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International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie

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Administrative Culture and Metaphor Change

Hindy Lauer Schachter Version of record first published: 21 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Hindy Lauer Schachter (2002): Administrative Culture and Metaphor Change, International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 12:1, 89-92 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03906700220135354

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International Review of SociologyRevue Internationale de Sociologie, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2002

Administrative Culture and Metaphor Change

HINDY LAUER SCHACHTER

New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA

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Administrative culture can be de ned as a dominant and coherent set of shared values conveyed by such symbolic means as stories, myths, legends, slogans, anecdotes and fair y tales (Peters and Waterman, 1982, p. 103). The culture of a given organization depends on the legal, social, and economic frameworks within which it is embedded. At the same time, cultures of different organizations in a single polity can vary depending on such variables as their history, mission, the services they provide, and their employees personalities. Within a given organization, different units may have radically different cultures. When Donna Shalala, then secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, once told managers to know the cultures of their organizations, she added, I emphasize cultures, not culture (Shalala, 1998, p. 285). Writers often conceive of culture as a static property. For Deal and Kennedy (1982, p. 4) administrative culture is the way we do things around here. This de nition implies that a given organizations shared values have a history and that this history legitimizes their present and future maintenance. The analytical emphasis is on continuity. Culture, however, is a dynamic property. Even shared values inevitably shift over time. In some organizations, change is swift and instantly visible to all participants. Constant, quick change has advantages and disadvantage. Such change frightens some employees. It may lead to role ambiguity and prod the organization to excessive use of written rules to enforce conformity with mandates. On the other hand, frequent shifts facilitate responsiveness to a changing environment and to a diverse workforce. In other organizations, change comes slowly, sometimes more slowly than it should. Many employees are unaware of shifting values and corresponding shifts in tactics. Only by examining an organization over a 10- or 20-year span would observers detect visible shifts that developed through the accretion of small movements. Far from being static, culture is contested territor y. Managers often debate whether a given slogan, legend or metaphor has outlived its usefulness or whether an attempt to change a particular value will cause more trouble than gain. Because culture is held together by symbolic means, changes in language are key to fostering shifts in administrative culture. Shifts in metaphors presage changes in behavior. One area of verbal contest in contemporary American public administration centers on the metaphor of choice for describing
ISSN 0390-6701 print/1489-9273 online/02/030089-04 2002 University of Rome La Sapienza DOI: 10.1080/03906700220135354

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citizenagency relations. I discuss this contest below and how it affects publicagency culture. The Culture of CitizenAgency Relations Lack of consensus exists in American public administration today about the proper metaphor to describe the relationship of citizens to their government. Zanetti and Carr (1999) are against the use of any metaphors derived from business; they simply consider the public and private sectors to be too disparate for cross-sector borrowing to be effective in describing citizenship. Other writers favor the use of some metaphor derived from business but differ on which private-sector metaphor is applicable. Osborne and Gaebler (1992) argue that public agencies should follow private organizations in aiming to delight customers. The idea of valuing citizens as customers received wide publicity during the tenure of President William J. Clinton through the federal National Performance Review (NPR) project which pledged to treat taxpayers like customers (Executive Of ce of the President, 1993, p. 2). The NPR projectin a book on putting customers rsturged federal employees to treat their government customers just as they themselves like to be treated when they are customers of private business (Executive Of ce of the President, 1994, p. 2). Schachter (1997, 1999) argues that the customer metaphor is wrong. It offers citizens a passive role and focuses on citizens acting as individuals rather than combined in projects to promote the common good or public interest. A better metaphor is to conceptualize citizens as owners of their government who work together to gain greater responsiveness and ef ciency in the public sector. The owner model emphasizes active citizenship. It emphasizes caring about an entire enterprise rather than ones own individualistic purchases. The proponents of customer and owner metaphors are not simply arguing over words. Writers urge the use of a particular metaphor because they believe that the phrase that agency members share will eventually induce a set of emotional consequences. A change in metaphor will prod a shift in administrative values. The NPR envisioned that the customer metaphor would spark a change in administrative culture where agency members would learn to value polite, conscientious service to social security recipients or taxpayers with a question about ling dates. The aim was an administrative culture borrowed from the culture of salespeople. Proponents of an owner metaphor hope that this phrase will propel a different shift in administrative culture. They want administrators to recognize the right of citizens to set public agendas in the same way that owners set the agenda for their enterprises. The metaphor of choice prods users to respond to certain aspects of a situation rather than others and this response, in turn, leads people to accept a certain way as legitimate for agency operations. A change in metaphor accentuates new aspects of the situation and this shift leads administrators to envision different ways as legitimate for their culture. Below I sketch an example of an agency whose culture changed as it moved from conceptualizing citizens as customers to conceptualizing them as owners of government.

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Administrative Culture and Metaphor Change

Culture and Metaphors

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The administrative culture of the Phoenix Water Conservation Of ce changed over time as it moved from a strategy of treating citizens as customers to treating them as owners of their government. In the early 1990s the Phoenix, Arizona water conservation of ce considered citizens its customers. Borrowing from business practice, the agency tried to conserve water by appealing to individualistic self-interest. Administrators reminded people that each time they used less water they had to pay less. This strategy had little impact on conservation (Phoenix Water Conservation Of ce, 1998). After a senior administrator in the of ce read proponents of the owner metaphor (Schachter, 1995; Smith and Huntsman, 1997), he worked to get the of ce to accept a shared value that citizens were owners of government. With the new value in place, administrators began to educate people about the longrange needs of the entire community. The assumption was no longer made that citizens care only about their own short-term monetar y advantage; the new assumption was that administrators interact with citizens on the basis of improving the long-range interest of Phoenix. That the citys water will become inadequate without conservation sometime after 2025 can matter to people now! The new culture of the Phoenix Water Conservation Of ce included a value that agency members behave as if citizens care about conservation for public-interest reasons. Such a perspective on citizen motivation became part of the shared values of the Phoenix of ce. In Phoenix, two discourse styles vied for hegemony. Passage from the language of customer to the language of owner had profound implications for administrative culture. A change of symbols presaged a shift in administrative behavior. References
Deal, T. and Kennedy, A. (1982) Corporate Culture: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley. Executive Of ce of the President (1993) From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, Washington, DC, US Government Printing Of ce. Executive Of ce of the President (1994) Putting Customers First: Standards for Serving the American People , Washington, DC, US Government Printing Of ce. Osborne, David and Gaebler, Ted (1992) Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial! Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector from Schoolhouse to State House, City Hall to Pentagon, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley. Peters, Thomas and Waterman, Robert (1982) In Search of Excellence: Lessons from Americas BestRun Companies, New York, Harper & Row. Phoenix Water Conservation Of ce (1998) 1998 Water Conservation Plan, Phoenix, AZ, Water Conservation Of ce, Phoenix Water Services Department. Schachter, Hindy Lauer (1995) Reinventing government or reinventing ourselves: two models for improving government performance, Public Administration Review, Vol. 55, No. 6, pp. 530537. Schachter, Hindy Lauer (1997) Reinventing Government or Reinventing Ourselves: The Role of Citizen Owners in Making a Better Government, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press. Schachter, Hindy Lauer (1999) The use of market metaphors in public participation discourse, International Review of Public Administration, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 1322. Shalala, Donna (1998) Are large public organizations manageable?, Public Administration Review , Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 284289.

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Smith, Gerald and Huntsman, Carole (1997) Reframing the metaphor of the citizengovernment relationship: a value-centered perspective, Public Administration Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 309318. Zanetti, Lisa and Carr, Adrian (1999) Postmodernisms new individualism and the detrimental effects on citizenship, Administrative Theory and Praxis, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 205217.

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