Today's City Managers: A Legacy of Success-Becoming-Failure

The theme here is commonplace: the failure of success. You know how it goes. Some innovation suits the times; the sweet memories live on, often tenaciously; and paradoxically, the greater the initial success, the greater the likelihood of failure, in the face of change. City management has the requisites. The concept has a heritage that attracts, but concerns are building. Alan Kiepper put his finger on the issue in the late 1970s. "There has to be something fundamentally wrong with a profession," we paraphrase him closely, "when it begins to lose so many of its best people just at the time of their greatest successes. " Two challenges dominate in this article and its companion, "Tomorrow's City Management," in a future issue. Is success leading to failure for city management? And what mid-course corrections seem reasonable? In this article, we deal with the first challenge, and the follow-on article addresses the second. How Success Is Becoming Failure Six themes carry the brunt of the present argument, and their time-line extends from yesterday to today, as it were. Many of the problematic features have been recognized, but their combined effects require attention. The six themes are: 1. making too much of the once-useful distinction between politics/administration, 2. failing to aggressively reject "conventional management" seen as only or mostly implementation in bureaucratic contexts, 3. continuing to try to separate facts from values, and hence acting on the impossible, or at least the seriously limiting, 4. tolerating city managements conceptual rooting in narrow "efficiency" and "economy," 5. limiting city management by an awkward style of interaction trending toward distance and depersonalization, and 6. settling for, perhaps even glorifying, a sense of the single and solitary manager. Frustrations of Dichotomizing the Increasingly Seamless Following the fashion in political science and public administration, the city management profession at start-up deeply incorporated a sharp separation of politics from administration. In short, policy making was said to reside in elected officials, and implementation remained firmly in the hands and minds of the professionals. This distinction worked well enough for a while, even famously, but has come increasingly undone. Conceptually, it is the rare student of public management who has gone untutored in the many ways in which reality never did - nor should - approximate a dichotomy featuring politics and administration. Indeed, the city management literature contains a fair share of such revisionism (Svara, 1985), for reasons that seem clear enough. Old electoral coalitions lose power new contenders demand greater roles in administration, along with greater citizen access, and hence city managers must spend more time in encouraging cooperation or even civility among stakeholders, coordinating efforts, and playing policy-making roles (Blubaugh, 1987; Nalbandian, 1991). However, neither the city management literature nor practice have given up the old or invented the new. Hence, the need for such reminders: "|City Managers Don't Make Policy': A Lie, Let's Face It" (Ammons and Newell, 1988). Indeed, a recent ICMA Green Book notes that one article rejects "the popular politics/administration dichotomy. " (Newell, 1993; 230, our emphasis). Why can one still find ample signs of the old gospel alive and well, cheek-by-jowl with revisionist rhetoric (Anderson, Newland, and Stillman, 1983; 76-78, 88-106, 128-129)? Perhaps paramountly, the traditional distinction left city management a large and unfettered administration. Politics dominated in principle, but in practice substantial scope existed for administration. The underlying ideological themes were comfortable - of professionals as arbiters of the public interest, of managers as so competent and public-spirited as to earn great discretion, and of once-conventional middle-class values as constituting something approaching a summum bonum consensus (Goldman, 1952; 161-187). …