This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from "http://www.jstor.org"

Maynard-Moody, Steven

Nalbandian, John

Administrative Science Quarterly

English

KU ScholarWorks

"gatekeeper" changes our perception of operators; individualswhom we might have regarded as peripheral to the organiza-tion are seen, in fact, to be central to its functioning. Gatekeep-ers can exist in any organization to which individuals try to gainaccess, from graduate schools to police departments to socialclubs. It would be useful to know more about how gatekeep-ers differ in different kinds of organizations. For example, howdo the strategies of gatekeepers vary depending upon whetherthey deal with the public face to face (as with an officereceptionist), by telephone, or by mail? It would also be usefulto know what kinds of organizations are demand processorsand what kinds are not. I suspect the distinction should not besharply drawn. Even though police departments react to de-mands, they have ongoing activities and internal structuresthat only accept certain demands and that can produce similarresponses to quite varied demands.The authors draw very general principles from findings in avery specific setting, the Fort Worth Police Department.Sometimes they provide more detail than is needed, as inlisting the codes used by telephone operators in processingcalfs for service. They also omit some elements that compli-cate their schema. For example, the flow of information andcontrol is not always from gatekeeper to response coordinatorto street-level bureaucrat. Some calls for service originate inthe field, and beat officers may receive, screen, coordinate,and execute some requests without ever contacting the largerorganization. Beat officers can also actively disrupt the flow ofinformation and control for example by failing to report backimmediately after completing a service call, thus preventingthe dispatcher from assigning them a new task and allowingthemselves time to take a break or complete other paperwork.This book is somewhat thin, both in pages and in ideas. Itdepends heavily on the study of one police department. Thenotion of gatekeeper is not new with these authors, but theydo not provide a clear picture of how gatekeepers differbetween public service organizations and other organizations.There is also more jargon than needed (knowing that beatofficers can be called street-level bureaucrats does not addappreciably to our understanding), in the end, I found the bookto be a rather light treatment of an interesting topic.James M. Dabbs, Jr.Department of PsychologyGeorgia State UniversityAtlanta, GA 30303Public Personnel Update.Michael Cohen and Robert Golembiewski, eds. NewYork:Marcel Dekker, 1984. 263 pp. $39.75.Government connotes laws, legislatures, courts, and adminis-trative bureaus. But, as Cohen and Golembiewski remind us,government also means jobs. The expansion of the publicworkforce dates back at least to the fifteenth century (Braudel,1983: 649), with 82,000 units of government in this countrycurrently employing 16,000,000 of us. For many, managingpublic employees and the reform of public organizations is at138/ASa March 19KBookRevwwsthe heart of contemporary government {March and Olsen.1983). Cohen and Golembiewski promise to take a fresh lookin this book at public personnel administration.The book begins with Cohen's analysis of the two majorfederal civil service reforms: the Pendelton Act of 1883, pri-marily designed to reduce the intrusion of politics into person-nel management, and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.Both reforms reflected contemporary theories of managementand the popular ideal of making government morebusiness-like.Rosenbloom writes about affirmative action and, with Shaf ritz,collective bargaining. These contributions stand out in theirattempt to link the technical world of public personnel manage-ment with the ever-present political environment. In contrast,Ouaintance's detailed technical chapter on selection proce-dures pays little attention to the conflicts over efficiency, socialequity, and seniority claims.Ouaintance's chapter and Schneier and Beatty's on perform-ance appraisal provide detailed technical surveys. Each empha-sizes the legal aspects of public personnel management.Quaintance ends her chapter with an instructive comparison ofthe Uniform Guidelines to Employee Selection Procedures andthe American Psychological Association's latest professionalstandards. Schneier and Beatty go beyond the typical perform-ance appraisal chapter with welcomed sections on design andimplementation. Cohen lists the problems of women at work.Motivating public employees and measuring their productivityare discussed by Miller, Colby, and Golembiewski. Millersummarizes motivation theory yet overlooks the special prob-lems of public employees that are so well documented byLynn (1981) and Lipsky (1980). Colby defines productivity asthe sum of effectiveness and efficiency, reviews private-sectorproductivity measures, and suggests how these measures canbe applied to government. Golembiewski stresses training, toincorporate contemporary knowledge of the applied behavioralsciences into the day-to-day management of publicemployees.Cohen and Golembiewski's collection is a solid blend of con-ceptual and technical chapters. It appropriately emphasizes thelegal environment of public personnel management, but thebook has several flaws. First, it reads like a text written bycommittee. Although edited volumes are routinely criticized fora lack of coherence, such books can be very good if theyprovide variety and new ideas. Many of the chapters in thisbook, however, are summative reviews written as if theybelonged in a text, yet the whole lacks the framework ex-pected of a text.Second, the volume is out of focus. The editors and severalchapter authors place considerable importance on the CivilService Reform Act of 1978, which targeted federal personnelpractices. But the book is not about the federal government. Itencompasses alt public employees, and the different levelsand forms of public employment demand greater attention.Third, if intended as an analysis of the impact of the CivilService Reform Act, this update is out of date. Although thebook has a 1984 copyright, the authors, except for Golem-139/A5Q, March 1986biewski, do not examine the act's implementation in thefederal government and its influence on state and locaJ person-nel practices. Whether this is the result of publication delays orthe false assumption that one can understand reform withoutanalyzing how it is carried out, this volume is unfortunatelydated.Fourth, the collection shares a flaw with much managementpractice. The technical chapters on how to select and monitorpersonnel ignore the very complexities introduced in the con-ceptual chapters. If the principles of responsiveness, distribu-tive justice, efficiency, and employee rights conflict, how dowe design personnel systems that continually adjust to thesecompeting claims? While Rosenbloom and Shafritz do look atthis debate, it seems peripheral to the update as a whole.Rather than a fresh look at public personnel, Cohen andGoiembiewski's book summarizes standard views. The Carterreforms and Reagan revolution have bared, rather than solved,the basic dilemmas of public administration. Advances inunderstanding public personnel wait for techniques and re-forms that encompass the value conflicts that are identified,but then ignored, in this book.Steven Maynard-MoodyAssistant Professor of Public AdministrationDivision of Government304 Blake HallUniversity of KansasLawrence, KS 66045andJohn NalbandianAssociate Professor of Public AdministrationDivision of GovernmentUniversity of KansasLawrence, KS 66045REFERENCESBraudel, Fernand1983 The Wheels of Commerce:Civilization and Capitalism,15th-18th Centuries. Vol. 2,New York: Harper & Row.Lipsky, Michael1980 Street-levet Bureaucracy:Dilemmas of the IndividualIn Public Service, New York:Russell Sage,Lynn, Laurence1981 Managing the Public's Busi-ness: The Job of the Govem-ment Executive, New York:Basic Books,March, James G., and Johan P.01 sen1983 "What administrative reorga-nization telis us about gov-erning," American Political Sci-ence Review, 77: 281-296,Other ReviewsEconomic Behavior Within Organizations.Stephen A. Hoenack. Cannbridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983. 290 pp. $34.50.The publication of Williamson's (1975) Markets and Hierar-chies was heralded by some as the beginning of a new era inorganization theory (Ouchi, 1977) — an era that would becharacterized by research focusing on such organization-140/ASa March 1986

Public Personnel Update

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/1808/17332/1/Maynard-Moody_ASQ_31%281%29138.pdf

Public Personnel Update

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

KU ScholarWorks