There is a common view that goes something like this: the leaders for subcabinet organizations generally are people with a deep interest in the policy area of the agency they will lead, not for an interest in management/execution/implementation. Furthermore, Washington is a very political town. Together, these produce a situation where politically appointed organization heads are interested mainly in politics/legislation/policymaking, and don't pay enough attention to execution/implementation.
I have heard this view a lot, but I am having trouble finding academic or practitioner (commission reports, congressional reports, wise people) sources for a conclusion such as this. (One classic academic source is a quote at the end of Pressman and Wildavsky's Implementation about leaders ignoring implementation, but I haven't been able to find others.)
Can anybody help me here? – need cites for this idea for a paper I'm working on. Please feel free to tell me about your own work that may have made a point like this.
I will be sure to give you credit in a footnotes of the paper if I use a cite you have provided.
Another cites area I need help on – though I do have a few cites, but would like more – would be academic cites for the view that a virtue of the US reliance (compared with Europe) on political appointees going lower down into organization leadership position is that this assures a better balance between the orientation of the politicals to change/shake things up and the orientation of the career people to serve as ballast/source of stability.
Steve Kelman
Albert J. Weatherhead III and Richard W.
Weatherhead Professor of Public Management
Editor, International Public Management Journal
Tel: 617-496-6302
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http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/fs/skelman
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"The Lectern," my blog on FCW.com
http://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/list/blog-list.aspx