Barry Bozeman
University of Georgia
Hard Lessons from Hard Times: Reconsidering and
Reorienting the “Managing Decline” Literature
Does the public administration research from the late
1970s and 1980s on managing decline contain useful
lessons for today’s Great Recession? Do these studies serve our
current research needs? Why has decline continued to be a
major focus of research in generic management, but not in
public administration? The answers to these questions give
some clues as to a possible new, revitalized research agenda
for our field. Whereas public administration often viewed
organizational decline as a self-contained set of problems
requiring remedial action, generic management and
sociology research on decline tended to view the topic as
part of organizational phases and life cycles, linking decline
to growth, stability, and change. Viewing decline as part of
the organizational life cycle encourages researchers to take a
longer view of organizations and their management, and
thus its orientation is more strategic than reactive. Three
areas of decline studies are identified as relevant irrespective
of sector: (1) implications of decline for human resources
management, (2) effects of decline on organization
structure and design, (3) the relation of strategy and
decline.
I
n 1978, Public Administration Review published
Charles Levine’s essay “Organization Decline and
Cutback Management.” It was a banner article in
a not-so-banner year. Looking back, 1978 was a harsh
year, and in many respects a strange one. Some notably
strange events occurred in 1978: U.S. Marines discovered Soviet agents in a tunnel that had been dug as
means of breaking into the U.S. embassy; grave robbers
stole the remains of Charlie Chaplin from his grave in
Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland; and, a portend, nursing
home operator Juanita Broaddrick alleged she had been
sexually assaulted by the state of Arkansas’s littleknown attorney general, one Bill Clinton.
Other aspects of 1978, especially those related to the
economy, were not so strange, just bad. Inflation and
unemployment conspired to increase the “misery
index.” With inflation at 11 percent in the second
quarter of 1978 and unemployment at 7.05 percent
(Bureau of Labor Statistics 2009) (compared to less
than 3 percent and less than 5.5 percent, respectively,
for most of the first decade of the 2000s), consumers
did not know which economic threat to fear most.
With the United States only recently emerging from
the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, the dollar falling 37
percent against the Swiss franc, the price of gold at a
record high, and U.S. productivity stagnating, economic decline was the topic of the day (Time 1978).
The prime interest rate of 9.5 percent provided no
solace to home buyers or investors.
Advancing
Cutback
Management
Research: An
Urgent Priority
for Public
Administration
Barry Bozeman is Regent’s Professor
and Ander Crenshaw Professor of Public
Policy at the University of Georgia. His
research focuses on public management
and science and technology policy.
E-mail: [email protected]
It was in this social and economic milieu that Levine
produced his article. We know in retrospect that Levine’s cutback management article became one of the
most visible, cited, and widely used Public Administration Review papers published in the 1970s. It was the
first of many similar papers published by Levine and
his colleagues (e.g., Levine 1979 1980; Levine, Rubin,
and Wolohojian 1982). The Levine oeuvre received
more attention than most in the cutback genre, partly
because of quality of the work, but also because of
the practicality and accessibility of the managerial
prescriptions provided.
Levine was not the era’s only public administration
scholar attending to issues of decline. A number of
contributors to the public administration literature,
myself included (e.g., Bozeman and Slusher 1979;
Bozeman and Straussman 1982), were writing articles
similar in focus and intent. Diverse terms were employed in these studies. Some used the term “retrenchment,” others “scarcity,” and still others “decline.” (In
this essay, I use the term “decline” to refer to all of the
management literature having as its common thread
analysis of hard times or prescriptions for dealing with
them). Whereas many studies examined the effects of
decline on management or leadership (Behn 1980;
Biller 1980), others focused on budgeting (Behn 1985;
Glassberg 1978; Lewis 1988) and policy or program
termination (Behn 1978; Brewer 1978; deLeon 1982).
When the U.S. economy pulled itself out of the
doldrums and state and federal revenues began to
grow, decline declined. Since the mid-1980s, the
Hard Lessons from Hard Times 557
public administration literature has seen only
a handful of new contributions on decline.
Now, in the throes of the “Great Recession,”
is it time to revive studies of decline and
cutback management? That is one of the
questions I examine here. The very success of
the literature from 30 years ago complicates
the question. As Sanjay Pandey demonstrates
in a companion article in this issue, many of
the findings from this era seem quite relevant
today. Has the topic been exhausted, or are
there new challenges? If public administration scholars can (should) be induced to once
again turn their creative energies to studies of
decline, what research agenda and approaches
seem to hold the most promise?
the public administration cutback management literature and some interesting and
original reflections on the meaning of that
literature. He makes a convincing argument
that publicness has important implications
for the development and use of cutback
management theory and application. To a
large extent, I agree with Pandey’s arguments.
They are compelling and evidence based.
However, it is important to note that Pandey’s
use of publicness equates, for the most part,
with government ownership. While this is a
common—perhaps the most common—understanding of publicness, another approach
equates publicness with the extent to which
organizations are endowed or constrained by
political authority (Bozeman 1987). By this
view, we can think of government, nonprofit,
and even business organizations as public in degrees. Because I take
this view of publicness, I come to somewhat different conclusions
than Pandey. Our differences are at the margins. I cede Pandey’s
major points; clearly, there are many aspects of public organizations
that are quite distinctive. However, my concern with the public
aspects of business organizations (and the market-based, private aspects of some government organizations) motivates me to give more
attention to the “generic” literature on decline. In part, this is because those of us who are concerned with public administration can
learn from this literature. In part, it is because public administration
concerns should be viewed as more relevant to businesses seeking to
manage decline and to the management researchers studying these
organizations.
When the U.S. economy pulled
itself out of the doldrums [in
the early 1980s] and state
and federal revenues began to
grow, decline declined. Since
the mid-1980s, the public
administration literature has
seen only a handful of new
contributions on decline.
...in the throes of the “Great
Recession,” is it time to revive
studies of decline and cutback
management?
In determining the wisdom of an entirely
new round of decline scholarship, it behooves us to ponder why
the public administration decline literature, a theoretically rich and
uniformly praised literature, vanished so quickly. Public administration scholarship on decline reached its zenith in the early 1980s.
By contrast, scholars in other organization-related fields, especially
sociology and management, continued their work on organizational
decline and, indeed, have produced a steady stream of relevant work
(Carmeli and Schaubroeck 2006; Fisher and White 2000; McKinley
1993; Weitzel and Jonsson 1989). Thus, the idea that public administration literature on decline vanished simply because of prosperity
does not provide a fully satisfying answer to the question, “Where
did it go?”
Another explanation for the post-1980s disappearance of public
administration decline literature is that there were never very many
In the next section, I take up some of the arguments as to why the
researchers engaged in the topic—a small band of scholarly brothers generic and business decline literature at least seems irrelevant to
and sisters simply moved on, and the work disappeared. Related,
public administration concerns. It will come as no surprise when I
perhaps the decline field was so underpopulated that it did not
suggest later that some of those irrelevancies are more apparent than
generate progeny. There is some support for this explanation. Even
real. In a later section, I briefly review some of the decline topics
a cursory examination of the literature on decline reveals that the
for which both the public administration and the more general
public administration studies represent only a small fraction of the
management literatures seem to share affinity. The availability of an
published work. The volume of work published in sociology and
unusually large number of high-quality review-and-synthesis papers
generic management far surpasses the public
(e.g., Greenhalgh 1983; Mone, McKinley,
administration publications on decline.
and Barker 1998; Weitzel and Jonsson 1989;
Comprehensive reviews of the decline literaWhetten 1980) on the topic of organizational
… [This essay presents] some
ture (see especially McKinley 1993) include
decline obviates the need for yet another
of the arguments as to why the
both the generic management and the public
comprehensive review of the generic and busigeneric and business decline
administration literature, and a reading of
ness literature (hereafter “generic literature”)
literature … seems irrelevant to
such reviews underscores the relatively scant,
on the topic.1 In this study, I focus on some
public
administration
concerns.
at least in volume, contributions of public
of the more important studies, especially ones
It will come as no surprise …
administration. Surely one important reason
developed since the early 1980s, when public
why other fields dominate decline studies is
administration scholars began to turn away
that some of those irrelevancies
that generic management and organization
from decline and related topics.
are more apparent than real.
scholars vastly outnumber public administration scholars. But the circle is a vicious one:
The article concludes with my answer to the
the underrepresentation is attributable in part to public administraquestion of whether public administration scholars should undertion’s early abandonment of the topic.
take a renewal of the decline studies. Following the tradition set by
Levine, and now Pandey, I pose this paradox: The generic decline
Decline Research and Theory: Another Publicness Lens
literature is of great value to public administration even if it has limited
My purposes require some literature boundary spanning. In his
value for public administration. (For sticklers, I acknowledge this is
companion paper, Sanjay Pandey provides an excellent synopsis of
really more a riddle than a paradox.) The reader has perhaps already
558
Public Administration Review • July | August 2010
solved this riddle? No matter. Its solution is provided in the concluding section of this paper.
The Irrelevance of the Generic Decline Literature
We can identify some important respects in which the generic and
business literature on decline seem not to relate to public organizations. Pandey underscores many of these reasons, chiefly identifying
the unique or distinctive aspects of public organizations. Many of
these differences pertain to the nature and control of resources in
the respective sectors.
With respect to public organization theory and application, some of
the “limitations” of the generic literature relate to its most interesting elements and findings. For example, the generic literature often
focuses on bankruptcies (D’Aveni 1989, 1990; Moulton, Thomas,
and Pruett 1996)—a socially relevant and extremely important
(though less so public organizations) form of decline. Hambrick
and D’Aveni (1988) provide an especially interesting bankruptcy
study, as they examined 57 large bankruptcies matched with 57 very
similar companies that did not go bankrupt. They found that the
bankrupt firms were more likely to have performance deficits and
limited organizational slack resources (no surprise), but also were
much more likely to have extreme and highly changeable strategic
actions. The companies with more stable environments, even during
a period of resource shrinkage, were much more like to survive.
Another interesting, and seemingly irrelevant, stream of private
sector decline research focuses on a major culprit in decline: debtbased funding (Moulton, Thomas, and Pruett 1996; Wiseman and
Bromiley 1996). For example, Moulton, Thomas, and Pruett (1996)
found that corporations with debt-funded, forced-growth strategies
had a much higher failure rate than a matched set of corporations
with no such strategy; this finding held regardless of the overall
industry growth rate. Many of the studies examining growth and
debt strategies focus on behaviors and characteristics of corporate
boards of directors, again an attribute that has no direct equivalent
in public organizations (e.g., Boeker and Goodstein 1991). For
example, Mueller and Barker (1997) found that “turnaround firms”
were more likely to have chief executive officers who were also board
chairs and that they were likely to have greater external control of
boards.
The foregoing examples show why some of the generic literature has
limited relevance for public administration. Government agencies
do not typically go out of business because they are performing less
efficiently than competitors, because their debt load is unmanageable, or because their plan to emerge from bankruptcy proves inadequate. Regarding the decline literature, one inference we can draw
is that those private sector studies emphasizing market and financing strategies typically have limited relevance for public administration. Likewise, studies focusing on shareholders (Furrer, Pandian,
and Thomas 2007), asset costs and depreciation (Morrow, Johnson,
and Busenitz 2004), and stock and corporate boards (Mueller and
Barker 1997) seem to have limited relevance. Even studies focusing
on technological innovation seem to have limited relevance. While
technology is vital in the public sector, the failure to adapt to a technological “dominant design” (Anderson and Tushman 2001) or to
innovate in a timely manner may lead to unfortunate consequences,
but not directly to decline and organizational death.
The Relevance of the Generic Decline Literature
If we compare sectors, assuredly there are different driving forces at
work, especially with respect to the nature and control of resources,
but once the manager is in the position of managing decline, it is
the fact of limited resources that is paramount, not the cause of the
limited resources. Many years ago, I wrote a book about “publicness,” and chose for its title All Organizations Are Public (Bozeman
1987). While the title has confused many and the term “publicness”
has subsequently been employed in diverse and sometimes even
contradictory ways, the basic point of the book is, I think, clear
enough: that all modern, complex organizations, regardless of sector,
are affected by both political and economic authority, though they
often differ greatly in the mix of these two bases of authority. This is
a view articulated earlier by Dahl and Lindblom (1953) and Wamsley and Zald (1973) and much later by others (e.g., Moulton 2009;
Pesch 2008; Spicker 2009).
The generic literature, even when it steadfastly ignores publicness,
cannot help but have relevance to public administration. Researchers
who study decline look at organizations that are infused, to greater or
less degrees, with publicness. Even if the researchers do not themselves single out public implications of their work, the fact that the
organizations they study are both endowed with and constrained by
political authority renders their work relevant to the enterprise of
public administration. We public administration scholars ignore this
work at our peril. We do not wish to make the same mistake that the
generic researchers make again and again: assuming that the ownership or legal status of the organization trumps all other aspects.
Three Relevant Dimensions of Generic Decline
Literature
With respect to the generic decline literature, one can make a broad
case or a narrow one for its relevance to public administration.
The broad case is that even those studies, such as the ones mentioned earlier—the ones focusing on bankruptcy, debt financing,
shareholder value, and organizational death—are in some respects
relevant. The broad case is a bit harder to make, but it is getting
easier all the time (Boyne 2006). For example, as governments at all
levels, even those prohibited from running deficits, face a mounting
debt load and illegal deficits, the role of debt seems not so different
among the sectors (McNichol and Johnson 2009). Likewise, when
counties make bad investment decisions that lead to bankruptcy, the
shelter of government ownership seems less distinctive (Halstead,
Hegde, and Klein 2004). At least one study (MacManus 2008)
shows that as financial distress increases, government financial
managers tend to adopt strategies that are more and more like those
employed in the private sector.
For present purposes, we need not make the broad case about
the relevance of the generic decline literature. Let us focus on the
narrow case, the one that assumes that government organizations’
resource basis and legal status render some aspects of decline unique
to the public sector. The narrow case says, “let us consider those
features of decline not directly related to legal status.”
In examining the generic decline literature, and the post-1980s public
administration decline literature, three categories of decline-related
research and theory stand out: human costs of decline, organizational
structure and decline, and strategy and decline. Each of these topics has
Hard Lessons from Hard Times 559
direct relevance to public administration, and
each has received much more attention in the
generic literature than in the small post-1980s
public administration decline literature.
Human costs of decline. While we know that
public and private sector employment have
many differences, it is nonetheless the case
that employees facing organizational decline
and retrenchment have shared concerns, regardless of sector (Feldt and Andersen 1982).
As organizations decline, it is to be expected
that morale and work habits will be affected
and that incentive structures will change (Cameron 1994). A sizeable literature, much of it by Brockner and colleagues (e.g., Brockner 1988; Brockner, Davy, and Carter 1985; Brockner et al. 1992;
Brockner et al. 1987), emphasizes that when the layoffs begin, no
one emerges unscathed.
Chadwick, Hunter, and Walston’s (2004) study of human resources
in recently downsized hospitals shows that one of the best predictors
of recovery and performance after layoffs have been implemented
is a consideration for employees’ morale and welfare during the
period of layoffs. Another study (De Vries and Balazs 1997), based
on interviews with employees in public and private organizations,
examined the psychological effects of employees working in downsized, declining organizations; it shows that employees commonly
enter a “mourning period” if they believe that the organization has
broken a tacit social contract (see also Kelman 2006). De Vries and
Balazs’s (1997) study suggests that effective vertical and horizontal
communication about the downsizing, its scope, and its effects
tends to reduce the burnout and mental health problems of employees. Cameron and colleagues (1987a, 1987b) note that employees’
scapegoating of upper management is a likely outcome of poorly
managed decline and that such scapegoating can undercut attempts
to reverse decline.
Organizational structure and decline. One set of decline studies that is quite common to the generic management literature has
been largely ignored in the public administration literature: the
effects of decline on organizations’ structures and designs (e.g., Hall
1984; Koberg 1987). One interesting question is whether administrative intensity (the ratio of administrative employees of production or services delivery employees) rises or falls during periods of
decline. McKinley (1987) studied manufacturing firms, but the
issue is as relevant to education or social services. McKinley found
that the long-standing organizational research finding showing a
relationship between organizations’ internal complexity and their
administrative intensity is not so predictable in cases of organization
decline.
Others have studied the relationship of control-oriented, hierarchical structures (so-called mechanistic organizational structures) to
decline. Do declining organizations become more mechanistic?
According to Barker and Mone’s (1998) study based on interviews
with chief executive officers of 29 struggling U.S. firms, organizations facing financial crises decline tended to shift to more mechanistic structure and these structures restricted firms’ ability to
change strategic orientations to effectively respond to decline.
560
Strategy and decline. The generic literature
on strategy and decline is perhaps the most
instructive for public administration. While
the objectives of business strategy (e.g., growth,
profit, shareholder value) differ significantly
from those of the public sector, as do many of
the determinants of strategic outcomes (e.g.,
production efficiency, debt and equity management), the idea of linking strategy and decline
is a valuable one. In the public administration
literature, studies focus on strategy, but in most
cases, the emphasis is on strategies for dealing with decline rather than the implications
of decline for broad perspective, long-term strategic management of
organizations. A few public administration studies (e.g., Boyne 2004;
Nutt 2007) link decline to long-term strategy, but not many do.
In examining the generic decline
literature, and the post-1980s
public administration decline
literature, three categories of
decline-related research and
theory stand out: human costs
of decline, organizational
structure and decline, and
strategy and decline.
Public Administration Review • July | August 2010
In the generic literature, decline is more often viewed as one of
many, interrelated environmental states requiring strategic management (D’Aveni 1989; Huff, Huff, and Thomas 1992; Morrow et al.
2007; Robbins and Pearce 1992). In some of the generic literature,
the focus is on strategic prerequisites for the long term, not just
decline but also revitalization. Some studies focus on managing the
jolts occurring in a shift from stable environments to more munificent, opportunity-laden environments (Castrogiovanni 1991).
Similarly, there is more of a tendency in the generic literature (e.g.,
Barker and Duhaime 1997) to distinguish between declines in
which the organization is culpable (i.e., performance deficits) and
declines in which the environment is causing all ships to sink at the
same time, but not at the same rate. The generic literature focusing
on decline, strategy, and performance has a kin literature focusing
on growth, strategy, and performance (e.g., Boeker 1997).
In short, the generic decline literature is not entirely about decline;
more often, decline is viewed as part of a long-term evolution of
organization environments and the strategies developed to adapt to
and manage those environments throughout the organizational life
cycle. Studies of organizational death are quite common in the generic literature (e.g., Barron, West, and Hannan 1994; Brüderl and
Schüssler 1990; Cefis and Marsili 2005; Sutton 1983, 1987).
Perhaps one reason for the generic literature’s greater focus on
organizational life cycles is that the organizations they study tend to
have “natural” life cycles. Generally, government agencies do not go
out of business—well, not exactly. The best known study of public
sector organizations’ death and dying is Herbert Kaufman’s (1976)
Are Government Organizations Immortal? Kaufman’s answer, while
nuanced, is essentially yes. While a few government organizations
were abolished during the Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations, chiefly holdovers from the New Deal and
the National Recovery Act, none was abolished from 1957 to 1973,
though dozens of new ones were created.
Anyone needing more recent historical evidence about the difficulty
of completely eliminating a government agency need only hearken
back to 1994, the 103rd Congress, and the Newt Gingrich–led
Contract with America. While the “Contract” appears to have
helped Republicans gain more seats in the 104th Congress, its effort
to eliminate government agencies met with limited success. Though
it had the Departments of Education, Commerce, Housing, and
Urban Development and Energy on its organizational death list,
when the dust cleared, only one agency was eliminated: the Office
of Technology Assessment. That office had fewer than 200 employees and, notably, was not an executive agency but an arm of the U.S.
Congress. The chief result of the government eradication effort of
the 104th Congress was for the Congress to eliminate its own staff.
We need to understand decline, but a better investment perhaps is
our effort to understand the environments that will replace our current decline. Today’s pandemic decline could be replaced by periods
of growth, but it also could be replaced by stable levels of scarcity, by
new, sharper step-change levels of decline, or in some instances, even
in the public sector, by organizational death. Which brings us to a
second reason for refocusing decline research and theory.
Conclusion: The Case for Redirecting the Public
Administration Decline Literature
In the introduction I posed a riddle: The generic decline literature has
great value for public administration even if it has limited value for
public administration. Readers steeped in public administration scholarly history will certainly have figured out this one. As Dwight Waldo
noted on more than one occasion (1948, 1972), public administration
has a vexing terminological problem—the term “public administration” is used to signify both a scholarly field and an occupational practice. My riddle pertains to this ambiguity. The riddle is easily solved:
The generic decline literature has great value for (scholarly work on)
public administration even if it has limited value for (the practice of)
public administration. I may have been a bit extreme in the service
of my riddle. In fact, the generic decline literature does have some
relevance for the practice of public administration, as I think can be
seen in this review. However, it has much more relevance for scholarly
public administration.
I noted earlier Kaufman’s work on public organization death and his
conclusion that the mortality rate for public organizations is quite low.
However, Starbuck and Nystrom (1981), among others (Stevenson
1986), have challenged Kaufman’s findings, noting that most studies
of business death take mergers to be “deaths,” and that if the same rule
were applied to federal agencies, and if one were to control of size and
scale effects, the death rate of private firms and government organizations would be quite close to one another. Government organizations
do not often die, but they are certainly reborn, perhaps even more
often than comparable private sector organizations. We can hypothesize that decline both causes these fundamental transformations, and,
in some cases, the transformations and deaths are larger-scale strategies
for moving from decline to a next environmental state. Reorganization
dynamics and the movement of government agencies from one organizational status to a different and sometimes nearly unrecognizable
organizational status have provided fertile ground for theory building
(Light 1997).
While acknowledging the considerable value
of the public administration decline literature,
I propose that the time has come to alter
and renew this topic. The decline or cutback
literature would benefit from an intellectual
transformation, focusing not on strategies
for mitigating decline but rather on the role
of decline in organizational life cycles and its
implications for devising resilient, long-term
managerial strategies. Much of the earlier
public administration work on decline was
very much motivated by strategy, but from an
episodic basis, focusing on managing decline
rather than managing organizational evolution
in response to environmental change.
While acknowledging the
considerable value of the public
administration decline literature,
...[this essay proposes] that
the time has come to alter and
renew this topic. The decline
or cutback literature would
benefit from an intellectual
transformation, focusing not on
strategies for mitigating decline
but rather on the role of decline
in organizational life cycles and
its implications for devising
resilient, long-term managerial
strategies.
Others have ably made the case for more scholarly attention to the strategic management of
public organizations (Boyne and Walker 2004;
Bryson 1988; Nutt and Backoff 1992; Poister
and Streib 1999), but a few words are required about the idea of
taking a life-cycle perspective on public organization strategy.
Why did the public administration decline literature nearly disappear? Because decline was replaced by growth. Why did decline
research continue in the generic literature? Because much of the
decline literature was never about just decline—it was about linking
organization environments to strategy. My argument for a life-cycle
approach to replace the decline approach is that an exclusive focus on
decline gives a disjointed, incomplete perspective on organizations.
If one views organizations longitudinally, it is almost always easier to
develop a valid perspective not only on decline and its causes, but also
on the strategic requirements of varied organizational environments.
Studies that are historically informed, longitudinal, and strategically oriented have the
potential to give us insights not revealed when
focusing on an isolated episode, no matter
how salient the events seem at the time. The
approach I am urging is not new (Tsouderos 1955; Whetten 1987), just one that has
not much influenced public administration
research. Scholarly public administration
tends to pay attention to the headlines. Its
timeliness is part of its attractiveness and its
relevance. But researchers must guard against
abandoning theory development for topicality. The two need not be at odds. However,
one lesson from the cutback management
literature is that topicality, even if it does not
drive out theory, can certainly truncate it.
Life-cycle-oriented studies of public organizations do not go out of style and, moreover,
may well give us better insights into decline.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Sanjay Pandey and Monica Gaughan for their helpful
comments and criticism, and to Daniel Fay for his research assistance.
Notes
1. The generic literature is different in important ways from the business literature.
Among the many important differences is that the generic literature often
examines organizations from diverse sectors, or at least includes some organizations that are not business organizations. However, the two literatures have in
common a resolute ignoring of public organizations or the public aspects of
organizations, and for this reason, as well as terminological convenience, I use
the term “generic” to characterize these two somewhat different approaches.
Hard Lessons from Hard Times 561
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