John D. DonahueEditor

Book Reviews

Michael Bisesi

On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer, by Peter Frumkin. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, 244 pp., $37.50.

The historic “contested area” between government and business has fostered thecontinuing growth of the nonprofit sector in the United States. This contest isincreasingly significant because so many of the most vexing and intractable publicissues resist single-sector solutions, much less single-organization ones.

Given the boundary-spanning nature of the nonprofit world, it is fitting that OnBeing Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer was written by a self-described“organizational sociologist who teaches strategic management in a public policyschool,” namely the Kennedy School at Harvard, where Frumkin is also affiliatedwith the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Moreover, his front-line expe-riences (foundation program officer, nonprofit manager, program evaluator) pro-vide a credible context that strengthens the application of his scholarship.

Nonprofit organizations go by many names: tax-exempt, nongovernmental, inde-pendent, third sector, civil society, charitable, voluntary, nonproprietary, private vol-untary, community based, public benefit, not-for-profit. Quite often, then, theseorganizations are characterized as being “not” something, rather than a more posi-tive description.

Frumkin believes that nonprofits actually derive their unique advantages fromthese “not” attributes. Unlike government, nonprofits do not coerce participation,thus creating a reservoir of goodwill that attracts and sustains broad involvement.Unlike private sector businesses, nonprofits do not distribute profits directly tostakeholders, but rather to the support of programs and services, thus encouragingcharitable and volunteer support. And unlike either government or business, non-profits lack clear ownership and accountability regimes, thus creating more avenuesfor involvement and participation.

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 23, No. 3, 633–648 (2004)© 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)DOI: 10.1002/pam.20032

Note to Book Publishers: Please send all books for review directly to the BookReview Editor, Eugene B. McGregor, Jr., Indiana University, School of Public &Environmental Affairs, 1315 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701.

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Frumkin measures nonprofits on an expressive or instrumental dimension and ona supply or demand dimension. Within this “matrix” of action, he argues that non-profits play four vital functions: (1) by promoting civic and political engagement(expressive/demand-side), nonprofits help to build social capital and also encouragecitizen involvement in politics and advocacy; (2) through service delivery (instru-mental/demand-side), nonprofits fill important gaps in government and marketservices; (3) by allowing for expressions of values and faith (expressive/supply-side),nonprofits enable staff, volunteers, and donors to see their important commitmentsembodied in the work of an organization; and (4) through social entrepreneurship(instrumental/supply-side), nonprofits are able to achieve charitable objectivesthrough commercial means.

Nonprofits enhance civic and political engagement, according to Frumkin’s analy-sis, by bringing people together to address community, national, or global issues.Indeed, as Tocqueville would argue, “associations are the crucible” for democraticaction. If inequalities of resources or opportunity impede individual participationin public issues, then nonprofits help to overcome some of these imbalances. Inaddition, nonprofits encourage problem identification and the development of pol-icy alternatives through advocacy and community organizing.

Service delivery by nonprofits contributes as much as 10 percent of United StatesGDP. Unmet needs, usually attributed to failure of government or businesses,become the focus of many nonprofit organizations. Frumkin chronicles this ration-ale as well as many related concerns, including whether nonprofits are a defaultservice provider rather than a positive choice, whether nonprofits are becoming a“third party” government provider, whether government contracts inhibit nonprofitautonomy, whether nonprofits are unfairly competing with for-profit providers, andwhether nonprofits may experience mission drift if they try to take on large com-munity or national issues while competing with government or private sectororganizations.

Frumkin finds a natural affinity between philanthropic work and faith and values,though he recognizes the inherent difficulties in documenting that relationship. As“mediating structures” between individuals and society, he notes that nonprofitsranging from churches to voluntary associations help to connect isolated individu-als to larger public issues through the organized expression of core beliefs. This par-ticular function attracts conservatives and liberals alike, although for differing rea-sons (devolution and privatization by the former group, community empowermentand self-determination by the latter). Frumkin’s insightful analysis includes a dis-cussion of how community needs may be balanced against the interests of donors,and also provides a timely context for examining emerging “faith-based” initiatives.

Finally, through social entrepreneurship, nonprofits may be able to combine bothexpressive and instrumental dimensions. Frumkin suggests that nonprofits, eitherindependently or in cooperation with business, can integrate both commercialinnovation and social motivation. He offers constructive illustrations, such as theRobin Hood Foundation of New York and Social Venture Partners of Seattle. At thesame time, he cautions against using measures such as “social return on invest-ment” unless the donor and the organization have a full understanding of this met-ric’s benefits and its shortcomings. He also reminds us that pluralism, diversity, andinnovation actually may be imperiled by an overemphasis on efficiency and com-mercial activity.

Frumkin cautions that the growth of the nonprofit sector may soon “outstrip soci-ety’s ability to support these endeavors adequately.” He makes a persuasive case forcollaboration, noting the large numbers of nonprofits that tend to work independ-

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ently on similar problems “will find it hard to achieve economies of scale andinstead be drawn into an exhausting struggle for organizational survival.”

As with most aspects of life, effective nonprofit leadership is a question of bal-ance. Resource shortages, management effectiveness, and public policy challengesare just some of the perplexing issues that must be juggled. Nonetheless, with thefurther battering of the domestic “safety net” resulting from public service cut-backs, the nonprofit sector becomes even more vital. Peter Frumkin has provided acomprehensive appraisal for the scholars who study the sector and for the practi-tioners who manage these important national resources.

MICHAEL BISESI is Professor and Director of the Center for Nonprofit and SocialEnterprise Management, Seattle University.

Gary J. Edles

The Regulators: Anonymous Power Brokers in American Politics, by Cindy Skrzycki.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 249 pp., $24.95.

Cindy Skrzycki is a journalist who covers regulatory issues for the Washington Post.Her stated objective is to “take a complicated and sometimes inscrutable topic andmake it a comprehensible, important lesson in government.” Generally speaking,she does just that. She avoids the doctrinal or theoretical elements that so oftendominate academic texts. Instead, she applies her journalistic style and experienceto allow themes to unfold through a series of anecdotes about both significant andobscure events to produce a highly readable book on how the federal regulatoryprocess works in practice. In a field of activity that owes more to politics and prag-matism than principles or postulates, The Regulators is an illuminating guide.

The six chapters highlight the essential points about regulation. Regulation per-vades every nook and cranny of American life, far more than most Americans real-ize. Regulations issued by government agencies can be as significant as the statutesthat authorize them—maybe more so. Unelected regulators, both politicalappointees and career civil servants, have real power (though, so do lobbyists forthe regulated community). Individual members of Congress wield tremendousclout, often behind the scenes. Special interest groups can be quite comfortablewith a regulatory environment that serves their overall interests and can, at times,be manipulated. Widespread recognition that we need regulation is coupled withdissatisfaction over its administration and a lack of consensus on how to reform it.The debate over the comparative costs and benefits of government regulation isongoing. Cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments have become accepted tech-niques of regulatory assessment, despite substantial controversy over the method-ologies they require. Regulatory reform is difficult but targeted changes are moreeasily accomplished than comprehensive modification.

These themes are not new. The book’s unique contribution is to develop and illu-minate them through a sampling of Ms. Skrzycki’s Washington Post columnsbetween 1993 and 2001. They skillfully—and often humorously—illustrate thepoints she wants to make. She captures the reader’s attention early on with a won-derful story about how, with industry prodding, the permissible size of prunes forthe grocer’s shelf was adjusted, with the Department of Agriculture’s blessing, sothat growers could dispose of unprofitable undersize prunes more easily. At aboutthe same time, the Food and Drug Administration assisted the industry by endors-ing a name-change program designed to enhance the fruit’s image by henceforth

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allowing prunes to be called “dried plums.” She includes a look at the Food andDrug Administration’s 6-year struggle to decide the appropriate serving size forbreath mints. It’s arcane stuff, but it’s interesting, amusing, and revealing.

The Regulators presents the regulatory process as a mixture of interrelatedrequirements, customs, practices, power struggles, compromises, and even per-sonal idiosyncrasies. For example, in chapter 3 Ms. Skrzycki tracks the numeroussteps leading to enactment of the Clinton administration’s ergonomics rule and itssubsequent rejection by Congress before it could become effective. The readercomes to understand both the narrow point that interest-group lobbies can be pow-erful players in the regulatory process, and the broader lesson that reversing majorbureaucratic action can require a confluence of interests and events not easilybrought together.

Chapter 4 addresses the largely unsuccessful Republican legislative effort in themid-1990s to achieve a “one size fits all” reformation of agency regulatory proce-dures. Ms. Skrzycki quotes the chairman of the Cato Institute as acknowledgingthat there can be no “silver bullet” for curing all regulatory problems at once.However, she gives the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” initia-tive during the same period reasonable marks for making modest improvements inthe regulatory process by trying to apply business practices to government opera-tion. Nonetheless, she recognizes that a key element of “reinventing government”was the Clinton administration’s acquiescence in the elimination of nearly 300,000federal jobs under threat of Republican budget cuts. While “reinventing govern-ment” helped to blunt wholesale Republican procedural reform efforts, de factoderegulation through the budget process achieved significant Republican regula-tory objectives.

The final chapter, which examines the current Bush administration’s efforts to rollback some Clinton administration regulatory initiatives, makes the obvious pointthat elections matter. It also illustrates the reality that unexpected events—Septem-ber 11 and the collapse of Enron, for example—can alter any administration’s reg-ulatory objectives or priorities.

The need for newspaper columns to be pithy can compromise a broader message.Ms. Skrzycki recognizes that limitation and intersperses her columns with thought-ful explanatory narratives. Only rarely does she fall short of her goal of merginggood stories with deep lessons about government. She reproduces a 1998 columnthat relates how John Truesdale, a 77-year-old career National Labor RelationsBoard (NLRB) employee, was plucked from retirement by President Clinton to fillthe fifth seat on the multi-member board when William Gould, a highly regardedStanford law professor, left after an unexpectedly contentious tenure as chairman.It is an entertaining tale, but doesn’t make all the connections that would render ita more general parable about regulation.

Congress created the NLRB in 1935 as a tribunal of theoretically impartial refer-ees for labor disputes. However, many Republican legislators saw the agency as pro-labor, so President Eisenhower—the first Republican president following passage ofthe 1935 statute—broke with tradition and appointed overtly pro-managementmembers. Recent presidents have often—although not always—appointed twomanagement-oriented members (generally Republicans), two labor-oriented mem-bers (generally Democrats), and a chair from an ostensibly neutral background,such as government or academia. NLRB members serve 5-year terms and appoint-ments require Senate confirmation. The chair is seen as the swing vote.

As Ms. Skrzycki indicates, the management, i.e., “Republican” seats were filledand a Republican Senate during the last 2 years of the Clinton administration was

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reluctant to approve a Democratic nominee to a 5-year term. However, in theabsence of a fifth member, the NLRB would likely have deadlocked on key issues.What to do? Ms. Skrzycki reminds readers that the President has constitutionalauthority to make “recess” appointments, i.e., temporary (about 1-year) appoint-ments, that do not require Senate confirmation. But recess appointments ruffle sen-atorial feathers—irrespective of which party controls the Senate—by compromisingsenatorial confirmation prerogatives and, thus, dampening senators’ political influ-ence. And what individual of recognized stature would want such a post of limitedand uncertain tenure?

President Clinton gave Truesdale a recess appointment. Truesdale agreed to comeout of retirement and, as a highly respected career bureaucrat who had alreadyserved on the board on several occasions over a decades-long NLRB career, he waspolitically tolerable. The Senate later confirmed Truesdale to a full term, but he hadto agree, as a condition of confirmation, to resign upon the election of a new pres-ident. Overall, the compromise provided a quality appointment for a 2-year period,avoided a regulatory stalemate, and preserved important presidential and senatorialprerogatives.

Academic observers of the regulatory process deal with abstract generalizationsabout, for example, the appropriate role of, and constraints on, agency power in ademocratic state, or the tension between government effectiveness and fundamen-tal fairness and accountability. Participants in the process—“The Regulators”—encounter such issues as daily practical problems. Ms. Skrzycki examines that dailyencounter through anecdotes that expose and explain a generally obscure and fre-quently abstruse subject. Newcomers to the field will find her book an informativeintroduction to the subject. For those wanting to learn more, the author providesreferences and furnishes with each chapter a helpful bibliography of books, reports,articles, government documents, or Web sites. Experts, insiders, or aficionados willfind her stories engaging, entertaining, and informative even if her themes come asno surprise.

GARY J. EDLES is a Fellow in Administrative Law at American University Washing-ton College of Law and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Hull, England.

Marina Ottaway

Stalled Democracy. Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development,by Eva Bellin. Cornell University Press, 2002, 239 pp., $35.00.

Much has been written in the last few years about the democratic deficit in the Mid-dle East. Particularly in the aftermath of September 11, we have been inundatedwith studies, and even more often with unfounded opinions, that purport to explainwhy the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa lag behind the rest ofthe world in the development of democratic political systems. Many of the expla-nations focus, predictably, on the supposedly unique characteristics of Islam as areligion and the Middle East as a region—pointing to the cultural chasm thatdivides the democratic West from the Arab world. Other studies point to the deep-seated Arab resentment against the West, born from centuries of defeat and humil-iation, that leads Arabs to continue to reject Western liberal ideals and to seekrefuge in primordial attachments to religion and tradition.

Eva Bellin’s masterful book, Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Para-dox of State-Sponsored Development, offers a refreshing departure from approaches

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that stress the centrality of culture and psychology to the weakness of democracy inArab countries. Seeking to explain why the democratic transformation of Tunisiastalled during the 1990s, and why this phenomenon did not cause a strong publicreaction, Bellin turns to the variables that generations of social scientists havefound useful in explaining successful and unsuccessful democratic transitions: therole of social classes and interest groups. While she finds that the business class andthe working class have not been supporters of democracy in Tunisia, as studies ofEuropean countries led her to expect, she shows convincingly that an analysisbased on the role of those social classes provides a sound explanation of Tunisia’sstalled democracy. Furthermore, Bellin argues that this lack of working and busi-ness class enthusiasm for democracy is not unique to Tunisia, North Africa, or theMiddle East. Rather, it is a phenomenon common to late-developing countries,where industrialization has taken place under some form of state sponsorship.

The book makes significant contributions in a number of areas. First, it providesa detailed, well-documented analysis of the industrialization of Tunisia and its polit-ical consequences. This analysis is unlikely to be improved upon in terms of wealthof data, methodological rigor, and firm, but not stuffy, grounding in theory. Second,in a somewhat abbreviated but still very sound final chapter, the book broadens thediscussion to other countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where both laborunions and the entrepreneurial class have shown tepid, and fluctuating, commit-ment to democracy. In so doing she moves decisively away from an ad hoc expla-nation of the Tunisian case or, worse, one based on a notion of the cultural peculi-arity of Arab countries—there is no whiff of clash of civilizations in her analysis.Third, although this is not her intention, Bellin also provides information that chal-lenges the facile assumption held by democracy promoters that market-orientedreforms inevitably lead to democratization. (This assumption is leading the Bushadministration, through its Middle East Partnership Initiative, to spend millions ofdollars to promote economic reform and entrepreneurship in countries of the Mid-dle East and North Africa in order to pave the way for democracy.)

Bellin’s exhaustive research leads her to conclude that the stalled democratizationof Tunisia is explained in large part by the fact that neither the business class northe working class—the two social groupings that historically have been the majorcarriers of demands for democracy—enjoy much autonomy from the state or havemuch power. It is difficult to do justice in a few sentences to Bellin’s sophisticatedanalysis, but essentially she argues that the power and autonomy of the businesscommunity and the labor unions have been limited in Tunisia by government’sefforts to promote industrialization. The Tunisian government weakened the pri-vate sector early on by favoring state-controlled enterprises. Later policies morefavorable to the private sector led to substantial growth, but still left private entre-preneurs dependent on state policies, and particularly on personal contacts with thegovernment and the bureaucracy. In turn, this curtailed their willingness to act asan independent political force. Furthermore, the business-class fear of the mili-tancy of the Islamist movement has led it to favor the stability of autocratic controlover the uncertainty of democracy. The labor movement, for its part, has beenweakened by repression in several periods; more favorable recent policies havemade the industrial labor force into a relatively privileged labor aristocracy, inter-ested in preserving its position and fearful of radical change.

Bellin also shows that the lack of independence of the business community andthe labor unions is a phenomenon common to all late-developing countries, wherethe government invariably takes a very interventionist role in promoting industrial-ization. Relying on the examples of Brazil, Mexico, Korea, Indonesia, and Egypt,

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among others, she shows that the specific dynamic of the relationship between thegovernment, business, and the labor unions varies from country to country andfrom period to period. Yet in all these countries the power and autonomy of the twocrucial social classes is hampered by government industrial policies that createdependency.

What are the implications for democracy promotion? Unfortunately, Bellin doesnot deal with this issue except in passing, noting that the modern interpretationof democracy—which requires immediate mass participation by the entire popu-lation—tends to make the business class fearful. It was much easier for the 19th-century bourgeoisie to support democracy since the suffrage was originally lim-ited to the propertied classes and extended only gradually to the rest of thepopulation. An even more fundamental issue not discussed in the book is whetherother social classes in late-developing countries have both power and autonomyfrom the government, and would also have an interest in the development of trulydemocratic political systems. As is the case with all outstanding books, a revieweris left wishing the author had turned her research and analytical skills to evenmore issues.

MARINA OTTAWAY is Senior Associate at the Democracy and Rule of Law Project ofthe Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Todd Swanstrom

Growth and Convergence in Metropolitan America, by Janet Rothenberg Pack. Wash-ington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002, 214 pp., $19.95 paper.

Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences and Policy Responses, edited by Gregory D.Squires. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2002, 404 pp., $32.50 paper.

These two books present contrasting approaches to the modern metropolis. Pack’sfocus on inter-regional competition contrasts with Squires’s focus on intra-regionalprocesses. Pack argues that individual well-being depends mostly on how the regionas a whole performs, and suggests there is relatively little that public policies cando about it. Squires contends that the internal organization of regions dramaticallyaffects well-being and public policies can make a big difference. Although eachbook is deeply embedded in empiricism, the debate ultimately has more to do withnorms, values, and assumptions than with the facts.

At the heart of Pack’s book is a huge database on per capita income, poverty,unemployment, and educational outcomes among 277 metropolitan areas from1960 to 1990. (A major weakness for a book published in 2002 is that it does notanalyze data for the booming 1990s.) Pack’s approach in the book is straightfor-ward. Using sophisticated econometric reasoning, she determines what variablesinfluence the performance of regions, as measured by their population and incomegrowth. She then asks the question: Which of these variables can be greatly influ-enced by public policies?

The strongest part of Pack’s book is her analysis of the sources of regional growth.Readers lacking technical sophistication will find some parts of the book difficultto follow. Many may want to skip chapter 4, with its complex equations and tablesof regression results; the book is probably most appropriate for graduate seminars.Notwithstanding the complexity of her analysis, Pack does an outstanding job ofintegrating her work with the scholarly literature on regional growth dynamics.

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Pack’s econometric analysis of regional growth produces a number of interestingfindings. She discovers, for example, that the dynamics of regional growth changeddramatically from the 1970s and the 1980s. The Northeast was the weakest of thefour regions in per capita income growth in the 1970s and the strongest in the1980s. This was largely because the basis of regional growth shifted from cost fac-tors, such as energy, to high-tech innovation spurred by sophisticated R&D clusterscentered around universities. Pack argues that policymakers are rarely in a goodposition to anticipate the changing sources of economic growth. Like generals, Packimplies, economic development policymakers are always fighting the last war.

Pack laments the fact that the debate about regional policies and theSunbelt–Snowbelt divide in the 1970s has been replaced by a debate aboutcity–suburban inequities. Pack uses her data to argue that regional growth andprosperity largely trumps intra-regional dynamics. In particular, she takes aim atDavid Rusk’s critique of inelastic cities and those scholars who argue that large gapsbetween cities and suburbs constitute significant drags on regional economic devel-opment. Pack even has two appendices that briefly summarize and critique thesearguments in the urban literature.

Overall, I am persuaded by Pack’s argument that the proponents of the newregionalism exaggerate the economic growth benefits of their policy prescriptions.Although many studies have found a high correlation between per capita incomesin central cities and suburbs, this does not mean that one causes the other. Packargues that it is a third factor that largely explains these correlations: regionalincome growth. For those (and I include myself in this group) who advocate moreregional collaboration and equity, it is tempting to hitch our caboose to the train ofregional economic growth. But the evidence is thin.

Although Pack’s analysis provides a clear challenge to the new regionalists, herown positive policy prescriptions are disappointing. She argues that her policy rec-ommendations follow from her data analysis, but for the most part they flow frommarket-based economic assumptions, not from empirical analysis. Pack concludes,for example, that state and local governments can have little effect on regional eco-nomic development, but this conclusion is not based on any analysis of actual eco-nomic development policies.

One of Pack’s main conclusions is that the different regions in the country areconverging and that the free market will more readily bring about equality thangovernment programs. Pack’s analysis begs a question: If the United States has freemarkets, and if governments are relatively powerless to influence regional eco-nomic growth, then how did we generate such wide regional disparities in the firstplace?

With the exception of a small number of deeply distressed regions, she concludesthat the Unites States does not need regional policies. My reading of the literaturedoes not support her conclusion of steady progress toward convergence. Moreover,Pack’s assessment ignores the crisis in small towns and rural America.

In the final analysis, I could not escape the conclusion that Pack’s policy pre-scriptions are more deduced from market theory than from empirical observations.Her policy prescriptions are reminiscent of the McGill Commission Report UrbanAmerica in the Eighties (1980), which signaled the rise of market thinking innational urban and regional policy circles. Ultimately, Pack’s book has all thestrengths and weaknesses of a strictly economic approach.

Squires’ very different approach flows from his decision—Squires, himself, is asociologist—to assemble contributors from a variety of disciplines, including polit-ical science, planning, law, and economics. The authors in this volume do not

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assume that regional performance is best measured by per capita income. Insteadthey examine a wide range of costs that are imposed on individuals, like traffic con-gestion and air pollution, which erode the quality of our lives no matter what ourincome. Although the book has plenty of economic analysis, overall it suggests thatwe must also examine not only the social and political costs of metropolitan devel-opment patterns, but the moral implications as well.

Squires’s broad introductory chapter is followed by five general chapters address-ing different issues in the sprawl debate, and then a case study chapter each onAtlanta, Portland, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Chicago, and Maryland. The book con-cludes with an insightful evaluation of the future political prospects of the anti-sprawl movement. To my knowledge, the chapters are original contributions, theyoften include primary data analysis, and they are generally well written. The bookis appropriate for undergraduate classes in political science, urban planning, andsociology. Readers should be forewarned that this is an anti-sprawl book; if youwant to examine the other side of the debate, free market defenses of sprawl, youwill have to go elsewhere.

An interesting characteristic of the anti-sprawl movement is that it combinesenvironmental issues with equity and efficiency concerns. The Jargowsky chapterargues, for example, that sprawl is related to central city decline and concentratedpoverty. Because new housing on the fringe serves mainly the middle class andabove, sprawl worsens economic segregation. Jargowsky observes that concen-trated poverty increased even when regional economies were growing. Jargowsky’srecent work, however, shows that tight labor markets in the late 1990s did signifi-cantly reduce the number of people living in areas of concentrated poverty (Jar-gowsky, 2003). If regional prosperity does not lift all boats, as Pack seems to sug-gest, tight regional labor markets do ultimately benefit the poorest parts of regions.

Urban Sprawl has a number of excellent chapters on policy innovations intendedto curb sprawl. For the most part, states and regions have not been successful incontrolling sprawl. Cohen’s chapter on Maryland’s “smart growth” initiatives pointsout that they are based on providing incentives for compact development and it istoo early to determine whether they will succeed. The most successful region incontrolling sprawl is Portland, Oregon, where, by law, a green-belt enforces com-pact development. The greatest concern is that effective anti-sprawl measures willharm affordable housing, but Abbott argues that rising costs of housing in Portlandare probably due more to the economic success of the region than to restrictions ondevelopment.

Overall, the argument that something needs to be done about sprawl is persua-sive. Whether a political coalition can be assembled to do this, however, is anothermatter. Abbott points out that the success of the anti-sprawl coalition in Portlandwas not primarily a coalition of interests, such as the central city–inner suburbancoalition advocated by Orfield. Instead, the defenders of sprawl controls capturedthe moral high ground, identifying their policies with civil community and the fam-ily farm, as opposed to individualism and greed.

Henig’s final chapter on the political future of the anti-sprawl movement bringsmuch-needed political insight to the issue. Henig argues that fragmented suburbangovernments do not just respond to preferences for public goods, as public choicetheorists argue; they actually construct those preferences. Suburban institutionsentrench parochial interests and elevate the value of “exit” as an alternative to polit-ical reform. Drawing on the work of Baumgartner and Jones (1993), Henig suggeststhat anti-sprawl forces must expand the institutional venues where political inter-ests can acquire a stake in regional solutions. Without innovative political strategies

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that go beyond rational planning, the new wave of regional reformers may have lit-tle more success than earlier proponents of regional government.

TODD SWANSTROM is Professor of Public Policy Studies, Saint Louis University.

REFERENCES

Baumgartner, F. R., and Jones, B. D. (1993). Agendas and instability in American politics.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jargowsky, P. A. (2003). Stunning progress, hidden problems: The dramatic decline of con-centrated poverty in the 1990s. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

Frank Hoffman

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, by Eliot A.Cohen. New York: Free Press, 2002, 288 pp., $25.00.

Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations, by Peter D. Feaver.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 381 pp., $49.95.

Anyone who studies civil–military relations toils in the long shadow of SamuelHuntington’s seminal The Soldier and the State, written nearly half a century ago(Huntington, 1957). No academic or student discusses the topic without genuflect-ing before Huntington’s catechism. Two new books chip away at key elements of hisnormative theory about the interplay between statesmen and their generals. Bothdetail historic cases in which this theory has produced serious tensions betweenpolicymakers and military advisors, and undermined strategic effectiveness andpolicy.

A myth attributable to both Huntington and the ghosts of Vietnam is the belief ina sharp division of labor between the civilian and military spheres. Huntington’sconception holds that civilian leaders should focus on setting forth clear policyaims, and then shun close supervision of operational plans or the conduct of war.His theory of civilian control acknowledges an autonomous operational sphere formilitary professionals. This restricts civilian policymakers to setting objectives, andminimizes or even dismisses their role in examining military means. The purportedinterference of the Johnson administration during Vietnam—its constraints on theadvice and actions of the professional military—reinforced Huntington’s theory andproduced a powerful myth that remains operative within America’s strategic cul-ture. At all costs, under this myth, civilians should avoid micro-management of mil-itary operations and leave the details to the professionals.

This orthodoxy is the major subject of Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command. The ori-gins of this clean divide between civilian and military roles is well documented inthe literature spawned by the Vietnam War, especially in military memoirs. Militaryofficers who served in Southeast Asia were embittered at the impact the war had ontheir institution. The heavy toll of the war left a collective impression on a genera-tion of officers, best captured by Colin Powell’s oft-quoted statement that “when ourturn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfarefor half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.”

Strategic planning during Vietnam does indeed offer ample grounds for dissatis-faction. The military scrupulously adhered to the principle of civilian control dur-ing the war in Southeast Asia, but it is pretty clear that effective interaction betweenDOI: 10.1002/pam.20036

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the statesmen and the generals was absent. Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary ofDefense during the build-up in Vietnam, belatedly admitted that the nation’s planswere based on “loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analyses” (McNa-mara, 1995, p. 203). The Secretary of Defense was responsible for much of the pol-icy development process, a process from which he excluded senior military advisorsso that he could control information. Nor were military leaders comfortable withforcefully articulating to civilian leaders their opposition to both the process andthe resulting policies. Their loyalty to the chain of command, and to a conceptionof professionalism that defines roles and duties narrowly, precluded aggressivelyadvanced recommendations. On this point, readers should see H. R. McMaster’sDereliction of Duty, especially his chapter on the Joint Chiefs of Staff titled “FiveSilent Men” (McMaster, 1997). From McMaster’s brilliant thesis emerges the clearconclusion that both sides contributed to the debacle in Vietnam.

Yet the conventional wisdom inside today’s military culture is dominated by thelesson that the Johnson administration micro-managed the war, and should haveleft the professionals to deal with it without constraint. Ironically, both sides of thecivil–military divide now subscribe to this myth. Bob Woodward, in Bush at War,records several references by President Bush and his chief of staff Andrew Card tothe lessons of Vietnam and the imperative to avoid micro-managing the military(Woodward, 2002).

So how should a modern-day policymaker resolve the dilemma posed by Hunting-ton’s separate spheres of influence? How are the responsibilities for policy develop-ment, decisionmaking, and supervision divided among civilians and military profes-sionals? Cohen’s Supreme Command offers a historically grounded answer. He arguesthat the role gap must be closed by intense involvement and incessant inquiry by civil-ian leaders in what he calls an “uneasy dialogue” with military advisors. Based uponfour wonderfully developed case studies, he contends that great war leaders do notaccept an artificial dividing line that separates the two spheres. His model states-men—Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion—were masters of detail whowere intimately involved in planning and supervising, always “querying, prodding,suggesting, arbitrating,” and occasionally overruling their military advisors. They didmore than merely offer guidance or goals. They selected commanders, fired others,meddled when necessary, and drove the refinement of strategies and plans until theywere satisfied. Cohen (p. 206) recommends that policymakers:

Immerse themselves in the conduct of their wars no less than in their great projects ofdomestic legislation; that they must master their military briefs as thoroughly as they dotheir civilian ones; that they must demand and expect from their military subordinatesa candor as bruising as is necessary; that both groups must expect a running conversa-tion in which although civilian opinion will not usually dictate, it must dominate; andthat conversation will cover not only ends and policies, but ways and means.

This is excellent advice. However, it should be noted that Cohen’s case studies arelimited to four severely imperiled democracies. Such cases, when survival is at risk,certainly warrant great introspection and much interaction at the policy council.Yet today’s wars respond to murkier, less vivid threats than those of World War II.Do the lessons and advice carry over to today’s ongoing global war against terror-ism? According to press reports, three copies of Cohen’s fine book were dispatchedto the White House, but there is scant evidence of its effect, unless one counts thepersistent prodding of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld during combat operations inAfghanistan and during the planning preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom. Neitherexample is comforting.

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Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University, takes a much different approach todismantling Huntington in Armed Servants. Feaver is no stranger to the subject ofcivil–military relations, having co-directed (with the University of North Carolina’sRichard Kohn) a thorough study of the putative crisis in American civil–militaryrelations that resulted in Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and AmericanNational Security. That effort replaced anecdotes with meticulous research andfacts. Armed Servants is an attempted reformulation to displace the Huntingtoniandoctrine. Feaver may be a heretic, but he is not an outsider. This is no critique fromthe comfortable abstraction of academia. Armed Servants reflects the author’s back-ground as a political scientist, as well as his experience on the National SecurityCouncil staff, which gives the book added credibility.

Drawing upon what is known as agency theory in the economics and political-science literature, Feaver lays out a detailed alternative about how civil–militaryrelations really work. Like any sausage factory, the factual reality of Washington’sinner workings are not for the faint-hearted or the idly curious. In Feaver’s alter-native construct, civil–military relations are the product of a strategic interactionbetween civilian “principals” and military “agents.” This construct subordinatesthe military to civilian control, but specifies the conditions under which civilianpolicymakers delegate authority to the military and how intrusively they monitorthe military. Conversely, the theory contends that military agents determinewhether to accept the mission assigned or shirk it based upon the monitoring con-ditions imposed by civilian authority and the expectations the military has aboutwhat the consequences might be for noncompliance. Shirking, as defined, is any-thing short of full obedience, to including overestimating potential costs and casu-alties, constraining options, or leaking details to political allies and the media toundercut elected officials.

The historical chapters that wrap up Armed Servants demonstrate the greatdescriptive power of agency theory. Without procrustean pruning of the facts to fitthe theoretical bed, Feaver ably shows how his approach fits the various contin-gencies in which the United States has employed military force as an instrument ofAmerican policy in the past decade. These chapters are crisply written and wellresearched, although limited to secondary sources. They are the highlight of thebook, and immensely valuable to any government or national security program.Armed Servants, unlike Huntington’s explanation about how things ought to work,is about how things really work in Washington.

Feaver is effective at showing how well his theory can describe the past, but heoffers little in terms of normative guidance for the future. He reduces the “uneasydialogue” between soldiers and statesmen about policy aims and means to tacitexaminations of oversight and possible punishments. Armed Servants lacks anappreciation for the ethical dimension of the profession of arms. Only at the con-clusion does Feaver suggest that today’s American military officer has a distinctfunction within a democratic society and that his conception of his obligations tothe State and his duty must give “as much on respect for the process of democraticpolitics as on the substance of the policies that process yields” (p. 302).

The importance of this issue cannot be underestimated. The study of civil–mili-tary interaction gets at the essence of the making and implementation of strategyitself. To overlook the process and politics of this exchange is to ignore the funda-mentals of strategic success or failure in the development of policy. Recent tensionsstemming from the war in Iraq and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s strug-gle to reform the Pentagon show that civil–military relations cannot be taken forgranted. The putative “crisis” between civilian masters and military subordinates is

Book Reviews / 645

not merely a transitory phenomenon but a continuous tension in American history,and not always a constructive one. The messy nature of conflict in this century willmandate even closer integration of politics, the armed forces, and interagency con-tributions. Accordingly, the study of the relationship between policy makers andmilitary leaders will be even more important to U.S. national security.

Taken together, these books offer solid and historically illustrated insights on pol-icymaking and the day-to-day management of national security problems. BothSupreme Command and Armed Servants indicate that separate and distinct spheresof responsibility at the strategic level are neither possible nor desirable. The rolesoverlap as suggested by Churchill’s famous dictum, “at the summit strategy and pol-icy are one.” The melding of ends and means must be a two-sided and interactiveprocess with civilian policy makers and military professionals fully participating.This interaction does not have to be cordial, but it must be intense and compre-hensive. In short, if the sword is to be a true instrument of policy, its employmenthas to be the product of considerable reciprocal interaction between the statesmanand the soldier.

FRANK HOFFMAN (Lt. Col., U.S. Marine Corps, retired) is a consultant in nationalsecurity matters for the Marine Corps.

REFERENCES

Huntington, S. P. (1957). The soldier and the state: The theory and politics of civil-militaryrelations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

McMaster, H. R. (1997). Dereliction of duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff,and the lies that led to Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins.

McNamara, R. S. (1995). In retrospect: The tragedy and lessons of Vietnam. New York: Vin-tage.

Woodward, B. (2002). Bush at war. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Jonathan D. Breul

The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue, by MichaelBarzelay. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press and RussellSage Foundation, 2001, 240 pp., $29.00.

The New Public Management: Lessons from Innovating Governors and Mayors, byPaul J. Andrisani, Simon Hakim, and E. S. Savas. Boston/Dordrecht/London: KluwerAcademic Publishers, 2002, 234 pp., $100.

Supporting and criticizing both theory and practice of the New Public Management(NPM) concept, begun in academic scholarship, has become a popular pastime foracademics. NPM embraces a common set of managerial values that emphasizeentrepreneurial spirit, urge flexibility, and downplay rigid procedures. It focuses onthe “rules-of-the-game”: the institutional rules and organizational constraintsaffecting resource allocation and spending, civil service codes, procurement, audit,and evaluation. But, what are we to make of these two books with the same title?Fortunately, the subtitles give us more than a clue. Paul J. Andrisani, Simon Hakim,and E. S. Savas’s The New Public Management: Lessons From Innovating Governorsand Mayors offers a catalog of innovations and lessons from 8 governors and 13mayors who are intent on using the principles and lessons of the NPM. Michael

DOI: 10.1002/pam.20037

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Barzelay’s The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue, onthe other hand, constructs an intellectually challenging conceptual framework toparse out the theory of NPM.

These two books illustrate the continuing struggle to define just what the NPM isand whether it works. The New Public Management: Lessons from Innovating Gover-nors and Mayors by Andrisani, Hakim, and Savas, is a set of 21 first-hand accountsby “innovating” American governors and mayors who have used market forces andprinciples to improve their states and cities. With The New Public Management:Improving Research and Policy Dialogue, Barzelay seeks to improve our thinking andresearch on NPM by providing a conceptual framework to structure analysis andpractice.

Andrisani, Hakim and Savas present a selection of contributions from 8 gover-nors and 13 mayors to illustrate the NPM. Former New York Mayor Rudolph W.Gilliani sets the stage in the foreword where he describes a new generation of may-ors and governors from various parts of the country and different political parties.These elected officials find themselves facing similar challenges and thus, perhapsunsurprisingly, some of their strategies and solutions have proved similar as well.

Andrisani, Hakim, and Savas describe the NPM as the “latest manifestation ofgovernment reform.” They find in the NPM an underlying framework consisting of8 elements: reverting to core functions; decentralizing and devolving authority; lim-iting the size and scope of government—“rightsizing”; restoring civil society; adopt-ing market principles; managing for results, satisfying citizens, and holding gov-ernment accountable; empowering employees, citizens, and communities; andintroducing e-government and modern technology. The editors describe and illus-trate these elements with concrete state and local examples, including chapters byformer Governors George W. Bush and Tommy Thompson of Texas and Wisconsin,respectively, and former Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Richard Daley of New Yorkand Chicago. Andrisani, Hakim, and Savas insist that the innovations detailed intheir book could change the way governments will operate in the next decade.Eschewing advice about the hazards of predicting the future, they foresee the emer-gence of a public sector in which:

• The Internet constitutes a new form of competitive marketplace for govern-ment procurement.

• E-government expands contacts between government and citizens.• A local government consists of a nucleus of professionals who monitor the

performance of satellite private firms that actually produce most services.• The number of services produced directly by any given government is declining.• Traditional public service increasingly deliver through public-private part-

nerships.• Separate jurisdictions increasingly cooperate in joint service delivery.• Governments with a competitive advantage in an area sell services to other

governments.• Hierarchical structure of government is becoming flattened.• Officials are held accountable for achieving high performance and visible

results.• Front-line workers have more responsibilities and are less unionized.

In a bold and unabashed conclusion, the editors advise that governments “shouldadopt the policies that together constitute the new public management and creategovernments redesigned for the 21st Century.”

Book Reviews / 647

Michael Barzaley’s carefully structured examination of the premises of the NPM(The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue) is a rigorousand intellectually challenging book that provides a research design for comparativeanalysis of public management policy change. Prompted by an invitation to lectureon public management at the University of California, Berkeley in the memory ofAaron Wildavsky, Barzelay developed his book over the 4 years between the invita-tion and the lecture.

Barzelay begins by explaining that NPM literature is still amorphous, interdisci-plinary, and policy-oriented. To give NPM literature a “recognizable shape,” he con-structs a framework to think of NPM in terms of research (scholarly works intendedto explain facts and events) and argumentation (scholarly dialogues about what-to-do ideas and actual policies). These two elements can also be thought of as processand substance.

Research is subdivided into Program Design and Operation, which focuses on thepolitical and organizational processes through which policy change takes place;and Public Management Policy, which involves the substantive analysis of theauthoritative means to guide, constrain, or motivate public service. Public Man-agement Policy is further divided into Policy Content and Policy-Making Process.Argumentation is divided into the literature addressing Guidance, Control andEvaluation and literature concerned with Policy and Bureaucratic Roles.

Barzelay reviews the empirical research on public management policymaking,mapping NPM literature into his twin framework of research and argumentation.He contends that thinking about NPM in this fashion helps focus research on twokey issues of public policy analysis: feasibility and desirability. He believes that thisapproach provides a more definitive context for discussing methods for conductingresearch and argumentation on public management policy, and one that is superiorfor learning from experience that was NPM’s initial formulation.

He catalogs single-country studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, theUnited States, Canada, Sweden, and Germany and ends with a summary of com-parative work. Shifting from the empirical analysis of public-managementchange, Barzelay moves to the normative discussion of NPM’s doctrinal bases andpolicy implications. He parses out the various directions and angles that thescholarly community has used to study and comment on the NPM phenomena.He looks at both skeptics and sympathizers of NPM. He contends that neitherNPM research nor doctrinal and policy argumentation has been sufficiently sat-isfactory. To remedy this shortcoming, he offers a number of specific guidelinesfor future discourse on NPM, organized around their claims and the rationale. Hebelieves that policy dialogue will be more fruitful when scholarly commentatorsembrace his standards.

Outlining good practices in argumentation, Barzelay uses Peter Aucoin’s (1995)The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective to illustrate howNPM arguments should be reconstructed to make the policy dialogue more fruitful.He offers three guidelines: discuss the claims (i.e., formulate your point of view asclearly as possible in order that it be open to critical discussion), discuss the war-rants and presumptions (i.e., be clear about viewpoints) and explicate the informallogic (i.e., explain key points of rationale or inference).

Barzelay’s framework and guidelines are designed to enrich policy debates aboutNPM—away from its initial contours toward one which is more useful for practi-tioners. His approach directs attention toward explaining change in public man-agement policy on a comparative basis—placing a high value on rigorous evaluativediscussions of policy choices. He cites Allen Schick’s (1996) study of New Zealand

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as an example of such policy-oriented, academically rigorous analysis. He alsoargues that the vitality of NPM calls for an interdisciplinary dialogue. He urgesresearchers to undertake work to explain policy change in as systematic a manneras required by a political scientist, and to begin to explain similarities and differ-ences among cases and understand the causal effects of such factors.

Together, these two similarly titled books beg for analysis and evaluation to sepa-rate rhetoric from reality. After more than two decades of theorizing, conceptualiz-ing, and debating the NPM, it is time to examine its effectiveness. Some countries(including New Zealand and Australia) have subjected their reforms to rigorousassessment and recalibration. To a much more limited extent, the Trosa report(1994) looked at the “Next Steps” effort in the United Kingdom, while U.S. reforms,for the most part, have stood outside the mainstream of NPM.

Indeed, for an approach that is all about results, the NPM could use a dose of thevery same medicine it recommends. As Allen Schick (1996, p. 3) explains: “On thebasis of almost 40 years observing government reforms in many venues, this writerwould argue that the failure to systematically evaluate what has been accomplishedis one of the greatest threats to durable innovation in public management.”

Barzelay and Andrisani, Hakim and Savas, each in their own way recognize theneed to see whether these management reforms have helped governments solvetheir particular problems. Barzaley, for example, points out that if the debate overthe NPM is going to be more useful for practitioners, it must begin to explainchange in public management policy on a comparative basis, and do so by placinga high value on carefully argued evaluative discussions of policy choices. He seeksto apply “well-honed explanatory frameworks” to case evidence, calling for com-parative research to explain policy change in a systematic manner.

Management reform is not an end in itself, but rather one aspect of governmentstrategy that is designed to support sound fiscal policy, improve service to the pub-lic, rationalize the distribution of tasks between the private and public sectors, andlower the cost of government (Mathiasen, 1996). Unfortunately, too frequentlyreform campaigns boil down to slogans and aphorism with little durable impact onthe structure or the function of governmental institutions. There is a temptation tolet perpetual reform crowd out lasting change. The professional challenge is to befirmly anchored in reality rather than aspirations. Otherwise we are slaves to fads,false theory and facile rhetoric.

JONATHAN D. BREUL is an Associate Partner and Senior Fellow with the IBMCenter for The Business of Government, IBM Business Consulting Services.

REFERENCES

Aucoin, P. (1995). The new public management: Canada in comparative perspective. Quebec:Institute for Research on Public Policy.

Mathiasen, D. G. (1996). Counsellor, public management service, organization for economiccooperation and development, letter to Alice Rivlin, Director, Office of Management andBudget, February 2.

Schick, A. (1996). The spirit of reform: Managing the New Zealand state sector in a time ofchange. Wellington, NZ: State Service Commission, Treasury.

Trosa, S. (1994). Next steps: moving on, an examination of the progress to date of the nextsteps reform against a background of recommendations made in the Fraser Report. Lon-don, UK: Cabinet Office, Office of Public Service and Science.