Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research - Book Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 2002 by James L. Perry

Lawrence E. Lynn, Jr., Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Carolyn J. Hill. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. 212 pp. $60.00.

The subtitle of this book is an important signal about its contents. Although the authors are concerned with improving governance, this is not a practical or theoretical guide for doing so. It is instead a framework for conducting research about governance. The overarching purpose of the book is to develop ideas for increasing the usefulness of governance and public management research. The need for a "new logic" is a product of the authors' assessment of both the shortcomings of previous research and the imperatives of governance research. Among the criteria the authors associate with research that embraces the new logic are studies that develop theory-based, multi-component models that are empirically verifiable, that define and operationalize concepts, and that present appropriately framed findings. The authors argue that the challenges of governance research are likely to pull investigators in one of two extreme directions--to tie modeling either to all sorts of variables or to decouple small parts of governance systems from their context. The authors make the case for a middle ground, where investigators are attentive to broad patterns of interrelationships informed by causal understanding. Thus, the new logic as a whole translates into habits of intellectual rigor, which they perceive are often lacking in current research.

Governance has different meanings across disciplines, so it is important at the outset of this review to understand the authors' meaning. They use governance more broadly than is typical in the management literature. They define governance "as regimes of laws, rules, judicial decisions, and administrative practices that constrain, prescribe, and enable the provision of publicly supported goods and services" (p. 7). The authors view this definition as encompassing public management, i.e., "the behavior and contributions to governmental performance of actors performing managerial roles" (p. 7). More importantly, the definition fits the new logic they propose by transcending a narrow interpretation of governance.

The authors' goal of creating a middle ground for governance research between the extremes of overly comprehensive models and decoupling phenomena from their wider context lead them to define a core model of governance. The logic model is a schematic that flows hierarchically, in its simplified form, from the global/national/cultural environment, to the institutional level, to the managerial level, to the technical level, to political assessment. As the authors note, the institutional, managerial, and technical distinctions will be widely familiar to social scientists because of their origins in the scholarship of Talcott Parsons, James D. Thompson, and others.

The remainder of the book is devoted to fleshing out the levels of the logic model (chaps. 3 and 4), designing research (chaps. 5 and 6), providing examples of research that employs the logic (chap. 7), and illustrating its benefits for practice (chap. 8). In chapter 3, on institutional governance, the authors discuss how configurations of formal authority can be incorporated into empirical research. They identify three scholarly traditions--administrative law, political economy or rational choice theory, and socialized choice theories--that are concerned with accounting for configurations of formal authority. Organization scholars will find this discussion useful for its clarity about the theoretical foundations for bringing institutional variables into their research. Chapters 5 and 6, which address research design, discuss explicitly a theme that runs implicitly throughout the book: good governance research is good social science. Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill observe, "Many of the analytical challenges and problems we confront in empirical governance research are generic to social sciences research" (p. 98). Thus, the new logic is infused with much that is known by scholars who practice good social science.

After laying out the details of their governance framework and research design, Lynn and his coauthors seek to illustrate that their call for more rigorous governance research is attainable. In chapter 7, they use two tactics to make their point. One is to synthesize disparate research in several policy domains to illustrate the cumulative insights the research provides about governance systems. The other tactic is to showcase individual studies that are consistent with the criteria the authors propose for governance research.

The value of the book's overarching perspective for practice depends on assumptions that the authors address in the concluding chapter. If the results of governance research are unable to answer important questions, then the research may have little practical value. Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill build a good case that the new logic they develop will help scholars address important questions. This chapter is more effective in discussing the supply side of good research and less effective in coming to grips with the demand for good research. Are practitioners likely to receive sophisticated scholarship and apply it to important governance problems? This question deserves to be analyzed using the rigor of the new logic, but the demand for governance research of the kind identified by the authors is not discussed in the concluding chapter.