The Blind Spots of Public Bureaucracy and the Politics of Non-Coordination

Abstract

This idea for this book developed in the context of a research project addressing the ‘administrative factor’ in explaining the financial crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the process of developing its analytical framework, presenting and discussing draft chapters, and inviting contributors, it gradually developed a life of its own. It became a book about how day-to-day decision-making in public organizations is subject to different types of attention biases. Those biases may lead to major disasters, but they may also have less severe, though far from trivial, consequences, such as inducing organizations to avoid coordination with other organizations. The contributions to this book address those attention biases and their effects for various types of public organizations in different policy sectors and national contexts. We believe this diversity is extremely helpful in addressing questions of the ‘why didn’t they see it coming?’ type, which are typically raised after major disasters and government blunders. At the same time, the issues raised in this book also appeal to the broader agenda of providing a theoretically informed, but realistic, account of organizational life in a political context.The book project started to take shape during a workshop entitled ‘The Blind Spots of Public Bureaucracies’ at the University of Oslo’s Department of Political Science in November 2016, where most contributors to the book presented first drafts of their chapters. Initial ideas for what has become the book’s introductory chapter were presented at the panel ‘The Administrative Dimension of Financial Market Regulation’ at the IPSA (International Political Science Association) World Congress in Poznań in July 2016, and we presented a more full-fledged version at the Executive Politics and Governance group at the Political Studies Association’s international conference in Glasgow in April 2017. We thank the participants of those events for their feedback, which helped us to sharpen our arguments. In particular, we would like to thank Tom Christensen, Martin Lodge, Paul ’t Hart, and Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling for their constructive feedback on different versions of the introductory chapter. Martin Lodge also commented on the book’s final chapter. There are more people we would like to thank. We would not have engaged in editing this volume without our academic mentor Werner Jann, who introduced us to organization theory and the importance of bounded rationality for decision-making. He taught us that a good theory about public organizations also needs to help answer very practical questions and illustrate ways for improving decision-making. We hope that the approach put forward in this book fulfils both criteria. We also thank Jessica Leong Cohen for her invaluable assistance in preparing the final manuscript. This is a book about organizations, and we should not forget to thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for funding the project State, Risk and Society (STARS) and the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo for funding the author workshop. Kai Wegrich wishes to thank the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation for hosting him during his sabbatical in Fall/Winter 2017/18 (during which time the manuscript was finalized). Oslo, Berlin April 2018