University of California, Irvine
feldmanm@uci.edu

Positive Organizational Scholarship and Public Management

My involvement with a positive organizational scholarship began several years ago when I started to teach a new course in Public Management for the Ford School of Public Policy. I was interested in learning from practitioners and bringing them into the classroom. I thought one way to do both of these was to videotape public managers talking about their work. I sent letters out to several alums of the school who held positions in public management and asked them to answer a series of questions about their jobs and their management styles. A handful of people responded. Most of them spoke in interesting ways about the challenges of public management, but two of them stood out as having extraordinary energy and excitement about their work. What others thought of as problems, they saw as opportunities. What others portrayed as worthwhile hard work, they portrayed as fun.

I was immediately intrigued. I followed up by visiting the organizations both these people belonged to. As it happens they were both city administrators – Kurt Kimball who is the City Manager of Grand Rapids, MI and Del Borgsdorf who was the Deputy City Manager of Charlotte, NC, now the City Manager of San Jose, CA. Both people facilitated my interviews with managers and other relevant people in their city administrations.
I found that the attitude these managers had was contagious. People within each city energized each other and enabled one another to turn what have traditionally been seen as difficult trade-offs into dynamic tensions.

I and my co-author Anne Khademian have taken up the joyful work of understanding how these managers and others in organization can turn dreaded dichotomies into interactive synergistic systems. Anne has added other managers to my city administrators, most notably Kenneth Reardon with the East St. Louis Action Research Project and James Witt with the Federal Emergency Management Administration. We have identified a model of management that we call Inclusive Management. Managers practicing inclusive management focus their attention on creating relationships, developing processes and building the capacity of people (employees, partners and people served by the organization) to participate. We argue that inclusion enables managers to respond to the very real demands for both bureaucratic control and democratic participation and for both flexibility and accountability that cause some managers to despair.[1]

Structuration and practice theories form the theoretical base for our work. From this perspective, actions produce and reproduce the structural features that constrain and enable further action. Inclusive practices, we argue, draw attention to structures that restrict inclusion or make inclusion more trouble than it is worth. For those who see that structures are fluid rather than fixed, the inclusive practices reveal opportunities to make changes that unlock energy and enable people to get things done that they think are important.

Examples of the work of these managers can be found in the papers cited in this description and also in our contribution to the Leading in Trying Times website.

Principles for Public Management Practice: From Dichotomies to Interdependence. Martha S. Feldman and Anne M. Khademian, Governance, July 2001, Volume 14: 3: 339-362.

Managing for Inclusion: Balancing Control and Participation. Martha S. Feldman and Anne M. Khademian, International Journal of Public Management, (2000) Volume 3:2:149-168.