Values

Documents/CCLG/Values

According to Rosenau, modernization includes these elements: * A communications revolution that rapidly transmits ideas, information, images, and money across continents * A transportation revolution that hastens the boundary-spanning flow of people and goods * An organizational revolution that has shifted the flow of authority, influence, and power, beyond traditional boundaries * An economic revolution that has redirected the flow of goods, services, capital, and ownership (2003, 51).

The impact of these revolutions is to create more administrative homogeneity throughout the world than previous generations saw. The literature on modernization and globalization suggests two characteristics that affect the design and practice of contemporary public administration.

First, hard data drive out soft data when there is confidence in an understanding of cause and effect in production processes (Thompson 1967). One would not think today of assessing property without the benefit of electronic databases and statistical formulas, and actuarial tables are essential to pension calculations, for example.

Second, the efficiency goal of administrative practice is to increase quality and reduce variation in outputs (Deming 1986) at the cheapest cost.

Standardization and centralization -- based on confidence in cause-and-effect relationships in production processes grounded in empirical evidence -- are designed to produce high-quality efficiency.

Politics of Identity -- Simultaneously, increasing quality and reducing variation through standardization and evidence-based best practices challenges what is spontaneous, unique, and experiential because these are sources of variation. The second trend, the politics of identity, is the desire to hold on to variation and to place value on one's experiences and to differentiate oneself, one's group, or one's community from others. Today's emphasis on branding in local governments internationally reflects this desire to differentiate one jurisdiction from another to counter the modernizing pressures toward standardization; the desire to tell a community's story offers soft evidence that uniqueness -- variation -- is valued. Howard Gardner insightfully writes about storytelling and leadership by employing examples of compelling narratives that speak to the mind but reach for the heart (Gardner and Laskin 1995). According to Gardner, the most powerful stories are those that touch one's identity -- who we were, who we are, and what we can become.

In the quest for identity, Gardner (1991) issues caution in introducing us to the concept of the "unschooled mind." The unschooled mind is driven by intuition and emotion that emanates from interests that touch one's self-regard. It is comparable to the allure of the "confirming mind," a human predisposition that seeks confirmation of one's views rather than challenges (Bialik 2012; Festinger 1957; Finkelstein, Whitehead, and Campbell 2008).

In contrast, in the arena of administrative modernization, enhanced analytical capacity means more data, which reveals more complexity.

Problems that formerly might have been seen in relatively simple terms are now subject to complex statistical analyses growing out of increasingly large databases, often producing alternatives qualified by probabilities. But the increasing sophistication of policy development and analysis is undermined by the simplistic themes and symbols contained in today's political stories and campaigns, often anchored in an idyllic sense of a past dominated by images of "the way we never were" (Coontz 2000).

The city and county manager and administrative staff work in the realm of data and analysis with sober concerns for what is administratively sustainable, while elected officials are working to develop what is politically acceptable within the often emotional context of community identity. The juxtaposition of the trends of modernization and identity accentuates and accelerates the gap. And we should remind ourselves of the proposition that connecting the two is a prerequisite for effective governance (Appleby 1949, 47).

... within each challenge is evidence of a common paradox. While each challenge expands the boundaries and the actors and entities involved in governance, new collective initiatives that operate without an influential role for government institutions may shortchange consideration of a comprehensive set of democratic values. The first challenge that we identified creates expectations that department heads will regard efficiency as just one in a broader range of political values to be considered in public policy making.

In this regard, a key responsibility of the city and county manager is modeling the engagement of conflicting values in a way that preserves administrative integrity yet acknowledges and builds on what is politically acceptable.

This issue of political values is noteworthy in the second challenge because we do cannot expect mission-based nonprofits or profit-driven private sector actors to embrace a full range of democratic values.

Regarding the third challenge, while we commonly associate citizen engagement with democratic values, the association should be isolated to the value of representation.

There is no guarantee that engagement will embrace the values of efficiency, equity, and/or the individual rights of others. It is passion reflecting one value or a combination of values that energizes the engagement process.

The comprehensive inclusion of democratic values such as representation, efficiency, social equity, and individual rights may be absent as we explore the three challenges and administrative responses.

These values are fundamental to the democratic social contract, and they are embedded within the structures and processes of the same democratic government institutions that are losing credibility as the gap widens. As we move toward a governance model of dealing with issues of collective concern, it remains to be seen whether nongovernment actors or partnerships in which government does not play a prominent role can enact a comprehensive set of values and accept responsibility for enabling democracy.