The Contemporary Role of City Managers

Abstract

A growing body of recent literature documents the city manager's politically active role in today's communities. This role challenges the normative assumption upon which the council-manager plan of government is based; namely that the city manager is a politically neutral, administrative expert subordinate to a governing body. On the basis of in-depth interviews and the published work of today's city managers primarily, the way city managers explain and justify their role is identified and examined.