Even so, at times, public concerns focus on hope. Citizens hope for relief from the cost of building new prisons, for reform of degrading prisons that succeed only in making inmates into more efficient criminals, and for rehabilitation to keep discharged prisoners from returning to crime and to prison. Such hopes may make it barely possible to introduce more effective sentencing laws and more promising rehabilitation programs. The commissioner learns to steer among these shoals without crashing on the rocks, but the mental chart she or he follows is more intuitive than reasoned and therefore not easily transmitted to lieutenants or successors.
A welfare commissioner undertakes to induce the poor to work but finds that they are sadly deficient in even the limited skills required. A plan to allow pay for such work in order to reduce the level of welfare payments is effectively blocked, first by the legislature because of its concern that the commissioner may be wasting tax money on lazy and intractable welfare clients, and second by recalcitrant clients who discover that the wages they can command are less than their welfare entitlement, a strong disincentive to work. A courageous commissioner of public health appears on television to advocate the use of condoms to prevent AIDS and returns to his or her office to be confronted by an alliance of outraged Catholic priests and bishops. A psychiatrist in charge of a state mental health department struggles to avoid making patients passively dependent on the hospital at the same time that he or she negotiates with community groups who loudly oppose the location of halfway houses in their neighborhoods. A special master finds that it is easier to get the judge to set general standards for equity than it is to get agreement between prisoner and warden about the demonstration of equity in daily prison operations. Oil is poured on the fire by the finance committee of the legislature when it refuses to appropriate the funds required to implement even an interim agreement.
The impossible pole of the dimension applies to commissioners who serve people who become clients because they are irresponsible, strange, lazy, or antisocial-such as criminals, potentially dangerous schizophrenics, welfare dependents, and drug users-pushers, all of whose claims on public resources are suspect. Such a commissioner will lose whether he or she serves the clientele well and demands many public resources or whether he or she does not serve the clientele well or returns them unreformed to society.
These few examples do not begin to illustrate the fullness of the dilemmas that people in such jobs must face every day. Are such dilemma-ridden jobs a class apart? Or are they typical of most, if not all, of public administration? We contend that the frequency, severity, and duration of such dilemmas vary from job to job along several dimensions of difficulty, but that some jobs are performed under so many extremely difficult conditions that they can legitimately be called "impossible."
We will often use the term commissioner to identify the incumbents of the jobs we will discuss. This all-purpose title refers to the administrative director of a complex bureaucratic system, a department of either state government or city government, such as a police department. These are positions of considerable autonomy in which the incumbent has the latitude to define missions and methods despite strong political and organizational constraints. For each job, we analyze an institutional role and the resources and constraints present in that role for most incumbents.
The authors first set out the history of the institutional strengths and weaknesses of each role, specify the extremes of difficulty that make the job impossible, and then compare the skills and strategies that particular incumbents have brought to the role. Such a dual analysis enables us to generalize about the degree to which effective performance in a role depends on personal skill or institutionalized capacities-or about the fit between the two.
Using these four dimensions the jobs of commissioners can be differentiated. The possible jobs are those with one legitimate clientele and with few constituencies in only mild conflict, those enjoying great public respect for professional or scientific authority, and those guided by strong, well-understood myths that sustain policy continuity and feasible goals. In contrast, commissioners holding impossible jobs must serve irresponsible and intractable clients in intense conflicts with more legitimate clients for public resources; must satisfy multiple and intensely polarized, active constituencies; possess professional, scientific authority that commands little public respect; and are guided by weak, controversial myths that cannot sustain policy continuity, so that the commissioner is vulnerable to swings of public opinion and to political scape-goating.
We must classify a number of jobs and clients along the four critical dimensions of difficulty that differentiate possible from impossible jobs. The core position is that impossible jobs have illegitimate clients and multiple, intensely conflicting constituencies; enjoy little public confidence in the professional expertise available; and are guided by weak myths that do not sustain policy continuity. These dimensions use theories and empirical findings from political science and social psychology to help explain how these conditions develop and how the consequences of that development contribute to the impossibility of the job.
