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Three Essays on the Use of Lean Government in State and Local Government is an examination of LG practices at the state and local government levels. LG is the most recent administrative reform in the tradition of efficiency-oriented, result-focused public management practices. I ask three sets of questions.First, what is LG? How do practitioners’ experiences and expectations differ from scholars on the outcomes from such reform practices? Second, why do governments repeat a cycle of adopting, implementing, and abandoning private sector management practices? In other words, why do these reform practices tend to be short-lived in government? Lastly, can government use efficiency-oriented, results-focused management reform methods to support democratic governance?To answer these questions, three empirical research essays analyze the adoption, implementation, normalization, and sustainment of LG practices in state and local government. Using ethnographic techniques, I collected unique datasets on the state and local government LG practice. Data were analyzed using theories from the organizational change and implementation literature. Each chapter provides unique findings that explore the variance between the public management literature and observations from the practice. Chapter 2 aims to define what LG is by synthesizing attributes of LG practices in state governments. It analyzes state governments’ use of LG managerial practices and their efficiency, effectiveness, and equity outcomes. I collected data on state governments’ use of LG from websites and other public records from 2018 to 2021. As of January 2021, 27 state governments posted descriptions of 1,764 LG projects with details on their project activities. These state governments used LG to improve the efficiency of service production and provision, program effectiveness, administrative accuracy, and implement performance measurement systems. It confirms findings from the existing literature that when process-oriented private sector management practices are adopted by the public sector they primarily focus on improving managerial values, such as efficiency and effectiveness. However, the research on the use of LG by state governments also found that LG is frequently used as the foundation of strategic planning processes, a few of which resulted in expanded service provision intended to improve equity for underserved populations. In some cases, states redirected resources LG freed to expand or improve services to underserved populations. An implication from this observation is that promoting equity in publicly provided services requires administrative leadership that supports equity as a clearly articulated project goal.Research in Chapter 3 unpacks the normalization process of LG by studying failures to normalize and then institutionalize LG practices in two suburban municipal governments in Ohio. Newly elected mayors implemented LG to achieve two goals: Sustaining service levels in the face of a budget crisis and changing bureaucratic work cultures. Both municipalities achieved successful outcomes after initially implementing LG practices—however, the municipalities abandoned LG after six years of investment in one city and eight years in the other. The research combines a two-and-a-half-year longitudinal case study, with key informant interviews and a survey of the cities’ workforces. The findings in this chapter imply that these cities’ political and managerial environments constrained their ability to normalize LG. Policy shocks, elections, and staff turnover reduced the human capital and political support required to normalize and institutionalize LG. Finally, there were failures to formalize LG in the cities administrative systems that inhibited their institutionalization. As a result, these once-promising administrative experiments proved to be short-lived. Research in Chapter 4 analyzes a mechanism to manage conflicts in public values and prevent zero-sum tradeoffs during LG engagement, using two cases from one suburban municipal government in Ohio. Chapter 4 provides an ethnographic case study of two LG projects undertaken by a suburban city in Ohio in which the Division of Police restructured its recruiting process, and the Parks and Recreation Department redesigned its summer camp registration process. Public managers desired to enhance efficiency and effectiveness without sacrificing the city’s formal and informal democratic values. Conflicts in values and management processes were observed during the field observation and confirmed with interview data. I analyzed the process of managing conflicts in values during the LG engagements using a four-part framework: (1) changes in the institutional environment, (2) mission, values, and goal statements, (3) informal constraints, and (4) formal controls within the structure of public organizations. Then, I described how institutionalized good government values in Creektown, shared norms, and the checks and balances from the horizontal separation of powers mediated potential value tradeoffs during LG restructuration. The findings demonstrate that governments can use LG to promote and support democratic values while improving program efficiency and effectiveness with a carefully constructed shared value system and institutional control. |
