The Presidency as a Learning Organization

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explain the process of large-scale policy development in a presidential administration by using an analytical tool presidency scholars have tended to neglect--organizational learning, a branch of organization theory.(1) Given the nature of the presidency in the political system, with its contracted time horizons, unsurpassed media attention, and high public expectations for success, both the individual occupying the office and those who serve at his pleasure (i.e., staff and most political appointees) are in the position of having to as you go. That is to say that they are not often afforded the luxury of systematically studying the methods by which a task is approached and disposed of, making informed decisions as to its efficacy, and prescribing carefully constructed alternatives for achieving that same task again. These methods are available to other organization inhabitants but often are denied presidents and their administrations. Indeed, one analyst of presidential policymaking, in offering suggestions for coping with what he calls a no-win presidency, argues explicitly that must wait.(2) Presidents do learn, but it often is on an ad hoc basis, with policy and political consequences of change uncertain and sometimes risky. A central task for research on presidential organization is to understand the conditions and processes conducive to learning, be they systematic or ad hoc, and to explain the consequences of learning or the failure to learn. This article examines organizational learning in President Jimmy Carter's administration to evaluate the usefulness of a learning perspective for understanding presidential organization and its role in the policy process. A collateral interest is to explain Carter's development of a comprehensive energy program from an organizational perspective. The structure of this article is as follows. First, I briefly review the arguments for analyzing the presidency as an organization. The fact that the presidency is occupied by individuals, each with varying approaches to the office, does not mean that it lacks continuity in important areas, particularly staff structures and functions. Next, I propose an analytic framework for understanding policymaking, drawing on insights from the organizational learning literature. I then argue that this framework is useful for studying presidential policy choices, focusing specifically on information acquisition and use, integrating policy and political imperatives. Next, I employ this framework to describe Carter's choice to drastically alter his mode of policymaking when developing his comprehensive energy program. Because this is an example of a president explicitly changing his approach to developing policy in midstream, I derive lessons for analyzing presidential decisions. In the final sections, I assess the applicability of organizational learning to presidential administrations and suggest refinements to be used in future research. Thus, this article constitutes a modest effort to advance our understanding of the way in which Carter was able to learn on the job, to help us understand what lessons the Carter experience might hold for subsequent presidents, and (most important) to refine and adapt organizational learning theory to the study of the presidency.(3) Presidency as Organization To promote the proposition that organization theory can advance our understanding of the presidency is to beg the question of whether the presidency itself is an organization. If it is not, then the application of a framework derived from organization theory is useless. But if the presidency can be rightly conceptualized as possessing entities or traits that continue from one administration to the next, then it can be argued that it exhibits characteristics of an organization and can be studied as such.(4) Certain aspects of the presidency, particularly several organizational entities, have become institutionalized over time. …