Notes on the Theory and Practice of Government Productivity Improvement

Abstract

The high water mark of America's government productivity improvement movement was reached during the middle years of the 1970s. As getting more yield out of agency resources became a major priority for public administration, programs were started at all levels of government, and sizable funding poured into research and training. The rapid greening of the movement has been recorded in a wide number and variety of publications including symposium issues of the Public Administration Review (November-December 1972 and January-February 1978), a massive handbook (Washnis, 1980), and articles in Public Productivity Review. Toward the end of the 1970s, it was evident that difficulties in maintaining the momentum were being encountered. Federal activities were at a virtual standstill, and once-promising developments in states, counties, and municipalities had failed (Balk, 1984). This decade of the 1980s is one of modest extensions of past activities (Poister and others, 1985). But, the broad-based, innovative push that characterized the past decade has certainly died down. All considered, the intensity of the productivity movement, the enthusiasm of high-level policymakers, the urge to experiment, and the allocation of program resources that characterized the 1970s have not been recaptured nationally. What happened? Few would question that there is still plenty of room for progress. Finding new ways to improve productivity should be no less a top professional priority than it was ten years ago. Did the slowdown just prove what others have been saying all along? Is it true that government is faced with immutable difficulties, such as lack of development funding, inflexible personnel systems, wasteful political actions, restrictive bureaucratic regulations, lack of managerial accountability, and inadequate incentives? Or, can the decreased interest in agency productivity improvement be explained by the fact that something better came along? For example, the main tenet of privatization efforts at the