Plus ca Change: Public Management, Personnel Stability, and Organizational Performance

Abstract

Ideas swing wildly in and out of fashion-take, for instance, the notion of stability in administration. For decades conventional wisdom simply assumed that stability contributes to public administrative performance. Such core bureaucratic features as standard operating procedures, regular structure, incremental decision making, and fixed rules are emblematic of the persisting features of such organizations. At least since the early years of the last century, scholars linked stable patterns to efficient functioning. Stability was often seen as virtually the sine qua non of bureaucracy (Weber 1946, p. 228). The literature on public administration in recent decades, however, has heavily emphasized the contrary themes of organizational change and development, adaptability, entrepreneurship, and reform. The term bureaucracy has become equated with stodgy, hidebound, and inefficient operations. Much of the emphasis among recent proponents of good government has been on finding ways to encourage an escape from or a banishing of bureaucracy (Osborne and Plastrik 1997)-and a move toward alternative forms and processes. In this article, we sort through some of the contrasting arguments by beginning a systematic empirical exploration of the link between stability and public organizational performance. We do so in the field of public education, an important policy context that has received relatively little attention from scholars in public administration. Our test of the stability hypothesis, furthermore, is undertaken within an explicit model of performance. To begin, we establish a basis for this inquiry by reviewing features of the relevant literature, clarifying the core concept, and narrowing the empirical focus to one aspect of stability: constancy in personnel.