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1. Metaphor, cultural imagery, and
the study of change in public
organizations
Arthur J. Sementelli
Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, Florida, USA, and
Charles F. Abel
Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacodgoches, Texas, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how mechanistic and organic metaphors
might be fused through the application of cultural imagery.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a theoretical examination of metaphor and its
application in public organizations. Specifically, this paper examines the possibility that images from
popular culture might offer some insights. Selected metaphors linked by elective methodological
affinities are examined in order to determine potential significance of the Robocop metaphor for
guiding research in organizations.
Findings – The popular culture image Robocop from 1980s films can help us detect what is not being
included in most theoretical analyses of public organizations, while simultaneously helping us to
purge the negative connotations of the Robocop image.
Research limitations/implications – The popular culture image can help us to understand
change in public organizations.
Originality/value – It is one of the few, if any, papers using popular culture images to bridge
metaphor and imagery in the study of organizational change.
Keywords Public sector organizations, Metaphors, Epistemology, Popular culture
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Metaphors are potent tools for reasoning and deliberation (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
At the very least, metaphors are a “basic structural form of experience, through which
human beings engage, organize, and understand their world” (Morgan, 1983). Some
scholars go so far as to suggest, “all knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical or
analogical modes of perception and thought” (Leary, 1990). Additionally, still others
consider analogical forms of metaphor as perhaps the most efficient of communicative
devices (Hesse, 1966; Sellars, 1963).
A significant body of literature argues that metaphor is important to action in
managerial contexts. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), for example, argue that metaphors
characterize such management practices as problem solving and budgeting time.
Morgan (1986) identifies a series of metaphors ranging from: the organization as
machine to the organization as amoeba as common tools to acquire an understanding
of organizational structure, character, and behavior. Many among us are familiar with
traditional metaphors such as those linking competitive organizational behaviors with
playing a game, fighting a war, or climbing a mountain.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
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Journal of Organizational Change
Management
Vol. 20 No. 5, 2007
pp. 652-670
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0953-4814
DOI 10.1108/09534810710779081

2. Much of this literature recognizes that metaphors map situations and behavior
allowing us to apprehend these concepts more easily reducing ambiguity (Lundin and
Sonderholm, 1995). What people can see, predict, understand depends on their mental
models, their metaphors. These models reflect logically integrated and mutually
reinforcing systems of beliefs and values, while cognitive structures simultaneously
manifest themselves in perceptual frameworks, expectations, worldviews, goals,
myths, rituals, symbols, and even shared language (Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984).
This property of metaphors suggests their importance to creative management
(DeBono, 1970). Consequently, new metaphors can suggest new realities, new ways of
accomplishing ends and new procedures within organizations.
For these reasons, metaphor is highly regarded in public organizations. Currently,
the field employs a wide array of metaphors for different theoretical and practical
purposes. Many classical and neoclassical normative theories of public organizations,
for example, relies upon metaphor for developing key ideas such as legitimacy,
authority, purpose, and identity (Diamond, 1993; Goodsell, 1994; Rohr, 1986; Terry,
1995, 1997). Among the most vivid of these metaphors are the pyramid (Weber, 1947),
the machine (Roth and Wittich, 1978), the balance wheel (Rohr, 1986), the ship at sea
(Goodsell, 1994) and the theater metaphor (Terry, 1997).
Similarly, metaphor plays an important epistemological role in crafting positive
theory, suggesting theoretical categories and concepts for research and analysis
(Bourgeouis and Pinder, 1983; Keeley, 1980; Manning, 1979; Morgan, 1980, 1983, 1986;
Yanow, 1987). On a more mundane level, market-oriented metaphors such as the
customer service model (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) and the public enterprise owner
(Schacter, 1995) are employed to capture the preferred dynamics of service and
resource delivery. Both Senge (1990) and Holland (1995) employ metaphor to deal with
public policy problems and organizational change, respectively, describing seemingly
small changes in complex systems that may cascade to produce exponential change
(a butterfly effect). The metaphor of fuzzy logic, is proving useful for administrative
decision analysis (Overman, 1996; Evans, 1996; Morcol, 1996), and many are familiar
with the numerous physical metaphors (e.g. critical mass of people, organizational
inertia) employed by public administrators on a daily basis (Behn, 1992, p. 412).
This paper proposes an inclusive metaphor that is true to the unusual ontological
properties of public organizations, built upon insights captured by metaphors
currently employed and better able to cope with the limitations of many current
metaphors identified in the literature. It suggests that the image of a cyborg generally,
and the image of the popular culture character Robocop in particular, could
reasonably represent the fusion of an organic (biological) system of metaphors with a
mechanistic one. As a result, we gain the descriptive and proscriptive properties that
both sets of imagery contain. When we look at the image of a cyborg more generally,
we can encompass Terry’s (1997) modes of hero (Robocop), victim (The Six Million
Dollar Man), and the villain (The Terminator) with some caveats. In addition, the
attentionality and other directedness of the Robocop image represent many of the
practical characteristics of public organizations including public stewardship,
service provision, and trustee. This fusion of the mechanistic and organic imagery
allows us to better reconcile the conceptual terrain we as scholars face when trying to
cope with complex, seemingly incommensurable ideas.
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3. The ontological properties and consequent modalities of public organizations
Fundamental realities of public organizations are typically conceptualized in terms of
authority, legitimacy, purpose, choice, and decision, and they reflect human decisions
at the core. Citizens, administrators, congressional committees, and executives decide
whether, when and how to apportion power. They decide who the decision makers are,
what decisions they can undertake, and what venues they have to comply or challenge
decisions by superiors. In addition, these administrators must reconcile conflicting
ideas, goals, purposes, and behavior, while balancing the influences of both internal
and external forces. This combination of synergy and conflict reifies organizational
structures and allows for the continual adaptation reflected by an ever-changing
behavioral repertoire.
Of course, none of these choices occurs in a vacuum. Both, hard (mechanistic) and soft
(organic) factors condition, constrain and enhance the ability to choose. Hard factors
include available technologies, black letter law, geography, and organizational
structure. Soft factors include organizational and social cultures, fads, and public
opinion. However, as the hard as well as the soft factors can be manipulated, choice is
still the heart of change in public organizations and administration generally. More
problematic is the fact that bureaucratic rationality is often limited, and decisions are
based frequently on incomplete information. Goals, purposes and the meanings of
behavior are often ambiguous, vague, shifting, and self-contradictory. Information is
always incomplete, subject to a number of equally convincing interpretations and
usually spun. As a result, choices in public organizations are intuitively and
heuristically premised and not likely to be well understood within the context of truly
rational behavior. Metaphors embodying simple regularities and law-like relationships
among ideas, actors, organizations, and the environment will not explain administrative
outcomes very well. At most, they may elucidate some of the conditions affecting
those outcomes. What regularities appear are more akin to eddies, the outcomes of fluid
processes and counter currents of greater or lesser viscosity depending upon the
environmental temperature. Much of what else occurs is accidental, the result of more
or less coincidental conjunction. Nevertheless, in understanding public organizations
we must never strip away its purposive aspects. It does not flow mindlessly.
Consequently, public organizations have at least three modalities. First,
administrative agencies are vital parts of the social order. They must maintain a high
regard for constituted authority and maintain a scrupulous official fidelity to positive
law. Second, they serve and help to check public power, moving beyond simplistic
notions of public administrators as vassals of those in power. Agencies are differentiated
institutions that must protect their own integrity. Any claims must be examined and
possibly vindicated through established channels. Change typically emerges from
proper process and not the singular exercise of discretion by agencies responding to
partisan, political, or even private demands. Finally, public organizations must be
sensitive to the fact that they embody an order subject to controversy, challenge, and
historically changing expectations. As an authoritative system it can best persevere and
improve if it is open to reconstruction in light of how the governed perceive their rights
and assess their moral commitments. Nevertheless, dangers lurk on both sides, raising
questions about what sort of integrity we are discussing. Should agencies make
administrative order paramount? If so, problems emerge when individuals implicitly
encourage evasion of the laws, rule, and regulations. Crises may even develop should
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4. channels for appeal, participation and change appear closed or beyond the ability of the
regulated to employ. On the other hand, over-responsiveness may foster vacillation
under pressure and yield too much to activists groups and individuals. In brief, public
organizations must maintain integrity, serve power, and facilitate meaningful response
to social needs and aspirations, simultaneously.
The requisites of a good metaphor
The implications of these dynamic complexities are that metaphors created to describe,
explain, and explore public organizations must provide insights helping us to order
and make sense of these possibilities, choices and constraints. It must also affirm both
the worth of order and the value of change in light of reasonable alternatives to the
current order; and it must communicate the essentials of both those insights and that
affirmation to people unfamiliar, disinterested, and even disinclined to hear about it.
Moreover, the metaphor must above all reflect the fact that public organizations and
the order implied by them do not occur naturally. It is a human artifact; an instrument
expressing our meanings, values, goals and patterned interactions; and it embodies
that everyday life artificially, in a ritualistic (programmed) domain of formal
definitions, rules, regulations, and procedures.
Equally important is the fact that any image or metaphor employed for use in public
organizations must express the integrative function of relating the government to the
governed. That is, it must recognize that public agencies have political artifacts;
instruments for getting, keeping and using power to perform legitimate governmental
functions, pursue public ends and secure public values. The metaphor must embody
the fact that in practical terms, public bureaucracies must have sufficient capacity to
respond to a variety of potentially conflicting issues emerging unpredictably, be
capable of securing support from unrelated or even hostile domains, balance
incommensurable positions, serve irreconcilable ends, satisfy contradictory needs, and
contain hostile pursuits of zero sum interests. In brief, the metaphor must reflect the
fact that successful management in this context clearly requires a complex, responsive,
creative, self-organizing, real-world practicality, prudence, and focus on making the
right decision for the current circumstances.
Equally important is the fact that any image or metaphor employed in public
organizations must express the integrative function of relating the government to the
governed. That is, it must recognize that public agencies are political artifacts;
instruments for getting, keeping and using power to perform legitimate governmental
functions, pursue public ends and secure public values. The metaphor must embody
the fact that in practical terms, public bureaucracies must have sufficient capacity to
respond to a variety of potentially conflicting issues emerging unpredictably, be
capable of securing support from unrelated or even hostile domains, balance
incommensurable positions, serve irreconcilable ends, satisfy contradictory needs, and
contain hostile pursuits of zero sum interests. In brief, the metaphor must reflect the
fact that successful management in this context clearly requires a complex, responsive,
creative, self-organizing, real-world practicality, prudence, and focus on making the
right decision for the current circumstances.
This self-organizing management of built in contradictions is both a practical and a
moral requisite. Some goals and values ought to be the subject of both continuing critical
discourse and continuing political power struggles. Certain collective goals (e.g. justice)
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5. are internally complex, valued achievements, embodying multiple, intrinsic dimensions
(e.g. merit, equality, and need), that are differentially stressed by different groups as the
most important dimensions. The meanings of these goals take on definite senses only as
we develop them in living out the discourses, practices and power struggles into which
they are woven (Gallie, 1962; Wittgenstein, 1953). For example, to be sure that we are
doing justice we must continually discover its meaning now, in our current practice,
whether the meaning is new or old. While it may seem that certain meanings in some
contexts are fixed and finalized, this is only so by human effort to make it so. This is
where politics and power are at work. Embodying all of the dimensions and pursuing
them more or less simultaneously through an intentional ambiguity structured into
political institutions, insures a mutual awareness among adversaries of the
achievement’s complexity; and the pressure of opposing interpretations insures that
all dimensions of the concept are secured. Most importantly, it is our only practical way
of attaining as much of what we can understand to be the desired achievement
regardless of apparent self-contradictions in our usages of the terms and understandings
of exactly what it is we are trying to attain (e.g. justice as equality, justice as recognition
of merit, justice as fulfilling needs).
The desired metaphor must also encompass the three modalities of public
organizations. That is, the device must express not only loyalty, independence, and
responsiveness, but certain entailed dualisms emergent in actual practice as well. On the
one hand, for example, loyalty refers to a public organization’s role as an integral part of
the social order, its high regard for positive law, and its power to both enforce and
elaborate that law through rules and regulations. In practice, it includes the status quo
orientation, its lack of imagination, and its sometimes dictatorial and apodictic behavior.
Similarly, independence refers to the fact that the various public organizations are
differentiated institutions protecting their own integrity and vindicating claims through
establishedchannelsandproperprocedures;proceduresinsulatedfrompoliticalorprivate
pressure to decide issues according to any standard other than the public interest. In
practice, this refers as well to their sometimes complex, slow, unimaginative and to some
extent unaccountable operation, occasionally giving credence to charges of waste, fraud,
andinefficiency.Alongthissame line, agoodmetaphormustembody notonlythepositive
role in solving pressing, complex, and persistent social, economic, and technical problems,
but also the negative tendency to intervene, disrupt, and become overly politically active.
Finally, the metaphor must manifest the fact that public organizations function at
different times, and even at the same time regarding different parties or issues, both as
an independent whole and as a part of larger wholes. Remember that while Rohr (1986)
extolled the independence modality, Goodsell (1994) perceived it as largely a product of
environmental factors beyond its control. This ambiguity in its nature engenders many
interesting puzzles. It creates, for example, its own dichotomies of independence versus
integration, individuation versus unity, competition versus cooperation and cause
versus effect. However, neither extreme can by itself, successfully explain much about
the patterned human interactions in public organizations. Once we recognize that as
public organizations function in all of its modalities simultaneously, we can say neither
that it is separate and independent, nor that it is necessarily controlled by anything else.
Consequently, the desired metaphor must juggle not only the built-in contradictions and
the dualities within each of its modalities, but the apparent self-contradiction of a public
organization being both cause and effect, both part and whole.
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6. In sum, the desired epistemological device, the desired metaphor, must embrace
the ontological dynamism of public organizations as well as its institutionalized
contradictions, its self-organizing nature, its three modalities, its dualities and the
apparent self-contradiction and overall complexity of its being both part of something
larger and a discrete organizational entity. Therefore, it must address this complexity by
conveying how the many facets can be both accurately and differentially understood by
differently interested parties. In addition, we want the image to take us past current
modalities and foster reflective debate. We want it to interrupt the unconscious flow of
ongoing activity in public organizations, focus attention on its nature, scope, and limits,
and show us both other possibilities and the place of these public organizations within the
order of things. We want the metaphor to provide comparisons that suggest new ways of
orienting ourselves given the scope, limits, and processes of public organizations.
Meeting the requisites: organic metaphors and machine metaphors
Our consciousness of the unity of the self in the middle of a vast complexity . . . is at least a
suitable metaphor for the unity of an organization, department, discipline, or science
(Boulding, 1956, p. 345).
In line with Boulding’s thinking, it has been argued that the person as metaphor is
fundamental to American political discourse (Rohrer, 1991). That hypothesis is borne
out empirically through research by Lakoff (1991). In fact, the person as metaphor is
prevalent in most of the social sciences just because of its power to embody internal and
external complexity, conflict, and contradiction. For example, Howe (1987) investigated
the role of metaphor in the US Presidential Campaign of 1984 and found domestic policy
primarily conceptualized in sports metaphors. Read et al. (1990) found that human
metaphors played an important role in the evaluation of arguments over domestic
economic policy. Realist and neorealist international relations theorists describe states
as having desires, including the overarching desires to survive, to dominate,and to make
others like one’s self. Mandelbaum (1988), for example, argues that the impulse for
strong states to expand is in part explained by the desire to “to extend the collective self,”
“to spread its domestic characteristics throughout the international system. . . to make
the world like itself.” Osgood and Tucker (1967) note the “extension of self” as the
person-state’s purpose or mission and link it to a survival instinct.
Vernacular language employs the person metaphor extensively in dealings with the
complexity of social and political reality as well. Consider, for example, everyday
references to social ills and the health of society. The person metaphor is thus
employed to depict the body politic as diseased and as a patient requiring treatment.
If a body politic is sick, its disease can spread, infecting other bodies and leading to the
death of society. Nevertheless, disease may also be purged, and society might recover.
Similarly, when the nation experiences economic difficulties it is depicted as in a
depression. When things are going well, the nation, state or city is making great
strides. Dangers are often depicted as cancers on society often emanating from its
bowels. Thus, the person metaphor serves as a coherent nexus, drawing together the
ontological properties and modalities of political, social and administrative excellence.
These considerations undoubtedly recommend Terry’s (1997) theater metaphor,
Osborne and Gaeblers’ (1992) customer service metaphor, and Schacter’s (1995) owner
metaphor. However, person metaphors are simply not enough for public organizations.
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7. These processes involve establishing viable and stable relationships among
government, people, technology, tasks, and a fluid organizational environment. It is a
complex of interdependent institutional, organizational, technological, human, and
socio-cultural forces acting collectively to produce behavior and outcome. These are the
ontological factors that originally recommended the metaphors of public organizations
as some sort of system or mechanism (e.g. a machine, a flywheel) in which people and
institutions are units bearing structural relations to one another.
Ultimately, the problem with many of the metaphors currently employed is that
they focus primarily on the regularities of administrative behavior and the regularities
constraining choice, thus missing the most distinctive aspect of public organizations.
Practices in public organizations are most directly involved in adaptive, collective goal
seeking processes. Given the limitations of law and law-making, public organizations
are often faced with the quandary of maintaining integrity, loyalty, and fidelity while
sufficiently escaping constraints in order to solve problems in dynamic contexts.
Public organizations are thus constantly coping with change. Mechanistic images do
not demonstrate this constant adaptation well. Entrepreneurial images demonstrate
adaptation tactically, but at great costs. One might argue that a goal of such images
might be to increase discretion, flexibility, and creativity. In public-sector budgeting,
for example, these entrepreneurial images fail to address the inherent conflict that
arises from goals of serving the public trust and risk aversion given that
entrepreneurial behavior by definition includes an assumption of risk. They often
fail to address the nuances of strategic adaptation combined with shifting and
contradictory collective goals and social objectives common in public organizations
with their differing modes of oversight.
Neither person nor machine metaphors individually, then, manage to capture the
nuances of public organizations in a holistic manner. Neither alone can depict quite
satisfactorily how adaptation, order, and intent unfold together. Administrative bodies
are certainly performing material devices. They are things (political artifacts) acting in
the material world. However, they are more. They are complexes of material and
human agency. They are networks linking technical and non-technical elements in
ways that systematically blur the distinctions among the technical, the non-technical,
and the human.
Nevertheless, both person and machine metaphors proliferate and endure just
because they are very suggestive and do sharpen our understanding of public
organizations. Morgan (1986), for example, points out that organizations are viewed
regularly as machines, organisms, brains, cultures, populations in ecological systems,
flux and transformation, instruments of domination, political systems and psychic
prisons. When one reads closely the descriptions of each metaphor, they seem creative
extensions of the person or machine metaphors (with the possible exception of the
organism metaphor). For example, a mechanical organization is one that is designed
and structured to achieve a predetermined end and is clearly an extension of the
machine metaphor. On the other hand, a cultural organization (an extension of
the person metaphor) is one that has its own distinctive values, rituals, ideologies and
beliefs. Similarly, Senge (1990) proposes a model of the organization as a complex
non-linear system (machine) directed by the vision of a charismatic leader (person)
who can control the system by identifying leverage points at which key interventions
can be implemented.
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8. On the one hand, having no paucity of metaphors reduces the risk of any single
metaphor exerting an undue influence on the way we see and think of an organization.
However, coexisting metaphors of the organization can give rise to incongruence and
conflict among different fields within the discipline and different public agencies
employing divergent metaphors for self-understanding, orientation, and direction.
Consequently, a unifying metaphor focusing on how the fields and agencies are similar
becomes highly desirable.
Toward providing a unifying metaphor or image, it is interesting to note that the
metaphors seeking to describe public organizations as a whole may be understood as
converging on a single metaphorical perspective: the organization as metabeing. In this
case, the term “meta” simply refers to a composite understanding crafted from the organic
and the mechanistic perspectives. In essence, it identifies the fusion of organic and
mechanistic ideas proposed in this piece. A meta being then is a person fused with both a
collective consciousness and a culture (shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and
artifacts (technologies), transmitted intergenerationally, and employed by the members of
a society to cope with both each other and the world. Such a being has a composite
consciousness constructed through the joint cognitions of the individuals who participate
in it, and a composite capacity constructed through the energies, efforts, and abilities of
participating individuals. It also exists on a different time scale. A metabeing may have
shorter or longer lifespan than the individuals composing it. A unifying metaphor, then,
mightwellfocusonhowinpublicorganizationsmetabeingsarealike.Earlyexpressionsof
the metabeing might in fact be gleaned within the works of Selznick (1957), Blau and Scott
(2003), and the work of other scholars of institutionalism.
Robocop
As the ontological properties and modalities of public organizations represent the
fusion of the person and the machine, it might best be conceived of as a fundamentally
human actor to whom both hard factors and soft factors accrue. That is, it might be
thought of as a metaperson akin to a bio-cyborg, an entity starting life as a human
being and subsequently enhanced with technologies and new networks of experience
(human, technical, cultural, and physical). Like the Six Million Dollar Man and the
Bionic Woman of seventies television fame, the bio-cyborg “Robocop,” is a person with
technological enhancements replacing body parts typically after some severe trauma.
These enhancements resulted from decisions to invest funds in their construction and
integration with the person, the purpose being to benefit society through synergy with
the resultant socio-technical system.
Moreover, the cyborg imagery embodies not only the ontological properties and
modalities of public organizations, but the ambivalence and problematic nature of our
relationship to our bureaucracies as well. On the one hand, it embodies the disciplining
of the chaotic dimensions of free will by the state; since even though we as a society
cherish the concept of free will, societal realities require us to forgo aspects of this
freedom for the sake of order. It, in effect, reminds us of our ultimate dependence upon
our institutions, their rules, and technologies. Just as bio-cyborgs require their
prosthetics to survive, we can together adapt and thrive at the price of some autonomy;
apart we are significantly diminished. This quandary is especially poignant given that
cyborgs have a dark side, where they might foster the sort of prosecutorial state
discussed by Fox (2003). They may become something akin to a techno-cyborg, where
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9. a mechanism with a computer brain and metal skeleton has biological elements such as
flesh, hair, and teeth appears human. This reflects the villain element of Terry’s work
and how operating as governmentally transformed or established mechanisms can
work against society or the common good. The concern becomes that human elements
may be sunk into the machine, organized around it, disciplined by it and used to its
own rather than the society’s ends. The image thus cautions about the futures that a
dehumanized administrative state may produce.
The image of Robocop, then, captures all of the ontological properties, modalities,
dualities, contradictions, and perceptual inexactitudes of public organizations.
Robocop is a special sort of contrivance. It is at once machine and person, created
from the fusion of an “other oriented” civil servant (police officer) with modern
technology. On the one hand, it is tool, instrument, device, and mechanism. On the
other, it is a living person. It acts independently upon information received (input)
through interaction with both (other) people and its general environment. Its
responsiveness depend upon what it has been taught (its programming, life
experiences and values), and what it does seems reasonable in terms of our cultural
expectations (another artifact of its programming, experience and values). It is goal
oriented (it has purposes), but it will not cross certain boundaries in pursuit of the
given goals (its programming embodies a value system which includes loyalty). It
behaves, in brief, not only in each of the three modalities captured separately by Rohr
(1986), Goodsell (1994), and Terry (1995, 1997), but as we would expect the people
within the machine to behave. Moreover, and it behaves consistently within Weber’s
intended conception of an ideal type, as the embodiment of human reason writ large. At
the same time, such a bio-cyborg is self-organizing. It is involved in adaptive change in
light of reasonable alternatives to the current order, a real-world practicality, prudence,
and focus on making the right decision in the right way at the right time, and a
changing of basic structures as a function of experience and environment.
Consequently, Robocop even though an artifact is nevertheless “other-and-self-aware.”
Unlike pyramids, flywheels, ships at sea and dramas, Robocop retains it is humanity and
can make practical, real world choices about how to make life good or bad, better or worse
for human beings. He has the capacity for attending to the situation and the pleasure, fear,
satisfaction, awe, happiness, pain, dissatisfaction, and anguish experienced within it by
human beings. He can therefore comprehend normative obligations, as Rohr would
suggestisfundamentaltopublicorganizations, and attendtothenuanceofthesituation to
be sure it is getting things right.
Robocop and purely mechanistic images
Robocop appears superior to the more simplistic machine metaphors since they
tend not to capture the ontological properties of humanity or self-awareness in
organizations. According to these mechanistic conceptions: policy, goal, and value
issues were decided by elected officials and implemented, accurately, efficiently and
obediently, by politically neutral, expert professional appointees accountable to the
elected heads of an organization. The immediate goals were policy implementation and
service. The ultimate goal was to provide a rational order facilitating the pursuit of
happiness and the security of life, liberty, and property ownership. Consistent with this
way of thinking, goal-oriented organizations are designed to efficiently attain goals set
by public officials according to rational principles, required hierarchical order, with
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10. information flowing up the chain of command and directives flowing down (Weber,
1947; Fayol, 1949; Gulick and Urwick, 1937; Taylor, 1967; Roth and Wittich, 1978).
Operations were mechanized through impersonal rules explicitly stating duties,
responsibilities, standardized procedures, and the appropriate conduct of office
holders. Such mechanical conceptions were thought directly responsive to change as
both their structure and functioning rendered them capable of advancing ineluctably
according to a rational, deductive, means-ends approach. Once launched and directed,
the organization would analyze the facts, determine the problems existed, master the
obstacles and optimally (within the limits of their discretion) achieve whatever goals,
implement whatever policies, and secure whatever values they were set upon (it is in
this sense that they were all purpose).
Evolving thought and practice challenged both this conceptualization and its
metaphorical expression (Weber, 1947; Roth and Wittich, 1978). Not that scalar pyramids
or all-purpose machines were unilluminating. Both are still useful introductions to the
field, conveying many fundamental concepts and goals. The scalar pyramid, for example,
probably best captures the first modality of public organizations: its high regard for
constituted authority and its fidelity to positive law. As the field matured so did both its
self-concept and its search for a better metaphor. Generally, organizations were less often
thought of as rational actors writ large. Political organizations like bureaus were known to
embody and pursue inherently ambiguous, vague, and indeterminate public goals and
values (e.g. liberty and equality, rights and duties, responsiveness and integrity,
conservatism and liberalism, punishment and rehabilitation, nonconformity and
law-abidingness). More importantly, a singular goal of many organizations was not
only to solve defined problems but also to relieve any stresses caused by pressures
operating outside of or overwhelming the capacity of normal channels. The machine’s
preferred method turns out not tobe a systematicevaluation ofmeans and ends producing
an optimum response, but rather a trial-and-error fumbling through standard operating
procedures to secure some satisfying response (March and Simon, 1993; Lindblom, 1959).
These and other qualms about the classic metaphors shifted focus from agency
structure and functioning toward the dynamics of agency interaction with various
internal and external stakeholders (publics and individuals perceiving their interests to
be affected by agency decisions). As decision-making by public administrators in each
sphere affected entire groups of people and required more time and expertise than most
individuals could muster, agencies grappled with the perplexity of maintaining
structural and functional integrity while maximizing sensitivity and responsiveness to
the variously affected publics. Ideally, all decisions had to be made in the most
accurate, effective and fair way possible under obviously complex, uncertain
circumstances. Consequently, many began thinking of public organizations in terms of
their active processes rather than as set structures and procedures. The most obvious
attribute of this process was of course, the accretion of increasingly appropriate
behaviors within an evolving course of trial and error. Public organizations, then, came
to be understood primarily as an evolving complex adaptive system similar to
language, religion, and learning systems like science, law, and medicine. That is to say,
it had its own internal information gathering and preservation mechanisms, its own
active and pertinacious maintenance and adaptive dynamics, and its own purposive
and self-directing elaboration techniques. In brief, bureaus and agencies were
understood less as machines and more as emergent forms of human interaction whose
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11. configurations, goals, values, and purposes ramified and multiplied synergistically
with those of its internal and external legal, economic, political, and social
environments. Such self-organizing systems change their basic structures as a function
of their experience and environment. More accurately, both the system and the
environment reconstitute together (Von Foerster, 1984). That is, the organization and
its environment together constitute a self-organizing network.
Many of these misgivings are quieted by the Robocop embodiment of
self-organization and multiplicity. Robocop is a socio-technical system capable of
reorganizing itself to adapt to a variety of environments. Its symbiotic combination
of human, machine and the concomitant networks of both, results in a reflection of
problem identification and problem-solving capability that is previously uncaptured.
Such an information-processing system is capable of achieving a progressively
improving capacity for self-organization. This capability allows for a spontaneous
emergence of the structures of order in the course of spontaneous processes, something
not allowed by the machine or pyramid metaphors. This human/machine symbiotic
intelligence also reflects the greatly increased potential for both success and harm by
modern Public agencies as they set about achieving goals, utilizing resources and
preparing for the future. For the human society as a whole, the metaphor better reflects
how public organizations can improve or worsen our quality of life.
Moreover, Robocop has identity maintaining control techniques that are subject to
change. Not only may Robocop learn in non-mechanistic ways, he may change his very
identity over time, deconstructing and reconstructing himself according to his
developing capacity and in response to both internal and external environmental
change. Thus, we may have military cyborgs, liberal cyborgs and charitable cyborgs
as easily as we may have cyborgs undermining such categories. Still, the entire
structure of his complex, living and technical systems could collapse with but a few
wrong decisions by himself or by the government for which he works. Human social,
economic, and political formations, including democratic structures and processes, are
fragile. By employing Robocop for conceptualizing those structures, we achieve a more
economical and more efficient way of understanding public organizations as integral,
albeit unique, actors in the seemingly infinite social, economic and political universe.
Robocop and the balance wheel
In To Run a Constitution (1986), Rohr created a metaphor incorporating the image of a
self-organizing system and extolling the activist nature of public organizations, while
nonetheless retaining the machine metaphor. Rohr conceived of public organizations
and their internal and external mechanisms, dynamics and techniques as part of a
governmental check-and-balance system. Properly employed, its purpose was to shift
the balance of power among the three branches in order to secure individual rights.
(p. 181). Emphasizing this normative, active role for bureaucracies, Rohr fabricated the
image of a balance wheel to express how a complex, adaptive machine should behave
while remaining subordinate to the three branches of government. The image is one of a
hubcap lying on its side. It has a downward flared center with public organizations
supporting a higher, spinning rim representing the circular, check-and-balance
interaction of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Alternatively, it might be
imagined as being similar to a sort of spinning top (a common childhood toy), or
flywheel, with bureaucracies constituting the grounding point (a relatively stable body)
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12. around which the entire governmental apparatus (which includes the elected officials)
spins.
This conception successfully captures the field’s second modality. Public
organizations are clearly depicted as differentiated institutional cogs in the wheel,
protecting interests and vindicating claims through proper process, even in the face of
pressure from political, economic, and private interests. Even though the image is both
dynamic and interactive it fails to be self-directing, and it distorts greatly the shifting
roles in society. First, the conception miscalculates the role of public organizations in
governance. Bureaus are not separate but a little less equal mechanisms of
government, duty bound to independently strike a just balance of power among the
executive, legislative and judicial branches on behalf of the citizenry. Rather, public
administrators often organize and manage service oriented and regulatory processes
designed to fulfill mandates worked out among the legislative, executive, and judicial
branches.
Second, any sort of hubcap, top, or flywheel has a set motion once launched. Unlike
the Robocop image, the flywheel acts only according to a single pattern, sequence, or
order of choices invariably made. Robocop is capable of shifting closer and farther
from specific constitutional masters, while constantly changing the direction of its
movement at the same time. Unlike Robocop, no hubcap, top, or flywheel can grasp
something new in terms of something familiar since it lacks attentionality. It cannot
provide an analogy, heuristic, or other device to bridge the normal context of a word
and the context of into which it is introduced; and it cannot juxtapose two frames of
reference, highlighting similarities and differences.
Robocop and ships at sea
Goodsell (1994) furthers Rohr’s pursuit of a metaphor expressing the nature and
identity of active public organizations with purposive internal mechanisms in The Case
for Bureaucracy. Goodsell’s primary concern is to counter systematically negative
conceptions and images of American public organizations by arguing that the
recurring disparagement of bureaucracies is often merely a convenient political ploy
for explaining why governmental policies do not achieve widespread, desired results.
In the process, Goodsell conceives of public organizations as the victimized branch and
depicts it as a ship at sea.
To some extent, this image captures the third modality: an order subject to constant
challenge and historically changing expectations. However, it too misjudges the role
and capacity of public organizations in the governing process. It portrays bureaus as
entirely responsive, desperately holding things together under constant assault from
the environment and ultimately doomed. Administrators collectively make up the
hapless crews damned to an endless buffeting at the whim of elemental forces. Public
administrators are forlorn, lost, bewildered, without bearings.
Unlike Robocop, such an image provides no insight into how public agencies
intelligently employ authority or act responsibly. It also underestimates the realities of
the political process in public organizations, raised carefully by Lowi (1979).
Additionally, it conceptually undermines the eventual goal for active public
organizations proposed by Rohr (1986) and Terry (1995). From the ship at sea, we
simply find victims, not participants waiting to be sacrificed to the whim of politics.
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13. Robocop and the theater
Building on both Rohr’s and Goodsell’s work, Terry (1997) proposed a significantly more
complex image of public organizations. Briefly, he depicted personnel in public
organizations as actors playing many parts in an ongoing political drama. Bureaus can
play heroes, villains, and victims depending on the circumstances of the moment and the
story being told. Public organizations are vilified primarily when politicians cast
themselves as heroes delivering the public from the callous abuses of mindless
functionaries or the authoritarian overreach of power-crazed bureaucrats. Beyond these
instances, bureaucracies can act like an evil empire governed by villains who threaten
the American way of life when they abuse discretionary power. Personnel in public
organizations play the hero in emergencies (wildfires ablaze across the forests in
California, floods crashing through small communities along the Mississippi), and when
it quietly yet persistently protects us from certain complex, technical and sophisticated
dangers (the multifarious lurking corruption of the security and exchange markets, the
ever potential pollution of the food supply). Finally, personnel in public organizations
play the innocent victim when it is in fact not in control of the situation for political,
economic, social, or legal reasons. Reminiscent of the ship at sea image proposed by
Goodsell (1994), this victim role again portrays administrators as meek individuals
without control of their destiny. This makes it less necessary to examine the specifics of
such an image since innocent victims tend to share the same fate of sailor’s on a ship at
sea during a storm, with a similar but equally unpleasant set of implications and implicit
outcomes.
Terry adds to the debate through the realization that unlike Robocop, each
image individually provides an incomplete, somewhat distorted representation of
public organizations. For example, he points out how the image of personnel in public
organizations acting as the great man or savior solving all complex problems, is not the
best choice as heroes are often harsh, violent, and reckless. Additionally, public
agencies may turn into techno-cyborgs like the original Terminator under the Robocop
metaphor, raising concerns about administrative actions similar to those discussed by
Fox (2003). Moreover, in reality, heroic action by an administrator would often be
considered overfeasance (Finer, 1941) and thus warrant some sort of intervention
by either the Judicial or Congressional branches of government. To cure these
problems and mollify the impact of these misleading connotations, Terry links the
three together and positions them in a larger political, economic, and social context
through the image of a drama.
Undoubtedly, evoking the image of actors in a drama is a powerful metaphor.
Itsucceedsinincorporatingallthreemodalitiesofpublicorganizationsintoasingleimage.
Public organizations are simultaneously loyal, independent, and responsive. It also
incorporates the human dimension and the notions of public scrutiny, symbolic acting,
and the ambiguous connections among ideology, reality, hope, and practicality. All of this
makes the theater metaphor interesting for an analysis of present-day public
organizations. In fact, the use of such a metaphor has distinguished history in the social
sciences for just these reasons (Edelman, 1964, 1988; Anton, 1967; Merelman, 1969;
Petersson, 1987). Lyman and Scott (1975) trace the use of the theatre metaphor in the
social sciences to Freud, Mead, and Goffman. The idea of impression management arising
from the theatrical metaphor of the role strongly affected not only the social sciences in
general but the management context in particular (Giacalone and Rosenfeld (1991).
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14. However, such uses of the theatrical metaphor involve both certain vagueness and a
certain notion of a true self-concealed behind the role, i.e. the impression management).
More specifically, the metaphor involves a triad of concepts: patterned behaviors, roles
or assumed identities and scripts or expectations for behavior that are understood by
all and adhered to by performers. Now, in applying this metaphor, how are these roles
to be understood? Are they to be understood in terms of the characteristic behaviors of
those playing the parts? Alternatively, are they to be understood as social parts (roles)?
Perhaps, they should be understood as scripts for social conduct? Similarly, what
exactly are the scripts? Are they social norms? Organizational norms? Beliefs?
Preferences? Personalities? In a strict sense, the theater metaphor connotes certain
rigidity by the concepts of role and script, both in the sense of actors reciting fixed lines
and in the sense of fixed responses to specified situations. This ambiguity and this
connoted rigidity each make the metaphor less attractive.
Moreover, within such a metaphor, administrators become cast members playing to
audiences rather than trained skilled professional practicing their craft as integral
parts of a community by responding to citizen needs and pursuing collective goals.
In fact, the closest the metaphor allows us to any idea of community is a rather
one-sided communication of an actor before an audience. If we take the metaphor as
including some sort of participatory theater, things only get worse. People then relate
to public administrators as if it were real. Environments in public organizations can
become a “hyperreality” divorced from the reality existing outside the perimeter of the
stage and dealing with that reality only abstractly, at best.
Given the strengths and limitations of the Rohr, Goodsell and Terry metaphors,
may be best built upon by employing an entirely different epistemological device.
We may arrive at such a device by remaining cognizant of the three modalities
of public organizations, evoking the latent implications of these images taken together,
and recognizing that the fundamental problem so far has been that the metaphors
themselves have specific features. They are simultaneously physical images
(machines, organisms) and limited abstractions. In addition, they are by their nature
simplifying heuristics and communicative devices. Public organizations and
organizations generally are complex, not simple, making it difficult if not impossible
for existing metaphors to function well even as a heuristic.
Robocop as a unifying metaphor
Robocop certainly fulfills the minimum requirements for an improved metaphor to
study change in public organizations. It opens a window of understanding upon not
only its built-in contradictions, but also the three modalities portrayed by Rohr (1986),
Goodsell (1994), and Terry (1997), the dualities within each of its modalities, the
apparent self-contradiction of public organizations being both part and whole, and
the field’s many images. As an integral part of the social order (the good soldier),
the cyborg has the power to coerce, prioritize and subordinate certain interests to
others. This includes the danger of its being repressive because of historically
contingent factors such as the distribution of social, economic, or political power, and
the resulting patterns of consciousness of the administrators underlying the omission
or even removal of certain individuals and groups from the dialogical context. Yet, as
an independent entity, Robocop also embodies regularity in process and procedure,
fidelity to law, constancy in following rules, stability and a degree of autonomous
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15. action as it functions on its own, insulated from direct, hands on manipulation by both
social, political and economic interests and the other branches of government. Finally,
Robocop’s intentionality provides it with the capacity for the responsible, discriminate
adaptation essential to its integrity as it takes account of new forces in its environment.
This intentionality allows it to experience social, economic, and political pressures as
sources of knowledge and opportunities for self-correction and reconstruction.
In addition, Robocop encompasses what classical models of public organizations
best captured about the field. These classical models embodied the notion that politics
and administrative organizations were two conceptually distinct and practically
separable activities. Politics entailed value judgments and involved responding to and
accommodating society’s demands through the articulation of policy. Public
organizations are instrumental in processes of implementing those policies.
Generally, it is understood that maintaining such a neat theoretical distinction is
neither accurate nor meaningful. Despite this knowledge, dichotomy remains an aspect
of study in public organizations. It remains a viable way of orienting students,
scholars, and practitioners initially toward a coherent set of positions across three key
areas of institutional performance and responsibility: the division and power in
controlling administrative decision-making, the scope of objectivity in administrative
decision making and the role administrative procedures should play in assuring
accurate, efficient, fair and responsible decision making.
Robocop also reflects what the traditional model does not capture: the fact that
agencies proceed on a case-by-case basis, exercising discretion, using the rulemaking
process and making as well as executing policy. As it does so, it raises all of the field’s
complex problems of legitimacy and all of its questions about how administrative
discretion should be structured and controlled. It suggests, for example, how decisions
could result from a whirlpool of conflicting interests and actors and how the
bureaucracy may serve as an access point for these contending interests and actors.
It illustrates why there may easily be calls for increased oversight, less delegation and
a fidelity to what the traditional model promotes.
The metaphor captures the interplay of public organizations and the other branches
of government as well. The chief executive (president, governor, mayor, and city
manager) may be analogized as a governmental representative in charge of a Robocop.
This executive has the institutional authority and programmatic incentives to
coordinate the complex, sometimes ambiguous and conflictual activities of the
bio-cyborgs and to sift among the demands made upon them. Nevertheless, there
remains that certain disconnect between the executive and Robocop that raises those
bothersome issues of legitimacy and control. Legislatively, rules and regulations may
be written and programmed into Robocop in order to decrease the scope of his discretion,
hone him to desired procedures, reconnect him to legitimate authority, and enhance the
quality of agency decision making. Consequently, all of the issues concerning
representativeness, responsibility, accountability, suboptimization, and total impact on
society are raised and addressed by the metaphor. Once this is done, of course, the courts
have an obvious role in overseeing and influencing the implementation of legislative
acts, and the personhood of Robocop clearly lends itself to explicating this relationship.
Beyond this minimum, the image takes us past current modalities. A good metaphor
must both describe and prescribe. We want it to interrupt the unconscious flow of
ongoing activity in public organizations, focus attention on its nature, scope and limits,
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16. and show us both other possibilities and the place of public organizations within the
order of things by providing comparisons that suggest new ways of orienting
ourselves given the scope, limits and processes of these public organizations. A such it
is capable of real-world-problem solving, inspired, self-critical, self-organizing entity
with open cognitive patterns, remove defensive, focus on these quirks, irregularities
and eccentricities creative, pragmatic, complex, responsive, creative, self-organizing,
real-world practicality, prudence and focus on making the right decision for the current
circumstances. Robocop accomplishes these ends in the same manner as every theory
of valuation. It presents a substantive vision of an actor possessed of wants, needs,
appetites, and potentialities. Over and above this, though, it includes what visions do
not. The elements of valuation change as Robocop learns through both experience and
programming. The number of decision makers involved in his programming and
evaluation expand and contract over time, as does the compatibility of goals he
pursues, the degrees of rationality he employs and the perfection of the information
he is capable of employing.
Conclusion
Briefly, Robocop embodies the notion of a fully cognizant though not fully coherent
system attaining, through constraint and response, a range of postures (hero, victim,
villain, fool, and machine) in a range of scenarios across which it pursues a range of
often-conflicting goals and values. Robocop embodies those functions identifying
potentials for change in a range of situations and enabling public bureaucracies to both
expand their competencies and deal accurately, efficiently, fairly and humanly,
moment to moment, with real-world uncertainty.
We believe that suggested interplay of creativity and constraint captured by the
metaphor of Robocop is fundamental to understand the forms of life in public
organizations. At the heart of its creativity lies constraint. Constraints and
unpredictability, familiarity and surprise, are in these patterned interactions, two
sides of the same coin. Robocop, a programmed, artificial, cybernetic, yet
other-and-self-aware device, mindless at its worst but at its best driven by controlled
dialogic analysis, criticism, synthesis, compromise and even a certain kind of poetic
proficiency is a useful metaphor for understanding change in public organizations.
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Corresponding author
Arthur J. Sementelli can be contacted at: sementel@fau.edu
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