We shall specify four dimensions:
- Legitimacy of the commissioner's clientele
- Intensity of the conflict among the constituencies
- Public confidence in the authority of the commissioner's profession
- Strength of the agency myth
This dimension embraces two issues, the first of which is client responsibility. At the possible end of this dimension, the commissioner serves responsible, pro-social, and diligent clients, such as veterans, farmers, protectors of the environment, or children. The commissioner must compete with other commissioners for public resources, but the competition is legitimate and institutionalized. Many conflict management techniques are available, such as forming flexible coalitions that change as issues change, taking turns at "winning," increasing the variety of the actions available, and expanding the pool of public resources.
Between the two poles are commissioners whose clientele stimulates ambivalence in the public. For example, the working poor may or may not be malingerers; first-time offenders may or may not be deserving of help; AIDS victims may or may not be morally reprehensible; inner-city school children may or may not be educable.
A further issue is client tractability. At the easy end of the scale, tractable clients are responsive and therefore legitimate. Public administration clients usually respond to commission services: Social security eligibility is readily determined and checks are distributed; employers are capable of complying with commission regulations, even if they choose not to; veterans adapt to the demands of the commission; most middle-class mothers have their children immunized. At the midpoint, there are commissions with hard but manageable problems, such as the schooling of inner-city children, the immunization of infants in poor families, and the regulation of industrial wastes. At the difficult extreme, intractable clients are not responsive and therefore not legitimate. The clients of such commissioners have already been characterized as intractable: chronically unsocialized, antisocial, dependent, or crazy. These include habitual criminals who are not rehabilitated but return to crime; people on welfare who do not overcome their chronic dependency and indeed enjoy rewards for dependency; deep-seated schizophrenias that are not cured and deteriorate further. When the intractability of the condition of the clients is added to public perceptions of their irresponsibility, their illegitimacy becomes more nearly conclusive and the job of serving them more nearly impossible.
Intensity of Conflict among Constituencies
Commissioners cope with at least five kinds of constituencies: (1) political masters, such as governors and legislatures; (2) advocates for client groups; (3) opponents of client groups; (4) the agency bureaucracy; and (5) the client or regulated group central to the agency's mission. The simple 4act of multiple constituencies does not make the job impossible, but the greater the number, the greater the likelihood that some constituencies will become antagonistic toward one another, the commissioner, or both. At the pole of impossible jobs, the conflict is intense; at the pole of possible jobs, the conflict is quite mild, often taking the form of legitimate competition with or among coalitions that regularly realign themselves as issues and political climates change.
When combined with client legitimacy, intensity of conflict does identify several forms of impossible jobs. First there is the "no-lose" position of those commissioners who serve a legitimate clientele (such as veterans) with general public-interest constituencies, who are involved in mild conflicts about the allocation of public funds. Next there are those who serve legitimate clients (such as middle-class school children) with multiple special-interest constituencies (such as parents, churches, employers, and teachers' unions), all in mild conflict and often allied in frequently changing coalitions. The job can be done well as long as the conflict is mild and the commissioner forms, supports, or joins strategically powerful coalitions. In a balance of power, the commissioner either remains aloof or tips the balance in accord with current commission policy. Finally, there are commissioners serving illegitimate clients (such as chronic welfare dependents) with multiple constituencies (such as human resource advocates, taxpayers, legislatures, and prospective low-wage employers), all in intensely polarized conflict about the most effective means of mitigating the dependency on public funds. Even though a combination of factors makes a commissioner's job impossible, other forces can make it worse.
When the conflict among constituencies is moralistic or ideological, beliefs and values, more than interests, are at stake. The conflicts are intensified and adversaries polarized, as the pro-life and pro-abortion constituencies have become. Any action by the commissioner antagonizes one side or the other, while no action antagonizes everyone. The commissioner's vulnerability is produced by his or her most conflict-ridden constituencies and least legitimate clients. Table 1.1 classifies examples of serving-regulating agencies by the two dimensions and illustrates the association between illegitimate clients, conflicting constituencies, and impossible jobs.
Respect for Professional Authority
The third dimension is the public respect for the authority of the commissioner's profession. At one extreme are the agencies linked to the solid authority of scientifically based professions such as medicine and engineering. At the opposite end are professions, such as education, social service, mental health, corrections, and police, that are less respected and hence more impossible. Thus, commissioners are arrayed along the dimension by the degree of public respect for their professional authority. Fully respected professional authority sometimes mitigates the public doubts raised by the questionable legitimacy and tractability of the clients; less than fully respected professional authority intensifies the public doubts about legitimacy and tractability-and increases the impossibility of the commissioner's job.
Strength of the Agency Myth
Along this fourth dimension, the possible pole is the condition in which strong and stable myths define altruistic, impossible goals. The goals are maintained as reassuring and sustaining guides, but no one expects actual attainment and anyone who demanded it would have little public support. Commissioners at this pole have goals that are such altruistic public goods that all constituencies fully understand actual attainment is not expected. Public education, for example, is universal and compulsory, but' 'everybody" understands that there will be chronic truants whose parents doubt the value of attending school. Health officers are committed to humane and continuing nursing-home care for indigent, chronically ill, or aging people, but "everybody" understands that the resources required, both material and human, are scarce and very hard to marshal.
The impossible, opposite pole of the fourth dimension is the condition in which the agency myth is weak, unstable, and controversial. We contend that commissioners with impossible jobs are sustained by myths that shift in the public mind from guiding ideals well worth pursuing to convenient fabrications to cover operational failures. When the myths command no sustained commitment to an ideal worth pursuing, the shift from idealism to cynicism is easily stimulated by either ineffectiveness of the commission's actions (however diligent) or a single unexpected discrediting event. The affective intensity of the experienced disillusion feeds the conflicts among constituencies, especially conflicts between the moral idealism of some constituencies and the worldly pragmatism of others. Commissioners are quite vulnerable to the shifts in power from idealistic constituencies to pragmatic ones, vulnerable in that they are easily sacrificed by elected politicians, who prudently seek to avoid the fervor directed at the commissioner by either idealists or pragmatists.
