How Management Matters: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Welfare Reform(Public Management and Change series)

Both "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrats" have taken on a pejorative hue over the years, but does the problem lie with those on the "street-level" - those organizations and people the public deals with directly - or is it in how they are managed? Norma Riccucci knows that management matters, and she addresses a critical gap in the understanding of public policy by uniquely focusing on the effects of public management on street-level bureaucrats. How Management Matters examines not only how but where public management matters in government organizations. Looking at the 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA), Riccucci examines the law's effectiveness in changing the work functions and behaviors of street-level welfare workers from the role of simply determining eligibility of clients to actually helping their clients find work. She investigates the significant role of these workers in the implementation of welfare reform, the role of public management in changing the system of welfare under the reform law, and management's impact on results - in this case ensuring the delivery of welfare benefits and services to eligible clients. Over a period of two years, Riccucci traveled specifically to eleven different cities and, from interviews and a large national survey, she gathered quantitative results from cities in such states as New York, Texas, Michigan, and Georgia, that were selected because of their range of policies, administrative structures, and political cultures. General welfare data for all fifty states is included in this rigorous analysis, demonstrating to all with an interest in any field of public administration or public policy that management does indeed matter.

Table of Contents:
Tables and FiguresAcknowledgmentsPreface Acknowledgements 1. How Can Management Not Matter? 2. Ending Welfare As We Knew It 3. The Important Role of Public Management in Welfare Reform 4. Public Management and Street-Level Bureaucrats 5. The Art and Science of Managing Street-Level Bureaucrats 6. What Are Welfare Workers Doing at the Front Lines? 7. How Public Management Matters Appendix A. The Survey Appendix B. Data and Data Collection Appendix C. Critical Events Leading to Passage of Welfare ReformAppendix D. Chronology of Major Welfare Policy and Legislation Enacted in the United StatesAppendixi E. Codes for Encounters NotesIndex

About the Author :
Norma M. Riccucci is a professor in the Graduate Department of Public Administration at Rutgers University, Newark; and author of Managing Diversity in Public Sector Workforces and Unsung Heroes: Federal Execucrats Making a Difference.

Review :
If a theory of management must build on what happens when operational reality confronts the traditional structures of hierarchical authority-can we make a case that management matters and, more important, how it matters? Riccucci provides a first valuable piece to the puzzle. Her terrific book adds to the important and growing literature on the management of welfare reform. Journal of Policy Analysis & Management