Citizen Desires, Policy Outcomes, and Community Control

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68810/2/10.1177_107808747200800107.pd

PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION VERSUS PROGRAM DESIGN: WHICH ACCOUNTS FOR POLICY "FAILURE"?

Many influential implementation scholars now argue that "street-level" bureaucrats, rather than legislators or high-level administrators, make public policy in the U.S. Such authors as Pressman and Wildavsky cite creaming in employment and training programs as an especially clear example of well-meaning programs that fail when implemented. This paper argues that two of the most significant and lasting of these programs, the U.S. Employment Service and the Manpower Development and Training Act, were designed to encourage creaming. The essay asserts implementation scholars overstate the disconnection between program design and program implementation because they assume there is little disconnection between program legitimation and program design. A better conception of design permits one to perceive that these programs were legitimated on the grounds they would serve a large number of constituents, but were designed to do so by serving employers. The combination of these premises made creaming an imperative of program operation, and the implementors who cream remain faith ful to original program strategy. This finding suggests a redirection of policy research toward a more rlgorous analysis of program design and a better understanding of the relationship between legitimation, design, and implementation. Copyright 1984 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Value solidity in government and business: Results of an empirical study on public and private sector organizational values

This article reports on a survey study of 382 managers from a variety of public and private sector organizations, on the values that guide sectoral decision making. Just as some important classical differences emerge, a number of similarities between the public and private sector appear to result in a set of common core organizational values. Furthermore, the data support neither increasing adoption of business values in public sector organizations nor flirtation with public values by business sector managers. This contradicts expectations in the literature on new public management and corporate social responsibility, suggesting public-private value intermixing. Value solidity seems the dominant feature in both sectors. Additional analysis shows that "publicness," the extent to which an organization belongs to the public or the private sector- rather than age, gender, years of service or a past in the other sector-strongly determines value preferences. © 2008 Sage Publications