in the direction described in Chapter Two: away from bureaucratized, mechanistic structures and toward flexible, organic structures. Management mavens touted extremely loose and informal structure as the ideal (Peters, 1988). Many large corporations launched initiatives to decentralize their structure and make themselves more flexible, and business periodicals carried stories about “bureaucracy-busting” executives. By the turn of the new century, experts on organizational design were describing how many corporations had adopted “lateral,” “horizontal,” or “team-based” structures in the quest for high levels of flexibility and adaptability.

The public sector followed the lead of the private sector in these directions (Barzelay, 1992). For example, the National Performance Review (described in Chapter Six) called for a 50% reduction in agency rules, eliminated the federal personnel manual as a symbolic gesture toward reducing personnel rules, and took other steps toward decentralizing and loosening up the bureaucratic structure of the federal government. The Winter Commission, which proposed ways of revitalizing state and local public service, also proposed reducing bureaucratic rules and decentralizing procedures. Among other proposals, the commission called for “flattening” the bureaucracy by eliminating middle layers in public agencies, and “deregulating” government by eliminating many personnel rules and decentralizing procedures (Thompson, 1993). State and local governments in the US have also undertaken reforms to eliminate layers of middle management (Walters, 1996) and to loosen the rules that gave public employees merit system protections in their jobs (Walters, 2002). More recently, experts continue to advance proposals for more flexible government (National Academy of Public Administration, 2021). President Trump's efforts in 2020 to de-federalize disaster preparation provides an example. Trump called on state and local entities to fund their own training for disaster preparedness and proposed eliminating millions of grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The emphasis on decentralization and flexibility has had major influences on how practicing leaders, managers, and researchers think about the best ways to design organizations. Yet ideas and concepts developed by their predecessors continue to have relevance. Academic journal articles still address early topics about organizational structure such as centralization (e.g., see Joseph et al., 2016; 2018) and hierarchy (Keum and See, 2017). We still need such concepts to analyze organizations.

Structural Dimensions and Influences

Researchers developing definitions and measures of organizational structure have run into many complications. For example, you can measure structural features objectively (by counting the number of rules, e.g.,) or subjectively (by asking people how strictly they must follow the rules). In addition, organizations can be very complex, with different units having markedly different structures, and this makes it hard to develop an overall measure of an organization's structure.

Organizational Design

Work on contingency theory led to the development of literature offering guidelines for managers and others engaged in designing organizations (Burton, Obel, and Hakonsson, 2020; Daft, 2020; Galbraith, 2014; Mintzberg, 1979, 1983). Although these authors usually do not consider the distinctiveness of public organizations, many of the concepts they discuss apply in public management.

Major Design Alternatives

Functional Structures. Management writers also contrast the pros and cons of the major design alternatives from which organizations choose (Burton, Obel, and DeSanctis, 2011; Chichocki and Irwin, 2011; Daft, 2020; Galbraith, 2014). Functional structures, the classical prototype, organize according to major functions: marketing and sales, manufacturing, finance, R&D. The advantages include economies of scale within the functional units (e.g., all the attorneys in the legal department can use the same law library; the manufacturing personnel share plants and machinery). Departments concentrate on their functions and enhance their specialized skills. Yet this may weaken coordination with other functions to ensure overall product quality or the implementation of needed changes.

Product and Hybrid Structures. As organizations grow, producing more diverse products and competing in more diverse, rapidly changing markets, the functional structure proves too slow in responding to changes and too hierarchical to allow rapid coordination across functional divisions. Large corporations, such as the major automobile manufacturers, thus adopt product structures, with separate divisions, each responsible for its own product line. Each division possesses its own units to perform major functions such as sales and manufacturing (e.g., the Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, and Buick divisions of General Motors or, in a high-technology firm, divisions for medical instruments, personal computers, and electronic instruments). This approach sacrifices some of the advantages of the functional form, but it provides for more rapid responses to environmental changes (in product technology, customer demands, competitors) and greater concentration on the quality of the products rather than on individual functions. In fact, many corporations actually employ hybrid structures, with major product divisions (e.g., chemicals, fuels, lubricants; see Daft, 2020) but also some major functional units (finance, human resources).

Matrix Designs. During the past century, some firms developed a matrix structure in response to demands for both high-quality products in highly technical areas (product emphasis) and rapid and reliable production (functional emphasis). The sort of mixing or crosshatching of different types of responsibility and authority characteristic of matrix organizations evolved into different alternatives, but still occurs quite frequently. Military weapons manufacturers, e.g., faced pressure to produce highly technical weapons systems according to demanding standards, and to do so within sharp time constraints. Matrix structures purposely violate the classic prescriptions for “one master” and clear chains of authority. High-level managers share authority over the same activities, with some exercising functional authority (such as vice presidents for product development, manufacturing, marketing, procurement) and others having responsibility for the particular products or projects that cross all those functions. Thus, one manager may have responsibility for pushing the completion of a particular aircraft project, while others may share responsibility for the particular functions involved in getting the craft built. The authority of the product executives crosses all the functions, whereas the functional executives have authority over their functions across all the products. Diagrammed, this structure appears as a matrix of two sets of executives with crosshatched lines of authority. It offers the advantage of the ability to share or shift personnel or other resources rapidly across product lines and to coordinate the organization's response to dual pressures from the environment. However, it requires a heavy investment in coordination, liaison activities, and conflict resolution. Successful matrix designs often require a lot of training and good interpersonal skills on the part of managers, because such designs typically produce high levels of stress and conflict that must be resolved.

Some structures in the public sector have been equated with matrix structures. Simon (1983) described the use of a matrix management arrangement at the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. This commission was organized into functional bureaus, including the Bureau of Engineering, the Bureau of Economics, the Bureau of Biomedical Science, and so on. Each bureau had partial responsibility for developing regulations issued by the commission, but none had overall responsibility. The matrix arrangement involved six functional directorates and the Office of Program Management. The Office of Program Management had a program manager for each of a set of new product-oriented programs, including a chemical products program, an electrical products program, and a children's products program. These program managers chaired program teams made up of representatives from the various functional directorates. The teams managed the overall development of regulations for the products for which their programs were responsible, and they coordinated the work of the functional directorates pertaining to those programs. The commission's executives felt that the matrix arrangement would improve productivity, morale, effective use of resources, communication, and accountability, but it also increased stress and turf battles and evoked some resistance, as matrix arrangements usually do.

The executive director of the commission observed that public managers face particular challenges in adopting matrix designs. He felt that private executives have more authority over rewards and have profit targets to use as incentives for cooperation. Public executives can impose fewer sanctions and have weaker authority to reassign those who resist a new design. Here again we see that a design developed in industry has potential value in government but requires skillful implementation within the constraints imposed by the public sector. Swiss (1991) provided further examples of the use of matrix organization in city governments.

Market and Customer-Focused Designs. According to Galbraith (2014), many corporations have moved toward a market structure, in which the main organizational units are organized on the basis of their orientation to groupings of customers, markets, or industries. The IRS reorganization described at the beginning of the chapter exemplifies a customer-focused version of this alternative. The more frequent adoption of this structural form has been driven by the rise of the service industry, which increases the value of knowledge of market segments and customers, and by the increasing tendency to contract out functions and services, which reduces demands for large-scale production operations that used to force an organization toward functional divisions or large-scale product divisions.

Geographical Designs. Organizations have employed geographical structures, such as the emphasis on geographic regions and districts in the original IRS structure described at the beginning of the chapter. Although the IRS has moved away from that alternative, organizations continue to utilize it, sometimes as part of a hybridized combination with another structural emphasis, as in the case of a global matrix structure for a business firm's international operations (Daft, 2020). This alternative can reduce transportation and logistics costs and challenges. It can bring services closer to customers and allow service delivery on site, and it can enhance the perception that the organization is local (Galbraith, 2014). In addition, organizations often face major geographical imperatives because of such developments as globalization and internationalization of organizational activities. Such developments virtually require emphasis on geography in organizational design, through such obvious alternatives as headquarters or centers of operation on different continents or in different nations (Daft, 2020).

Process Structures. Still another contemporary approach to organizational design involves the process structure: Divisions are organized around processes, such as the new product development process, and customer acquisition and maintenance processes, in which customer service teams focus on segments or groupings of customers.

Given all these alternatives, it should not be surprising that structures in organizations show a great deal of variation. These alternatives actually serve as prototypes that organizational designers choose among and blend using heavy doses of pragmatism, because obviously no scientific method exists for designing organizations. As discussed earlier, management experts currently propose that many organizations should adopt highly adaptive, permeable, fluid, loosely arranged structures, and they observe that organizations increasingly attempt to do so.

The literature on organization structure and design provides many illustrations of the employment of teams – including shifting teams in “reconfigurable” organizations – and of designs for lateral and horizontal coordination in and among organizations. The heavy emphasis on the accountability of public organizations to external authorities may impede the use of some flexible structures in government agencies, but these alternatives are often applicable in some form. A geologist with the US Geological Survey, e.g., works with officials of the nation of Afghanistan to develop that war-ravaged nation's geological resources, such as water, oil, and mineral deposits. A project assessing the potential for such resources and their development will involve an ad hoc team representing different organizational units, including experts on water resources, mineral resources, oil and gas resources, and other resources and related issues (such as earthquakes). The team will be flexible and “reconfigurable” over time. In many other instances as well the more contemporary design alternatives apply to government and its organizations.

Holacracy. A holacracy refers to a decentralized management and organizational structure of governance, a sort of “no-structure structure” that claims to distribute authority and decision making via self-organizing teams. The term “holarchy” was first coined by Arthur Koestler (1967) in “The Ghost in the Machine” wherein Koestler describes a holocracy as comprised of holons (from the Greek), autonomous and self-reliant units, and at the same time, dependent on the greater whole. Puranam and Hakonsson (2015) describe a holocracy as an organizational form without a formal hierarchy, job titles, or job descriptions. Organizational analysts have advanced similar ideas, such as “postbureaucratic,” “poststructuralist,” “information-based,” and “organic” organizations. Holacracy has been adopted by businesses in several countries and in non-profit organizations. The online shoe company Zappos has been described as a holocracy (Groth, 2016). In its early phase, the online publisher Medium was also structured as a holacracy. However, in 2016, the company reportedly abandoned the form because of difficulty coordinating large-scale projects (Boyd, 2013; Stirman, 2013; Doyle, 2016).

In a Harvard Business Review article, “Beyond the Holacracy Hype,” Bernstein et al. (2016) argue that organizations are attracted to the holacracy form as a way to balance reliability and adaptability. They describe the holacracy as the latest variation of self-managing teams and an extension of adhocracy – e.g., a flexible informal management form, observed by Warren Bennis and Henry Mintzberg in the 1980s. They also predict that despite the challenges associated with holacracies, elements of self-organization will become valuable tools for all organizations in the future. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic made work-from-home arrangements widespread. Companies increasingly grapple with novel ways to communicate, integrate, and coordinate. The lessons from Zappos and other organizations, which have structured their organizations as holacracies, deserve attention.

Organizational Structures in Public Organizations

The question of alternative designs for public organizations brings us back to whether public organizations have distinctive structures. As mentioned earlier, some academic theories and observations suggest that public organizations are inherently different from private organizations, because governmental oversight and the absence of performance indicators such as sales and profits cause them to emphasize rules and hierarchy. If this is true, it suggests that public organizations cannot adopt some structural forms, such as decentralized and flexible designs, or that they can do so only with great difficulty. Conversely, many organization theorists regard public sector status as unimportant (in part because their research has often found little evidence that public organizations have distinctive structures). Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings (1969), e.g., predicted that government organizations in their sample would show higher levels of formalization (they used a measure called “structuring of activities”), but they did not. Over the years, additional studies have concurred. Buchanan (1975) also sought to test the proverbial red-tape differences by comparing federal managers to business managers on a “structure salience” scale. Unexpectedly, the public managers perceived that a lower level of salience was assigned to structure in their organizations. Bozeman and Loveless (1987) found that public sector R&D units differed only slightly from private sector R&D units in the amount of red tape with which they had to contend. Langbein (2000) analyzed the results of a 1994 survey of 2,750 members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and compared those who worked in the public sector to those employed in the private sector on the degree to which they felt they had discretion – autonomy in decision making – in their work. She found no significant difference between the two groups (although she concluded that conditions that the engineers perceive as constraining discretion, such as disagreement among higher-level authorities, were more likely to prevail in the public sector). Kurland and Egan (1999) analyzed a small sample of organizations, comparing responses from members of two public agencies to those in seven private firms, and found little difference between the two sets of employees on perceptions about the formalization of their jobs and their communication patterns.

Yet other evidence suggests that public organizations do differ. Although Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings (1969) did not find greater “structuring of activities” in government organizations, in those organizations authority was more concentrated at the top of or outside the organization, especially concerning personnel procedures. The researchers concluded that an organization's size and technological development act as the main determinants of how the organization structures its activities, but government ownership exerts an influence independent of size and technology, causing this concentration of authority at the top or with external authorities. The study included only eight public organizations, all local government units with tasks similar to those of many business firms, including a local water department and a manufacturing unit of a government agency. This might explain why these organizations did not show as much bureaucratic structuring as anticipated. It also indicates, however, the effects of government ownership even on organizations that are much like business firms. A public manager would probably comment that the researchers simply observed the effects of civil service systems.

Mintzberg (1979) cited this evidence from Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings when he designated public machine bureaucracies as a subtype within the machine bureaucracy category in his typology of structures. He argued that many public bureaucracies tend toward the machine bureaucracy form because of external governmental control. Other studies have come to similar conclusions. Warwick (1975) concluded from his case study of the US Department of State that public bureaucracies inherently incline toward elaborate hierarchies and rules. Meyer (1979) analyzed a national sample of state and local finance agencies and found their vertical hierarchies to be very stable over time. Political pressures forced frequent changes in their subunit composition, however, and pressures from the federal government led to formalization of their personnel systems. Meyer concluded that public bureaucracies have no alternative to elaborate hierarchies. Their managers' political strength and skill, however, determine how well they can defend themselves from external forces that can strip away their subunits and assign them to some other organization.

Holdaway, Newberry, Hickson, and Heron (1975) found, in a study of Canadian universities, that higher degrees of government control are related to correspondingly higher levels of formalization, standardization of personnel procedures, and centralization. Chubb and Moe (1990) reported that public school employees in the United States perceive more externally imposed formal constraints on personnel procedures and school policies than do private school employees. Rainey's sample of middle managers in state agencies (1983) perceived more organizational formalization, particularly concerning going through channels and adhering to standard operating procedures, than did middle managers in business firms. This study and a number of others found that government managers report much stronger constraints on the administration of extrinsic rewards such as pay and promotion under the existing personnel rules for their organizations than do business managers. Chapters Nine and Ten cite various studies that have found this difference at all levels of government. Also indicating the effects of public sector status on personnel procedures, Tolbert and Zucker (1983) showed how federal pressures influenced the diffusion of civil service personnel systems across governments in the United States. Light (2002b) compared the results from a survey of 673 US federal employees to those of a survey of 505 private employees and found that federal employees perceived more layers of supervisors in their organizations. Zaffane (1994) compared survey responses of 474 public sector managers and 944 private sector managers in 238 organizations operating in Australia. The public managers perceived more emphasis on rules and regulations in their organizations than did their private counterparts.

Studies by professional associations and government agencies, and the testimony of public managers, paint a similar picture. A National Academy of Public Administration (1986) report lamented the complex web of controls and rules governing federal managers' decisions and the adverse effects of these constraints on their capacity and motivation to manage. The report complained that managers in charge of large federal programs often face irritating limits on their authority to make even minor decisions. The head of a program involving tens of millions of dollars might have to seek the approval of the General Services Administration before he or she can send an assistant to a short training program. Very large surveys of federal employees have found that a large percentage of federal managers and executives say they do not have enough authority to remove, hire, promote, and determine the pay of their employees. Large percentages have also expressed the opinion that federal personnel and budgeting rules create obstacles to productivity (US Office of Personnel Management, 1979, 1980, 1983). Executives who have served in both business and government say similar things about the constraints on the authority of managers in government positions imposed by overarching rules and oversight agencies (Allison, 1983; Blumenthal, 1983; Chase and Reveal, 1983; IBM Endowment for the Business of Government, 2002). The National Performance Review during the Clinton administration sought to enact a number of reforms aimed at reducing rules and red tape in the federal government. President Clinton issued an executive order instructing all federal agencies to reduce their rules by 50% (an order that appears to have had virtually no impact), and other initiatives sought to decentralize and reduce the rules and constraints in federal human resource management and procurement procedures. These efforts reflect a widespread conviction that government organizations are subject to extensive and excessive rules and hierarchical controls.

Research on red tape also generally supports this view. Sociologists and psychologists who study organizations have not made much use of the concept of red tape, probably because they regard it as a vague, colloquial idea that supports crude stereotypes about organizations. Because the problem of red tape has been a classic and proverbial topic in government, however, researchers in public administration have done more in recent years to develop the concept. It derives from the practice in the British civil service of binding official documents in red tape, and it generally refers to cumbersome organizational rules and procedures, frequently associated with government. A topic of satire and ridicule at least since Charles Dickens wrote an essay about it, the red tape problem has over the years led to many initiatives aimed at reducing red tape in government. These efforts have tended to make little headway, often because even as one person or group may regard a rule as burdensome and absurd, another person or group defends it as an essential protection of the public interest (Kaufman, 1977). Bozeman and others (Bozeman, 2000; Bozeman and Feeney, 2011) have developed the concept for use in research, however, and their research tends to support the generalization that public organizations have more red tape than private ones—a finding consistent with the findings about greater levels of formalization in public organizations. Bozeman defines red tape as “rules, regulations, and procedures that … entail a compliance burden but do not advance the legitimate purposes the rules were intended to serve” (2000, p. 12). Thus, red tape differs from formalization (formal rules and procedures) in that red tape involves excessive and unduly expensive or burdensome rules and regulations. Bozeman also develops concepts for dimensions and types of red tape, such as rule inception red tape, which originates when the rule is established because of such problems as inaccurate forecasts about the effects of the rule, or because managers make excessive attempts at control. Rule-evolved red tape occurs when rules drift away from their original form because of how they are implemented or because they are incompatible with other rules. Pandey and Scott (2002) and Pandey and Kingsley (2000) further show empirical evidence that red tape should be regarded as a concept distinct from formalization.

Most important, when surveys have asked government and business managers about the extent of red tape in their organizations, the public managers have consistently reported higher levels than the business managers (Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman, 1995). In other studies, in which public and private managers have responded to questions about how long it takes to finish certain administrative functions, such as hiring a new person, firing an employee, or purchasing a piece of equipment, the public managers have reported longer times than the business managers (Scott and Falcone, 1998; Bozeman and Rainey, 1998).

All of these studies and reports provide increasing evidence that public sector status influences an organization's structure in a number of ways, particularly in regard to rules and structural arrangements over which external oversight agencies have authority, such as personnel and purchasing procedures. The stream of research does show some inconsistencies, however, on such dimensions as formalization, in which some studies find differences between the two sectors and some do not. A very interesting and important interpretation of these inconsistencies involves a distinction between formalization and red tape in general and formalization and red tape in such areas as personnel and purchasing, in which government agencies are subject to control by external authorities that impose the rules on them. This interpretation takes on importance because it contrasts with the common assertion that a lot of rules and red tape originate inside public bureaucracies because bureaucrats have an affinity for rules and because higher-level government bureaucrats issue a profusion of rules in attempts to control lower-level bureaucrats (e.g., Downs, 1967; Lynn, 1987; Warwick, 1975).

Bozeman and Bretschneider (1994) provided explicit evidence of these patterns. They analyzed them in R&D laboratories on the basis of the labs' public or private status and on the amount of government funding they received. The government labs had highly structured personnel rules. The private labs did not, even when they received high levels of government funding. The private labs did, however, receive more contacts and communications from government officials when they received more public funding. This suggests that government funding brings with it a different pattern of governmental influence than does governmental ownership. Ownership brings with it the formal authority of oversight agencies to impose rules, usually governing personnel, purchasing, and accounting and budgeting procedures. Bretschneider (1990) provided more evidence in an analysis of decisions about computer systems in public and private organizations. Managers in the public organizations experienced longer delays in getting approval to purchase computer equipment and in the processing of those purchases. The delays apparently reflect the procurement rules imposed by central procurement agencies such as the General Services Administration. In sum, these studies provide evidence, consistent with the pattern that began to emerge with the Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings (1969) study, that government ownership often subjects organizations to central oversight rules over such matters as personnel, purchasing, and budgeting and accounting procedures.

More recent survey evidence supports this observation more strongly than ever. Feeney and Rainey (2010) reported results of surveys in several different states, involving all levels of government and many different organizations, at different points across a thirty-year period. They compared the responses of public and private managers to numerous questions about constraints under personnel rules. They asked whether the rules made it hard to fire a poor manager or reward a good manager with higher pay, and similar questions. The differences between the public and private managers were huge by the standards of survey research. Roughly 90% of the public managers agreed that their organization's personnel rules make it hard to fire poor managers and hard to reward good managers with higher pay, whereas 90% of the business managers disagreed. These differences shape the context of leadership and motivation in public organizations discussed in later chapters.

Another recent study provides further evidence of distinctive structural characteristics of public organizations, with findings based on a large representative sample of work organizations in the United States (Kalleberg, Knoke, and Marsden, 2001; Kalleberg, Knoke, Marsden, and Spaeth, 1996). The study also supports the interpretation that higher levels of rules and formalization in public organizations tend to be concentrated in areas such as personnel and purchasing, which are subject to controls by external authorities. The researchers undertook the National Organizations Study (NOS) project in part because the samples in most studies of organizations are not large, representative ones, in that such samples are expensive and hard to attain. Chapter Three of this book, in the section headed “Findings from Research,” described a study by Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings (1969) that sought to develop a taxonomy of organizations. Pugh and associates did not find that the public organizations in their sample differed sharply from their sample of private organizations, although they did find some distinctive attributes of the public organizations. The researchers included only eight public organizations in their sample of nearly sixty organizations, however, and they expressed reservations about their findings for the public organizations. The NOS, by contrast, surveyed a carefully designed representative sample consisting of 725 work organizations, about 94 of which were state, local, or federal government agencies. Status as a public agency turned out to be one of the strongest correlates of structural characteristics in the study.

The NOS researchers asked the respondents in the organizations they surveyed to reply to questions aimed at measuring the structural characteristics of their organizations, including decentralization and formalization (defined earlier in this chapter). Status as a public organization was among the variables most strongly related to these two structural characteristics. The public organizations tended to be less decentralized (thus more centralized) and more formalized (Kalleberg, Knoke, and Marsden, 2001; Marsden, Cook, and Kalleberg, 1994). In addition, the method of measuring formalization makes this finding consistent with the evidence mentioned earlier about the formalization of personnel rules and procedures in public organizations that appears to result from government civil service personnel systems. The researchers followed a procedure similar to that of Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings (1969), in which they asked whether the organization had written documentation for various important organizational matters. In the NOS, almost all of the questions used to measure formalization asked about written documentation of personnel matters: documentation on fringe benefits, hiring and firing procedures, personnel evaluation, and the requirement for written job descriptions and written performance records (Kalleberg, Knoke, and Marsden, 2001; Marsden, Cook, and Kalleberg, 1994). Thus, this study of a nationally representative sample of organizations, although not intended as a study of public organizations, provides evidence of the tendencies toward distinctive structural characteristics on the part of public organizations in the United States.

All of this evidence supports the interpretation that the heavier dose of rules and regulations in public organizations originates mostly from external sources and not from the bureaucrats within the agencies. Adding to this evidence, Bozeman and Rainey (1998) reported a survey that showed that managers in government, compared with business managers, would prefer their organizations to have fewer rules. This contradicts the view that managers in government generate excessive rules.

As indicated earlier, researchers have also found distinctive structural characteristics of public organizations that are not tied to rules imposed by oversight agencies. Tolbert (1985) found differences in the subunit structures of public and private universities related to external influences from public and private institutions and the universities' dependence on them for resources. Crow and Bozeman (1987) and Emmert and Crow (1987, 1988) reported that public R&D units differ from private units in the size and structure of the administrative component of the organization and the way the research teams were organized. The public labs actually had more team-based organization. This again emphasizes that government organizations vary a great deal from one another, and that by no means do all follow a rigid bureaucratic pattern. In fact, these government labs appeared to respond more directly than the private labs to task contingencies of the sort discussed earlier.

Information Technology and Public Organizations

Information technology (IT) has been the most rapidly developing topic related to technology, with the developments coming so fast that everyone has had difficulty keeping up with them and providing conclusive interpretations about their effects on organizations. The rapid advent of computer applications, the internet, social media, and other forms of information and communication technology have had major implications for organizations and their management, but people have had trouble saying exactly what effects they have. As for effects on public organizations, especially until close to the turn of the new century, little research had been done (Kraemer and Dedrick, 1997).

Public managers are also starting to realize potential benefits of adopting artificial intelligence (AI) systems (Kankanhalli et al., 2019). The United States and India are at the forefront of this effort. Although academic research on AI is still in short supply, the literature discusses application associated with public sector functions. These include public health (Qian and Medaglia, 2019; Ziuziański, Furmankiewicz, and Sołtysik-Piorunkiewicz, 2014), transport (Kouziokas, 2017), education (Fernandes et al., 2018), security (Ku and Leroy, 2014), and communications (He et al., 2010). In the United States, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School is conducting ongoing research on AI and sharing it with government officials interested in AI solutions.

Experts on IT tend to report that the more salient effects in industry include the extension of computing technology into design and production applications, such as computer-aided design, in which computer programs carry out design functions, and computer-aided manufacturing, in which computers actually control machinery that carries out the manufacturing process. Computer-integrated manufacturing links together the machinery and the design and engineering processes through computers. Ultimately, an integrated information network links all major components of the organization, including inventory control, purchasing and procurement, accounting, and other functions, in addition to manufacturing and production. These developments supported an evolution from mass production to mass customization, whereby manufacturers and service organizations produce large quantities of goods and services that are more tailored to the preferences of individual customers than previously possible. In addition, observers suggest that computerized integration of production processes has effects on organizational structures and processes. Computer-integrated manufacturing reportedly moves organizations toward fewer hierarchical levels, tasks that are less routine and more craft-like, more teamwork, more training, and more emphasis on skills in cognitive problem solving than in manual expertise (Daft, 2020).

While computer-aided manufacturing and terms such as digital corporation might not apply in many public and nonprofit organizations, similar developments have led to the international usage of such concepts as digital government and e-government. E-government is now institutionalized in many countries, with 94% of countries in the world possessing infrastructures to support e-government systems (Ramnarine and Endeley, 2008, p. 14). Practices and levels of implementation vary across governments, because each government identifies its needs and resources for information and communication technologies (ICT) in different ways. Commonwealth countries, e.g., have used three approaches to adopting and developing e-government: benchmarking (comparing projects against other projects), best practices (identifying the best alternatives), and technology transfer through such procedures as training and consultation (Ramnarine and Endeley, 2008, pp. 9–14).

Computer technology and the internet have also become more influential in organizational decision-making processes. For many years organizations have been using computers to store large data sets and retrieve information from them, but more recently the capacity for active utilization of that data has advanced, so that computer-based management information systems (MISs) have become very common. An MIS typically provides middle-level managers with ready access to data they can use in decision making, such as sales and inventory data for business managers, and client processing and status data for managers in public and nonprofit organizations. Decision support systems provide software that managers can use interactively. Such a system may, e.g., provide models that enable managers to assess the effects of certain decisions or changes they may be considering. Executive information systems provide MIS-type support, but at a more general, strategic level, for the sorts of decisions required at higher executive levels. Many government organizations currently use geographic information systems (GISs), which provide information about facilities or conditions in different geographic locations. A GIS might allow a planner to designate any particular geographic location in a city and pull up on the computer screen a diagram showing the underground utility infrastructure, such as pipelines and electric cables, at that location. State employment training agencies have used a GIS to store and retrieve data on clients and potential clients at different locations in the state for use in planning the location of their facilities and programs. In a case study of a regional development project in the Netherlands, Bekkers and Moody (2006, pp. 113–118) describe how GISs played an important role in the policy formulation process by integrating economic, residential, and ecological information. GIS technology allowed town and country planners, civil engineers, regional board members, and representatives of the province to visualize potential effects of the project and to analyze complex policy problems. Computers, the internet, electronic mail, and other forms of information and communication technology have made possible more elaborate and interactive networking of people and organizational units, both within and between organizations. Some organizations have moved away from traditional hierarchical and departmental reporting relationships to forms of virtual organization and dynamic network organization, in which a central hub coordinates other units that formally belong to the same organization, as well as organizations formally outside the hub organization (such as contractors or agencies with overlapping responsibility for public agencies), via e-mail and the internet. Advances in IT reportedly lead to more decentralized organizations, better coordination internally and with external entities, more professional staff and professional departments for developing and maintaining the information systems, and more employee participation.

Over the past several decades, researchers have sought evidence about just how widely and deeply these generalizations apply to government organizations, but examples clearly indicate that they definitely apply in certain cases. Concerning evolution toward smaller organizations, e.g., few Americans are aware that during the 1970s and 1980s the SSA went through Project 17,000, in which the agency eliminated 17,000 jobs, due largely to the computer taking over large portions of the processing of client claims that human beings had formerly handled.

As for effects on professional staff, governments and government agencies, like business firms, have increasingly appointed chief information officers (CIOs) to lead the development and maintenance of IT and information systems (IS), with staff to support the CIO. Governments often face challenges in attracting and retaining the professionalized personnel required for IT, due to such conditions as lower compensation levels in government and cumbersome recruiting and hiring procedures (McKinsey and Company, 2010; National Academy of Public Administration, 2010).

In government, of course, the multiple levels of authority create special issues and challenges for IT professionals. In 2009, President Obama appointed the first federal government CIO (Williams, 2009). This new federal CIO oversees information technology investments and spending by the federal government. While one might expect various IT-related activities by industry associations, can anyone imagine a national CIO with authority over IT matters in all corporations in the United States or in most other nations? Significantly, in relation to levels of government, state CIOs, as represented by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, paid close attention to this official's work. The state CIOs are very interested in the coordination of federal agencies' programs that provide funding for state-level IT initiatives, among other issues (Newcombe, 2009).

Concerning internal and external coordination, most large government agencies, like business firms and nonprofit organizations, now have an intranet: a network within the organization with access restricted to designated organizational members. To maintain security of data about individual citizens and about such sensitive matters as national security, these intranet arrangements usually require elaborate provisions for controlled access. Some government employees carry with them devices that periodically inform them of newly assigned access codes for their agency's intranet because the codes are changed periodically as a security precaution. Access to information raises additional issues concerning internal and external coordination. The federal CIO emphasized “democratic” access to federal government data and launched www.data.gov to begin to provide such access.

All federal agencies and virtually all state and local government agencies of any reasonable size now have websites that provide a lot of information to clients and citizens, and more and more public services are handled through the internet and website-based operations, just as more and more business organizations relate to customers and suppliers through e-commerce. For example, because of federal laws that resulted from abuses of human beings in research projects in the past, the Centers for Disease Control requires researchers proposing research on human subjects to go through a “human subjects review” of their proposal. Researchers can obtain forms for such a review and submit the required information via the agency's website. As another example, Congress directed the IRS to increase the number of tax returns submitted electronically. The IRS did so with considerable success, because in customer satisfaction studies of federal agencies, the IRS has gotten much higher customer satisfaction ratings from taxpayers who filed electronically than from those who filed through surface mail. This development contributed to the IRS receiving its all-time highest customer satisfaction rating in 2012. In 1998, 32% of respondents to the American Customer Satisfaction Survey expressed satisfaction with their experience in filing taxes. In 2012, 73% expressed satisfaction (Insight, 2013).

To enhance internal coordination and communication, some governmental executives and managers have actively encouraged employees to contact them with questions and comments. For example, as part of the National Performance Review during the Clinton years, the administration encouraged federal agencies to establish or designate “reinvention laboratories,” organizational units that would try new ways of improving and streamlining the agency's services and administrative procedures. In one such unit in the Department of Defense, the leaders invited employees to submit questions and suggestions to them via e-mail and promised to respond to each e-mail within several days. During his widely praised service as commissioner of the IRS, Charles Rossotti developed a reputation for reading, and frequently responding to, e-mail from employees at many organizational levels.

These examples indicate that IT has provided significant improvements and opportunities for government, its employees, and the clients of government agencies. As one might expect, however, IT has raised many challenges for managers in government. These challenges involve the topics covered in this book and challenges similar to those encountered in managing any significant operation or initiative (McKinsey and Company, 2010, p. 40). Fountain (2001; see also Dawes, 2002) has analyzed developments in and challenges of IT in government by using a technology enactment framework based on an institutional perspective similar to the one described in Chapter Four. The framework treats IT developments as emerging from interactions among objective technologies such as computer hardware and software, organizational forms such as bureaucracies and networks, and institutional arrangements such as cultural and legal conditions. These components of the framework combine to influence the way technological initiatives play out. The framework helps to explain why even very similar technological initiatives can have very different outcomes, because of different organizational and institutional influences on their implementation. Fountain also describes how such influences raise formidable challenges for successful utilization in government, given the strong, often entrenched organizational and institutional influences. She describes the complications encountered by officials in the numerous agencies involved in trying to develop the International Trade Data System, an IS on international trade that linked all the different agencies with responsibilities related to it. The differences among the agencies in their cultures, missions, stakeholders, standard practices, and other characteristics caused the project to founder. Fountain concluded that this and other examples suggest the impediments to major IT initiatives linking and coordinating diverse agencies and programs, and the likelihood that developments in IT applications will involve more modest projects and changes. Other authors point to evidence that the bureaucratic characteristics and political contexts of government agencies create significant challenges for major IT projects and initiatives in government (McKinsey and Company, 2010; Nye, 1999).

Illustrating and analyzing challenges in IT adoption in government, Bozeman (2002b) chronicled the agonies of the IRS in trying to modernize the tax system with IT. One glaring example of the problem took the form of a “meltdown” at one of the large centers where IRS employees process tax returns. A visiting official found tax returns, including checks for payment of taxes, stuffed in the trash cans in the restroom. The new equipment designed by contractors for automated reading and processing of the tax returns did not work. Employees, fearful of discipline for not finishing enough tax returns fast enough, resorted to discarding the returns. News of such breakdowns and failures in the new systems brought a tidal wave of criticism. In 1996, one congressman referred to the agency's efforts as “a four billion dollar fiasco” (Bozeman, 2002b). Bozeman pointed out that the “fiasco” was not as disastrous as critics sometimes claimed, because the IRS was still successfully using much of the equipment and hardware years later. The problems were severe, however, and Bozeman described how many of them arose from management lapses, such as failures in project management and in management of relations with contractors. The IRS struggled with the challenges of tax systems modernization, but succeeded in updating their systems.

Also providing evidence about IT developments and challenges in government, for over two decades researchers in public administration have conducted surveys covering large numbers of organizations. These studies also show a mixed picture of difficulties, but also progress and influence of IT initiatives in public organizations. Bretschneider (1990), e.g., added survey results to the evidence of particular challenges for public managers and IT professionals. He found that public organizations tend to be more information intensive than private firms; they have to engage in more information processing. Even so, he found that managers in government agencies report longer delays in procuring computer equipment than do private managers, due to more red tape, procurement rules, and accountability requirements in the public agencies. Conversely, Bretschneider and Wittmer (1993) reported evidence of innovativeness in IT adoption by government agencies. In comparing IT conditions in government agencies with those in business firms, they found that the government organizations reported having more microcomputers per employee than the business firms. This appears to result from the more information-intensive task environment in public organizations, and the evidence tends to contradict the view that public agencies tend to lag behind private firms in IT adoption and utilization (Moon and Bretschneider, 2002). Somewhat similarly, Rocheleau and Wu (2002) surveyed municipal government IS managers and compared their responses to those of IS managers in business firms and found that the government managers rated IT and IT training as more important than business managers did. Conversely, the business managers reported higher levels of spending on IT, IT training, and IT personnel in their organizations.

Moon and Bretschneider (2002) reported survey results that indicated that public sector managers engage in higher levels of IT innovativeness in response to higher levels of red tape (as measured by survey items about the level of burdensome rules and procedures). Public managers may regard red tape as a transaction cost and try to minimize it through proactive adoption of IT. In addition, Moon and Bretschneider found evidence that more entrepreneurial and risk-receptive leadership in the organization has a positive relationship to IT innovativeness.

Other studies have reflected on IT influences in addition to its utilization. On the basis of a mail survey of government program managers in the 450 largest US counties, Heintze and Bretschneider (2000) analyzed the impact of IT implementation on organizational structures and performance. They found that the managers reported that IT implementation has little impact on organizational structures, in the sense of increasing management levels and numbers of decision makers. In addition, the managers perceived that any structural changes caused by IT implementation in public agencies have little impact on organizational performance (measured as improved ease of communication and improved technical decision making). However, the managers tended to regard IT adoption as having a direct positive impact on improving technical decision making (as opposed to an impact on decision making by way of influences on structure). Although Heintze and Bretschneider noted that county government managers may have different responses to developments in IT than state and federal managers, the lack of perceived structural effects of IT is striking.

Moon (2002) found generally similar results when he analyzed the data on 2,899 municipal governments with populations of more than ten thousand from the 2000 E-Government Survey conducted by the International City/County Management Association and Public Technology, Inc. Moon found that most municipal governments surveyed have their own websites and intranets. However, few had well-developed e-government strategic plans. At that time, most of the municipal governments were in early stages of evolution in e-government utilization, using it mainly for simple information dissemination or two-way communication with citizens and stakeholders. Few governments reported being at the more advanced stages of development that involve using e-government for service provision and financial transactions. In findings similar to those of Heintze and Bretschneider, Moon stated that only a small portion of the governments reported that e-government programs enhance cost saving, downsizing, and entrepreneurial activities. A higher portion, however, reported improvements in work environment, general efficiency, and effective procurement. Although larger governments showed more active engagement with e-government, Moon concluded that in general municipal governments were not aggressively utilizing IT and that IT innovations were not contributing strongly to cost savings, revenue generation, and downsizing.

More recent evidence tends to be consistent with Moon's conclusions in some ways, but again provides a mixed picture of progress and valuable development, coupled with ongoing challenges. In a survey of about nine hundred cities, the International City Management Association (ICMA) found that 96% of the cities reported having a website (International City Management Association, 2011). Only 24%, however, had surveyed residents to determine the information, services, or forms of participation they wanted from the website, and 84% had no plans for such a survey. Small percentages (4 to 15%) reported using the website to conduct forums, operate chat rooms, permit citizen petitions, conduct town hall meetings, enable citizens to vote in elections or referendums, or enable citizens to participate in a public hearing. On the other hand, 50% or more of the respondents reported that “e-participation” had improved the quality and quantity on information available to local officials for decision making, and improved the quantity of citizen participation. The responses indicate that the websites tended to provide information to citizens more than to facilitate communication from citizens to local governments. While interactive communications with citizens via websites may be limited, however, websites are providing enhanced services in many ways. Very high percentages of the respondents reported that they provide online services for downloading forms such as building permit forms, for employment information, for council agendas and minutes, for codes and ordinances, and for e-newsletters (International City Management Association, 2011).

The ICMA survey also provides indications of management issues for local government IT services, and again makes the point that effective IT requires effective management. Among the local governments, 39% do not have a dedicated webmaster. Among the top five barriers to e-governments that the governments have encountered, lack of financial resources led the list (67%), followed by lack of technology and web staff (46%).

The findings in these studies about IT in government provide indications of progress and successes, as well as ongoing challenges. Both the good news and not-so-good news underscore the imperative of effectively organizing and managing IT. Organizing and managing any major new initiative, and especially highly technical ones such as IT projects, should be expected to involve challenges for leaders and professionals. As some of the sources indicate, the challenges may be even more formidable in the public sector. The studies and sources reviewed here suggest conditions for meeting those challenges and for effective management of IT resources and projects: strategic thinking and planning to guide the processes involved; clarification of mission, goals, and timetables; measures to identify progress and successes; clarification of leadership roles, authority, and responsibilities on the part of CIOs, webmasters, and others involved; adequate resources; and knowledge and skill in systems of control and project management. Prospects for improved service delivery, efficiency, communication, and general effectiveness should motivate anyone concerned with public service – which should include literally everyone – to confront the challenges and take advantage of the possibilities.

Social Media and Public Management

The challenges in managing information technology apply as well to governments' rapidly growing use of social media. Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and blogs, add new dimensions to the already widespread use of websites, e-mail, and other media. O'Reilly (2005; see also Mossberger, Wu, and Crawford, 2013) coined the term “Web 2.0” to refer to these new media that add to previous web applications the possibility for users to contribute content and to participate in developing collective intelligence, information, and communication. Mergel (2012a; 2012b) has contributed the term “Government 2.0” to refer to employment of these media in government and public management. The use of social media and interest in them has grown rapidly because of their potential to support much higher levels of interaction and information sharing between governments and their clients, stakeholders, and citizens. Government organizations now attempt to use social media to invite comments and reactions from citizens to post policy and program statements, to participate in policymaking in various ways, and to form social networks. Governments and their organizations seek public participation in problem solving in such areas as crime prevention and responses to crimes, and many others.

The examples of such uses of social media are now widely recognized and can be quite dramatic. They include law enforcement officials' responses when two men planted explosive devices among the spectators at the Boston Marathon, which injured numerous people and killed a young boy. Law enforcement authorities used social media to make public the footage from surveillance cameras that showed the men who had apparently planted the explosive devices. Citizen responses very soon helped to locate the suspects and contributed to their final confrontation with police.

Less nationally publicized examples further illustrate the role that social media can play, even if in a rather gruesome way. In Oconee County, Georgia, a man murdered a woman. He used his truck to take the deceased woman in her automobile to a shopping mall parking lot and left her there in the car. County sheriff's officials, one of whom was a graduate of a well-reputed MPA program in the area, circulated surveillance camera footage of the truck via social media, asking for public assistance in identifying the truck and its owner. Within twenty-four hours, a citizen had suggested the owner of the vehicle, and the sheriff's officers made an arrest and obtained a confession.

Much broader than these individual instances of social media use are program- and policy-related initiatives that government agencies at all levels of government now undertake. President Obama issued the Transparency and Open Government memorandum (2013), and federal agencies have engaged in a variety of initiatives. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration used social media to publicize the Mars rover landings and to encourage citizen engagement through such opportunities as meeting astronauts. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have launched efforts to employ social media in engaging citizens and interacting with them about policy issues and the agencies' programs (Mergel and Bretschneider, 2013).

Social media have played a widely publicized role in citizen unrest and protest in various nations, with communication among protesters building and encouraging the protests. Erkul and Fountain (2012; see also Fountain, 2013a) describe the role of social media and other media and IT resources in the nation of Turkey's efforts to expand e-government and use of IT and social media in their society. The initiative led to a vast increase in the number of citizens using social media. The developments had ironic effects, since when citizens protested against the government, the availability of social media supported their efforts. One social medium provides information as to where an individual is located. This medium widely distributed information indicating that a large number of people were at the location of the protest, which encouraged supporters of the protest and potential participants in it. Erkul and Fountain ultimately conclude that social media cannot alone enhance democratization in a nation moving in that direction, but can play a substantial role in the process.

Regardless of the accuracy of such observations, the challenge for leaders, managers, and professionals involves deciding how governments can employ social media to avoid the need for protest. Governmental use of social media has been increasing dramatically. Mossberger, Wu, and Crawford (2013) report an analysis of local governments' use of social media, concentrating on the thirty-five largest US cities. In 2009, about 13% of the cities were using Facebook. By 2011, 87% were using that medium. In 2009, 25% used Twitter, but by 2011, 87% used it. Use of a YouTube link increased from 16% in 2009 to 75% in 2011.

As rapidly as social media have become an issue in public management and government, experts have provided resources to support development of knowledge and skills for public managers' use of social media. Mergel (2012a) provides a comprehensive discussion of the experiments, best practices and policies, and available guidance for the employment of social media. Mergel (2102b) also provides the design of an online course to develop such skills. These resources include detailed listings and references to additional resources.

The spreading, growing government use of social media raises issues that have been common as in governance for years (Fountain, 2013a; 2013b; Mergel, 2012a). Encouraging citizen participation in government decisions has always raised questions about who gets to participate, and whether advantaged groups participate more than less advantaged groups. Experts on social media report that “trolls” representing particular issues and interests try constantly to impose themselves about all topics (Mergel, 2012a). The “digital divide,” which refers to certain groups' lack of access to computers and the internet, aggravates this problem. City councils and city-county commissions have to decide how much to allow single-issue groups to influence their decisions. In addition, there are issues regarding who owns information that citizens contribute to postings on various media, and about confidentiality and privacy versus public access.

Effective use of social media to create social networks and citizen participation and communication poses challenges. Mossberger and associates (2013) reported in-depth case studies of major cities' experiences with social media. They found no evidence of overwhelming successes and found the city officials to be very interested in practices in other cities that provide insights. Norris and Reddick (2013) analyzed two nationwide surveys of e-government among local governments and found no evidence of major advances. They found that implementation of e-government at local levels has been incremental, rather than “transformative,” as some authors had earlier predicted. E-government at the local level tends to involve governments delivering one-way transmission of information and services online with limited interactivity.

These apparent limitations of social media use suggest questions about how social media policies and processes will be managed. The framework presented in Chapter One illustrates many of the matters to be considered. What will be the goals of the process and how will they support the overall mission? Who will provide leadership? What level of resources will be provided?

Initiating and implementing social media use raises questions about how public managers and government officials can go about implementing social media processes. Mergel and Bretschneider (2012) provide a three-stage framework for understanding government use of social media. A first stage involves intrapreneurship and experimentation. New technologies become available in product and service markets external to the organization. Intrapreneurs, or entrepreneurs inside the organization, often act as “mavericks” and experiment with initiatives using a new technology. Multiple and separate instances of this process go on that differ among themselves in protocols, norms, and procedures. This leads to recognition of the need for better organization of social media use. It leads to a second stage of constructive chaos involving efforts to bring order from chaos. The growing recognition of the need for common standards leads to establishment of task forces and steering committees to achieve standards and coordination of activities. In a third stage of institutionalization, the organization develops uniformity and standards, rules, and processes. New elements of technologies will still be introduced, but the rate of change will slow down. This provides more predictability and sharing of innovations, common training, and other benefits.

The advent of social media provides opportunities and challenges for leaders, managers, and professionals in government. The three-stage adoption process that Mergel and Bretschneider describe provides a valuable perspective for understanding the challenges and addressing them.

Instructor's Guide Resources for Chapter Eight

• Key terms
• Discussion questions
• Topics for writing assignments or reports
• Exercises
• Case Study: The Management of Brookhaven National Laboratory

Available at www.wiley.com/go/college/rainey.