**A Precis' on Political Theory and Emergency Management**

**By Richard Sylves**

**Dept. of Political Science and International Relations**

**University of Delaware,**

**Newark, DE 19716**

[**sylves@udel.edu**](mailto:sylves@udel.edu)

**A good way to explore how political theory may contribute to the study
and application of emergency management is to consider its contributions
via organization studies and theories of public management. This paper
is a short overview of public management-related political theory likely
to be of help to academics, students, and practitioners interested in
emergency management. The core of this paper is a logical extension of
*Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession,* by Laurence E.
Lynn, Jr.**[^1] **Lynn's book does not address emergency management
directly, but its treatise is immediately relevant to emergency
management because it examines critical questions about "public"
management in general that students of emergency management cannot
afford to overlook.**

**Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians**

**Let's examine two simple normative political theories to start.
Consider a subset of the political theory contributions of two of
America's important forefathers: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander
Hamilton. Jefferson, major author of the Declaration of Independence and
the nation's third president, has been generally understood to insist
that the job of public managers was try to obtain "popular and
stakeholder guidance" through political consultation or public
deliberation before-the-fact. In other words, public managers make their
decisions as the product of grassroots public consultation and the
consensus of interest group recommendations. This gives a public
manager's decisions greater legitimacy for public purposes. This so
called Jeffersonian approach requires that public managers possess skill
in consultation, negotiation and communication, and deftness in probing
for public understanding and consent. Good Jeffersonian public managers
are educated generalists who know and understand personal relationships
that exist between agents and tasks. Jeffersonian public managers are
strictly accountable to the public and to their elected overseers.**

**For Alexander Hamilton, who was a great American patriot, the first
Secretary of the Treasury, a huge contributor to *The Federalist Papers*
and a major architect of the U.S. Constitution, public managers must put
emphasis on getting results. So called, Hamiltonian public managers
expect others, especially strong elected executives, to judge them by
whether or not their efforts produced the desired results. They work
under "after-the-fact" accountability, and their concerns are
performance and evaluation under public law. Hamiltonians must be expert
decision-makers, students of organization, and must possess executive
talents in formulating plans and carrying out duties. Hamiltonian public
managers know the substance, tools and processes of their work. A
Hamiltonian public manager is in many ways a technocrat who possesses
special knowledge and expertise most average citizens do not have and
who works under norms of objectivity and political neutrality. The rise
of a professionalized U.S. civil service system of government employment
demands well-educated public managers. Moreover, the complexity and vast
array of public problems and governmental responsibilities demands
managers who possess specialized knowledge and technical abilities.**

**Those studying emergency management are not well served if their
trainers or instructors blithely maintain that emergency managers can
simultaneously behave as both good Jeffersonians and good Hamiltonians
in their work. The two theories point to two different ways to approach
public management work. Though the two theories may be compatible in
some circumstances, the two theories ordinarily stand in basic
counterpoise to one another. Emergency managers need to grasp the
difference between each theory and they need to understand that they may
often have to choose between behaving as a Jeffersonian and behaving as
a Hamiltonian. If they understand these theories, they will be empowered
to make more informed decisions in the course of their work.**

**Political Theory and Profession Knowledge**

**What is a profession? A profession is an occupation that is esoteric,
complex, and discretionary. It requires theoretical knowledge, skill,
and judgment that others do not possess or cannot easily comprehend.
Theory-grounded knowledge is the basis of most professions. A profession
embodies self-directing work. A profession occupies a position of legal
of political privilege that protects it from competing
professions.**[^2]

**A knowledge system governed by abstractions and accepted methodologies
helps the profession survive encroachment from other professions. Once a
person masters the profession's abstractions that person enjoys more
autonomy in the work they do. To enter a profession one needs education
and training in a professional program in order to achieve mastery of
the necessary abstract concepts. Alexander Hamilton would favor a
government management workforce staffed largely by professionals.**

**Professions often rely on universities since universities are expert
at imparting and creating abstract knowledge. In most professions, a
professional must be suitably credentialed and universities are often
able to convey these credentials. Professions acquire the status of
their clients.**

**Disputes regarding who accredits emergency management education
programs and who certifies people as qualified emergency managers will
profoundly affect whether and how emergency management evolves as a
profession.**[^3] **Theories and concepts are engines of knowledge
creation, but in emergency management the matters of developing and
testing theories and deciding what constitutes knowledge may well be
determined by the authorities and interests that win accrediting and
certification powers.**

**Why is abstraction important in a profession? Abstract reasoning helps
produce testable propositions and knowledge that is generalizable.
Abstraction helps individual scholars transcend the world of single case
studies. Abstraction enhances the value of experiential learning by
enabling those with field experience to collect empirical evidence
amenable to analysis by themselves and by others, most particularly
those working to add predictive power to the theories they are
developing and testing. Abstraction provides a basis for improved
qualitative and quantitative examinations of social and physical
phenomena, this includes disasters. The logic and rationalism supporting
abstract reasoning facilitates the co-production and exchange of
knowledge between people of different scientific disciplines, something
essential in emergency management work.**

**Is emergency management (and related homeland security) work evolving
as a profession? Tierney, Lindell, and Perry think that it is.**[^4]
**Waugh, Sylves, and others concur and they have explored this question
at length.**[^5] **Drabek and others have also explored the matter of
emergency management professionalism.**[^6] **If those working the field
of emergency management succeed in establishing their work as a
"profession," they have to do it by building and enriching theory
knowledge in the field of emergency management. Lack of theory or weak
theory undercuts emergency management's authority of expertise and
contributes to its marginalization: something dangerous in an era of
occupational competition within the realm of homeland security.**

**If emergency management becomes a serious profession, then it would be
reasonable to expect that the recommendations of emergency managers to
top political officials, including the President and White House
officials, would be respected and taken seriously; this owing to their
substantive and technical merit and because they are fashioned by those
with acknowledged expertise (mastery of knowledge and extensive field
experience). If emergency management has not achieved the substance or
status of a profession, political officials, might conclude that their
own judgments are just as valid as those of their emergency managers. In
other words, emergency managers would lack an "authority of expertise."
Emergency management might then be perceived as a body of
unsophisticated skill sets imparted to others through simplified
directed training. Worse still is that some might assume "anyone could
do emergency management because the field is so ill-defined, diffuse, or
based on easily learned proverbs."**

**Emergency Management Theory and Bureaucratic Politics**

**According to Hugh Heclo, the statecraft of political administration is
"office using by people in a variety of circumstances at the top of the
executive branch of government."**[^7] **Statecraft is "using and
risking political power through action." It is political leadership
times bureaucratic power. Bureaucratic politics are conducted quietly,
behind the scenes, in skillful ways, with strategic reversals possible,
caution, and contentment with sharing credit for good results. To
exhibit good statecraft a person needs these attributes.**

**One set of scholars produce knowledge by observing (or recounting)
field experience and they try to produce applicable principles referred
to as "best practices." Chester Barnard is the exemplar of the best
practice approach and he sees practice as the basis for scholarship, not
scholarship as the basis for practice.**[^8] **You need "reflective
practitioners" to make the best practice approach work. Here public
management study becomes a kind of art form. The practitioner draws the
picture for the observer. James Lee Witt's book about his experiences
directing FEMA stands as a perfect example of best practice knowledge
offered by an emergency management reflective practitioner.**[^9]

**Another set of scholars creates knowledge based on empirical
validations of useful propositions derived from models.
Simon-Smithburg-Thompson's *Public Administration***[^10] **and Graham
Allison's *Essence of Decisions***[^11] **epitomize building practice
wisdom as a social scientific approach. They see scholarship as a basis
for practice. This is the "applied heuristics" approach. Analytical
approaches here help public managers deal with "a messy reality."
Analytical approaches and models allow for experimentation, trial and
error; they were the early basis of policy analysis. Heuristics are
verbal explanatory sketches or conceptual frameworks that help public
managers produce adequate explanations for puzzling things. Heuristics
embody propositions subject to confirmation or disconfirmation, and when
applied to particular situations they should offer reasonable insights
that improve a manager's effectiveness.**

**Those using reductive approaches seek support from practitioners.
Those using analytical approaches seek support from academics. "Best
practice" reductionist views of public management have been criticized
because they are often not good guides to scholarship, teaching or
practice. However, according to Lynn, some open minded studies of cases,
especially those showing how public executives "shape the institutional
frameworks for policymaking and execution," have been praised for their
contributions to theory knowledge. Executives are the molders of
contexts that will affect public policy in both the short and long runs.
Lynn favors a broad perspective on public executive leadership, one that
draws from classic works on executive leadership inspired by practice.**

**There is an incredible range of analytical approaches to the study of
disaster produced within sub-fields of various scientific disciplines
(e.g., meteorology, climate science, seismology, volcanology, sociology,
policy studies, physical geography, engineering, etc.). Those advancing
the analytical approach to the study of disaster have benefited from
advances in high powered computing and the development of sophisticated
software programs (e.g. Geographical Information Systems, HAZUS,
etc.).**[^12]

**Yet, the generalization sought in analytical approaches overlooks the
assertion that, "Reality is a social construction rather than an
objective construct that is the same for all observers." Many scholars,
particularly some working in the disciplines of sociology and political
philosophy, maintain that organizations (including government
organizations) are systems of socially constructed and cognitively
ordered meanings. Empiricism, which is the collection of information
about the physical and social "real" world and is so essential to
analytical approaches, loses out if information and "facts" are
discounted as products of social construction and personal belief
systems. Today, constructivist theory is widely popular in many academic
realms, including disaster sociology.**[^13]

**This said, in any organization, experience and action are based on a
blend of tacit or un-codified knowledge and structured or codified
knowledge. Tacit knowledge is vague and ambiguous and depends on sharing
expectations and values through social relationships. Codified knowledge
is impersonal and learned through thinking and reasoning, not social
relationships. To manage well do emergency managers need to operate in
face-to-face forums (that are consensual, democratic, Jeffersonian, and
based on un-codified knowledge)? Or can they achieve their goals by
imparting technocratic knowledge (that is produced from data analysis,
repeated experimentation, scientific study, Hamiltonian behavior, and
codified knowledge)?**

**Emergency Management and Principal-Agent Theory**

**"PRINCIPAL-AGENT" theory assumes managers function in an environment
in which they cannot observe whether their agents in fact carried out
the instructions they issued as principals. In addition, agents hide
information from principals and these agents may use the information to
behave in ways inconsistent with what the principal wants.
Principal-agent theory gives rise to performance contracting studies.
Principal-agent theory helps integrate non-economic elements with
structured economic analysis. This approach involves refining
situational logic.**[^14]

**Principal agent theory seems most appropriate for the world of
emergency management.**[^15] **Government emergency managers work in a
universe of federal, state, local, and private sector agencies. An
immense amount of government emergency management work involves the use
of private contractors and non-profit volunteer organizations.
Information flows among agents and principals influence the decisions of
principals in matters of fund distribution, budgeting, planning, program
administration, and management in general.**

**Working the seams is part of principal-agent theory. According to
Richard Elmore, public managers must know how to work the edges of
administrative-legislative interaction, intergovernmental relations,
agencies and interest groups.**[^16] **They need technical and
analytical knowledge to do this. Their world is composed of agents,
seams and a technical core. Elmore assumes agencies are open systems.**

**Charles Lindblom's "partisan mutual adjustment" seeks to explain how
public managers behave in governing relations. Lindblom's theory of
partisan mutual adjustment**[^17] **contrasts well with the findings of
Heclo's** *Government of Strangers***.**[^18] **Heclo's world is one in
which political appointees interact with top civil servant
administrators. Theirs is a system of organic interdependence.**

**Michael Barzelay's** *Breaking Bureaucracy* **stresses customer
satisfaction and advises public managers not to take personally their
subordinate's resistance to change.**[^19] **The Clinton era
"reinventing government" effort offered low-level administrators more
power and these administrators needed to be educated and trained to help
them take on this opportunity. Under James Lee Witt, the Clinton era
FEMA assiduously embraced the reinvention movement.**

**Lynn makes a worthwhile distinction about codified knowledge and
diffused knowledge.**[^20] **Codified knowledge is written down and
openly available so that audiences outside government can use it. If
knowledge is codified but not diffused, it sits contained within the
bureaucracies. Someone could only master this knowledge if they worked
inside the bureaucracy and if they learned internal rules and unique
types of information. If knowledge is diffused but not codified, those
entering public management positions from the outside stand little
chance of coordinating the work of others, unless they get inside help
and/or have the time to learn the un-codified information. To succeed
under conditions of diffused, un-codified knowledge, a public manager
needs to "learn the agency."**

**Unfortunately, a considerable share of federal emergency management
knowledge, if recorded at all, is partially codified but not
sufficiently diffused beyond the agency. Federal emergency managers have
codified their expertise but much of it resides within the bowels of
various bureau offices, with the possible exception of knowledge
dissemination conducted FEMA's National Emergency Training Center (now
Department of Homeland Security, Emergency Preparedness and Response
Directorate) training of state and local authorities and managers.
According to former FEMA official William Cumming, "the real disaster
tradition was oral, not in writing, and ad hoc rather than
procedural."**[^21] **Moreover, FEMA and its progenitor agencies lacked
"history divisions" (common at the Department of the Army, Department of
Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NASA, etc.) or institutional
memories that were more than merely the recollections of employees who
have worked there.**

**A fiefdom or cult of personality results when management knowledge is
both un-codified and undiffused (inaccessible). Such may have been the
case in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI many years ago. Management control then
becomes highly personalized, unreviewable, and unappealable. In
un-codified but diffused situations, clans are the norm and people learn
by being socialized. Those selected to join the U.S. Diplomatic Corps
face this type of situation. Much is publicly known about diplomacy but
those who endeavor to do it as part of the State Department's Diplomatic
Corps must be socialized to the Department's way of doing things before
they are officially entrusted to do diplomatic work. Certain first
responder emergency management occupational specialties (fire services
and law enforcement) put great emphasis on socialization and mastery of
un-codified knowledge, or codified knowledge not widely diffused to
those outside the occupational specialty.**

**Conclusions**

**When it comes to the field of emergency management the aim should be
to, develop new theory, or adapt old theory, to produce manageable
policy. "An intellectual field cannot be built on self reports by the
subjects of interest."**[^22] **The field must advance through the
production of codified and diffused knowledge available to anyone who
chooses to learn it. Haddow and Bullock have made a worthwhile start in
their book *Introduction to Emergency Management* by conceiving
emergency management as disciplinary work, albeit with only an elemental
start at theory construction and testing.**[^23]

**Emergency managers need to grasp the significance of political
theories relevant to their work and they need to understand their role
in the policy process.**[^24] **They need to appreciate that government
embodies actors and structures intended to facilitate the effective
operation of democracy and political accountability. Various political
theories and concepts furnish "explanations of political behavior and
the exercise of power."**[^25] **To grow as professionals, emergency
managers need to understand a range of political, organizational,
managerial, and decisional theories and the conceptual reasoning
embedded in each. Knowledge is power and theories are tools that make it
possible to expand, refine, and critique public management knowledge so
necessary in conducting emergency management work for the American
people.**

[^1]: Lynn L: *Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession.*
    Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1996.

[^2]: Lynn, 1996, pp. 144-149.

[^3]: Tierney, KJ, Lindell, MK, and Perry, RW: *Facing the Unexpected:
    Disaster Preparedness and Response in the United States*.
    Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2001, pp. 233-40.

[^4]: Tierney, 2001, p. 236.

[^5]: Sylves, RT and Waugh, WL eds.: *Disaster Management in the U.S.
    and Canada*. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas Publishers, 1996.
    See also, Waugh, WL: *Living with Hazards Dealing with Disasters.*
    Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. See also Sylves RT and Waugh, WL:
    "Organizing the War on Terrorism." *Public Administration Review*
    62, Special Issue, 2002: 81-89.

[^6]: Drabek, TE: "The Evolution of Emergency Management," in T.E.
    Drabek and G.J. Hoetmer (eds.) *Emergency Managemen: t Principles
    and Practice for Local Government.* Washington, DC: International
    City and County Management Association, 1991. See also, Schneider,
    SK: *Flirting with Disaster: Public Management in Crisis
    Situations*. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.

[^7]: Lynn 1996, p. 91.

[^8]: Barnard, CI: *Functions of the Executive*. 30^th^ Anniversary Ed.
    Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

[^9]: Witt, JL and Morgan, J: *Stronger in the Broken Places: Ten
    Lessons for Turning Crisis into Triumph*. New York: Times Books,
    2002.

[^10]: Simon, HA, Thompson, VA, and Smithburg, DW: *Public
    Administration.* New York: Knopf, 1950.

[^11]: Allison, GT: *Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile
    Crisis*. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

[^12]: See Sylves and Waugh, 1996 and Waugh, 2000.

[^13]: See Tierney, et al., 2001, pp. 194-95.

[^14]: Lynn, 1996, p. 116.

[^15]: For more about Principal-Agent Theory see Arrow, KJ: "The
    Economics of Agency," in *Principals and Agents: The Structure of
    Business*, J.W. Pratt and R.J. Zeckhauser eds. Boston: Harvard
    Business School, 1988, pp. 37-51.

[^16]: Elmore, RF: "Backward Mapping: Implementation Research and Policy
    Decisions." *Political Science Quarterly,* 94:4, 1979-80:69-83*.*

[^17]: Lindblom, CE: *The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making
    through Mutual Adjustment.* New York: Free Press, 1965.

[^18]: Heclo, H: *A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in
    Washington.* Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1977.

[^19]: Barzelay, M: *Breaking through Bureaucracy: A New Vision for
    Management in Government.* Berkeley, CA: University of California
    Press, 1992.

[^20]: Lynn 1996, p. 145.

[^21]: Cumming, WR: FEMA Office of General Counsel, retired, email
    exchange with the author March 15, 2003.

[^22]: Lynn, 1996, p. 165.

[^23]: Haddow, GD and Bullock, JA: *Introduction to Emergency
    Management*. Amsterdam: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003.

[^24]: Birkland, TA: *After Disaster: Agenda Setting, Public Policy, and
    Focusing Events*. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
    1997. See also, May, PJ: *Recovering from Catastrophes: Federal
    Disaster Relief Policy and Politics*. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
    1985 and May, PJ and Williams, W: *Disaster Policy Implementation:
    Managing Programs under Shared Governance*. New York: Plenum Press,
    1986.

[^25]: Heineman, RA: *Political Science: An Introduction.* New York: The
    McGraw-Hill Companies, 1996, p. 21.