ویژگی های مدیریت عمومی آمریکا: مفهوم فرهنگ مدیریتی Characterizing American public administration: The concept of administrative culture

Introduction Administrative culture is not a new concept but neither is it one in common usage in the USA. Book length treatments have been developed for Canada (Dwivedi and Gow, 1999), Israel (Caiden, 1970), Korea (Paik, 1990), India (Sharma, 2000) and elsewhere but none for the USA. In various ways, it has been the organizing concept for journal articles (e.g. Anechiarico, 1998; Keraudren, 1996) and academic colloquia but it has been largely eclipsed by other cultural interpretations, particularly organizational culture and political culture. The intent of this article is to show its relevance in the US context and its potential for cross-national comparison. Personnel in government service (“public officials,” “bureaucrats”) will be examined using the concept administrative culture, along with three current sub-cultures. Sources of the overall “merit culture” will be indicated and an evolutionary approach adopted which shows discrete time periods. The concept will first be contrasted with organizational culture and political culture, one rooted in the study of politics and policy, the other in managerial studies. “Culture,” of course, was originally used in anthropology to indicate clusters or patterns of common behavior, knowledge, custom, etc. and has since been adapted and expanded in numerous ways in other fields of inquiry. Academic interpretations of “American culture” along with widespread journalistic and popular usage of that term make it familiar. In the US context, administrative culture allows us to focus on the values, beliefs and attitudes held by administrators, recognizing change over time from a Patrician notion of “administration by gentlemen” in colonial times, through endemic spoils as the reward for winning political office, to the merit system for government employment, modified in the last half-century by the introduction of values relating to equal employment opportunity and affirmative action. Comparative features and evolutionary changes in public administration – reflected in numerous reorganizations and reforms, as well as subtle changes in morale within the government workforce – can be well understood through the concept of administrative culture. Organizational culture There is a vast literature on organizational culture in the field of organization theory, most of it centered on the “culture” within an organization. Edgar Schein was one of the pioneers, with his detailed listing of dimensions of workplace analysis associated with culture (Schein, 1985, 1992) and, along with other pioneers such as Pettigrew (1979) and Hofstede (1980, 1991), helped to define the concept. Earlier studies of organizational climate by social psychologists informed the later formulations by Schein and others. Schein elaborated a number of categories of organizational analysis which include: (1) Observed behavioral regularities when people interact (language, customs, traditions, rituals). (2) Espoused values (e.g. “product quality,” or “price leadership”). (۳) Formal philosophy (guiding a group’s actions toward stockholders, employees, customers, and others). (4) Rules of the game (implicit rules for getting along in the organization; the “ropes” that a new employee must learn). (5) Climate (the feeling conveyed in a group). (6) Embedded skills (e.g. special competencies). (7) Habits of thinking, mental models, linguistic paradigms (Schein, 1992, pp. 8-10). The seven categories are artifacts and patterns of behavior of organizational culture and are the most visible aspect of it. There are also underlying basic assumptions deriving from the culture at large (Schein, 1992). Climate (No. 5) is included in the categories and represents a departure from the original field theory approaches and the quantitative study of attitudes within organizations by social psychologists. In a more recent discussion, Schein seeks to clarify the difference between climate and culture (Schein, 2000). Organizational culture has developed since the early work to encompass a vast number of studies of business organizations and a few of public agencies. Bozeman, for example, has recently researched the Internal Revenue Service in terms of its “risk culture” (Bozeman, 2003). Organizational culture remains a useful concept and one that should be borne in mind as we move to a higher level of abstraction and a public focus. A good overview of the field is found in Martin (2002), Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain. Martin, a leading figure in current organization theory, includes the latest research and an insightful three-perspective model. Disputes in the field are highlighted and her own approach elaborated. A good compendium to supplement Martin is the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate (Ashkanasy et al., 2000).