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Managing Upward, Downward, and Outward:
Networks, Hierarchical Relationships and Performance
The importance of public management in shaping what happens through public policy has
been a major theme in the field for decades. Classic arguments depict the manager as a crucial
policy actor (for instance, Appleby 1949; Goodsell 1994; Herring 1936), and key theoretical
arguments make compelling cases for why and how managers can shape performance (Barnard
1938; Simon 1997). A rich and insightful case-study literature characterizes managers and their
impacts in fascinating and nuanced fashions (Ban 1995; Behn 1991; Cohen and Eimicke 1995;
Doig and Hargrove 1987; Holzer and Callahan 1998; Riccucci 1995; and Thompson and Jones
1994). The recent surge of interest in “governance” refashions rather than replaces the argument,
with reminders that managers and management are consequential but take place within a larger
and more complex system of governance involving multiple additional parties aside from
managers and their employees (Heinrich and Lynn 2000; Lynn, Heinrich and Hill 2001; Meier,
O’Toole, and Nicholson-Crotty 2003).
There are many reasons to expect public management to matter for public program
performance. Two serious limitations, however, constrain what can be said with any confidence.
First, the systematic validation of the management-matters hypothesis has been limited and
sporadic. With a few exceptions (note for instance the work of Wolf 1993), until our recent
research program undertook a number of empirical investigations, the theme lacked much social-
scientific support.
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Second, the causal paths channeling the influences of management are much
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For abbreviated coverage of some of this work, see the discussion later in this paper.
Convention