Professional Expertise
We argue that the power of the expert professional offers a great resource for public administration, despite two indications to the contrary. First, professional education and socialization do not prepare people to function in political arenas. Second, expert knowledge about attaining certain goals is often incomplete and limited. Even so, professional training and status offer resources for credibility. Professional expertise keeps the spotlight on the public good as it treats the ills and relieves the fears of individual clients-private goods for which the clients are grateful and often willing to pay. As a case in point, the medical profession may not know how to cure AIDS, but its research efforts have great credibility and sustain a real, important, and essential hope that guides the support of constituents. An announcement in a University of Southern California bulletin provides an excellent illustration of soothing fears by prestigious association.
Initial toxicity testing of an experimental agent, intended to immunize individuals already infected with the AIDS virus to prevent development of the clinical disease, has shown that it is safe and that further studies are warranted, according to data presented by USC researchers at the International Conference on AIDS held in Stockholm in June. The research is being conducted by the School of Medicine ... in collaboration with Jonas Salk, founding director of the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
Commissioners whose professions inspire great public confidence, such as medicine and engineering, repeatedly demonstrate that professional intervention into the plight of their clients brings the expected correction or the management of a previously uncorrectable problem. Their technology works. The high standing of commissioners holding possible (as distinct from impossible) jobs results from an attribution of value and efficacy to their work: Health is achieved through research, security through military technology, progress through invention. As long as the professional expertise of the commissioner commands the respect of the constituencies, the job is rendered less difficult.
Conversely, commissioners whose professional expertise and technology are much less respected include those in education, social service, mental health, corrections, and police. These professions tend to inspire confidence through attractive personal style, so that a practitioner-commissioner becomes known for her or his style and the loyalty of his or her staff and clientele rather than for a communicable technology. Often such commissioners seem heroic: "Nobody can do it like he can!"' i don't know just how she does it, but ask her clients. She does it." As long as the reputation for heroic personal effectiveness is intact, the job can be done well-as demonstrated by the work of the three police commissioners whom Moore analyzes. It is impossible to directly control the discretionary routines practiced at the street level, revealing another intractable agency process. In Eugene Bardach's terms, our commissioners face social entropy in their control of street-level bureaucrats. The fact is, however, that these professions lack a dependable technology. Although an individual commissioner can lean on his or her personal reputation, as a group such commissioners cannot. Commissioners in impossible jobs need a high level of expertise, but it is often simply not available. This means that they find close limits on the development over time of their ability to shape both policy and administration by virtue of professional expertise-close limits on what Theda Skocpol has called "state capacity."
Administrative Expertise
Power may be based on a qualitatively different kind of expertise, that is, the mastery of the technology of policy implementation. The professional positions of most commissioners developed from the Progressive movement of the early years of this century. Educated, middle-class Progressive reformers hoped to take administration out of politics and establish it on a scientific basis. Good government was to be achieved not by filling jobs through the patronage of machine politicians, but by placing qualified professionals in them. Public administration itself was to be a science of policy implementation separated from politics and policymaking and neutral toward any political conflicts involved. The discipline of public administration developed around axioms of efficient government, many of them borrowed from the organizational archetype of the day, the modern business corporation.
Government organization was to be hierarchical, with all functions specialized but under one coordinating, accountability-ensuring umbrella. Efficient managers would use tools of budgeting, personnel development, measurement, and statistical analysis to bring light and order to messy government. It was easy to attach the concept of expertise-based administration to this ideal type of organization. Administration by engineers, geologists, physicians, and educators was to match the nonpolitical model of the technologically inventive, effective, profit-making business. The idea of "neutral competence" in public management emerged. The public administrator was to assist the policymaker by providing neutral competence in the form of institutional memory and knowledge of an effective professional technology of policy implementation.
A large number of civil servants in American government at all levels embody this dual ideal. They are both expert public administrators and experts in their particular area of service. Such consultative expertise-based power is consistent with the democratic ethic because the expert is "on tap but not on top." Even so, political scientists have long since demonstrated that the idea of policy-implementing neutral competence is not realistic.
Policy is made in the act of implementation, and civil servants are, in this sense, policymakers. The legislative process produces statutes that are often written in broad or even ambiguous language, sometimes stating contradictory goals. Legislative language must not be so specific as to prevent adaptation to unforeseen circumstances, and therefore administrative latitude is virtually inherent in lawmaking. Neutral competence, defined as institutional memory and understanding of both implementation pitfalls and specific professional knowledge, is certainly valuable. But the task of management includes the responsibility of interpreting policy as it is implemented.
