Integrating Urban Regime Theory with Organization Theory

Most of modern life takes place in and around interorganizational networks, which is to say, within complex organizations. Even within the cozy confines of local America, these complex organizational structures abound. These organizations and their administrative processes, arguably, represent the infrastructure for local policymaking. Without clarifying these organizations and their interorganizational relationships, it is nearly impossible to understand either local policymaking or its impact on the legitimacy of public administration in any depth.



Gareth Morgan (1986) provides a viable method for understanding the underlying logic of organizations, one he calls \"imaginization.\" In Images of organization, Morgan unravels the underlying logic of a variety of organizational forms by likening their logic to that of specific metaphors.4 The metaphors capture the essence of how organizations behave, at least as far as this is understood from certain theoretical perspectives. In this way, Morgan\'s work provides a conceptual vocabulary for explaining, understanding, and planning organizational development. Similarly, his metaphors provide useful behavioral descriptions for present purposes: understanding how public organizations or agencies participate in, and often make, public policy, and how, when, and where to intervene in their policymaking processes in the interest of the public.



The machine metaphor, for instance, explains how the original organizational theorists viewed the bureaucratic organization. For Morgan, the machine emphasizes the more neutral, unassuming, or impersonal side of organizational life, engaged as it were in the process of production, and controlled by rules to which organizational actors comply. These rules speak to the organization\'s specific concern for making production more efficient. Doing so requires, at some point, for the organization to seal off its \"core productive processes\" from most outside influences (Thompson, 1967; Mintzberg, 1979). Only in this way can the insulated activities be managed to achieve optimal levels of service or production. Morgan also compares organizations to organisms, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, as flux and transformation, as instruments of domination, as well as machines. Each type of organization has distinctive norms of operation, and the effects it has on those both inside and outside of it are suitably captured by the name given to their metaphor. Morgan\'s machine, organism and political system metaphors are most descriptive of local organizations. Each of these, and their crucial roles in Cleveland development policymaking, are here explained.



1. Public Organizations as Machines
The current modern era is indeed characterized by bureaucracies, which are, conceptually, quite similar to machines. Originally a conceptual framework of Max Weber (who feared for its effects on both individuals and societies), these tightly controlled, efficiency-oriented, and instrumentally rational \"creatures of modernity\" quickly became the basic prescription of the early organizational designers. Conceptually, bureaucracies are impersonal hierarchies vested with legal authority to achieve prescribed ends; clients or customers are treated as cases and records of their organizational interactions are entered into files. When combined with the mass production methods of industrialization, these types of organizations are highly productive and quite resilient.



2. Public Organizations as Organisms
Within the same modern era, another set of theories perceives organizations quite differently. Borrowing from biology, these theories treat organizations as if they were organisms, reactive and responsive as it were, to their respective environments. The limits of this metaphor have to do with its potential normative dangers, when used as a basis for moral or political judgment. Underlying this concern is an acute awareness that the organism seeks merely to survive and thereby places a normative premium on prediction, conformity, and behavior which is certain. It places little value in those acts that can only be justified on aspirational grounds (i.e., democracy-enhancing acts). By extending the organism line of logic, public organizations are inclined to promote those policies that are conservative in nature and to sometimes act oblivious to the biases that such policies may perpetuate.



3. Public Organizations as Political Systems
The final organizational metaphor that helps clarify local policymaking is the political system metaphor. For Morgan, this metaphor conjures the image of an arena of conflict and compromise within which individuals, groups, and organizations struggle for dominance and rationalization (Morgan, 1986; Harmon & Mayer, 1986). Public services, from this perspective, are merely goals over which dominance is sought, or rationalization maintained. The more complex the political system, the more Byzantine the politics. Interestingly, political struggles of this sort are often discussed as efforts to achieve \"public service,\" \"good government,\" and even \"professional management.\" Such rhetoric is usually convincing enough to garner public support for developmental subsidies, but vague enough to limit meaningful popular participation. It is, after all, merely a tactic in an increasingly competitive struggle for power.



These three types of organizations have been dominant at different times during various political eras in Cleveland, Ohio (Elkin, 1987; Stone, 1989). Earlier regimes are noted only in passing, as a backdrop for explaining the current regime, which is here called the suburban regime.5



Author: Steven A. Maclin, Ph. D.



About the Author: Dr. Maclin has been a university professor since 1994, but from 1998 - 2004, he lived and worked with American military troops in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He has previously edited and published dozens of articles in professional administrative journals and recently, in his ‘spare time,’ he’s been building websites for distributing materials to his graduate students. He\'s now stateside, teaching graduate students online, writing articles and developing a small online business (see http://buyfromart.com); he can be reached at info@buyfromart.com.