Warren this is a most useful blog for exchanging ideas on bureaucracies.  Here is what I am currently working on....

CULTURE & COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS:  The Military Bureaucracy

At the United States Army War College, where I serve as Professof of Management, my colleague Colonel (Retired) Rich Meinhart and I have been doing research on how cognition effects culture.  Most especially, we are interested in how a person's cognition patterns effect thinking for military personnel in their globalized workplaces.  An important related issue is the need for greater understanding,  firstly,  of one's own cultural constructions and shared meaning, and secondly, of how others construct meaning.  

Any ideas or examples of interaction with military personnel, or your own experiences in the  military would be helpful to this research.

Thanks!

Breena E. Coates, Ph.D.

Professor of Management

United States Army War College

breena.coates@us.army.mil

The creation of this discussion forum is a tremendous idea and, ultimately, asset to practitioners and scholars of public administration alike.  As a scholar who has both researched culture in public administration and taught public management for a number of years, I would like to provide some basic food for thought with regard to the knowledge that we currently hold on this topic.  

Warren Masters points out that much of what we know in our field is borrowed from the world of business.  That isn’t really surprising since a good deal of the foundation of public administration was built originally from the ideas borrowed by early scholars such as Frederick Taylor, Wood Wilson, Frank Goodnow, from the world of business.  In the early attempts to define and structure the field of public administration, these folks and others like them, helped to characterize the culture of the arena with a heavy business slant.  However, as later scholars began to realize that public administration is its own unique entity, separate and distinct from the world of business, the behavioral aspects of the arena became of greater importance.  Understanding the hybrid culture that exists, today, in public administration is no easy task.  In the world of public administration, culture extends beyond the simple definition of a system of shared values and beliefs.

Anne Khademian points out in her work, “Working with Culture: The Way The Job Gets Done in Public Programs,” the common understandings, beliefs and values manifest themselves in the commitments that the practitioners bring to bear on their work.  She argues that when they apply their commitments they help to define how the job gets done.  She also provides a set of strategies for understanding and working with culture that can assist practitioners in their efforts to shape and/or change existing cultures in which they find themselves that may be inhibiting them from accomplishing optimal performance.  The six strategies are as follows:

1. Identify the commitments that form the existing culture;

2. Identify the connections between the roots of culture and commitments;

3. think about what needs to change and articulate that change;

4. Understand the management of cultural roots as an inward, outward, and shared responsibility;

5. Relentlessly practice and demonstrate the desired changes in culture; and,

6. Capitalize on incremental change and institutionalize it.

Khademian delves into the reasoning behind each of these six strategies and provides examples of each at play in the arena.  It is a work well worth reading and certainly provides a base on which to form discussion.  I, highly, encourage all interested in this topic to read this work.  It was published in 2002 by CQ Press.

Warren,

This is an interesting and important discussion.  I am a career federal employee (26 years) and currently work as an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist for the government.  Several agencies ago I worked as the Program Manager for Culture Transformation and thus worked as a practitioner in this area.  I maintain my profound interest in culture transformation in the federal government through dissertation research I am currently completing as a part of my Ph.D. degree program in Organizational Psychology.  Essentially my research is examining the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance (e.g., customer satisfaction) in the federal government.  I am hoping to eventually publish my dissertation research in peer-reviewed journals and journals such as yours, to help begin closing the gap in federal-sector culture research.

I believe there are several important reasons that more hasn’t been done in the area of culture change in the federal government (or even in the private sector for that matter)—one is external to the federal government, the others are internal.  

First, organizational culture is a deep, thick, complex area; as such, there is still considerable disagreement and debate in the academic community on how to even define organizational culture in addition to whether or not it can or should be assessed quantitatively (which Schein opposes), what it’s true link to organizational performance is, etc.  So it is no wonder that organizational leaders and OD practitioners alike are at a complete loss on what to do relative to culture change since there is such discord in the research community.  

Second, the federal government itself has done a poor job of selecting and preparing transformational leaders (as opposed to transactional) to manage (or I should say lead) the government of tomorrow.  Without astute, transformationally-driven leadership, any type of change initiative (culture or otherwise) is virtually impossible without such an orientation toward change and the future.

Finally, the Office of Personnel Management which is the federal government’s lead in the area of Human Capital, has done a poor job of conducting federal government-wide, organizational culture-related research with which to develop and provide agency senior executives and practitioners with tools and solutions for culture change.  Without a true lead in the federal government in culture transformation, there remains extreme difficulty in establishing sound research (such as what I am conducting) to develop solutions to “move the giant” forward.

I can say one thing has immerged from the research and work I have done “down in the trenches” in government thus far: organizational culture has a profound impact on federal agency functioning and performance and a “force to be reckoned” with and it should be taken seriously.

My two cents worth :-)

Scott