Role Emphases of City Managers and Other Municipal Executives

Abstract

How city managers spend their time, how they ought to spend their time, and how they prefer to spend their time have been issues of both controversy and curiosity in public administration.' That the discipline remains interested in such issues is not surprising since they emerge from the fundamental nature of councilmanager government and reflect the evolution of reform government in the United States.2 Only slightly less attention has been directed toward similar questions regarding mayors as chief executives in cities with mayor-council government.3 The council-manager form of government was introduced in part to secure expert administration through the appointment of a chief executive with requisite managerial skills. The assumption at the outset was that the city manager would devote attention to the function, generally refraining from or involvement.4 Council-manager government is a product of its time. Conceived in an era of dual concerns over blatant influence in government and the desire to find the one best way to carry out the activities of government, council-manager government was at once the progeny and victim of the myth of the politicsadministration dichotomy. Early proponents justified the new plan either as a vehicle for the application of Taylorism5 and other techniques in local government or as a means of achieving a desired separation of politics and administration. Later observers acknowledged the implications and nature of city but some still debated their appropriateness. Modern students of council-manager government, with more science and less prescription, have examined the roles played by city managers, mayors, and council members and have detected considerable overlap6 as well as conflicts between elected and nonelected officials arising from role dissonance.7 Although early notions of the manager as a technician, devoid of or responsibilities, have been modified,8 if not discarded, the mere acceptance of a broader set of roles reveals little about the dimensions or priorities of those roles. Deil Wright's pioneering work on the role perceptions of city managers in 1965 exposed the extent of executive involvement beyond the management role9 and set the stage for this inquiry, which reexamines city managers on a broader scale and compares their role perceptions with those of other key municipal executives-mayors and mayoral assistants in mayor-council and commission cities and assistant city * Survey responses of 527 city managers, mayors, assistant managers, and mayoral assistants demonstrate the multidimensional nature of the work of municipal executives. Varying degrees of emphasis are placed on the management, policy, and political roles by respondents serving in different capacities, suggesting not only the importance of position within a given structure but also the relevance of reform government. Finally, perceptions of city managers regarding the relative importance of specified roles are contrasted with opinions of their counterparts of 20 years earlier (1965) to reveal a dramatic escalation in the perceived importance of the policy role of city managers.