Governmental Mystique

Recently for a class I read an article about public sector bureaucracies that do surprisingly well in developing countries that are otherwise rife with corruption and incompetence. The article, “Divergent Cultures? When Public Organizations Perform Well in Developing Countries” by Merille S. Grindle of Harvard University, argues that these organizations defeat the odds and overcome the norms of their societies through organization culture, or mystique.

According to Grindle, members of these high-performing bureaucracies generally believe that they follow professional norms with universal validity. They believe their organizations are unique—particularly responsive, ethical, or efficient. There is a respected meritocracy, in which good work is rewarded. Finally, these employees feel a sense of service, that their contributions help their organization, which in turn helps their community.

As I read Grindle’s article, I thought about my own experiences in organizations. For example, in high school I was extremely proud to be a marching hawk—a member of the Rio Rico High School Marching Band. I believed our band was unique because of its small size, our loud uniforms, and our commitment to the “fundamentals.” I thought I was an important role model for younger students. I held my horn high and stood up straight in the Arizona sun with many material incentives—social approval, something to do, good for my resume—but also out of reverence for the organization itself.

Likewise, in college my most important extracurricular activity has been AIESEC, a non-profit that helps college students intern in foreign countries. In AIESEC we explain ourselves as unique because we are a campus club with both a passion about global issues and a businessy focus on the bottom-line. Our executive board positions have an internal mythology to give them mystique—AIESEC leaders aren’t necessarily the smartest and most qualified, but the most passionate and eager. Finally, we have a “myth of creation”—students came together from the ashes of World War II to make the world a better place. These narratives collectively give “AIESECers” a purpose worth working to fulfill.

These aspects of organizational mystique pervade every major company. Uniqueness is communicated in mission statements and logos. And it’s increasingly clear that a sense of service, however mythological and transparent, is important for companies in the form of corporate social responsibility. Visit the website of any Fortune 500 Company or sports team and I expect you’ll find a category for the environment, ethics, involvement in the community, etc.

So why is it news when a scholar tells the world that government institutions operate more effectively with organizational mystique? I think it’s because the dominant view of government in the last few decades is of plain, incompetent, and corrupt people wasting time and taxpayer money.

Speaking (too) broadly, the conflict of individual freedom and state power has been constantly renegotiated in the age of liberalism. The “myth of creation” for the United States is that of a free people earning liberation from a foreign and illegitimate regime. The founders of the United States were famously skeptical of human beings in positions of power and protective of individual freedoms. But importantly, the Founders did not disparage government’s usefulness. After all, most of them helped create two federal governments, in addition to their own state and local ones.

This anti-Statism may be more a product of the current (or subsiding) era of Neo-Liberalism. Neo-Liberalism, in reaction to the growth of the welfare state after the Great Depression, essentially prescribes a smaller state and more freedom for individuals in the economy.

Politically, the economic model of Neo-Liberalism was adapted to criticizing the state as the source of evil in society a la Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. President Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” And in his first inaugural address, he called 1980 “the time to check and reverse the growth of government.” Politics in the United States have been embedded in this rhetoric for the last several decades. President Bill Clinton assured anti-government skeptics that “The era of big government is over.” Obviously, this same rhetoric and the paranoid fear of big government pervades the Tea Party Movement of today.

My argument is that government has been deprived of its organizational mystique. It has been degraded as boring, incompetent, and wasteful. But government bureaucracies, just like campus organizations and private companies, can be successful and efficient if they have a strong culture. By relentlessly criticizing government—and not just a government, but all government—we unleash a vicious cycle in which talented people eschew the scorned life of public service. Those who do join the government have only low expectations to live up to, and successes will be overlooked as the exception, not the rule. From a citizen’s perspective, a belief that “government is the problem” makes us less able to distinguish between good governance and bad governance because we are uniformly hostile to all governance. That’s quite a problem for a democracy.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he’d make government cool again. He doesn’t seem to have succeeded. But this week in two commencement speeches to university graduates, he defended the legitimacy of government, saying “When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.”

There must be a golden mean in the power of government and the freedom of individuals. Likewise, there must be a balance between our skepticism of the current government and our faith in the larger regime. Rarely in history, circumstances change so quickly and dramatically that a full revolution against the regime is necessary, but now—I would argue—is not that time. My hope is that with the Obama Administration, we can escape the paradigm of bad government and shift state-ward. It would make government institutions more prestigious, more responsive, and better-staffed. That would give my statist inclinations thirty years or so to relax, until those government fat-cats get too big for their britches and it’s time for the mean to be adjusted again.